I suppose I should introduce myself. Hi. I'm a long-time lurker. This is going to be a long post. (The actual good stuff is at the bottom.) This should serve as both introduction and farewell -- at minimum for awhile. My job is going to be taking me out of contact for a bit. Perhaps irreversibly. It's a high risk profession. But that's the way things are. Reality might catch up with your forgetting that I exist soon enough. I should be around for a brief while if anyone needs me; although, I can't see why. Who am I? Unlike what it says in my user info on this forum, I am not 46 years old. Whenever a form asks for a birthday, out of habit, I put the date of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. I'm actually in my 20s. I don't know exactly how old. I stopped counting birthdays, and I would rather not do the subtraction for particular, painful reasons. I have a BA in History and four Master's Degrees: History, MBA, Physics, and Physics-adjacent. Having four Masters' is the same as having a doctorate, right? I'm being informed that no it is not. And that it is a huge waste of money. It wasn't my idea. They paid for/made me get these random degrees for professional reasons. Apologies to any American taxpayers reading this. Over the course of my career I have learned to speak over a dozen languages. Granted, two of those languages are Dothraki and Klingon. I also read an additional six languages which includes Ancient Sumerian/Akkadian Cuneiform and Mycenaean Linear B Script. Miscellaneous: former animator, competent programmer, voice actor, rotary-wing pilot, NREMT, two semesters of remedial med school, and a bunch of other stuff I'm not going to commit to text. I was pretty awesome. In fact, I was smart enough that they gave me an office that lets me watch the ships sail through the Golden Gate. There used to be more of us, but now it's just me. If you're wondering what I do, you probably shouldn't. Besides, you should be able to infer rather specifically from how blatant I was four lines ago. Slightly less cryptically, I craft and enact unique, creative, preferably non-violent solutions to high-level, unsolvable problems and situations in the World. It's mostly a lot of office work punctuated by long travel, loud noises, and sprinting while carrying people to safety. You know: typical public service employee. Just as a casual mention, I was a little shy -- which is why I rarely said anything in chat. I suppose I never found a way to fit into the rhythm of staid platitudes and cliquish patter. The Looney Bin is probably the best chat on Twitch, and I was still too shy to interject. Plus, Lowco is intimidating. I have done drogue-drop auto-rotation cold starts that are less scary than Lowco. Seriously. Instead, I tried to contribute by creating roughly community-oriented content. Whenever I was bored, I would entertain myself by making stuff that you could play with. Thank you to anyone who indulged me by showing any kind of passing interest. It allowed me to pretend that I was part of the Looney Bin – even if it was ephemeral at best and quickly forgotten. Apologies for not participating more. Sorry. Speaking of which, I have a few incomplete Looney Bin projects. I suppose here is as good as a place as any to put them. Enjoy. Chart of Pies On November 11, 2015 this conversation took place at 1838 UTC (2:38PM EST) indognito: i would like to see a pie graph with the types of games she plays DrMorningWoody: indognito, I'm sure clumsywise is working something. indognito: i don't know who clumsywise is but i like him I see all. Anyway. I made an interactive pie chart (Click here to go to the Pie Chart). It was a literal chart made of pies. The data was represented by stacks of pies. It's loosely based off of OldSchoolGentleman's List of Games. I never finished it because it was kind of a smart-ass response. It's mostly complete. There are some slight scaling and category spelling problems. But I think it gets the point across. It starts with all categories displayed. You can click the "i" in the upper left and pick your own variable categories to compare. It has categories across the bottom. Mouse over the pies for the game name. You can mouse over the category names to get a larger pop-up box if they are hard to read. It reads the data from a published Google Spreadsheet. Because of possible impending existence problems, I may not be able to maintain the document. If anyone wants to update the Google Sheet, I can give permission. Better yet, you can just take the Javascript file and change the interpreted URL to another spreadsheet. It has to be a published spreadsheet and not just a shared link. Or you can use it to represent any kind of data in pie form. Twelve Days of Twitchmas On August 22, 2015, Lowco was playing H1Z1 and began singing, as she does. At first it was “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”' with Koekiemonstr. A song that was originally recorded as a 1939 South African Zulu song that the White man stole, Anglicized, and 76 years later turned into the above monstrosity. Later, Lowco tried to remember the lyrics to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and failed pretty spectacularly. She became increasingly upset with the viewers for not helping her remember. She then decided to write her own Twitch themed lyrics. She demonstrated a slight lack of feel for the cadence and word shapes of the song. Also, she wrote the song backwards. Lowco proceeded to become increasingly upset with the viewers for not writing down her genius song lines, chastising them for interfering with her lyrical expertise. Here is a rough version of that song. It's incomplete because Lowco never said the words “On the (ordinal number) day of Twitchmas, my true love gave to me.” I did piece together the phrase from other patches of words, but it never sounded right. Sort of like a Speak & Spell or a dog attempting to speak. Additionally, the song is not massaged properly. If I had given it another two passes, I would have equalized it better, smoothed out the cuts, and slightly auto-tuned it. For reference, here is what auto-tuned Lowco sounds like. Here's a ZIP file with the four most complete, clean songs that I could find of Lowco singing. The Legend of Lowco (working title) Okay, this game was supposed to be based loosely on the original NES/Famicom The Legend of Zelda: an 8-Bit Top-Down Adventure Pixel Art Game. Here is the link to the game. The game starts in the editor. Press |\ and then click TEST to play the game. The controls are based on an American keyboard. I don't know how they work on those crazy European keyboards with all those diacritic marks and metric punctuation. In the editor: |\ (Vertical Bar, Backslash) to bring up Editor Pop-Up Click stuff. Click on Grid to place stuff. Shift-Click to remove stuff from Grid. Shift-Click for Alternate Pop-up manipulation. Click TEST to play the game. In the game: WASD – Move around {[ , }] - Action Buttons: Interact, Use/Equip Item in Inventory, Attack |\ - Switch Character, Trade Item in Inventory Enter - Inventory 2 – Fire a Bow (Left in for Testing) = - flip between one and all characters unlocked It's maybe about 20% done. It has some sound but not music. Most of the sprites, dialogue, and maps were meant to be temporary. What is provided here is just an early Alpha demo. There are still a lot of bugs. I was able to get the hard edges to work in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but, for some reason, Chrome interpolates everything, making it look like you need glasses or have cataracts. The plot was fairly haphazard. The games Lowco played became sentient AI and pulled her into the computer world. They also split her into four personality Aspects. The player needed to gather the three outstanding Lowco Aspects and defeat the Boss AI in the CPU Core. The player would normally progress through the story to unlock the playable Aspects. You can flip between one and all characters unlocked by pressing the Equals key. I was going to ask members of the Looney Bin to submit pixel versions of themselves to be included as NPCs in the game. I made a tool for it and everything. Again, I'm shy. You were going to be put into a pool of randomly selected NPCs in this room: Surprisingly, there are actually very few permanent cultural signifiers (more enduring than memes) on Lowco's stream that can be turned into game world mythology. I tried to include most of them: Charlie, Fred, Hummus, Chinese Food, the artwork on the back wall, Grumpy Cat, Booker, sharks, rocks, general aloofness, unjustified rage, etc. Just poke around and play with things. If you want to make your own maps you can click ERASE in the editor. Save your map as a text file with the save icon. If you want to go back to the Default Quest, click DEFAULT. Here's a sewn together Overworld Map (click to enlarge): Conclusion So, there you have it. If the worst happens, I'll be gone in an existential sense, and you probably won't notice. If the worst doesn't happen, I'll see you on the far side of tomorrow, and you probably won't notice.
