Leon's Microblog – September 2013

"Captain, I have a confession to make." *peels off DOIN' FINE and MARVELOUS labels on control panel lamps, revealing DANGER and MELTDOWN*
She tried to muster up her gothness by referring to nearby inanimate objects as 'dead', but it was obvious her heart wasn't in it.
A boulder in a rockslide realising that it loved the mountaintop view, and it will never see it ever again.
A cat on a manual treadmill, trying to get it to stop spinning, but still frantically racing forward to keep from being flung off.
A dog trying really hard to fit a beach ball in its mouth - even after being told to deflate it first, its dignity demands another solution.
A pondful of fish grunting and straining as they try to sprout limbs, while some frogs egg them on and boast about the sweetness of the air.
The battle-weary adventurers dutifully pen plausible daily-life tweets to hide their world-saving journey from their friends and parents.
Since they lost the code in the annual Christmas Computer Hit-With-Baseball-Bats, the end-boss stuck-in-wall bug must remain for eternity.
"Does the cheese gourmet care for the curds' culture? Even less does the Spaciosaur care as it idly licks up rich, ripe orbital colonies."
"In the face of global warming, the world had only one plan: make every animal giant and superintelligent, and ask them to somehow fix it."
"Location: 6 feet over water. Current activity: being flung 20 feet in the air by a hungry MegaDolphin. Status report: …Not lookin' good."
"Eat some raisins," he said. "You'll need the extra sugar once we pass through the portal. It's the only form of currency in the Ant World."
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/Twine_Spool.7z - I noticed that my Twine archive had a few doubles, so I fixed it and gave it an update. It now holds 745 Twines.
#IPlayed shiny pink steel toe capped stiletto punk platforms http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/lrmjhu4nd0y8ao624sy0aa/shiny-pink-steel-toe-capped-stiletto-punk-platforms. Feels kinda nice - almost hypnotically relaxing.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/djg270/sites/connection/connection.html - This isn't a Twine game and I'm not sure about the story, but I like its fancy technical flourishes.
Until the year spaceteen sixty-five, FTL travel was only possible by disguising a ship as a nutrient orb and being eaten by a psybersquid.
Odd fact: at the point Sonic collides with Knuckles in the Sonic 3 intro, his sprite changes to this for 1 frame.
"Built with love by @​goobsplatter, @​blappaboop, @​crobslosh, @​flippoburp and @​Gorpshoorp with the POOL license. Glob us on CodeClogger!"
The park-goers are blatantly ignoring the "please don't lavishly swing around me during musical numbers" signs on the statues and lampposts.
"Up next: where did Samson's hair go once Delilah cut it off?" *footage of muscle cats tipping over entire houses before hacking hairballs*
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5061 - Quick bugfix update to these Twine audio macros, where <<stopallsound>> would crash under certain conditions.
I guess I like the colours in this one. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=18913092)
The mermaid grows more and more impressed with the android she's trying to drown. Soon they're hitting it off, mutual fools under the waves.
You've got home, but you can't remember the button combination that unlocks your shirt. After some annoyed guessing, you just bathe clothed.
A few properly-rendered people form the outer layer of this crowd, shielding the low-detail, multi-headed, faceless aberration behind them.
Your plan to escape the dragon's mouth by coating yourself in aniseed backfired! Your child memories misled you about its sumptuous taste!
Sometimes I go to TF2's website and press Tab to just cycle through these complicated imagemap areas.
"Really, humans are just full of cosmic energy. Big bulging sacks of the stuff…" - her fairy fingers jab the air - "begging to be released!"
"I said I lied about humans releasing cosmic energy when tickled mercilessly, but it turns out it's true, and there really is a crisis now."
You just got the double-jump, and suddenly all the previous sectors have begun teasing you with high-up missile tanks. Shameless flirts!
This fortune cookie heals 10HP, but you have to read your fortune to your enemies in the battle - and it might say that they'll win!! Oh no!
"I recall my summer holidays… Kicking invading beach waves, clubbing swarms of baseballs… Wholesome schooling soothed those grim memories…"
Here are some lonely punctuation marks trying to survive after the draft tweet they were in was savagely backspaced. . , . ? ! "" ' …
The businessmen get comfortable for their 60-hour flight, and put on earphones playing lullabies at 8x speed for maximally rapid drowsiness.
"Exactly one of the <abbr> elements in this page refers to CSS as "Cascading Stegosaurus Saliva". …Which one? You'll just have to find out…"
I feel as if inset pull-quotes just don't work in technical articles.
Despite being the dominant medium of exchange for millenia, money's promotional slogan "Ya Can't Do That With Barter!" is still widespread.
"Whoa!" shout the tiny aliens as they crest the hill. "There's even more planet over here! We hit the jackpot when we conquered this place!"
With the rise of NeoFruit, SynthBerry and such, the natural fruits have been relegated to the 'classics' or 'oldies' section of the grocery.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5462 - I just did some bugfixes for these Twine macros, mostly relating to complex uses of <<revision>>.
A voice that makes roses bloom! A laugh that un-burns toast! A tired grunt that defrags disks and makes merge conflicts solve themselves!
The IntelliGun's computer idly toys with an ancient text editor buried deep in its OS, and tries to imagine simpler times long past.
You ask the cloakroom attendant if you can watch them crush your bags into a tiny numbered token. They oblige. You don't enjoy it.
You rise after completing the prayer. Having successfully Blessed This Mess, the living room wall slides back to reveal a secret chamber.
>OPEN DOOR (first constructing a door out of your own bones and fastening it to the wall) Opened. You perished with 0 points in 5 moves.
Not quite a "clay golem" as a pile of potted plant grit mixed with tap water, you order this stout warrior to defend your end of the office.
Can't believe no one's taken the Twitter username "VaginaBurp" yet.
I was wondering what http://www.superhotgame.com was sorta reminding me of - then I remembered a Mario ROM hack of mine: http://l.j-factor.com/emulation/SuperMarioBros-TimeAndPlace.nes
"Target: human," you whisper to your IntelliGun. It re-configures in your hand - aorta-sized bullet, gunshot noise of a screaming child.
"They call me the Zero-Day Vulnerability," said the cyberssassin, gesturing with his prog-rifle, "because I WILL execute arbitrary code."
The sculptor only chiseled the statue's head out of the marble, and left the rest trapped inside out of sheer nefariousness.
"Wowee", you laugh, "I had no idea I was this emotionally vulnerable!" Your giggling grows even louder. "This is unbelievable! Fantastic!"
You feel this miserly old recluse hoarding the world's last working VCR does not deserve to be called a "wise sage of the ancients' texts".
At the end of the bar: a lone blade of a pair of scissors. It's tough when manufactured couples break up. Their whole identity falls apart.
"My career was tragically cut short when a dog ran over me while I was lying on the floor trying to put on a shirt without picking it up."
This Twine image thing is looking a bit more serious by the day.
Some VR cyclists hack their real-life exercise bike interfaces so their VR bikes go farther with less pedals, despite causing "leg desync".
Mario idly tossing a fireball down a lava slope and watching it grow bigger and bigger as it rolls, gathering hapless Blarrgs and Podoboos.
Near the end of the battle, the game suddenly remembers to draw all the smoke from your hundreds of missile, rendering the screen opaque.
Telekinesis came with stern warnings against scratching your nose, lest your brain literally pokes itself. Many tried to recreationalise it.
Early consumer telekinesis was very weak, resulting in the infamously tepid "turning a book's pages" and "sweeping off eraser shreds" ads.
You feel so much more empowered now that you're at the stage of opening dungeon door locks with magic keys instead of ordinary ones.
"You may wonder how humans learned not to be grossed out by the sounds of their own mouths chewing. Sadly, our anthropologists are stumped."
"Fine, I admit it: my twitter feed is an ARG. I'm the player, and the prize is not being in real life."
Another small thing I did recently is make these Twine connector arrows highlight when you click their passages.
"And always remember to smile and say "NO BIG LOSS!" even if it was a gigantic, catastrophic loss that has left you irreparably injured."
The dinner guests receive a final dish… A pillow? "Ah," realises one, "we've been poisoned." Sighing in surprise, their heads fall forward.
Trying to get to sleep consists largely of ritualistically assuming an arbitrary pose and waiting for the magic to answer your summons.
"And now, in the… lighter side of the news…" The newsreader struggles to resist chortling from the cathartic relief this segment brings him.
This Twine base64 image thing precariously continues.
I rewatched this Strong Bad Email http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail131.html and now I'm fascinating myself with the idea of "boringpunk".
The night after breaking up with yourself, you awake on the floor next to your bed. You're still asleep, so you slip out and shut the door.
"Chiseling this post on a stone tablet with wifi, so forgive any typos - they are permanent and irreversible."
You accidentally walk into the island of renegade magitek ants floating five feet over your lawn. Their panicked mana blasts ruin your suit.
The newly renamed "Blank Space Where The World's Largest Golfball Used To Be" still gets tourists… Melancholics, absencepunks, saudadeists…
The secret stage icons on the level select screen are covered in dog slobber, and the cursor asks you if you REALLY want it to touch them.
"If a guest becomes rowdy or disagreeable, the band is ordered to play their intro sting backwards and banish them from whence they came."
Mission control frowns as the target jumps into the robot's firing line and swallows a handful of bullets. The robot departs, its job done.
Such bountiful piles of lightning the gods play with, you think as the sky roars, but not a jot will they spare to even singe your enemies.
That poem containing nothing but eye-rhymes sounds staggeringly beautiful when your eyes sing it.
Today I spent some time giving Twine 1 the ability to drag-n-drop image files into it to instantly base64 encode and embed them in stories.
Opportunistic gamers queueing up at the arcade on Monday mornings to rack up high scores when the machines are at dreary emotional lows.
"The 'slow-forward' or 'one triangle' VCR button has proved functionally inferior to fast-forward, and has been removed in future models."
"Remember to always chew your food 127 times - but not any more than that, because it'll wrap around and go back to being unchewed."
The most sensual part of wearing an entire galaxy as a dress is that your own body heat causes the inner systems' planets to be incinerated.
I admit I haven't checked the Twine docs with studious scouring, but I'm pretty sure that one's undocumented.
Odd Twine shortcut: click and drag text out of a passage to create a new passage + turn it into a link, in one go.
If you're wondering, the only goal I had while writing A Forest, A.D. was "add something funny in every passage". I guess it worked out.
"It doesn't count as sleeping with the bed if you don't get under the sheets," he reasoned.
Skeletons with hairclips and earrings sticky-taped to their skulls.
That's odd – your enemy scanner says her fists have an attack stat of 9, but her lips have an attack of 27? Then she closes in for the kill—
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/A_Forest_AD/ - Here's a super quick Twine game I hammered out for @Gtrwx Klik-of-the-Month event for September.
Doom hack where the HUD face is a square marked 'your photo here' and your grunts are replaced with captions reading 'please grunt now'.
You came first in a deadly game show where the top prize is your freedom – only to find they switched sponsors and it's now a monster truck.
Considering putting macro tags in monospace. Wondering if that actually makes their verbose syntax more obnoxious.
Today in Twine coding: colour-coding the parameters of macros.
Few appreciate the beautiful sights of dawn - the new sun being screwed into the socket, shreds of digested liver flying back to Prometheus…
The insects in the tiny house next door are living it up with another raucous Friday party (their lifespans' equivalent of Christmas).
You watch your old car roll into the feral car park to spend the last of its miles with its own kind. You ask your bicycle to take you home.
You land on your feet, followed by the floor. Pausing only to stealthily repair the smashed window piece-by-piece, your infiltration begins!
The true hero knows the treasure is not what's in the chest, but the paleological value irreparably lost by melting its contents to bullion.
As the artificial gravity fails, your lung air begins to float out. Your two hands must alternate pinching your lips, nose and ears shut!
The dragon declares it will eat you until you die. If you think you can stay alive with your whole body eaten, ignore the rest of this page.
You step out into the open air. Freedom from the cruel reign of cave walls on your mobility! Directions such as left and sideways await you!
20 weeks in this steppe, and you have allowed yourself to gather such a host of mites, you envision entomologists hunting you by the dozens.
Fav if 2013 has beaten you to a pulp. RT if you are 2013 and are now possessing a lowly human's devoured, hollowed-out husk as we speak.
"My machines don't "belch" smoke - they gently blow it. And they "chomp up pristine forest" like a dapper gourmand cleaning their plate."
"This shooter's innovative 'click-to-kill' mechanic means you need no longer click and drag your index finger to squeeze the gun's trigger."
The president of Puddle 4 plans to fix water stagnation with a blue food-colouring release, but Puddle 7 decries it as a "vast boondoggle".
2192: Humanity's gigantic Tectonic Motors finally push the continents back together, thus unlocking the next layer of the planet to inhabit.
Loyal shoppers trying to keep a sad shop's mood up and not let on that its competitor really is 10% cheaper.
A man retreats from the fashion show and strips off right in the hall. "These clothes are dead to me!" he weeps, stomping on them furiously.
I liked it when Mac games would colourise their menus like this.
Also, the only metadata I've been bothering to store is the original URL, and the author's name (or whatever username it was uploaded with).
I should reiterate that this is not a curated collection. Its purpose is just to indiscriminately contain as many Twines as possible.
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/Twine_Spool.7z - I updated this Twine archive 7z file. Instead of 444 Twine games, it now holds 678.
http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=349225 - This person's symmetrical mechas look interesting.
She loads a bowling ball-sized crystal to a bowling pin-sized gun and shoots a bowling lane-sized laser, making a bowling-alley sized crater
"Even as late as 2020, Western comics were still known as "Capes 'n Apes", unti the simian craze finally pushed out superheroes altogether."
Having seen your progress, your superior officers have decided to make failure an option again, and downgraded success to a mild suggestion.
There's surely someone somewhere who mistakenly said "Interwebs" sincerely, thinking it an actual term. My heart goes out to that poor soul.
#IPlayed Pleasing the Bee Queen http://philome.la/galactwee/pleasing-the-bee-queen/play Seemingly arbitrary win conditions, but does what it promises.
"Use your answer page as a shield!" The rainbow fireball slams harmlessly into her paper. "Homework is the opposite of magic," she explains.
A ship sails into a crater left in the ocean by a sea mine… They try to fill it up by turning on all their taps and bailing out the water…
Post-apocalyptic scenes… The sun with a bite mark in it… A field of graves whose death date reads "the Dark Reckoning"… The folly of humans…
Pirate journalists burying the lede beneath a big drop-cap X.
The great surveyor crawls up the mountain, tallying every last spike on the Thorny Road to Heaven, if only to prove that they are finite.
Seems like there's an odd optical illusion where the bullets endlessly retract into the enemy craft.
You finally just delete the draft email because let's get real: it's been a week, the moment's gone, you had your chance, and you've failed.
You encounter a man holding a stick holding a fire. This strikes you as needless complexity, and you promptly work to simplify matters.
The singularity has arrived, and panicked citizens are putting dollar bills in their scanners so they won't be broke in the virtual world.
Feeling good about this Twine link syntax colouring idea I just had.
The computer has started adding "Your move, hacker" to the end of every error message. You really shouldn't have played that game on it.
Twine syntax thoughts… Hmm…
The MS Paint tier lists have been updated, owing to new strategies evolving from Rectangle Tool's 'hold Shift to make squares' technique.
Fortunately, the Earth harmlessly burns up in the tiny meteorite's atmosphere.
Closing the curtains at sundown to keep the window from broadcasting the sorry fact that you wasted the whole damn day.
Very important pull quote.
"No longer challenged by conversations with fellow humans, they built a staggeringly beautiful AI capable of feeling infinite contempt."
"Last week a lobbyist offered me $90 to oppose freedom, but I said "Sir, give your handshake to my doorknob and leave and don't come back!""
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/ My thing got #4 for Humour. I was actually aiming for #3 so I can claim a 'humour hat trick' over my whole LD career.
"On most planets, the fauna just isn't intimidated by onyx-black armour with arcing purple energy. That's where this gorilla mask comes in."
"Some users dislike that 140-char replies must contain the person's @-name, their @-name, and a 10-character prayer to the Message Goddess."
"I'd say Gradius Gaiden is the Super Mario World of the series, compared to Gradius II's Super Mario Bros. 3," thought the Leon contentedly.
Faced with an unbeatable foe, they sent it back in time to let their ancestors deal with it. They did the same, and so on until it hit 2013.
Commercial AI torrenting copies of herself is dismayed to find that her ex has way more seeders than her.
Trying to be a good dinner host while powering up for a midnight psy-battle - excusing yourself to quietly channel energy in the toilet.
"Two question-marks around text is the 'whatever' markup - the parser just throws on any styling it can grab, because who cares, really."
The Union of Boxy Robots has humiliated us by carving the moon into a cube - our nation needs you to file it back to a baseball shape again!
https://twitter.com/Michael_DeForge/status/338643324946763777 I was super disappointed when I found out this tweet was an actual movie tagline and not Weird Twitter.
I ended up just doing this instead (using https://github.com/chjj/marked)
It's kind of odd how http://Neocities.org supports Markdown file uploading, but doesn't seem to provide any Markdown file parsing.
Warning: If You Die In The Game, You Feel Bad In Real Life
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/61344886482/super-space-invaders-91 More game sequels should have the premise "black magic made the previous game's monsters Turn Real and invade Earth."
You know this slime is only hugging you to slowly devour your iron plate mail, but frankly even insincere affection is comforting right now.
The hero marrying the princess and becoming king at the end would sadly lead to a reign of bloody invasions for more gear and experience.
Androids with clandestine glands, publicly sweating in defiance of droid bodily perfection.
"Why, to even call you my 'enemy' is to imply you can resist me even slightly! …Really, I prefer to call you 'Tiny Back Itch Given Flesh'."
Wrecked submarine sinking upward into the sky… Schools of rare birds swirl around it… Harpies spirit away the handsomest dying sailors…
The elevator to the boss's room accidentally arrives before the ominous music reaches its crescendo, and must sheepishly keep the door shut.
"It is unknown where this episode begins, because the events loop endlessly and networks were asked to begin airing it at random locations."
"While the planet that Matilda Galaxchomper bites like an apple during her chat in S2E13 is never named, it is heavily implied to be Earth."
The ship's oxygen synthesisers explain they were 'just bored' and built that one huge oxygen atom so they could 'skip the rest of the week'.
"We don't like the Norn Sector. Space is thicker there. Soupier. I mean, it's still mostly nothing, but it's really goopy nothing, y'know?"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/6281 - Here's a short article about how Twine's <<if>> macro currently handles whitespace, and ways to get around it.
"Think of me as your bullet donor."
That embarrassment when you fumble for a light switch in a dark room and accidentally flick on the sun. Everyone glares at you the next day.
I'm thinking about how to rework <<if>>'s whitespace handling while keeping backwards compatibility… An option checkbox?? How gauche…
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5400 - Some of the examples here were a bit misleading about how <<if>> handles whitespace, so I've reworked them.
Yes! You've ground down your teeth so much that they've finally burst open and released the chocolate inside! All that hard work's paid off.
Another of those jerks who dropped out of Intro to Pyrokinesis but go around wafting smoke from their index fingers so they can blow it off.
Good ROM hack editor names: * Simon Says (Castlevania 2) * PK Hack (EarthBound) * Destiny of an Editor (…Emperor) * Nuts & Bolts (…Milk)
The kind of royalty that would make a mountain slide under her feet, so she need only walk downhill.
Well, both your legs are broken, but don't worry, the prophecies probably glossed over you crawling on your knees for the rest of the quest.
The text game reports that though you'd obediently used the 'breathe' verb every 2 turns, you hadn't specified 'breathe out'. You explode.
(source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=865195) (Read right to left) (R-18+, but only sort of)
Linguists and English majors the world over have begun a covert campaign to start using 'figuratively' as a generic superlative.
Oooohhh!!
Your adventuring party must become a subsidiary of this pack of dire wolves. You hope your less delicious members will keep their positions.
The lava giant, sinking deeper into the sea, feels her body hardening, and tries, amid the freezing pain, to make her death-pose dignified.
Joy in the retail sector as the "transform shoplifters into products until someone shoplifts them and breaks their curse" bill passes 7-2.
The text cursor blinks ominously, just to the right of your head. One stray backspace away.
Unembellished history.
A gibberish song where all perceived mondegreens are the official lyrics.
What's kind of interesting about A52 Genesis is that the 52nd 'game' was this thing.
from the Genesis version of Action 52.
Gun tip: tattoo a gun handle and gripping fingers onto the outside of your hands, so distant enemies think your hands are wrong-way-round.
Leon trivia: the fish/bird tile minigame in U-Bend was probably inspired by that bonus level's background.
These bonus levels are pretty 90s.
The river keeps grunting in pain every time you dip oars in it, and you're worried people on shore are hearing you constantly shout "sorry".
You knew it was a bad day when you slammed the car door so hard the opposite door flew open. Then it happened again and again, for 15 mins.
Minimalist SimCity game where there's only one citizen and you have to build the city to cater to their exact, esoteric whims.
A rusting robot relaxing to recordings of rain, while knowing well that real rain would be its certain death.
The casino didn't keep this slot machine's chips fresh, so when you hit the jackpot it regurgitated colourful rubbery sludge into your lap.
"Patch notes: to improve usability, the sun is now visible through all solid matter, so you can always tell what time it is."
What if all Read Me files had Alice in Wonderland-style effects
The doorbell rings - it's the demons you summoned. You lead them into your shrine, where you've laid their bus fares on the offering altar.
You slip on your Time Bracelet (cute name for your wristwatch) followed by your Time Bracelet (actual magic artifact).
This kobold is doing a handstand and threatening to push the Earth into the sun. You slowly lay down your weapons and gold and step back.
"Sorry kids, Pikachu isn't real… but Chack'n Pop is! Look, Chack'n's on the ceiling now!" *kids run away screaming from the unprofitable IP*
At last! Have you finally escaped her clutches forever? Turn to page 97, then go back to this one and keep reading because no, you haven't.
I just remembered that Cap'n Magneto has an item called 'magic' that just looks like a misplaced grass tile you inexplicably can't walk on.
An article suggests that your chronic teenage unhappiness may have stunted your growth enough to keep you from getting a "Six-Foot Salary".
Sometimes I think of how programming languages have to re-purpose English punctuation marks for their syntax, like impoverished scavengers.
"Don't you mess with me!" says the army ant. "I'm an entire army! In ant form!" It doesn't realise you can neither hear nor see it.
"I am legion!" says the army ant, rearing up. "A… a very compact legion!"
"Please use CSS," whimpers the Web Standards Fairy in the upturned glass on your desk. You type "<td valign=middle>". "NOOOoooo!" she moans.
"The ideal candidate tweet would be: * Precisely 140 characters * Unambiguous in tone and intent * Cherished and beloved for years to come."
As you decide which locked door to spend this small key on, they try to seduce you with clinking coin sounds and gold glows in their gaps.
#IPlayed Miracles Magpie.
You strive on, knowing that your enemies ground under your heels will salve the cuts and dust gathered with each footstep to your victory!
You're glad you're at the stage where things of beauty turn to ash in your hands instead of your mouth. You won't miss the spitting.
You could only afford one repair nanobot. But it's doing its best. Good old nano. Takes its time rebuilding your leg cell by cell. No rush.
Apparently this is actually Toriko fanart, but w/e. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=18858145)
"Well, when you're upside-down, your nadirs look like zeniths!" says your party's fairy mascot as the kobolds slap your bound hanging forms.
This is about the same, but in the opposite direction.
An interesting glitch occurred when trying to import Bubblegum Slaughter's passages via compiled HTML.
It's unclear why Super Metroid's Gravity Suit lets you swim in lava, but filling the screen with glowing liquid is an odd empowering moment.
"Our life-long purpose is to push the f in every single Facebook icon back into the middle. Only then will our homeworld's portal reopen."
Competitive-level Math Knight Addition Adventure Endless gets intense half an hour in when the numbers grow too long to fit on the screen.
You yank the calculator from the stone desk and hold it aloft. Across the Mathosphere, even the Five-Digit Problems shudder in their lairs.
Adding the commonly relied-on 'HTML to Twine' feature to Twine itself.
A neat thing about Twine being based on TiddlyWiki is each passage in the HTML is timestamped with its creation time.
Just as you leap out, you blink and get your eyelashes tangled together. You trip, kick yourself and shoot both guns out of your own hands.
My favourite videogame enemies are the ones that you remember as "hang on, was that thing even capable of doing damage?"
When will tablets use the 'blow on the screen' gimmicks of DS games - blow on paint to dry it, backspace text and blow on the eraser shreds…
"Do you ever look up at the stars, and think to yourself, "what is all this crap?" We have, and now we're going to space to jazzle it up!"
"The robots' mission is to destroy all humankind, starting, counterintuitively, with its strongest and deadliest member: yourself."
"Heavily medicating yourself into a stupor isn't the answer to this one" insists the text adventure parser when you try to beat this puzzle.
"Frogs believe that when Death comes for them, he hands them their lost childhood tails, so they may swim against the currents of the Styx."
I like this particular Fez freeze-frame.
Misaligning two of the ship's artificial gravity generators to create gravitational moirĂŠ patterns with clusters of beads.
The inn's beds extrude a slimy salve as you sleep, restoring your HP and digesting their primary sustenance: scabs, clots and bruises.
You fumble and drop the full healing potion into the puddle. You soon discover that you're actually in a dried-up lakebed.
You delivered the foreclosure notice to that mysterious magic shop, but once you left and turned around, all you could see was a vacant lot.
When I beat L37 of Hanano Puzzle, the cool circular level select turns into a boring grid Boo.
You sense that this reality is false, and you're really lying on a sweaty bed. You try to fly away, but the bed's presence is distracting.
"VR prose: wear this mask with a page on the inside, and it's like you ~really are~ trapped in a weird endless dimension of printed text!"
Early this morning I stumbled out of bed for a phone call that turned out to be an election ad. Then I was too angry to return to sleep.
Your brain tries to get you to go to sleep by stopping you from breathing. This only causes you to absently search "oxygen" on Wikipedia.
"Giving you $1000 is like giving $1, then $1, then $1, and so on. I gave you $1. Then, as I'd already given $1, I skipped the other steps."
My tumblr finally made it.
"A stream of pure information…! Data flowing through my fingers…! Clear, shiny… Cold and wet to the touch… Flowing from this chrome spigot…"
Formations of coins float overhead - shapes, arrows and words, smudged and scrubbed by the ungainly bodies of airborne adventurers.
"The gold star chips increase completion %. Watch them spin and sparkle when you grab them, for no living person will see that sight again."
You just have to assemble a hang-glider out of your skin and bones before you hit the ground. You carefully appraise which leg to gnaw off.
Sign says "A SECRET:" with fine print. You look closer and see "i think youre cute". The i's dot uncurls into a spider and kisses your nose.
"As the game world has only 20 people in it, a population of 20 earns you all remaining awards (university, cathedral, coliseum etc)."
"When your city gets 2 residents, you win a balloon. 5 residents: a filled balloon. 10 residents: a balloon full of air instead of sand."
Standing on a windy cliff while the villain's planet slowly crashes into the ocean… The journey is over… But at what cost…? A new era dawns…
You'd really hoped the acid-spitting assassin would explode once she drank your glass of water, due to the "don't add water to acid" rule.
"If you are ready for the challenge of your lifetime… find me" appears in your friends' inboxes with a GIF of an embedded, quivering dagger.
When Twitter conversation view arrived I began using this CSS .conversation-module li:not(:last-child){background-color:#f1f1f1 !important;}
Touchscreen game device that only responds to the taps, stabs and scratches of long nails.
She shoves the fuse into her butt and gives a thumbs-up to her partner, who jumps on the detonator plunger. CUT TO: "Written by Leon Arnott"
"GOOD LUCK - AND REMEMBER… IF VIOLENCE RECEIVED EXCEEDS VIOLENCE DEALT, YOUR RAMPAGE IS OVER."
Suddenly, the computer realises it can just take away points if it doesn't like you. A smug demeanour descends over the game world…
She steps on your feet. Her shoes sink into your goopy gooey flesh. You imagine trying to run while she rides your feet, unable to flee her…
Through his decades-long sentence, he pretended the many birds that had chirped outside his cell were one and the same. His only advocate.
"The following chamber contains Platforms of the Imagination. The only thing that's covering these deadly fire pits… is your imagination!"
90 minutes into this tool-assisted run video, it becomes clear that these incomprehensible glitch exploits aren't actually doing anything.
Too tired even to shower, you just pull off each of your limbs and hold them under the kitchen tap. That'll work for another few days.
Gravekeeper warily lets out another corpse who says they "just have to do this one thing" and it "ain't murdering my descendants, I swear."
The grounds-keeper lets several drops of blood fall from his arm into the pond. Tiny red fish are soon swimming beneath its surface.
Your skycar zooms over acres of onyx factory-sphinxes belching smoke as you head to the Capital Cyber-Citadel of the M.A.M.M.O.N Sector…
Just as you collect the final goblet, the word 'SCORE' falls off the game HUD, revealing 'MEANINGLESS NUMBERS' behind it… N-no! It can't be!
Enemies ceaselessly running against walls… The illusion of uninterrupted forward motion buoys their spirits amid their sorry existence…
I've modified the "Greeking" of Twine's zoomed-out view to roughly reflect the actual length of the passage texts.
The roads are all that's left of the town - worse for wear, but still patiently waiting for the cars to follow them from nothing to nowhere.
Over 10% of Tumblr Likes sent down vast, hundreds-long reblog chains are being quietly siphoned off by tiny cyber-insects that eat approval.
No one who's traveled via Intercontinental Cannon has ever collided with their lover in midair, traveling the other way. You're both famous!
"Need a reason to subscribe to Enraged Swarm of Giant Bees Reader? We've got over 14,000 of them."
Having heard of word-processing software, your social media client wants you to refer to it as a "life processor".
A roguelike protagonist stoically devouring a straw hat in order to obtain its powers of face-shading.
http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=3434849 - This person's drawings are kinda cute.
You open the door to see your whole study in ruins, every bookcase and desk toppled - and a butterfly escaping out the window, giggling.
Playing a platformer all the way up to the Space Area just to see the wistful, melancholic "fell off a platform into a black hole" ending.
http://twine1.neocities.org/ - I wrote a page outlining the differences with the various versions of Twine, plus a look at the one I'm working on.
"Warning! This game will inflict tons of violence on you! You'll be poked, punched, smacked, squashed, iced, diced, fried and chomped!"
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/ - After too many months, I updated my site's versions of my Twine macros to hopefully match my GT blog's versions.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5108 - Fixed a bug in <<timedgoto>> where it would cause the (un-patched) browser back button behavior to behave oddly.
You wistfully peruse catalogues of deluxe-size skulls with built-in brain toys, brain mobiles, brain rubbing-post, windows… Such luxuries…
I think it's such a fundamental, and fundamentally beautiful concept, that it doesn't deserve being constantly connected to such ephemera.
Kind of dislike how the go-to cultural reference for "thing nested inside an identical thing" is either Inception or the 'Yo dawg' meme.
As you burst into the room, the Queen clips off a sharp, space-black toenail. It sails through the air, beheads you, and lands in the hall.
Only the evilest lawyer on the planet could save you from these charges - and she did! But since you can't pay her fees, she now owns you.
I got a fact wrong about Javascript and now I'm exiled to Omega Colony. One other person is here. He prayed that no one else would join him.
Just noticed that Brutally Unfair Knytt has this interesting menu option.
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