I can’t be arsed to read this thesis, but it’s got the best title ever!
Sex and violence in lobsters - a smelly business
Apparently lobsters pee in each others’ faces, fight, and generally behave like dirty bastards. They’d fit right in this Saturday when there’s a ginormous party. I couldn’t find a good picture of drunken debauchery to emphasise the last sentence, so here’s a dead rabbit instead:
While I’m not keeping myself busy with work and more work, I’m writing dialogue for WIldhollow. Wildhollow, for the uninitiated, is my upcoming adventure/management game featuring insane and probably very bad humour. Just to show off my progress in the bad humour department I decided to post some screenshots:
The game starts when our young hero or heroine (screw political correctness - I’m claiming that “hero” is gender neutral) comes back to Spring Valley, the village close to Wildhollow Ranch…
He (in this case) is met by the town greeter who has terrible news! Gasp! Shock! Oh, the horror of non-subtle exposition initiating the main quest of the game!
In town he can meet inept adventurers…
Tell bad jokes to the barber…
And do lots more, like get quests and sell fish to the owner of the Angry Weasel Inn (caught in a minigame at the Pork ‘n Beans Lake) and enjoy lots and lots of strange dialogue! And this is just one of the adventure screens! Wow, isn’t this game just filled with adventure?! Stay tuned for more information. And hopefully a Wildhollow homepage soon, once the re-design is in place…
In all of Linköping there is just one tea store that sells cactus tea. There used to be at least three stores where I could get nicely flavoured cactus tea, but there’s just one decent place left. And I’m talking about the tea shop downtown; I know that there’s a store in Tornby that sells something they call cactus tea, but that’s just perfumed rubbish.
After I stocked up on the good kind the other day I browsed the teapots in the store, and found something really curious:
This picture doesn’t really convey the full extent of the pot’s strangeness. I really don’t see the point of this design - it looks like the shunned lovechild of a hash pipe and a teapot. In fact, I have a nagging suspicion that it would be possible to use this to smoke various things if one did some minor modifications. I’m sure there are more knowledgeable people than me who have tried it already.
I saw another funny thing yesterday when I went to the bathroom at work:
My useless cell cam couldn’t take a sharp enough picture, and it’s in Swedish anyway, so I’ll provide a loose translation:
Toilet Quiz
Q: How many engineers does it take to change an empty toilet paper roll?
A: Apparently many since it never happens here.Q: What IQ is required to know the difference between a urinal and a toilet?
A: (Can’t remember exactly; something to the effect of “must be pretty high ’cause you people pee on the seat”.)Tie breaker: What’s the brush in the corner used for?
Yes yes, typical dull humour that nagging bitches find amusing. (Okay, I did smile a little as well.) The really funny part is that someone wrote a reply to the last question:
When there’s no toilet paper left.
Ka-ching!
In the beginning of the summer I posted an ad where I asked for web designers interested in having a go at integrating all the KarjaSoft pages into one logical unit. Essentially, what I want is a unified presence in order to explore synergies between my different projects - e.g. Cynical Stuff, the KarjaSoft company webpage and the different game pages. Yes, you may now slap me in the face for using both “unified presence” and “explore synergies” in the same sentence. Either way, I got a couple (as in two) responses…that somehow missed the mark a little.
What I desperately need is a designer. Not a programmer (I can code PHP myself, goddammit!) or an artist (what good is a pretty logo if it’s just sitting there like a bloated toad?) - a web designer! But somehow the word design gets lost when one mentions web design. Web design almost inevitably gets interpreted as either “make a logo” or “do a customized content management system.” Design is of course present in both making a logo and writing code, but my needs were for a person more keen on usability and design in the classical sense.
To make a short story long: In the end I sighed and shook my blonde curls in dismay, and decided to have a go at it myself instead. Hey, at least it’s a learning experience, right? Here’s what I ended up with as my first concept:
This is supposed to be the Games page; a list of all KarjaSoft games with easily accessible links to each game. Clicking a game logo leads you to the specific game’s page. The color scheme and the logo is modified for each game, but the main design is kept in order to give a sense of unity. Also, the navigation buttons in the top right are present on all pages. As you can see I’ve used common terms instead of titles. If someone sees a button with Cynical Stuff it is probably hard to guess that it leads to this blog, but by typing out Blog everyone will instantly know where it leads.
And yes. If I adopt this design, it will mean that Cynical Stuff will be redesigned according to this as well. As long as I can make a decent WordPress template out of it, that is.
Any thoughts? Does it look like cat vomit? Does it look okay?
Miro Karjalainen is a pretentious bastard with a background in punk rock, computer science, linguistics, embedded systems, game development and the noble art of drinking beer. E-mail: info@karjasoft.com