Untitled Project Day 1

I have started working on a new “stupid flash game”. You can view the most recent version of the interface at http://www.antimodal.com/hideseek/.
The inspiration for this game came from a dream I had a few months ago. Aliens have landed on Earth, and are able to disguise themselves as buildings. Your job is to find the camouflaged aliens in a metropolitan sized game of hide-and-seek.
The screen is a section, or block, of a city. Each block has a number of buildings. The layout of each block is dynamically generated for each game.
The player can move north, south, east, or west to another section of the city, depending on the city layout. When the player moves, the aliens also may move. The player can identify an alien disguised as a building when one of the buildings on a block appears or disappears on subsequent visits, because otherwise the buildings should always be the same.
The aliens keep the same disguise as they move around the city. Just because a building is incongruous does not mean it is an alien, since the city blocks are random.
The game is scored by time elapsed. When the player guesses incorrectly, time is added to the score. I don’t want it to be “three tries and you are out”, nor do I want there to be a fixed time limit for the game.

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Looking at White Chamber

I first played Crimson Room around February, 2004, hearing about it through Nick’s GrandTextAuto post. Viridian Room came out in June of 2004, and Blue Chamber later in 2004.
It has been over a year since we have seen a new locked room puzzle from Takagism/FASCO-CS. Interestingly, the news on the site, dated August 4, 2004, claims the next room is going to be “Pink Prison”, followed by “Tangerine Room”.
(update 26 Jan)

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White Chamber

Another puzzle from Takagism and FASCO-CS: The White Chamber. [Link is to the FASCO-CS front page.] Click (and sometimes drag) to escape from the White Chamber.

Trackback Attack

Starting from December 8, this site has received over 400 phony trackbacks from 60 assorted referrers. It appears that someone is testing yet another spam client. The ip address varies, with one or two hits from the same ip with the same referrer, and 5-7 hits per referrer. Probably a network of zombied clients controlled over IRC.
Many of the referrers are for older, archived blog postings. Why would a blog article posted in July submit a trackback ping in December? It wouldn’t, of course, because this is just another attempt at spam.
I am also getting attempts to POST trackbacks for Drupal and whatever package uses the file “xmlrpc.php”.

Special Announcement

Corita Elizabeth Kahler-Rickman was born at 9:18 am on Tuesday, December 6, 2005. She is 7 pounds 5 ounces and 21.5 inches in length.
After a brief recovery in the hospital, we are now all back home. Corita is a sweet child, she is quiet and likes to sleep.

Reading for November, 2005

I read most of James Agee’s A Death in the Family, but skipped the last forty pages or so. There is some criticism that the book was assembled by editors and did not appear in a form Agee would have approved of.

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