Tom 7 Radar

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Entries from January 2015

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January roundup (31 Jan 2015 at 23:55)

Happy 2015, everyone, and time to phone in another last-minute blog post. In two months will be the 15th blogiversary of Tom 7 Radar and I'm not giving up!

In the last post I shared Entire Screen of One Game, a quick weird-concept-game that I made for Ludum Dare (theme: Entire Game on One Screen). This game was by far my most popular ever, actually winning first place for "Innovation" and second for "Theme" (of 2,637 entries!). Aside from all the Twitter buzz, it also ended up in a fairly legit "Game of the Year" list as well as some mainstream media, including, incredibly, the "Must List" in the print Entertainment Weekly. This was a weird one for me, since usually I pour every ounce of energy into the game all weekend, but I did learn something about ways that things like this can take off.

I also started making furniture. This may be a problem. Here is my first piece:

One Nightstand It took a long time but I learned a lot. I worry that I may end up spending the rest of my life hand making everything in my house.

And speaking of arduous projects, current work includes trying to make the FCEUX emulator hack that I built for Learnfun & Playfun into a proper multithreaded library. This has been a crazy amount of work so far&emdash;the software is just so complicated and messy&emdash;but it's getting close. I have some specific stuff in mind, but also this (plus my new secondhand understanding of NES hardware and emulation) will open the door to other crazy NES projects. Watch this space (really, space inserted above this space in the future).

(9 comments — almost 10 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from December 2014

Pittsburgh Running — 6.0mi. in 00:54:43 (289ft. gain) almost 10 years ago · View

München - English Garden — 16.0mi. in 02:58:42 (223ft. gain) almost 10 years ago · View

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The Entire Screen of One Game (08 Dec 2014 at 16:12)

This weekend was the 31th Ludum Dare, the 48h video game programming competition (which I have participated in many times). The theme was "Entire Game on One Screen". But this time I had several prior obligations such as flying to Zurich, where I now write you from. But, undaunted, and perhaps even freed by the inability to apply the normal polish, I put together this quick weird game, "Entire Screen of One Game." It can't be won, at least formally, and exists only to destroy your mind, but people seem to be getting it. Use the arrow keys and space.

Categories: video games ludum dare

(50 comments — 2 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Zürich Uetliberg jaunt — 4.0mi. in 00:37:02 (495ft. gain) almost 10 years ago · View

Entries from November 2014

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Some costumes &c. (30 Nov 2014 at 19:03)

I know it's a little late to be posting about Halloween, but I had a hard drive crash and some other emergencies that delayed this post. Now, in typical fashion, a last-minute monthly Tom 7 Radar episode.

This summer I bought a house, and I've been having a lot of fun with household stuff I would never have cared about while living in my apartment. I've been working on some home improvement projects, starting deep in the basement where the things I'm replacing are most gross (but also any mistakes would be least regrettable), like I made this replacement drain cover:

Can you tell which one is old / new?

It's fun. I now see it's possible to spend one's entire life making the one boiler room in the basement totally perfect, too.

But if it's not a permanent modification, I'm willing to do something aggressive in the visible nice portions. Here was my house's Halloween costume this year:

Don't worry, it has lockjaw ...

I also installed some additional items to attract children as seen in this short video. Not every costume is scary, though. My own getup was this 3D printed Dr. Potato Head costume:

Dr. Interchangeable Face Parts Face

Many more things to make and projects in the works!

[ comment ]

Pittsburgh Running — 5.5mi. in 01:03:39 (279ft. gain) almost 10 years ago · View

Entries from October 2014

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Pittsburgh Great Race 2014: Balloon Fight (05 Oct 2014 at 11:03)

Last weekend was my 35th (!) birthday. Does it make you feel weird that there's been more than 14 years of Tom 7 Radar and that I used to be young? Of course not, since you know that people get older and haven't actually been reading my dumb blog for that long. Makes me feel weird though. Weird and kinda old. Anyway, one thing that happened to my adult self is I bought a house last month, and I promise a nice internet writeup of that experience and some photos soon, but I have a limited mental energy budget for house things which is consistently exhausted. But I had some old friends stay on my birthday weekend and we had a fun party and also ran the Great Race, which five years ago I ran on my birthday carrying a cake. Unknown to me until a humorous low-coffee series of escalating realizations, my friends ran the race in costume; that costume was me in 2009:

Michelle, Bronwen, Tom, Cortney

I'm the least dressed like myself on account of not wearing the huge plastic frames, and I wasn't carrying a cupcake either! I can confirm that all three cupcakes made it safely and more-or-less cleanly to the end, because I dutifully ate them there.

Does it look like I'm doing a bad job of hiding something in that picture? It's true. I still have a little tendinitis from the last bad idea so I decided to not do something foot-hurty. Going with the birthday theme, I instead spent the whole race inflating balloons and tying them to myself. I bought this super expensive race photo to illustrate:

Balloon fight! Only 1 days left to purchase your proofs!

This was my easiest costume ever, not on purpose. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to occupy my breath with the balloon blowing, but the balloons only take two seconds to inflate, and I spent the entire rest of the time just trying to tie them to myself. I had picked up some fishing line (I know, I know) right before the race and cut it into 3 foot segments and tied a bunch of them to a piece of string that was my belt, very fancily. Sitting still with dry hands, tying fishing line is not too bad. But on the move, especially trying to keep a reasonable pace, with sweat-fingers, it took like a minute of frustrating concentration per balloon. Plus the fishing lines would get all tangled with each other and pull off my belt and send balloons flying, off to the races. Terrible choice. So really it was an exercise in multitasking and not very athletic. I managed to inflate 44 balloons, which was more than the par of 35 (obvious rule: you must inflate the number of balloons commensurate with your age), and tie each one onto my belt at least momentarily with two half-hitches (actually I carried three across the finish-line in hand). More than half of them were subsequently lost. I finished in 58m35s, not fast for me, but I was in the throng the whole time and mostly looking down at my hands and couldn't open the throttle much. I don't really care about the time; the big disappointment was not being covered in balloons so you could barely see my body and being challengingly out of breath. I feel that I may need to come back to this one.

Category: races

(9 comments — almost 10 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from September 2014

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Connector World by Tom 7 (29 Sep 2014 at 23:37)

Old news now, I know, but earlier in the month I made Connector World, a video game, for the 48h programming contest Ludum Dare.

Connector World by Tom 7

This is another browser game using just HTML and JavaScript, having divested of Flash. It should work great in Chrome and OK in Firefox and might not work on other browsers.

Since I took so long to post this one, I can report the results of the contest! I got 73rd place overall (there were about 2,500 entries) and 11th place for "humor."

Anyway, it's an adventure-puzzle game that's pretty short. You can do it! Click to confirm your order.

Some hints:

I regret that the rules require you to leave open spaces for the "in" and "out" indicators, since there's no real point to this and it's not that fun to figure out

Once you get past the metal balls, you're almost done

If you get stuck on the last level, perhaps your current approach is wrong? There shouldn't be any dead ends.

Categories: video games ludum dare

(14 comments — 10 years ago) [ comment ]

... Sep 2014 continued

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