Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Blog: Favourite YouTube Videos (Volume 36) - ZeFrank Special

This volume of my favourite YouTube videos is a bit special, first of all it marks the point in time where ZeFrank had just started doing a show. This is special in and of itself, and caused me to have several of his videos in my favourites in a row, but somehow I managed not to favourite "An Invocation for Beginnings" which is possibly my favourite ZeFrank video of all time. So I decided to slip that one in and add in one extra to give us a totally ZeFrank focused volume.

I'm going to let each of these stand alone.

  • "An Invocation for Beginnings"
  • "Thinks Like Me"
  • "Make. Beleive."
  • "TMMTO :: Comfort"
  • "2601 People Wrote This Song"

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Project 1: Third Season of The Blog

Happy Birthday!

Well, not birthday. Happy Project Ending Day and Happy Project Start Day. More precisely, Happy Blog Start and End Day!

Today is the last day of the Second Season of the Blog. Today is also first day of the Third Season of the Blog.

The Second Season of the Blog was not all I'd hoped it would be. I wanted to be really good about regular updating, which I haven't really been. I've managed to post in every month of the second season, ranging from 1 post to 11, but not as regularly as I'd hoped.

By far and away I've been best about posting my "favourite YouTube videos", managing 27 of them in total. I've also managed to post 5 "Thoughts on Games", which is fewer than I'd hoped. Finally I tested out "Cool Things of the Week", before deciding that it would be better served living on twitter.

I'm glad I've managed to post as much as I have, although I would like to write more and more regularly. I did manage to finish my PhD coursework and my candidacy during that time, which certainly has more priority.

That being said, I've managed to keep up with the blog for a whole year and for that much at least I'm pretty happy.

The Third Season of the Blog starts now. I'm not planning to change my content that much although I'm hoping to change my schedule/quantity and improve my quality.

Ideally I want to post twice a week for the foreseeable future. This would mean one favourite YouTube videos post, probably on Friday and one other post sometime during the week (hopefully on Tuesdays, but no promises). This other post will be thoughts on video games or something else, if I happen to have a project update (and ideally I'll have more of these than I have so far) then that will count too.

As far as quality, I'm hoping to spend a bit more time writing each post. I also hope that my quality will naturally improve simply by getting more practice.

Hopefully I can keep this up for another year. So the third season will last until August 1, 2014.

Thanks for reading, and keep getting excited and making things.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Blog: Favourite YouTube Videos (Volume 35)

In this volume of my favourite YouTube videos we get the chance to talk about creativity, hats, story telling and bowser's arms.

  • The first set of videos are from Charlie McDonnell. A while ago he decided (if that's the right word) to have a "YouTube Midlife Crisis" and he talked about some of his creative stresses. He also talked about some of his rules for YouTube videos, which I think are also interesting rules to look at for any creative endeavour. Interestingly I didn't favourite Part 2 of his rules, but had to watch that video immediatly after I watched Part 1 so I decided to throw it in as a bonus.
  • Next, did you know that Team Fortress 2 has a story? Well now you do, and it only took a minute, thanks to the Lore Team.
  • For all that I like Belated Media, I wasn't exactly sure why I'd favourited this video ... until the last 5 seconds. Stay tuned kids. Stay tuned. (Although it is a bit spoilery for A Cabin in The Woods)
  • Finally, we have the kick off episode of Chuggaconroy's Let's Play of  Super Paper Mario. As with most Let's Play's I tend to favourite the first episode if the whole series is worth while and this one is. It's a lot of fun and is apt to keep you distracted for a while to come.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Project 4: A Further Surprise Snake Update (Version 0.2.0)

So it seems I still have a lot of procrastinating to do. I've managed to turn out another version of Snake. (This time version 0.2.0).


This version introduces:

* Awful Sound Effects - it's weird old beeps, that kinda appealed to me
* Mute - press 'M' to turn off the awful sound effects (this doesn't preserve between games yet)
* Scaling Snake Colour - now as the snake grows it fades to grey towards the end of it's tail. This makes it easier to see which way you're going (especially when coming back from pause).

Please play and let me know in the comments if you run into any problems or bugs or any thoughts at all really.

You can get the game from these links:


Thanks as always!

Rereading

A little while ago, somewhere out there on the Internet, I ran across a thing about the joy and value in rereading books. I’ve managed to lo...