SIGBOVIK 2009 has come and gone, and was a great success. This is a real simulated conference that we've been holding at CMU for the past few years. It's hard to really describe the vibe, but it's a bunch of academics getting together to make fun of the academic conference and publication system by putting loads of work into making very sophisticated and polished papers and presentations about nonsense ideas, or to put together disturbingly real implementations of things that pretty much should not exist, just for fun. This year was great, I think better than last year's. My contributions were as follows:
(2) The "LFMan" game and associated ephemera. If you have never seen the old TV Show "Square One" then you should watch this video of Mathman to understand the referent. It is a paper and talk and sort of an actual game: LFMan. (Use the arrow keys and '1' or '2' to select between SERVER OK and ABORT). The talk and demo went well even though I think there were a lot of people that are too young to have seen Square One.
The award is itself an unplayable Arkanoid clone. This was playing on the screen during the awards presentation, and had just one dot left (you'll see it takes like 10 minutes for it to get that last one) for a long time, with people continuously going "awwwww" when the ball just barely missed the last dot. For the "people's choice award" we used the Clap-O-Meter to determine the favorite paper from a short list, but while we were using applause to determine that, the final dot was struck in the Arkanoid award, which was met with the clearly most enthusiastic cheering of the Clap-O-Meter phase. So the People's Choice award ended up being given for my own Award drawing, which I think we are pretty happy about the way that turned out.
If you like this kind of thing, do check out the full proceedings. There's lots of good stuff in there. Long live SIGBOVIK!
c o m m e n t
William
(c-24-131-16-216.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) – 04.06.09 01:25:12
congratulations once again! i agree that Generalized Super Mario Bros. is much better than Level of Detail.. it's probably your best work
c o m m e n t
Tom 7
(h-69-3-248-195.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 04.06.09 08:53:04
Here's a video if you don't want to play the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pKjOudDDEc
c o m m e n t
Austin
(optima.wv.cc.cmu.edu) – 04.06.09 14:49:43
This may be working as intended, but it seems like sometimes the ball just goes *through* some of the squares - like when it hits the right side of the ascender on the "k", for example. Intentional?
c o m m e n t
Tom 7
(h-69-3-248-195.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 04.06.09 19:54:02
There's actually space between the blocks (visible) which if the ball hits exactly, then it can kill two blocks and appear to go straight through. Is that what you're seeing? I'm sure it's not perfect, as I wrote it in one hour.
jonas
(dsl51b61807.pool.t-online.hu) – 04.17.09 14:09:17
I prefer Wikiplia. It's a pity it ran for such a short time only despite that you claimed it would run until it would stress your server or net connection too much, but I too am lazy and tired to maintain the bitrotting public services I'm running.
c o m m e n t
Tom 7
(h-69-3-248-84.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 04.17.09 23:19:33
Sorry, yeah, I had to take it down when I was writing my thesis and it kept getting spamminated or infinite-looping and my machine was having all sorts of hardware failures and I just wanted to be able to finish the damn document. I should put it on spacebar.org again and just ulimit it.
