taking fire

After nearly eight years of blogging there are inevitably a few gems buried in the archives of taking fire. In an effort to revisit past glories I’ve added voting buttons to each entry.

If a new post tickles you, or particularly if you find something old that deserves more attention, hit the Vote button to bump up the magic number.

Over time I’ll add better ways to get at the top voted entries – for now there’s a rough list on the sidebar. Happy voting.

UPDATE: I ended up blowing this away after the sidebar was taking ages to load – terrible bit of SQL. Happy googling!

Good news for gaming geeks everywhere – Spelunky is not unbeatable. Today I finished this lovable bastard of a game after many hours of swearing and outright fun.

It’s an Indiana Jones-inspired platformer. It’s difficult and unforgiving, but fair. It’s cute and well-animated. Like its predecessor Nethack, the content is randomly generated and throws up constant surprises.

If you’re feeling anarchic you get to rob shopkeepers, who in this game have completely evil AI and will chase you down with terrifying efficiency.

It has a whole bunch of Secret Stuff which you find out in pleasant moments of ‘oh, I see’ and by checking out the buzz on the official message board.

It will make gamers respect you and give you fingers of whisper-nimble adamantium.

It’s completely free and will run on old PCs. As you can see from my stats (which I assure you are pretty good), don’t expect too many wins per play…

So the original plan was to upload all my photos to flickr and write up something about the trip to Chicago and Lollapalooza, and of course the nightmare journey/adventure getting back to NYC.

Instead I just blew a bunch of hours finishing version 1.0 of my next pixel-based project. It’s called ‘Peggy’. Say hello to her over on pixelpusher.

Now it’s officially midnight so that’s it for now.

And by that I mean Attention Deficit Disorder, not some other geekfest.

People still write excellent interactive fiction even in this late age.

This one – Aisle - is a single step game. One action and you’re done. A subtly different story is hinted at depending on what you do.

Hit Enter to get past the intro text. Add a comment if you find any good/funny outcomes.

As you will recall I get a lot of enjoyment from image macros.

What are they? They are images with a caption. They follow established internet memes. These memes generally originate on sites like [NSFW] 4chan or somethingawful. They are endlessly repeated until funny.

I am going to post an unholy stream of comments on this post with images that I’ve made from the photo archive.

Now ideally *you* should make one as well and add it as a comment. But for the love of Jebus, how?

Roflbot makes it easy.

1. Go to roflbot and make the image.

2. You get an option to host it for free on Imageshack. Do this and get the URL, at the bottom where it says Direct link to image
3. Add a comment on this post with the URL – I can make it a proper link for you.
4. Profit!

For reference [some NSFW]: lolcats, DO NOT WANT, FAIL, NOM NOM NOM, O RLY?.

This is a tech update for iTunes users, opponents of Digital Rights Management and those who generally like to see The Man getting sexually interfered with.

For iTunes investors like myself who have maxed out their ‘five authenticated computers’ allotment, there is nothing more annoying than emailing someone a great tune only to discover it’s a crappy locked-up .m4p file. It’s possible to open these files up, but awkward and time consuming.

If this applies to you go and check out doubletwist, a desktop app for PC, now in open beta. They promise to be free indefinitely. Fire it up and it goes to work decoding all your protected iTunes files (but leaves the originals intact). You’ll have to leave it overnight – it’s an intensive process.

The other part is that it hooks into your facebook account, so you can easily punt files (music/pics/video) to your shallow, refresh-clicking online acquaintances.

The reason I’m backing this one is because it’s written by a true information hero, DVD Jon – someone who dedicated their abilities to freeing information wherever it’s encoded. This is the guy who made his DVD-cracking algorithm so terse that they printed it on a T-shirt, and consequently could not ban it.

I finally got round to adding something new to pixelpusher.

Implausibly enough the sketch was inspired by the film Zidane back in 2006. I remember Stu and I both being blown away at the time.

Probably the best pie-chart joke ever, now generated live and before your very eyes by Google’s free chart generator.

Addendum: tip of the +2 Hat of Reminding to James Gary, illustrator, purveyor of fine ink and pixel works and all-round good egg.

This is just a quick test to see if the mp3-streaming plugin works.

If you hit the Play button below you should hear Professor Elvin Atombender giving it his sinister best.

another visitor

Or this, which sounds slightly camp on reflection.

destroy him

Possibly more lo-fi sounds to follow : )

With the newest version of the can’t-praise-it-enough WordPress, we get statistics and some insight into what people are actually doing reading taking fire.

At the moment TF averages between 60-90 hits per day (general upward trend, with a record 96 hits yesterday). Lots of hits are from people coming in to old entries from search engines.

things people search for

People search for very weird, puerile things. And the results frequently point to TF, which probably says something about us. Recent sampling with links to entries:

• sexy boys
• this one was always asking for trouble
• difference between dwarfs and midgets
• bare-assed men

stalkers

And then of course there are the searches for names which have been mentioned on these pages.

• Yvonne Dagan is a popular term on Google, believe it or not. Thanks to bean we are the sole hit on the web for this lady.
• Dave Draper should also be unnerved by the fact that people are searching for him, and coming here.
• Last but not least, I am amazed by the enduring appeal of Eileen Kinnear, a Google search that leads here at least 2 or 3 times every day. Totally justified though.