DarthTofu

I went when I was about ten, with my family, and was bored out of my mind. Of course, that's likely because I was ten years old at the time. The highlights of the trip were the M&Ms building, any place with A/C, and getting kicked out of Ceaser's Palace for pointing out that the "decorative mirrors" were set up perfectly so that the house could see what the Poker players had, but the poker players couldn't see what the house had. That, and we corrected the grammar on a few of the strip club signs. "That's shouldn't read "girl's, girl's, girl's." Those apostrophes are superfluous! 'Course, I have to give credit for that one to a (then 14) Tofu Senior.

Me likey. Very professional looking. Rest assured: If I were a Hungarian government official, I would choose your design, sir.

Not quite a videogame, per se, but I managed to write a new game for my TI-83 graphing calculator. That thing's going to save my butt when I take the AP Statistics exam at the end of the year; can you imagine if I had nothing to do after I finished the stupid test with an hour or so to spare?! It's a pretty nifty little game, if I do say so myself. It's currently two-player, though I'm going to try to make something like AI (it'll probably select options based on a random number generator). It's a fighter game, with seven attack options. Two of them are just jokes (One option is to "Summon Nick," the single most annoying kid at my school. It simply displays "YOU FAIL!" over and over again, in an endlessly repeating look. The other option is to "Annoy Allison." Allison is one of the nicest people I know, and impossible to annoy. Annoying her results in the destruction of the planet, and causes both players to love), while the other five work. The options include: Falcon Punch (5-10 damage), eye jab (10 damage), Nad Shot (Originally "Crotch Shot," but then my friend reminded me that girls would also be playing the game. One in three chance of doing twenty-five damage. A miss gives zero), Pray to Satan (Randomly subtracts up to forty points or adds up to ten points to your opponent's health; originally I was going to make it an option to heal yourself, with an equal chance of helping and hurting you, but I couldn't get the code quite right; I intend to try to fix that), and Death Glare (twenty percent chance of removing all of your opponent's health). The thing took me about three or four hours to program, and that was only after I scrapped an earlier version 1.0 that wouldn't work. I got it done during AP Statistics, AP Physics, lunch, and AP Calculus. Fortunately we had free days in AP Physics and AP Calculus, and AP Statistics is a big enough waste of my time that it didn't matter that I didn't pay attention; the teacher can't actually teach, anyway. The whole thing is basic enough to make the eighties ashamed of my video game programming, considering the "power" I control, but keep in mind that this is all with calculator commands. It's a step up from my old text-based adventure games. So far as getting an "AI" to work, that'll be tough. I'm thinking I'll have to figure out a way to make a random number selection from a menu, which I currently can't do. Unfortunately I can't get more than one conditional statement going. IE: generate random number from zero to four, and store that number as A. if A=0 then execute one attack if A=1 then execute another attack if A=2 then execute a third attack etc. It causes a syntax error if I give it in any form other than "If then progrm1 else prgrm2" Anyone know how to fix that?

Hey- you gotta let it out somewhere, mate. I wouldn't have known about it if you hadn't said anything, and I wouldn't be trying to get people donating if you hadn't said anything. We're interested in hearing about your (hopefully continued) well-being, mate.

I'm head of a local community service group at my school. I'm interested in seeing what sort of aid we can start fundraising for for you Australians, and what charity groups would be the best to send it through. Any suggestions for what's wanted? Bottled water, bandages, burn salve, etc? We meet tomorrow, so promptness will get this resolved quicker. Sorry to not think of it sooner. Any other forum members with ideas for what would be helpful are welcome. I still need to figure out who to send any charity stuff we raise to. I'm guessing writing, "The Government, Australia" on a package won't go so well...

Oh, Jesus.... I'm sorry, Kryt. You have my sincere wishes that this all turns out for the best. This has to be trying and difficult for all of you guys. If I prayed, you'd be in my prayers. But seeing as there's some (shoddy) scientific evidence that lots of people thinking hard about the same thing happening decreases the randomness in the universe, and may help the desired effect to come about, I will hope very strongly that everything works out alright, and that the fires go out before any more lives or properties are damaged. Godspeed, and stay safe.

I'm more than game. That's some nice art in the previews, and I've become something of a comic book fan ever since I decided to leaf through them (IE read them all the way through) at my local Barnes and Noble.

Yikes! Looks like the bush is not the place to be right now. Here's hoping everything turns out alright for you, mate. When I finish my FAFSA forms, I'll give Bill Hicks a looksie.

That guy died on my birthday!

lol- amusing.

Since when were my videos intelligent? And since when did they include any semblance of direction or rational explanation? I wrote the scripts and directed those things. I know for a fact that there was no direction or rational explanation for any of it. For God's sake, the Teletubies owned the Mafia in one of them!

Well, sort of. Free gift certificates. To Kiva.org, which is a non-profit organization that gives out micro loans to working-class poor all over the world. You jut have to set up a few accounts (two, to be exact, neither of which should increase your junk E-mail levels). Click here for more details: http://think.mtv.com/044FDFFFF009896EF00080099073B/User/Blog/BlogPostDetail.aspx It's sponsored by Stanford, and my sister is involved with the team, so I can contend that it's fully legit. You aren't giving anyone a "handout" (so no worries, Tex ), but a micro loan, one that has to be paid off. You get twenty-five bucks free, which you can distribute in whatever increments as you see fit. I imagine you can't be a dick and give one cent to 2,500 people individually, but you can give five dollars to a baker in Brazil, ten to a farmer in Libya, etc. They have to pay it back, and when that money is paid back, you can start giving it out to different people. You can track the profiles of your people, see who else is supporting your people, etc. There's a brief profile on each of the people applying for loans, BTW. So sign up- it's completely free.

This looks like a truly hilarious movie, one which I would love to see on its opening day. So why am I angry? Because the release date is March 13. Same day as Resident Evil 5. *Shakes fist angrily at scheduling gods* How will I know which to do on March 13?! HOOOOOW?!?!? ... On the upside, it's a Friday.

The Res 5 demo is awesome. Get it. Play it. Die a couple of dozen times. Love it. My friend and I had a blast playing it (she's a lot better as Sheva, I kick arse as Chris), and have defeated the Chainsaw man twice and the Executioner once. The Executioner is a real toughie, as you can never actually knock him over. You can get him with an uppercut/somersault kick, but nothing more by way of meles. I killed him by basically blasting him non-stop with shot guns and uppercuts once, and all of the remaining times, he just crushed us with that massive killer axe of his. Found the machine gun, though, so that helps tremendously in taking on the Zombie hordes. The chainsaw man gave us a considerably lesser challenge (after we tried it twenty times or so), and after beating him once, we completely creamed him the second time around. Who knew- there's an electric transformer you can knock down to hurt him some more.

Irony- just a week or two ago, Florida had its coldest weather in 100 years or so. There was snow outside one morning. Snow. In Florida. In central Florida- madness. I mean, here it never goes below 0C (32 F), so when that happened, it was just nuts. I had to scrape ice off of my car in the morning instead of wiping water off. On a related note, that cold front has passed, and now we're just experiencing brisk weather at best- it's hovering around the sixties, never really sticking with one range of values beyond 60-69.

So we're reading Pride and Prejudice in AP Lit now, and the teacher is supplementing it with the movie. No, not the Kiera Knightly movie. The "really strange looking girls who aren't all that pretty, filmed in the nineties" movie. It's actually not as bad as I make it out to be, though. Whoever did casting for that film did a wonderful job with the Bennet family. Mrs. Bennet sounds like a Monty Python man playing at being a woman, but gets across the shrill annoyingness of the character splendidly. It's quite a funny movie, really hitting on the satire that the book is meant to portray, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the novel. It stays quite true to the book throughout, and omits only minor bits of information. Only downside is that, because it's so accurate, it's ridiculously wrong. BTW: Saw Mall Cop the other day. That movie should have been marketed for children. A few laughs, but a week plot. I was happy to pay only $1.50 for my ticket.

Take that you zombie scum!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7846822.stm That's sad.

How many five year olds could you take in a fight? I could take 25, apparently. Not because I have good martial arts skills, or because I'm in particularly good shape, but because I have no morals, and have no problem beating the crap out of anyone and anything that attacks me.

Wasn't there a galaxy move-around that made the AI much more powerful? Well, not more powerful, just better, because it had something of a leg up in the fight. I've heard people say that it helps tremendously to decrease the price of enemy ships to ridiculously low amounts- sometimes more than half if you really know what you're doing. Also, you can up the firepower on AI ships, giving them that much more "oomph" in a battle. I think there was a way to make sure that the AI won't run away whenever there isn't an interdictor present, too, though I don't recall what it was.

Nice, Krytos. Not an animated gif, but I wish it were. http://comics.com/cow&boy/?DateAfter=2009-01-14&DateBefore=2009-01-21&Order=d.DateStrip+DESC&PerPage=1&x=22&y=14&Search=

Yeah, 'cause we totally won't scare the living (and dead) daylights out of any normal woman who meets us. Let's see- we have the old guy from Texas, the UFO guy from Germany, the exceptionally dorky/awkward/calculus-inclined teenager from Florida, the music-mixer from Switzerland, the (engaged) nerd from New York... Okay, yeah, in retrospect, I'm pretty sure Tex, Eagle, and I are the only three likely to freak anybody out. And I only include myself on the list because I know me. And because I apparently look kinda creepy with my goatee, which I will not shave, no matter how many folks try to make me. If I don't have a goatee, I can't take over the world. We all know that you need at least some form of chin fuzz if you want to conquer other countries and keep them for yourself.

Ladies? On this forum? Not since DinoChick, CarrieoftheWest, or TofuSenior, none of whom stayed on for very long. And TofuSenior only ever showed up to make fun of me.

The Onion Movie on Megavideo. Unless you have the premium subscription, you're going to get to just about the best part in the movie, when it's suddenly going to tell you that you can't watch any more for another 54 minutes, but it's worth waiting an extra 54 minutes to come back and watch it.