Last week I had an interesting conversation about confusing units. For instance, the commonly used light year is of course not a measurement of time despite its rather confusing suffix. During that conversation I heard about another length measurement called beard second. As you can imagine, what it measures is not time despite its ending in “second,” but rather the length that beard grows in one second. Something like 5 nanometers, or 100 Ångströms according to some.

Wikipedia’s list of humorous units of measurement lists a few more of these, but I feel that a very important unit is missing: the drunk mile (drm). I debated with myself whether or not to call it drunken mile instead but in the end I opted for the shorter version. This is a unit of measurement that is supposed to be used during rather inebriated states, so the fewer syllables the better.

So, time for some definitions. What is a drunk mile? The drunk mile, despite ending in a length measurement, is the time it takes for a drunk person to traverse the distance of one mile.

“But Karja, that won’t work,” I hear you cry. “The time it takes to walk a mile varies enormously from person to person! And what if someone has a bike? Or goes by taxi?”

Ah, but despair not! Careful scientific study has revealed that – despite what one might think – the drunk mile is surprisingly constant. And that constant is two and a half hours. I’ll give you some examples of situations that have been proven to support the drunk mile hypothesis, i.e. take exactly 1 drm:

• Sven and Inga has been drinking heavily but at different locations. Sven’s location is exactly one mile from Inga’s. Sven calls Inga whom replies that she’ll be right over. She arrives two and a half hour later.
• Ragnar and Knut are at a party, and Knut suddenly remembers that he’s forgotten to bring his iPod filled with awesome trance music (or whatever kids today listen to). Ragnar graciously lends his bike to Knut, who rushes off to fetch the iPod from his house which is located one mile from the party. He arrives two and a half hours later, even more intoxicated for some reason.
• Sophie and Sanna are preparing to go to a party, and are drinking heavily at Sophie’s place. They call Mauri, whom they are going to meet downtown, and say that they’ll take a cab right away. Despite the introduction of a motorized vehicle they still arrive downtown (which of course is located one mile away) after two and a half hours.

As you can see, the drunk mile is a very useful measurement. Instead of saying “we’ll be right down” or “oh, maybe fifteen or thirty minutes” you can say “I’ll be down in 1.5 drm” and everyone will know what it entails!

Juuso of the Game Producer blog has initiated a cool project: an indie games xmas calendar. The concept is to reveal a new game each day, until…well, you can guess what day. For obvious reasons there’s only one game revealed so far, but I’m interested in what games are going to pop up during the following weeks. This is an excellent opportunity to see what’s brewing on the indie development scene.

Oh, and one of those games just might be a certain adventure/pet raising game called Wildhollow.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Get Ready for Adventure! KarjaSoft Releases Wildhollow

Sweden, November 27, 2009 — Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of tongue-in-cheek adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow for Windows and Mac.

Wildhollow introduces the story of a young boy or girl returning home to find his or her parents missing under mysterious circumstances. The player is tasked with solving quests and ultimately discovering the fate of his/her missing parents, while also restoring the titular Wildhollow ranch to full glory. The game features an original mix of dialogue driven adventure gameplay and pet simulation elements in which animals can be raised and crossbred. A wide variety of breeds can be discovered, and varied food gathering minigames spice things up even further.

The game world is filled with colorful characters and humorous dialogue, and provides many hours of open-ended entertainment. The player encounters inept adventurers, cowardly dragons, greedy merchants, dwarf lords in love and much more as the story progresses.

“If you enjoy funny dialogue, adorable pets to raise and clever jabs at common fantasy cliches you’re going to love Wildhollow,” says Miro Karjalainen, owner of KarjaSoft, not at all deterred by the fact that his opinion might be slightly biased.

Wildhollow is available for Windows and Mac at the price of $19.99. More information, screenshots and trial downloads can be found on the official webpage:

http://www.wildhollow.com

Features:

- Loads of wacky characters to interact with
- Adorable animals to breed
- Tongue-in-cheek humor poking fun at fantasy cliches
- A colorful fantasy world to explore
- Hours of adventurous quests
- And much more…

System requirements:

1 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM. Windows 2000 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

About KarjaSoft

Founded by Miro Karjalainen in 2006, KarjaSoft has previously released the fluffy arcade game Sheeplings in 2007 followed by superhero puzzle/RPG Spandex Force in 2008. KarjaSoft focuses on developing casual indie games with a twist, including lots of humor and genre blending. Visit KarjaSoft online at http://www.karjasoft.com

Contact:

Miro Karjalainen
www.karjasoft.com
info@karjasoft.com

###

I went through my X: drive today in search of old screenshots of Might and Magic games (don’t ask), and I found these hilarious newspaper clippings. Thoughtful as I am I thought I’d share them with you:

Ironically, if line six is to be disregarded then the instructions for how to read the notice should be disregarded too. I smell a paradox.

Sooty is a legend. He’s become part of my standard repertoire of drunken anecdotes. “He slept for two days” is just the icing on the cake. But no matter how funny Sooty is, I found something even better:

Sweet mother of the f-word, I can’t stop laughing at that. It has to be a fake…but if it isn’t, it’s the best captioned picture ever.

I saw this thread on Indiegamer.com about Antair Games’ most prestigious Indie Bake Off 2008 competition, and I simply had to post a picture of my delicious Pac-Man saffron buns I baked a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t planning on entering the competition per se, but Gavin from Antair Games just told me that the pic was added anyway…despite its blatant disregard for competition rules! (He didn’t say the last part explicitly, but I can tell!)

It’s been a semi-annual tradition for me to make these every year around December 13. It’s my own particular way of celebrating Saint Lucy’s Day. Normally the traditional saffron buns look like this, but I prefer my geeky buns:

As you can see, my Pac-Men are a little darker and maybe not quite as yellow. I blame that on two things: my covering the buns just a tad excessively in eggs…and the fact that I used some strange unlabeled saffron that I bought in Tunisia. I think it was saffron at least…

Now go check out the other entries!

2008 has been a stagnant year for Internet browsing. I’ve pretty much kept to my old favorites, never straying far from the well-trodden path of news sites, Tom’s hardware, Kotaku, xkcd, etc etc. But amidst the stagnation there have been a few golden nuggets; a few new websites that I have discovered. Not many, mind you – I had to struggle to come up with a top 5 list that anyone would find interesting. Some of the sites I have discovered in 2008 have been sites that everyone else has used and forgotten all about already, such as Facebook and StumbleUpon. I won’t even bother mentioning those; I don’t want to appear a totally inbred and pathetic loser.

Well then… Without further ado, here is the Cynical Stuff list of:

Top 5 New Sites of 2008
——————————————

5: The Minus World

This humor site is filled with irreverent parodies and references to video games. I’m not a rabid fan but there are some brilliant pieces like the Grand Theft Auto IV Activity Book For Kids. Absolutely hilarious at its best; pretty meh at its worst. Definitely worth checking out regularily, though.

4: GameProducer.net

Juuso is an indie game developer/entrepreneur with an interesting blog and forums that I – unfortunately – haven’t spent much time in lately. I used to check both the blog and the forums regularly before my recent minor hiatus from the online world; I think it’s time to re-discover this newly discovered site soon.

3: Passive Aggressive Notes

What can I say? I’m a sucker for ridiculous humor pages filled with short, quick and funny things to check out. Notes with passive aggressive messages are funny – and a whole collection of them is even more so.

I’m not so good at writing these kinds of subtle notes, myself; the only time I’ve left a note in the laundry room, it was a death threat.

2: The Official King’s Bounty Forums

King’s Bounty is the best game of 2008, and there’s nothing you can say that can make me change my mind! Play the game, read the forums! Do it, now!

Finally… It’s time for number one… What could it be?! What could it be?!?!!

1: LOLCats

I don’t think there’s a single site I’ve spent so much time at in 2008 as LOLCats. I can’t help it – I adore the kitties, and I love the captions. Yes, still! This is a fad that’ll never grow old for me. I squeal like a little puppy when I see those adorable pics, and every day I hope and wish that there’ll be a new hedgehog or squirrel picture along with the normal kittens.

——————————————

Note that this is a list of sites that are new to me in 2008. I don’t care if you knew the webmaster when his site was still indie and hardcore back in 2005, before he got corrupted by fame. The term new is a pluralistic and highly relative concept after all, wouldn’t you agree?

Christmas time is here, by golly! (Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / etc etc.) This means that lists are starting to pop up everywhere. “Best games of 2008,” “Most ridiculous hairdo of 2008,” “Top STDs of 2008″ and so on. Cynical Stuff can’t be any worse, so here’s my own incredibly well-researched and non-biased list. I couldn’t find any suitable 2008 theme, though, so I went for:

Top 10 Songs Under One Minute

My criteria are as follows:

• Only reasonably well-known songs.
• No jingles or theme songs. This means that I had to remove the Dethklok theme from my list, unfortunately.
• The length of the track as it appears in an album absolutely must be under 1:00. This excludes a lot of good material at e.g. 1:05 and 1:15, but c’est la vie.
• No interviews/sketches/speeches/thematic intros.

Enough already; let’s get to it! Click the links for YouTube links to the different songs.

10 – Dead Kennedys – A Child And His Lawnmower

This is a good ol’ punk song. I’ve never been a big fan of DK but the humor is excellent and the style is interesting. Not worth more than a 10th place here, though.

9 – The Misfits – Demonomania

If I were a cynic I’d say that this song is a good example of The Misfits’ music since many songs sound pretty similar. Good thing I’m not, eh?

8 – Bad Religion – 52 Seconds

Bad Religion rocks! Too bad that this song is rather dull; it only gets as high as an 8th place because it’s a Bad Religion song.

7 – Stormtroopers of Death – What’s That Noise

Okay, okay! This song is pretty much only speech with some jingle-like riffs. But I can’t leave it out!

6 – Stormtroopers of Death – Fuck The Middle-East

Well, I can’t agree with the message of the song. But it’s damn catchy and a good song despite its length of less than half a minute!

5 – Flogging Molly – The Wrong Company

A capella songs count. And that’s a good thing – otherwise this funny and pleasant song wouldn’t have made the list. To tell the truth I had never bothered listening much to it before I compiled this list.

4 – Stormtroopers of Death – Ballad of Jimi Hendrix

There are dozens of S.O.D “Ballad of” songs I could have chosen, but I selected this one because it’s the first one I heard. Awesomeness!

3 – NOFX – Murder The Government

This video misses the first couple of words. If you’re wondering, the complete first line is “I wanna see the constitution burn.” Ah, nostalgia!

2 – NOFX – Monosyllabic Girl

This is an extremely cute and catchy song by NOFX, the masters of short melodic punk songs. Sure, a lot of metal bands do the whole “growl growl grind grind” song-in-ten-seconds thing but that’s not a proper song in my view.

Now onto number one…

1 – Blink 182 – Happy Holidays You Bastard

Good band! Good song! I’m not sure if it’s truly better than the NOFX songs but given the end-of-year theme in this post I couldn’t let it slip any lower.

There are other top 10 short songs lists around (such as this one featuring not a single song I’ve ever heard of) but I can guarantee that my list is the best! Or at least very good! Or pretty nice, at the very least! Or possibly decent. Maybe just a little bit crap. It might be rather horrible, come to think of it…

For those of you who haven’t kept up with the important events of the world lately, a game called King’s Bounty: The Legend has been released. It’s not only the best game of 2008 according to my very scientific measure – it’s the best game I’ve played for years! I’m currenty on my second play-through; normally I spend an hour or two trying out a game, but this incredibly addictive game has kept me occupied for ~30 + ~35 hours! Yes, that’s an immense amount of time. It could explain my lack of blogging of late, and the slow progress on Wildhollow.

The reason I’m playing the game through twice is twofold:

1. I played it on normal difficulty first, so I have to play it on hard as well – to see how much harder the tactical battles are.
2. It’s a bloody brilliant game!

King’s Bounty: The Legend is the spiritual successor to the old 1990 game King’s Bounty. I’m saying spiritual since it quite obviously has nothing to do with the original aside from some superficial details. Like the name. And the fact that it’s a tactical strategy RPG. As much as I love the original I must say that it never captivated me to the same degree that KB:TL has stolen my spare time, my free will and my soul.

Why is KB:TL so good, then? Read this Rock, Paper, Shotgun article and tell me that you don’t want to play the game! But, aside from all the general weirdness and strange Russian humor, it’s simply an amazingly good game. You have to play just another battle. You have to see just where the next quest will lead you. You have to collect just another magic rune. The first time I played the game I think I played for 16 hours straight! I haven’t done that since I was a wee whippersnapper!

If you decide to play the game (and you should) I have some sage advice:

• Start playing as a paladin.  Paladins are cool: they have good leadership (which enables you to have large armies) and good magic as well. They also start with the resurrection spell which will help you conserve armies. Later you may want to play mage or warrior too; the playing styles are pretty different and offers varied experiences. (After I’ve finished the game on hard with a mage I’m going for an impossible game with a warrior.)
• Don’t worry too much about money if you start at a lower (below hard) difficulty level. You will have more than a cool million gold pieces to spare toward the end of the game either way. Unless you plain suck.
• People say that you shouldn’t travel too much between continents because it costs game time. They say that you should learn how to play with the armies available on each continent instead. I say screw that: if you find a good army setup that works, play with it until something better comes along! If it means riding the boat a few times too many – so what! It’s just affecting your end game score.
• But on the other hand, if you’re interested in getting a good score you should not only follow the advice above – you should also learn how to not lose any armies in battles. (It’s entirely possible to complete the entire game without losing a single army, but it’s ludicrously time demanding.)
• Complete the king’s quests quickly! And when you acquire the rage box, get the first two rage spirits quickly! You’ll thank me later.
• You can sneak around! You don’t have to fight everything, and it’s often quite worthwhile to grab all goodies before you start slaughtering polar bears and dwarves.
• Read the official forums. There are some great hints there, and also inspiration for different ways to play the game. Not to mention some good ol’ fashioned Internet drama now and then.

Order King’s Bounty: The Legend now and thank me later! Or, as it may be, curse me for stealing your precious time. See if you can match my best accomplishment so far: defeating Karador at level 20 on hard. (It’s nothing special, but it wasn’t easy.)

Now sod off. I have to gain a few levels before I can tackle Haas’ Labyrinth and finally get to the last area of the game. Again.

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!

As a wee kiddo I used to play a lot of adventure games. First text adventures like Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure, and old Infocom classics. Then I got hold of Maniac Mansion for the C64, and I was completely hooked on graphical adventure games. Prior to playing that game I had only stayed up all night reading books (ah, Dumas, how your stories caused me to lose my well-needed beauty sleep!), but I vividly recall being physically unable to quit playing Maniac Mansion. The clock struck midnight, and I desperately tried to escape the prison. The clock struck 2 AM and found me finally figuring out that the rusty key opened the car’s trunk. And so on.

After that point, having to write text in an adventure game seemed like a giant step backwards to me. That’s probably why I never was a big fan of the Sierra adventure games. I’ve played my fair share of King’s, Police and Space Quest, but they never captivated me the same way that Lucasarts did with their magnificent opii. (Did you know that I’m trying to be ironic with my misuse of the word opii, and that the plural of opus is actually opuses or opera? And did you know that opii is the genitive form of opium in singular? Sweet mother of crap, I’m pretentious today!)

Still, I tried to enjoy Quest for Glory (or Hero’s Quest as I knew it) because I loved the idea of mixing an RPG with an adventure game. I never got very far, though; it was too cumbersome to type everything. So my fascination with the QfG series died in its cradle.

Boy, did I miss out.

Check this out. One guy is attempting to play all Quest for Glory games completely through, and is documenting it all on YouTube. (This is the very first one; he has over a hundred more clips.)

This has to be one of the coolest things ever. Evah! It’s thanks to his efforts that I’m rediscovering the QfG games, and its wonderfully witty punny humour. I don’t really do puns myself but I thoroughly appreciate reading the plethora of witticisms in the Quest games. “I forgot my Visa in the desert.” “We don’t take Dinar’s Club here.” …Just awful. In an awesome way.