Cheezer and Louzer

This game – Echoes – is one in a collection that seems to have popped up over the last couple of years that feature really old-school 2-D style game play with a lot of the latest graphics tricks and twists. I am including Geometry Wars and all of its copy cats in that set.

This wonderful little game is from Binary Zoo, makers of a bunch of really fun and FREE games, including a demo they call Mono that’s way more playable than 90% of the so-called “casual” games out there these days. These guys know how to write lean, sleek code and make really fun games that you want to keep coming back to again and again.

If you watch this video I made with Fraps and wonder where the player’s character is, that’s because the game is pretty much non-stop chaos. It’s pretty mind-numbing at first but you can control the level of graphics effects to make it simpler, if you want. I prefer that A LOT over the Windows-XP version of Geo Wars released recently for Steam since it has none of those controls.

Way to go, Binary Zoo! Thanks a million.

What have we become? According to what I’ve just been reading, the answer is disturbing. This is not necessarily safe for your kids to read, although I would have died laughing reading this when I was 12, but apparently there’s a newish weight loss pill on the market called Alli. It is a fat-blocker, they say, but it also has some side effects. Which is why they have you take the quiz you can see in the attached picture here, to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

Which is oily “gas” coming out of your bum at the oddest moments. That’s what happens, apparently when you interrupt the body’s natural fat absorption process. I can’t imagine anyone actually buying this product but these articles say it’s very popular. All I can say is:

Yuk.

I’m really really thankful I’m not so overweight that I would consider doing this to myself.

A Crocs controversy. I mean, is that really all parents have to talk about? I came across this site, parentdish.com, accidentally tonight and started looking it over. They have tons of posts on all sorts of parenting related themes (including adoption) but the topic with the most comments right now is this one.

Why doesn’t the author want her son to wear Crocs? Because they are ugly. There, nothing else to see. You can stop posting comments, folks. Move along now…

Someday, I will get to write a post here about all of my favorite topics of discussion in one all-consuming post: China, adoption, legos, pugs, squirrels, music and robots. For now though, I have just China and robots to share with you. This post from Console Nomad tells of a Chinese man who is building his own collection of robots at home. He is quite the “maker” and his robots are really wonderful.

FWIW, these are autonomous machines – not remote controlled – but they don’t have any intelligence. Still, they are light years beyond anything I could make right now so this gets really high ratings from me.

Enjoy the vid.

~Peter

Once again, it’s not like I really need to do anything here, other than just post the facts, as provided this time by MSNBC.com:

An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

Does it matter any that this happened in Germany? No, it does not. It just shows how widespread their evil doings have gotten since we first started posting on this. Also, this so-called ‘police spokesman’ is clearly just another shill working for THEM, content to keep covering up the truth about squirrels.

So Greenville was nice. The folks we worked with were great and they seemed to appreciate what we were offering. We’ll see if they stick with the program for long, but they had a great start at least.

The city looked nice too, from what I could see. I was in the hotel and conference rooms mostly, but one night we did get to go out to the BMW Performance Driving Center, just outside of town.

The client paid for all of us to go there and test drive some neat cars. We drove the X3’s on the off-road track, Z4’s on the oval track with water, 335+twin turbo’s on the Auto-X track, M5’s on the big oval and the Z4’s again on a timed road track. Those last Z4 races were the most fun, even though the cars had auto transmissions. When you get ready for the first time, the instructor says, “OK. This is not your car. This is not your gas. These are not your tires. Drive this thing like you stole it.” IOW, go wild, so we did. I did a 30.44 lap and then a 28.76 lap. The best driver there that night did it in 26.56 though, so I need to improve quite a bit more still. I’ll take that anytime. It was a ton of fun and really nice of our client to let us join their employees.

…South Carolina, that is. Not that other Greenville. This little town is about 100 miles from the Atlantic and it’s going to be about 88 degrees and humid, but there’s work there so why not. We are leading a roadmapping workshop for some folks from a new customer – teaching them all about the benefits of collaborative roadmapping. From what we’ve heard so far, these folks should be ready but it’s always hard to know until you start talking the talk.

This is my first trip to any state in “The South” other than Florida, so that’s pretty exciting.

We’ll see…