I rickrolled Dr. Tiki. In public. At his own event. And took video. Here’s the video of it happening:
I’ve only been genuinely rickrolled twice and both were by Dr. Tiki, including the “lala Shower Outtakes” video that made it the front page of Digg.com. So when I heard that Jeff Macpherson (the guy who plays Dr. Tiki on Tiki Bar TV) announced a “Dr. Tiki meetup” at my local watering hole Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge, I had to come up with a plan to get him back with a rickroll while he was there.
To trick him into clicking through to a rickroll while at a Tiki Bar seemed like it would be a difficult task, but I had some advantages: One, I am good friends with Martin Cate, the mastermind behind Forbidden Island, which was Dr. Tiki’s destination. And two, I designed and programmed Forbidden Island’s tiki-themed touchscreen jukebox. The idea of using something other than the Internet-- specifically a jukebox -- to rickroll someone seemed incredibly devious and yet the same time strangely appropriate. I pitched it to Martin and he was in.
It all came together quickly. I made a special build of the jukebox software that when activated, would make every song selection on the juke trigger the Rick Astley video full screen. I got it working in record time and coordinated with Martin to clandestinely install it on the jukebox before opening.
The rest was up to Martin himself. The plan was for Martin to give Dr. Tiki a tour of Forbidden Island -- which is a top notch Tiki bar truly worthy of a Tiki connoisseur’s guided tour -- that would culminate at the jukebox. At that point Martin would add free credits to the juke while secretly turn on the rickroll mode, then encourage Dr. Tiki to pick a few songs. Meanwhile, my friends Chad Spacey, Rebecca and I would shoot video.
The plan worked like a charm. Dr. Tiki was caught completely off guard. Someone not in the know even asked him what was going on and got him to explain the whole rickroll phenomena on camera. It was a classic moment. Jeff Macpherson was truly a great sport about it, a genuine nice guy, and I’m glad I and the other Forbidden Island regulars were able to meet up with him while he was in town. It took a lot of work to rickroll him in public like that, but it was totally worth all the effort. I’d like to think we’re even … but I wonder if I have to watch my back, virtually speaking.
I know there’s a been a lot of anti-video ranting about this, but I think it’s brilliant. My camera takes both photos and videos. When I first started using a digital camera (in 1999), I took many photos and not too many videos. But as memory increased and video got easier to share, I’ve been taking more and more video. So for any event in my life, I have a mixture of photos and video. But there’s never been a single workflow for getting the memories of the event into the hands of my friends (and thus, I never really shared videos). Flickr is solving that, and I think it’s great. Good work Flickr.
I’ve been a bit lazy about posting stuff to my blog here. I guess “lazy” isn’t the right word. I guess I’ve just been a bit uninspired. But I am still reading and commenting on blogs, and I’ve been sharing interesting articles via Google Reader (clicking a button is so much easier than writing a post). If you’re interested in my shared reading list, you can bookmark this link (and get a feed from it if you wish), or you can scan them in this handy box below, which at some point will go into my side bar over there, if I can get it to look non-ugly.
Wired had exclusive screenshots of Spore for the Nintendo DS and ….
Well, um. It’s ah … unimpressive.
Don’t get me wrong … it looks real cute and all. But, it’s just … clearly not Spore. Now I know the trend to make lame mobile “name branded” franchise tie-ins to popular real games has been going on for a while, but I thought the DS was above taking a game that is all about 3d character creation and reducing it to what appears to be Colorforms.
I read on Level Up that EA is claiming that they took the art direction from Japanese 2d rod puppets, but really it’s pretty clear that their real inspiration came from “The DS is not powerful enough to run this game, but we gotta cash in somehow on the brand!”. Nice spin attempt, EA, but these screenshots just aren’t doing it for me. I hope the game in motion convinces me (as, admittedly, is often the case!)
You know, the full mia culpa here is I’ll probably buy it … if it comes out.
Will it be fun? I have no clue. But I am sure to play it for months anyway. At GDC last year they hinted they may be releasing the editors early (for free?) ... I wonder what happened to that plan ..
I got an email from a customer who purchased my first indie game Rocknor’s Bad Day from the now-defunct games site Dexterity.com, whom which I had a distribution agreement. She wanted to re-download the full version of the game, because she had lost it. The agreement I had with Dexterity stipulated, as usual, that they got to keep all the sales records, meaning I had no way to tell if she was a legit customer. But I decided to give her a free copy anyway.
Here’s a snippet of what she had to say the next day:
Thank you so much for your prompt response. I can’t thank you enough for your generosity. My son will be delighted! He has Autism and gets obsessed with things for months at a time. He will play the one game for months and then move on to another. Then he will often return to a game he was obsessed with previously. Its so long since we played Rocknor I honestly couldn’t remember when we bought it. Thus far i have managed to keep him away from most of the awful games that consist of killing things.He will be so excited! Actually the whole family enjoys Rocknor and its so nice to have the kids playing something that makes them think instead of just pushing a button.
Once again my many many thanks. You have made one little boy very very happy.
When I hear firsthand how someone is enjoying something I made, it makes it very hard to think of doing anything else as a career or hobby.
If you’re ever near Alameda, California, stop in at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge and check out the touch screen jukebox that some bar buddies and I made:
Tell them Hanford sent you.
Scott Lund did the hardware, Matty & Jessica did the case, and Martin Cate organized the content and was executive producer. I did the software and most of the UI design along with the rest of the team.
It randomly plays music from the least-recently played selections on the juke. This was a major beef the owners and staff had about the old off-the-shelf jukebox, which played the same 20 songs over and over.
Here’s a shot of the jukebox’s custom “shipwreck” case:
When you’re a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it’s messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.
The end result is this little web app I wrote. It’s got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.
Here’s a brief rundown of how it works:
+ The canvas is made up of “passes” of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it’s own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you’ll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the “Copy to clipboard” button or “copy inverted”, which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There’s no way to save settings yet.
you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
