I recently ported some of my ancient QuickBasic code to FreeBasic. One such piece of code was an old unfinished prototype of a Bob the Hamster jump-and-run side scrolling game.

You can download the results here ↵ bob-old-sidescroller.zip

You can move Bob around a single level, and interact with a few objects, although there are no enemies to fight.


This code is notable in O.H.R.RPG.C.E history because, as best as I can remember, it is the first Hamster Republic code to use the multi-directional scrolling code used for the OHRRPGCE's maps.

I have no plans to finish this code, but I do have another sidescroller in the works

Raku is made of burning. It is sort of like love, except that it is done with ceramics and a lot of flammable natural gas. Raku glows red hot, and you drop it in a bucket full of newspaper and let it burn, and when you take it out it is beautiful.

The review I posted yesterday of Sex Club Reject's new album was criticized by some as being too full of hyperbole. To those naysayers, I would refer this article I just read hot of the AP:

In related news, other research from the same team suggests that the Permian–Triassic extinction event may have in fact been triggered when a 13 second clip from a Sadjelko track fell back through a time rift from New York 2006 to somewhere in the middle of Pangaea 251,400,000 BC

For the past week I have been enjoying the new Sex Club Reject album. My friend Josh is the mastermind behind SCR, and he asked me to do the spoken-word vocals on track 07 "Pow Boom No!" It strikes me as fascinating that so many of my favorite musicians are actually people I actually know, and even count as friends. For the past few decades, the world of music has been about big stars, and I see that big-star-world crumbling. The big stars can't realistically compete with the myrmidon tiny stars anymore. Not for my ear anyway.

Sex Club Reject

SCR's music covers a wide range of styles. It exhibits more versatility than what I see out of most other bands, as it touches upon rock, and metal, and emo, and dance, and techno, and love-ballads, and desert-rock, and beatles-esque rock and punk and industrial and many points in-between, while managing to be good on all fronts, and getting steadily better every time I hear more of it. I am obviously not an impartial source here since I have known the band's lead since we were both in grade-school, and my voice is featured on the new album, but still, with all the impartiality I can muster, I insist that this album is several different kinds of awesome, and if Josh's music keeps steadily increasing in awesomeness at the same rate that it has increased over the past ten years, then by 2012 he will reach a level of widespread acclaim that is the post-RIAA-apocalypse year-2012-equivalent of superstardom*, and by 2017, Sex Club Reject music will cure blindness, eradicate cancer, and cause military dictatorships to crumble.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of the interwub, you don't need to take my only-mildly-hyperbolic word for it, you can simply listen for yourself.

I was too distraught to post about this earlier, but yes, it is true, somebody has shot Bob the Hamster!

He's in the hospital right now, in a coma. The details of the attempted assassination are still unclear. Because the Hamster Republic has no standing police force, we are asking the public for help in investigating the crime. You can find details here. Apparently the shooter was arrogant enough to leave a string of cryptic clues to his identity.

I have often heard it said by computer security type people that using real words in a password is a terrible idea, and that all passwords should be made of random letters numbers and punctuation.

So here is your math puzzle for the day. Estimate which is of the following is a better password:

(1) 8 random characters that may include lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and any punctuation found on a generic keyboard.

example: (mR{Yu_g

(2) 3 random words from the english language. They have to actually be random, and not just three words that you picked from your imagination.

example: dotard mane skycap

Be sure to show your work.

I am still alive. The blog-urge has not left me, it is just hard to find time to draw anymore, and I hate posting a blog without a drawing.

Here is a sculpture I am working on:


And here is something Genevieve painted recently (which I think is beautiful!):

I drew this inside the OHRRPGCE's built-in sprite editor. I drew it for the Castle Paradox Miss Pixel 2007 contest, but I was just a few hours too late for the ending deadline :(

A few more pictures at gilgamesh

I have finally tried my hand at something I have wanted to do for quite some time-- a Book on MP3! I recorded myself reading my short story Leviathan. The sound quality is bad, because all I had to record with was my laptop's build-in microphone, and if you listen carefully you can hear my cat and dog chasing each other around in the background, but overall I think it is pretty listenable. To hear it, go to click here

I offer 1000 cool points™ to anyone who can record a better version of this :)

This is Bosco. He is applying to join the Black Rabbits Scootering Club. He owns his own motorcycle, and has been riding solo for about a year-and-a-half. He has never been in a motorcycle gang before. He is secretly hoping to meed a nice biker babe and start a family.

He doesn't know a lot about motorcycles, but he is totally pretty sure that his isn't a cardboard box.

Thanks to my friends at CastleParadox, I bring you Revenge Of The Kitten Wearing Mittens!:

A friend of mine today informed me of the National Novel Writing Month contest. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I haven't been doing very much writing since my collection of short stories, so the idea of trying to write a 50000 world novel in one month is really very appealing... The catch of course, is that I haven't had much free time lately (as evidenced by my lamentable lack of block postings here) so whether or not I will be able to pull it off is... debatable.