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!

Either way, one thing has led to another and through the years I’ve gone from solely private trips, to business trips that involved troubleshooting and customer assistance, to more varied tasks such as System Manager in an outsourcing case, and representative at standardization organizations.

What this means in practice is that lately I’ve been gotten my fair share of travels.

What it also means is that I’m having some trouble finding a good time to go on vacation.

I thought I had everything planned beautifully right now: China last week, France this week, and then I go on vacation to Turkey for a week this Saturday. Just look at the hotel! Susesi De Luxe Resort Looks wonderful! And look at the reviews on Tripadvisor. Sounds great!

Then irony struck. I’ve unfortunately never gotten to travel to the US on business – no meetings there, and no customers there so far. But lo and behold: I was asked if I had time to go to Seattle for a technical meeting with a potential customer!

…Can you guess when the meeting is? Of course, exactly the same week that I’m away at that lovely Ultra All-inclusive hotel in Turkey.

Sigh!

Phah, says I! If they wanted to go for nerdy humor they should have selected July 22 instead:

22/7 = 3.1428571428571428571428571428571

Pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795

Sure, it’s not perfect. But it’s damn close!

I’ve come to realize that my English is fairly decent for a non-native speaker and that I write dialogue in a fluid and relaxed style, filling my characters’ sentences with wit and occasional panache. Oh, and I’m modest too! But all is not well in the land of writing… Even if I disregard the fact that my storylines are haphazardly and organically evolved rather than thought through and planned (I need to work on that), there’s another problem that’s slowly starting to become more and more opaque:

My sense of humor isn’t good enough.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m not on some self-doubting angst trip here. I know full well that I have my brilliant moments and that I produce good stuff. But lately I’ve started to analyze the jokes in sitcoms and I see no reason whatsoever that independent games shouldn’t have the same intelligent jokes that sitcoms have.

“Did I hear you right,” a few of you exclaim. “Did you just say that sitcoms have intelligent jokes? Dude, it’s just a bunch of TV shows! Mass-produced garbage!”

I disagree! I’ve plowed through a number of complete series, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the brilliant jokes I’ve seen. Malcolm in the Middle, Seinfeld, 30 Rock, Scrubs, The Office, Two and a Half Men, Frasier – there are heaps of excellent comedy series one really ought to analyze if one wants to become a better humor writer for games. Before you question my sanity and/or taste in humor, and claim that shows like Family Guy or Saturday Night Live should also be part of the list of series to analyze, I have to mention that there are a few reasons I chose the series I chose as examples.

• First of all, the shows I mentioned have a great sense of continuity. There are references to earlier episodes, and the shows rely on a strong cast of well-known characters to bring forth the humor. In fact, a lot of the humor stems from knowledge of the characters. This is all very suitable for a game.

• Secondly, the shows mentioned have a great sense of inner logic. They may be surreal at times, but they follow more-or-less believable plots and act consistently and rationally within the internal boundries. One might argue that, for example, Family Guy also acts rationally within its defined set of rules: it has a rule that states that it will include random absurdities. But that’s more of a meta-rule in my view – it basically states that “the rule of the show is that it must break the rules” and I prefer to not judge that as rational reasoning and internal consistency. Even if it technically is.

• Thirdly, the series all rely on well-known settings. The hospital in Scrubs, Charlie’s place in Two and a Half Men and so on. I find this very suitable for humor in independent games where budget constraints makes it impossible to constantly include new locations.

• Finally, the jokes are often very verbal in the shows mentioned. Verbal humor relies more on good writing than on an actor’s individual quirks and delivery. This is a pretty weak point since most sitcoms do rely on individual actors, but I find that a lot of the humor is in the dialogue itself despite this. One just have to disregard the gags that aren’t applicable.

However, one thing that’s common not only for the shows that I mentioned, but for almost all good ones is that they aren’t written by a single person. The reason I feel that my writing is particularly inadequate in comparison probably stems from the fact that I’m a single person trying to come up with stuff – I lack the synergy of having a bunch of other people to bandy ideas with. If I want my games to be better I just might have to look for someone to co-write dialogue and storylines with.

Who knows, maybe I’ll find someone in time for Spandex Force 2.

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.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year well in advance! Just in case I forget to mention it later.

Now I’d better get back to my cactus tea and a that stupid movie I was watching.

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

Top 5 New Sites of 2008
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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.

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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?

It was surprisingly simple to convert the KarjaSoft design into a WordPress plugin. I feared that it would involve days of strange PHP coding – instead it only involved hours of strange PHP coding. I’d like to mutter some choice words about WordPress, but truth be told the more I work with it the more I like it. The themes are structured pretty logically and the default fallback works great. (I.e. if you haven’t written a special PHP file for, say, viewing a single blog entry then it makes some magical assumptions and displays the content as best as it can anyway.)

You can see the result right now: it’s a lighter, happier blog than the old black Cynical Stuff. Granted, something darker would be more appropriate for the title but it’s my bloody blog so you just shut the hell up if you’re not happy! If I want to have a shiny happy blog I’m damn well going to have it! And either way I actually prefer contrasts. Like the suicide bunnies:

Suicide bunnies rule! Or at least they will when the revolution comes.

By the way, I’ve removed the ugly “Cynical Stuff” handwriting from the logo! An era is at an end. Only yesterday I was convinced I were going to let it remain – but today I realized that it simply won’t fit in with the new design. Oh well.

Welcome to Cynical Stuff v3!

I can see you all nodding and smirking in recognition right now.

I tried to make a feeble design myself, but it sucked. Then I decided to try something new: actually find a web designer to make a brilliant design for me. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that I spent a load of cash on something that didn’t fulfil my vision.

To make a long story incredibly short, I ended up making a design of my own after all. I can only hope that II have learned a few lessons about how not to suck completely. You can check out the KarjaSoft homepage and the Sheeplings homepage to see it in action – and unless I regret my decision I’ll be switching the Spandex Force and Cynical Stuff designs as well soonish.

I know, I know, there are prettier web pages out there. But I think it’s better than what I had previously, and then it’s a step in the right direction!

Oh… And did you know that I’ve released v0.2 of Wildhollow? Play it and let me know what you think!

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!