Who's got the most toys? Me, that's who!

CivilGrrl's got a bit of money left over at the end of the year, and we'll have to pay franchise tax on anything left in the account, so we're making sure all bills and debts and such are paid off. While checking for software upgrades, I ordered a year's worth of DevNet Professional Subscription from Macromedia. It was a pretty pricey ($699 upgrade from Flash MX), but it includes self-upgrading licenses to damn near every Macromedia product in existence. Given that Flash is likely to get a major upgrade next year, I thought that'd help defray the cost.

While ordering I noticed that they were pushing a couple of promotions for buying stuff, namely a 20% discount off a $500 order and a free Flash Video Kit extension ($99 value). Unfortunately, DevNet wasn't on the list of stuff that qualified for the 20% discount. Luck had it, though, when the system had trouble with the CivilGrrl credit card and recommended that I call their 800-number. While placing the re-order, the saleslady gave me the 20% discount, dropping the price to $560.

Given that next year's Flash upgrade is gonna probably be $199 or $299, that means that I got a reasonably good deal on Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Freehand, Contribute, FlashPaper, a pile of server stuff I don't care about (1, 2, 3) and Quarterly toys. Wheeee!

Next Week On ABC: The Fish Police Save Christmas

Looking at the Internet Movie Database and Amazon, it is clear that Christmas is the most fragile of holidays. Searching for "Saves Christmas", I find that Christmas has thus-far been saved by. . .

• Ernest (the late "Hey Vern" guy)
• Elmo the muppet
• Inspector Gadget
• Felix the Cat
• The Berenstain Bears
• The Flintstones
• Rainbow Brite (a really creepy 1980's-era toy)
• The VeggieTales
• The GLO Friends (more creepy 1980's-era toys)

Is Christmas such a fragile holiday that it requires constant saving by everything from flash-in-the-pan 80's toys to fundamentalist Christian vegetables?

What can we do to shore up this fragile holiday and thus prevent further need for saving?

A record of sorts, I guess

Well, it looks like I'll be getting just under the wire for my 2004 New Year's resolution to watch my 100th Roger Corman movie. Netflix had Saint Jack and Targets which are, far as I can tell, numbers 98 and 99.

Targets is a bit of an oddity. It was Peter Bogdanovich's first theatrical movie, predating The Last Picture Show by three years. Apparently Corman had a contract with Boris Karloff for a certain number of days of filming, no matter how many movies they made. Karloff still had two days remaining in his contract, so Corman gave a young Bogdanovich a chance to get a running start with an established (albeit very old) actor. Since Corman figured you couldn't get a full movie's worth of material out of two days of filming, he required Bogdanovich to use Karloff footage from The Terror to pad out the film.

Instead of using the footage in yet-another "evil castle makes people do bad things" movie, Bogdanovich decided to make a film with two independent subplots that converge at the end. Since only one would involve Karloff, you'd only need him for half of the movie. In the one half, Karloff plays an elderly actor who decides to retire upon the release of his last movie (which is where The Terror footage comes in). The other plot is all unknowns and involves a young everyman who snaps and becomes a mass-murderer.

Unfortunately the film only half works. And, ironically, the half that doesn't work is the Karloff half. While Karloff is an excellent actor and it's interesting to see him playing "himself", there's really very little going on other than him repeatedly stating that he's retiring while producers beg him to stay on for another film.

The mass-murderer subplot, however, works extremely well and rescues the movie completely. It starts slowly, but by the end of the movie it's got you totally hooked. The scene where the guy's hiding on a water tower shooting at passing cars on the highway belongs up there with the shower-scene in Psycho as one of the most disturbing movie clips ever. If they'd have let Karloff's contract slide and made the entire movie about the mass-murderer, it would've been a classic thriller. As it stands, it's only halfway there.

Saint Jack is another Bogdanovich/Corman co-production. This one was done in 1976 after Bogdanovich had become a hot property with The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, then squandered his success with a couple of really big bombs. Anyway, Ben Gazzara plays Jack Flowers, an American pimp working in Singapore catering to Western clients. He's well-liked by both his girls and his clients but is on the run from Singaporan organized crime. After several adventures and run-ins with dotty characters (including a Chinese midget pimp --did I mention Corman's a genius?), he's eventually reduced to a job that he considers beneath his station, namely working for the CIA procuring girls for Vietnam vets on weekend passes. He eventually sinks even lower than that, but I won't give it away.

Speaking as a movie-buff, Saint Jack is a real gem. It's occasionally hampered by a story that's not told well by its actors (mainly because 75% of 'em are Chinese and barely speak English) and I found myself occasionally playing "catch up" with the plot. It's a great ride, though. It actually reminds me a bit of The Big Lebowski not only because both feature Ben Gazzara playing "the likeable sleaze", but also because just about every character in the film is interesting enough to have a film unto himself. You feel like you're only getting a tiny glimpse of a much bigger and more colorful picture.

On the whole, both were nice surprises. Targets features a top notch B-story hampered by a dull A-story, and Saint Jack is definitely a forgotten gem of the 1970's. Neither feel like a typical Corman film, which isn't necessarily a bad thing :)

I still need to watch Corman Film Number 100. I've got a 99-cent copy of Ski Troop Attack that I've been meaning to watch. I've heard it's pretty bad, but I'll watch it just for completeness' sake.



Oh, and if you ask why I want to see 100 Corman films, it's because I want to unreservedly state that I've done something that I know nobody else to have done. I know people who can recite pages of dialogue from Monty Python films. I know people who have filmed cheapo horror films of their own. But I don't know anyone who's seen 100 Corman films.

Look at all the pink stuff

Christmas day for a two year-old is a magical time. I just posted pictures at http://civilgrrl.com/gallery/04-12. Don't look, though, if you're averse to pink dollhouses and princesses.

We had a fun time. I ended up with that bigass two volume Complete Far Side collection, a Barnes & Noble gift card, a memory card for my camera, and enough Nespresso coffee capsules to keep the whole freakin' Mormon Tabernacle Choir awake for a month.

Happy holidays to all!

Boy, Lucy was right

After 38 years on this planet, my thinking has gone back and forth on several subjects. The most recent is the holidays. In the past I've had drilled into my head that all of the glitz and commercialism and such that surrounded Christmas was shallow and distracting and wrong and that you should instead cherish all of the "deeper meanings" of Christmas, be they religious or family or otherwise.

But I've got to thinking about it, and I'm now having a very hard time figuring out exactly WHY the commercialism of Christmas is so very wrong. While I can certainly see why some would find the hustle-n-bustle of holiday shopping to be overwhelming, I rather enjoy it. This year I made an Excel spreadsheet in early November containing a list of what we were gonna get everyone, and whenever we had an "aha, that'd be a great gift for " moment, we put it on the list. Last week we finished getting the last of the items on the list, and I think we got everybody something that they'll like. For the folks we won't see soon, we boxed up and shipped off the stuff. The rest is wrapped and under the tree.

And I enjoyed all of it. I didn't stress over the shopping, even when I was in the crowded mall. I took the rugrat with me, and we made time to stop in at "Starbooks" (as she calls it) for a coffee and a chocolate milk to watch all the goings-on while we checked out the latest animated furry Sesame-Street toys.

All my life I'd been like Charlie Brown, often worried that I wasn't getting the "deeper meanings" of it all. Even when I thought I had properly plumbed the depths of these Christmas meanings, I still worried that there were even deeper meanings that I was missing. The whole time, though, Lucy was still telling me that Christmas was all about "Santa Claus and Ho Ho Ho and Mistletoe and Presents to pret-ty girls", and I now think Lucy's right. While I've heard of people who've stretched out far enough that they've found this brass ring of meaning, I'm not convinced that they have, because they're inevitably unable to articulate it. And I'm never one to embrace concepts that cannot be articulated. True meaning and self-hypnosis look virtually identical to the outside viewer as well as the practitioner.

Watching cable news (a thing that I really must avoid more), I'm told that there is a culture-war surrounding Christmas, and it's being perpetuated by those shallow department stores and toy manufacturers and soft drink vendors who are trying to hijack Christmas and turn it into a bigass commercial greedfest, and the religious and cultural forces are defending against this onslaught as best they can. Seems to me to be the opposite, though. Christmas is whatever I make it to be, and those who insist that there's something wrong with ME for embracing the mirthful shallowness of it all are the ones firing the culture-war shots.

. . .and that's the meaning folks. So if you want depth to your holidays, have some. Meanwhile, I'm going to the mall. Last week along with the gifts I discovered that Sears was selling gigantic boxes of laundry-detergent (quite highly rated in Consumer Reports) for $10, so I now have enough to last at least a year.

---

On another note (and one that I'm fully convinced that you don't care about, which is fine because I write this journal for me and not for you), I finished Mountain Man and am now working through Managing Ignatius : The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in New Orleans, which is a chronicle of the Lucky Dog hot dog company in New Orleans and the dotty array of human flotsam that drifts through the company to sell hot dogs on the street. It's a perfect read for a ConfederacyOfDuncesophile such as myself.

Betcha didn't know I was a cartoonist too!

Since it's guest-week at the gamedev comic page, I decided to follow Mushu's lead and make an unsolicited submission.

You probably can't tell, but it's made entirely out of clipart. The kid image was the most disturbing one I could find.

Now here's a deal

I know there are some folks out there who like it when I post deals. I find deals all the time, which often entertains my coworkers here. Last thing I got was a free mini-fridge and luggage when I bought some more ink for the plotter.

This deal's gonna be hard to beat. It's Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, which is a nice "Baby Photoshop" app. It's not quite as nice as Paint Shop Pro, but the price is becoming more and more unbeatable. And you can get it along with an old version of Borland Delphi shipped for under $16. No rebates or anything.

Here's how to do it. . .

1. Go to http://www.softwareoutlet.com/christmas. On this page you'll see Elements for $19.99. Add it to your cart.

2. Search for "Delphi" in the search-box and add a 99-cent copy of Delphi 2.0 to the package. This'll get the purchase price over $20.

3. When checking out, use the code "10XMAS" in the coupon-code box for a $10 discount.

4. Choose the economy $4.95 shipping, and you'll have yourself a Photoshop Elements and Delphi for $15.93, which is a pretty unbeatable price for what you get.

I've done plenty of business with Softwareoutlet in the past, and they're a good company with some great deals.

Alternately, if you don't want the Photoshop Elements, they've got Half Life 2 for $39.99 on the Christmas page. Subtract the 10XMAS $10 and add shipping, and you've got HL2 for $34.94. Given that Best Buy's selling it for $54.99, that seems like a good deal too.

Happy dealing!

Oooh, more level builder

Okay, Bulldozer Builder Client Release Candidate One is now up for your level-building enjoyment. Try it out here.

It's a friggin' Flash-applet, so there's nothing to install. Just click the link and start making a level. Sheesh.

Following TANSTAAFL's buglist (scroll down about two entries), it appears that Flash MX 2004's tooltip classes have a bug. Well, not really a bug, but just something that Flash can't do. In a regular Windows app if you hover your mouse over a button near the edge of your app's window, the tooltip will happily display itself off the edge of the Window. You can't do that in a Flash applet, though. All drawing in a Flash applet has to occur in the space granted to it. The tooltip object in Flash is smart enough to scoot itself around horizontally if you're near the left or right edge of your applet, but it always stays below the mouse cursor. Hence, if you've got a button near the bottom of your applet the tooltip will be clipped off.

The obvious solution was to make the applet a bit taller so the entire tooltip could display. When I did that, however, I found myself with enough space for a little status-help display. So I dumped the tooltips entirely and just made everything display help there.

I was also able to prune another 6k out of the applet. The whole level builder now clocks in at about 33k. Pretty good considering that the first one I uploaded was 79k. And I'm not just being obsessive about size. Small applets are good because they load faster on slow connections and save you space on your monthly ISP bandwidth limit.

Ghostwire just updated their lightweight PHP-Flash communication object for PHP 5, so I've now got no excuse for not starting on the server stuff.

---

I'm taking a break from Asimov for a short time. I'm currently reading Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher. Good read. It's pretty violent stuff, but I don't think you could write a book about the mountain men without violence unless it was a romance novel.

Thems was the days

Since I reminded Bryan of an old college incident that he recounted in his blog comments, I shall relay another.

The old Texas A&M engineering building was across the street from a McDonald's, and I often ran by there to grab some lunch on the way to the lab. One day I popped into the lab to find Bryan. He had apparently been up all night working on a project. At this point I was holding the empty, save for several ketchup packets, styrofoam (this was the 80's) Big Mac container and I was looking for a place to throw it out. The exchange then went like this.

Bryan: What's in there?
Me: A tiny dwarf.
Bryan: Can I see it?
Me: No. It's an evil dwarf, and it will bite you.

Before I could stop him, he grabbed the container out of my hands, threw it on the floor, and stomped it. What resulted was a spray of ketchup across the carpet and up the wall.

It took him a while to readjust to reality, as he for a moment thought that he had just killed something in the package.

Is this an audience or an oil painting?

Umm, doesn't anyone have a comment about my level editor?

Like it? Hate it?

Hellooooooo?

Buildin' dozers

Everything on the dozer-builder is now done except for the server communication. I did a lot of optimization of the graphics and buttons and such. Took the size of the app from 70k down to 40k. You can record and playback solutions. You can also pop up your entire level in ASCII form if you wanna share it or email it.

The app is here. If you want to check out the cut-n-paste, put the following level text in your clipboard, then press the "clipboard" button in the applet and replace whatever's there with this. . .

---

The level text is here, placed as a link because it's 694 characters wide and it screws up the formatting of the rest of the journal and I can't figure out how to get the gamedev journal baby-HTML to do anything with hard word-wrapping.

---

In the builder itself I wanted to have a traditional cut-n-paste rather than this kludgy paste-box, but the Flash sandbox prevents you from reading the clipboard except inside of an editable text field. I suppose that's sensible, because it'd otherwise be an easy job for me to write a hidden applet on a page that grabs the content of your clipboard and uploads it to a database where I can leisurely browse whatever URLs/passwords/etc that you left in there.

Anyway, try it out. If you see anything broken or that just makes no sense, lemme know. If my level text parser is broken, post the text that breaks it. Thanks.

Lotsa stuff

Got some ebay goodness here. There are couple of things that might interest folks such as yourself, namely copies of 3D Game Engine Programming For People Misguided Enough To Want To Write Their Own 3D Game Engine, a new just-reviewed copy of Turnip Boy Teaches You How To Write A Mediocre Space-Shooter in C#, and a couple of books on Flash, one of which was a review copy and one that I no longer need now that I have discovered Flash Resource Manager.

FRM has now become a necessary utility for me, and I always run it whenever I do anything with Flash. It realizes that Flash has excellent help content but a really lousy built-in help browser. It puts a new MSDN-inspired face on Flash's help content along with a reasonable search facility. It's all the manual you need if you're using Flash.

---

A couple of you are on my Xmas card list, but most of you aren't. If you're not on the list or you require instant gratification, here's our holiday letter that we stuff in cards.

I also took good advantage of those McDonald's win-codes. One of the free codes you could win was a pack of 25 free pictures from SnapFish. I won four sets of codes, so I used 'em to print 100 pictures that we're stuffing in the cards. Given that photo studios are charging about a buck apiece for photo cards, that's a good alternative.

Yeah I'm a frugal cuss. Frugality prevents me from having to get a real job, so it's worth it.