Ready, Player One?

On a road trip to Colorado, I read all of Ready Player One. At the time, I felt bad because I didn’t love it. All my friends at the time were enjoying it. The buzz I heard was positive. I didn’t hate the book but I had a lot of reservations.

With the film coming out, I’ve discovered I’m not alone in my take about the book. However, I am one of the most nuanced in my opinion. In fact, I’m pretty mild. Let’s dig in.

Minor spoilers ahead!

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Pixels Was and is Total Trash

So I saw Pixels a couple of years ago and forgot I wrote this blog post. I find it hilarious and wanted to share it even though it’s an old entry.

So, a couple friends of mine wanted to see Pixels (they love watching bad movies–think Iron Sky). I was slightly hung over and thought, “what the hell?” But Hell was all too correct of a term for the film.

In case Peter Dinklage’s eyes weren’t screaming “WHY?!” loud enough in every shot.

I call it, “Held against my will.”

Dev Update for May

Hey-o! Another month in the bag. Holy impending deadlines, Batman! My school project, RPG Library, is maybe 70% done. I need to finish out the quest system and port it to HTML. The quest system I feel pretty good about. Most of the quests don’t have a lot of moving parts. There is a bug where once you complete a quest the icon sticks around. So, that’s mostly grunt programming and design.

The porting to HTML can die and burn in a hell of its own creation (likely without text and a bucket full of timeout errors).

Until Dawn (literally)

I tried out Until Dawn with some friends over my super blowout of a birthday. It is a great game and left me some ideas to mull over.

Gate-Keepers are Bad for Gaming

Steps to becoming a gamer

1. Play games

Congratulations, you are now a gamer.

This may seem pretty straightforward but in recent years this has become a heated debate. One that I feel strongly about: there are no requirements to playing games and shouldn’t be. To play games is an incredibly important aspect of being human. Therefore, it makes no sense at all to say what is a game or who can be a gamer.

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Dev-ing Around: Asteroids

Hi ya! So as part of my graduate degree, I am making a short video game to mimic library activities. As such, I have been working through some short tutorials to get reacquainted with Yoyo’s GameMaker. It was the best option for creating an HTML5 game that would need the least amount of work from the user to get started. So I wanted to share an Asteroids knock-off I made called Rock Shooter.

My First Presentation in the Wild

Hello! So I am still getting back into the hang of things after a busy week last week. I gave my first academic non-classroom presentation on Friday and I spent most of the last week getting ready for it. So, I thought I’d unpack how it went and talk a little about the how the day went and my research.