"Of course the dragonling won't imprint on us when we're so tiny… but what if…"
*rotates stage lights*
*gestures to huge shadow behind them*
"Eh, I didn't wanna work today anyway," you shrug as you step into the "elevator" that is clearly a giant shapeshifter's salivary mouth.
Smash Bros. tweet: "Down-throw-up-air-combo" sounds like something an aged sitcom writer would make a preteen say.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/109607012405/urban-champion – I can't freaking believe this off-the-wall Apex footage.
You did it! You saw the problem in the code, worked through it, and made the error message even longer! There's nothing you can't do.
Life is full of unanswerable mysteries, such as "Why is the GameMaker: Studio manual called "DadioSpice" in the URL" http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/
You swiftly sprout a hundred liquid hands to cover your naked slime body – so many hands that you no longer have a body to cover.
"Taking damage to save time? More like taking damage because taking damage rocks."
"Welcome to our JSON. Notice there is no P in it. Let's keep it that way!"
Well, your robot arm needs 1 minute to reboot, so you might as well spend it pathetically scrabbling at the doorknob until someone opens it.
She kisses between your legs, and when she pulls away, there's only a tiny alpine mountainside there. It feels like taciturn autumn winds.
"All we can do" said the surgeon to the giant "is take your brain, chop off the bits we think are inessential, and stuff it in a human body"
You remember your first wound that never healed, and the only advice they could offer: look away, look to the stars, paint over your mirror.
Every movement elicits a chorus of complaints from your body – you hear every muscle's moan, every sore's squeak, a hurtful harmony.
"The truth: that humans are the unknowing seeds of a vast alien organism, traveling hundreds of light-years to find just the right soil."
I wrote all but 3 of the victory text lines in this game, and most of the marketing copy – as well as this fansite: http://868-hack.neocities.org/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/274700/ - My favourite 2013 game 868-HACK is available for purchase on desktop computers now, so I can finally recommend it.
You step in the elevator, which lifts your spirits and carries you away with truly moving music. Thus buoyed, you exit and take the stairs.
"Which of your body parts would I prefer to be magically transformed into? Hm… probably the head. The entire head. Eyes, brain and all."
"I wonder what's in the Mario Paint pixiv tag."
"The work-life balance problem is really overblown."
*takes big slab marked WORK*
*balances it on tiny brick marked LIFE*
"See? Easy peasy."
You take a very deep breath for the first time in weeks, and exhale dozens of lung mites that had squatted in your lungs' unused reaches.
"You may have popped me from my pore,
but we'll meet again.
Where hair grows thick,
and fingers can't reach.
I'll be waiting, my dear host."
The cat rushes to lounge in the heat of the teleport pad after you've gone – and blocking it from letting you pop back in to get your keys.
"The human body at birth contains 23,000 omnipotence cells. In a healthy, socially adjusted person at the age of 29, all of them are dead."
Your ex once bought you a duchy in that tax-free ice nation a billionaire wizard founded. Did it melt? Are you now a mere duke of warm sea?
"Your coffee's awfully white." "Eh, I need the extra chicken fat, or whatever farm animal makes milk."
"I'm detecting immense concentrations of psy-power…!" they whisper to each other, nervously ogling you. You gladly, fearsomely ogle back.
At the end of the story, her smartphone shatters and the Internet pours out – partially answering why she was the only character to use one.
"Disguise as a human? But humans are only six metres tall! I'll be puny! Microscopic! Utterly helpless!"
"…Six feet…"
"What?"
"Nothing."
NAME: Tall Slim
SOLE CHARACTER ATTRIBUTE: Tallness
RINGSIDE TAUNT: "'How's the weather up there?' Sunshine for me, a rain of blows for you!"
"Sorry, the program has unexpectedly gone very, very right," murmurs the dialog box. You swiftly dive for the off switch, but it's too late.
There's no word for lifting their hair and feeling humid warmth rise off the back of their neck. How could humanity name the infinite?
And last, your hacker calling card: every copy of Minesweeper is patched into permanent expert mode. Corp lackeys, the true game has begin.
Baring your shoulders has already consumed your foes in fiery rain. Surely cocking your head will quench all the stars and expel the moon.
"Gunzip" sounds like a really good lost cyberpunk arcade shooter game and not just a program that decompresses gzip files.
A chunk of Earth drifts by. You spy a wind farm on it, its turbines' blades unmoving in the windless void of space. How melancholic!
Your fairy pal sets up the huge curling rosebud in their spare bedroom. They mask its heady aroma with "office scent", known to calm humans.
In the dream I was going to play a bunch of cyberpunk PC-Engine point-and-click games - you wouldn't believe how many.
Last night I dreamed I'd somehow gained the power to read any language, and when I felt myself starting to wake up, my heart sank.
Seeing Mario used in competitive Smash amuses me because it implies being confronted with all 51 playable characters, then selecting Mario.
I actually do want to see a Pokémon Trainer fighter who just pulls out live Pokémon for every attack. Just whips out an entire Garchomp.
Smash Bros. tweet: I think the "pulls garbage out of their clothes and swings it at the opponent" fighter design is one we can all cherish.
Leon circa 2000: http://web.archive.org/web/20000706204622/http://kaleidoscope.net/schemes/new.shtml
Leon, 2015: http://zshthem.es/all/
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=1529126 – This picture's so damply lit it's hard to imagine it isn't raining outside.
You? Kiss the foot that did a dozen kicks, the hand that hurled a dozen bombs, the butt whose dozen ground-pounds brought you low? N-no way…
You give up. You take Red Flunky's offer to join their boss trio. You ask if you can be Fuchsia Flunky. Red Flunky says you're Pink Flunky.
Overheard: "Diddy Kong doesn't seem like he's actually grabbing and holding the opponent. It looks like he's tricking them."
Which is interesting as his design is far more orthodox than the playful tool-users like Villager and G&W, or mechanical oddballs like Ness.
Falcon's maybe the most entertaining character to spectate because a lot of his moves are super flashy quick KOs.
One of my favourite subtle Smash Bros. jokes is that Toon Link's sword is so weak, it makes hollow slapping sounds instead of slicing sounds
Yeah, they're boring – but check out the next 4:
(I refer to every part of the title screen, including its wondrous parts. Let's not forget even Yume Nikki had moments of beauty and awe.)
Videogame tweet: Why does the Mario Paint title screen have so much Yume Nikki in it. Had I known before, I would have leaped right into it.
The grapes had no seeds, but still their eaters spread their progeny: grape vines appeared in their stories, paintings, songs and dreams.
You're glad your ratio of "time being hugged" to "time remembering being hugged" is up to 1:800. Maybe your grandchildren will enjoy 1:600.
"No! Not that cheap 90s magic!" groans the wizard as you download a spell to make a prince become a toad when you hover your hand over him.
2015's new programming disses:
"a knife made by sharpening a hammer"
"a boat made by sharpening a car"
"a penguin made by sharpening a duck"
You loudly ask "Now where was I…" as you turn from the interruption and return to sleep, even though it was just another riding-a-bus dream.
Your tiny robot needs you to say it's your birthday so it can pretend it forgot, thus setting up its surprise party. "Talk to me!" it wails.
You try and channel a few spots of natural mana from what little sand is still in your underpants, just enough to light this damn cigarette.
"Relax! I made this same mistake at your age," grins the sorcerer as he and the apprentice are carried in living cups toward a giant teapot.
Desert communities building shelters beneath the ruined colossus mechas' dismembered metal hands.
"Santa doesn't remember you this year because after Christmas, he forgets everybody – so you can start afresh even if you were naughty."
A secret audio message, found by running a record needle down the unbroken calligraphy etched in the scroll, revealed the spy's true fate.
Space assassins know it's a rare and solemn deed to perform a planet's first murder, to pollute a ghostless world.
"You can have my beauty and confidence, too – just join me in spreading chaos and mayhem." *flicks through phone in middle of busy hallway*
"The final log entry was just the words, "All plants are carnivorous if you make them angry enough". Their meaning eludes our scientists…"
A fifty-human hivemind walking down the street, carrying their five-human hivemind lover on their shoulders.
"The following values are falsy:
false
0
null
string of whitespace
array of falsy items
regex that matches any falsy value, including itself
You swallow the pill, then apply the racing-stripe temporary tattoos to your tummy so the pill will be absorbed faster.
The few humans uploaded to mainframes, turned into birds, inhabiting dolls, living in paintings… all these survived while others did not.
Teens sneaking into the forest to be immersed in hypnotic birdsong; trying to remember how to hear English when their parents question them.
To stave off the muscle atrophy effects of microgravity, space-faring heroes must get into dramatic chase scenes three times per day.
The entire weight of the ocean on a sunken ship, making sure it knows it will never see the sun once more.
One of the columns is broken – the weight it transmits to the ground is spilling out onto the floor and flowing down the (warped) staircase.
With all fiction banned, storytellers had to claim they were retelling their dreams, even when length and lucidity stretched plausibility.
Tried to think of the most queasily self-deprecating name for Twine 2 feature proposals. Decided that I'd probably go with "SLAGIATTs".
"Any of you used to be human?" growls the general. Neither the cyborg, the lich or the hovering brain reply. "Har! Me neither!" he chuckles.
"Humans long to destroy all they did not create. Their greatest pleasure is making fists, and greatest misery is uncurling them into hands."
"A tree stump turned into a sundial – each annual ring reduced to a mere minute. Behold it as you would behold a century in a day."
She sticks her finger in the flames you're firing from your heart. Out it comes – not even singed. The fire becomes water – tears of defeat!
"My body shares a wall with a hardware store. I'll, er, sleep in the other bed while they're restocking."
"PHP was pretty weird in gen 1. There were only 151 global functions."
The wizards in the plane are waiting for the "magic allowed" light to go on with raised fingers and open tomes on their seat-mounted trays.
The 2020s, "the decade of hovering crystal skyscrapers", and the 2030s, "the decade of hastily adding supports for the crystal skyscrapers".
I'd better make the most productive use of this weekend *watches 7 consecutive hours of Smash 4 tournament footage* nerf the diddy. nerf him
Who knew that dance was fiercer than fire, that their body's force can flow through your arms harder than any thunder spell ever has
They say magic has 3 participants: you, the cosmic forces, and God with his eagle eye, watching eagerly for the moment you finally mess up.
"Metal is very strange," she said, leaving great dents in the steel with each jump. "It's stiff as rock, but longs to be springy as rubber."
"There was a fire in my house, and I just… ordered it not to burn the things it was on. It blazed and blazed, and nothing was harmed."
http://zeldawiki.org/images/thumb/9/98/MM3D_Happy_Mask_Salesman_Artwork.png/400px-MM3D_Happy_Mask_Salesman_Artwork.png – Majora's Mask backstory is that the Salesman met Mario and played the Song to turn him back into a normal human.
http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/File:Farewell_to_Gibdos.ogg Let's not forget the house in Majora's Mask that must constantly play this music day and night to ward off the undead
I like it when Smash 4 pros have three or more main characters that they switch through regularly. Like their own little adventuring party.
Competitive Smash 4 two-vs-two is fun because sometimes Ness does a PK Thunder rocket and KOs 3 people at once, including their teammate.
The details of how macros like (font:) or (text-style:) work are hidden from the author, so exposing them in a clear way may be a challenge.
People may not quite get that this is a higher-order function: it's a macro that returns a macro that the engine uses instead of the player.
(Also ponder for the moment whether I really must introduce a new sigil, %variable, specifying a detail as baroque as the variable's scope.)
(Ignore for now the odd manner in which the %hookMap datamap is altered by adding another datamap to it, lacking a more readable phrasing.)
Exploring whether text-changers like the (font:) macro could be self-hosted in Twine 2 using this proposed syntax.
"Wow can't believe January's over already." "But it's only–" *marches past, walks in straight line to bed, knocking over furniture and junk*
"If you time-stop both the enemy and yourself, the only way to escape is to wail for help until someone turns off the game console for you."
"BUGS:
* The Dazzle Sword is described as "impressive" – however, it is not.
* The 'Win Game' menu option is both disabled and invisible."
"Hard to believe the twenty-foot sky-beast that trampled our village was really a sad little man with a bad lawyer," cheers the prosecution.
Finally the sun grew so big, and so cold, that when its surface finally touched Earth, we just stepped aboard and started new lives.
Combos that give you less points the longer they go on, as the computer grows bored.
Rubbing the giant gold toad's throat sac and hearing prophecy in its croaks had been solely the pastime of rich politicians for generations,
"I regret that I can't kiss my frown muscles, which always do a great job and are there for me in my darkest hours (i.e. all hours)."
"The reasons for the AI returning in new seasons range from "a temp file became sentient" to "a cat retyped its source code by accident"."
*tries to name a French Mediterranean city* nice
"Really, it's obvious that a GUNK has triple the hit points of a SPEW, which has double the hit points of a MOUSSE. It's all in the name."
"You may wonder why they call me "wizard lips". My friends say they're dry 'n' cracked as tomes. My lovers say they taste of cosmic spells."
"The child is told if they resist eating the candy for 50 years, they'll receive two candies. Most rush back to eat it in their mid-30s."
A cool patch on your lover's skin,
a sweet morsel for your fingers to lap.
You wake up so coated in sweat that fairies in hazmat suits are surrounding your bed with tiny caution tape.
Many were disappointed when a cuckoo hatched from the egg in the phoenix's ash pile, but still gave its mother credit.
As the castle's lord approaches, the lady hisses "Quick, hide under my dress!" while secretly standing astride a death pit trapdoor.
You'll never know who ensnared this roving surveillance orb long enough to spray-paint a well-sculpted butt on it, but you're in their debt.
"The entire episode consists of the bosses debating whether sending their weakest members to guard the early worlds is really meritocratic."
"Wizard researchers often just keep working in the craters where their homes used to be. We call 'em pit wizards and show them to tourists."
Powerful flowers just plucking bees out of the air and slam-dunking them head-first into their stamens
The gold-detecting app is asking you to break open your phone's casing… a secret cache, or a ruse to release the AI from its endless labour?
"It was customary at the end of murder mystery films for the whole cast to laugh at the audience, mocking them for not expecting the twist."
"We thought the best way to imprison a genie would be to encase its lamp inside a bigger lamp… but that somehow vastly amplified its power…"
"The deadly all-devouring slime pit kind of inconveniently floats on top of the sexual all-devouring slime pit, like oil and water."
"We thought the anger apes we created on that accursed blue planet would be simply too angry to invent space travel and infest the cosmos."
"21st century pain requires new self-esteem strategies, like, saying soothing baby talk at yourself while eating. I'm disrupting coping."
Twine 2 syntax sketch. Just at a glance, would you say you have some idea how this seems to work?
What if there are no more sunsets. What if it'll just go dark from now on, and the one you're missing while imagining this is the last one.
"When you endure life's harshest headdesks, the lord God is headdesking with you."
A new year brings new Twitter jokes.
The most beautiful person was in your mirror last night,
but in the morning, all that's there is you.
You hope they come back, someday soon.
Smash Bros. tweet: Luigi developed his unique fighting style on his own, without any actual research. Mario just does what comes naturally.
You sift through photo after photo of well-lit empty rooms, until you find the one that's perfect, and step inside. Your new best selfie.
"Hahaha! This defeat has finally awakened my most dangerous combat form!" *sadly sprouts wings in the fighting tournament parking lot*
How could you be a fish, you asked yourself, if you were such a good frog? But your frog friends hated going underwater to be with you.
The two floating castles, lacking any means of steering, spent a long time raising and lowering themselves trying to allow the other to pass
You stretched in the back room and suddenly uncricked your back, and now you have to serve customers while wreathed in blue flames of power.
The passionate emotion you had earlier this week has attracted a global cafe franchise, who wants the rights to it for use by its waitstaff.
Since lying can raise stress levels, politicians were forced to wear helmets that soothe and comfort them when they lie, for their health.
Everyone else at your law firm has met their quota of 50 jewel heist cases! How could you flounder in the jewel heist capital of the world?
"We brought dinosaurs back from the depths of unfashionability… but at what cost?" *pans over mall after mall of t-rex-themed outlets*
The government's advice about the electronic fog was curt: just ask your human owner to help you navigate. You'd laughed in dismay.
http://www.mariowiki.com/Oerlikon – I can't freaking believe this enemy's ridiculous name origin.
You wish you didn't work in the wing of the building that solely serves as a gauntlet of obstacles for the office yoga ball races.
You gaze on the Red Hills – old forcefield domes guarding wastelands amid wastelands. Why not, the domes ask, when there's naught else left?
All humanity is, at this moment, weeping into this pillow, you darkly observe from inside your spaceship's bedquarters.
To think your world is but a grain of sand, a mote in a mote, and her world is a massive crystal edifice visible from thousands of galaxies.
https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/branches – Is this really what you have to put up with when you're forced to use Hg branches as if they were Git branches
It was supposed to be called "ACMEScript" to denote that the language has the same efficacy as those death-traps Wile E. Coyote mail-orders.
Of course, I privately expect they'll just bring back these clips verbatim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR_G08HZAFk
Many speculate this is actually somewhat likely, given that for Mewtwo's most recent appearance in Pokémon movie 16, it had a female VA.
Nintendo tweet: I hope when they eventually add Mewtwo to Smash 4 they give it a female VA instead of a male one.
The human mouth had but 2 unit tests: "peanut butter sticks to roof" and "can't fit a bowling ball in it". All else was undefined behaviour.
You allow the beast to affectionately jab you with its hoof. Its owner reminds you it's the only part of their body that can't sprout teeth.
She doesn't say it to your face, but she thinks it so loudly that the sound of full-strength burning contempt whistles out of her ears.
https://twitter.com/personasama/status/411090633772650496 – This one would've also been a contender if not for a few weeks.
I can't freaking believe the only legal Smash 4 stages are 75m, its sequel 76m, the N64 retro stage 75m 64, and its modern prequel 74m 65.
Glad to see they've got emoji for all 9 bodily excretions.
"Some netizens refuse to use social networks that requires them to be complicit in the pun in their title."
You resent these clothes, but you resent more the fact that you can't even sully them with a decent sweat in this chilly building.
Yes, I confess I'm bothered by slides that deploy quotes as if they were just fancy spelling-bee example sentences.
"If you put a frog and a crab in heating water, the crab will pointlessly stop the frog from trying to leave, even though it never does."
Your and your horse exchange life stories while dying in the gully, so that in your last moments you can both know the life of two beings.
fight dozens of teen heroes who shout things like "No! I believe in hope!" while you scatter them with flicks and kicks. It's a bestseller."
OKAY the big problem with the word "bellicose" is that what it means is the opposite of how it sounds.
"Imagine investing so much into a friendship, only to then break up. That's why seasoned friendsters maintain a diverse "friend portfolio"."
"He refused to die until he smelled a hardware store one last time."
"Human medical research has found that the #1 cause of sadness is already being sad. If you ever find yourself sad, it's already too late."
"Her fatality animation, in which she folds the opponent into an envelope, stuffs them with prize money, and mails them to her landlord, was
Satisfied, you prepare to bless this abode with your mightiest rite of enchantment: falling asleep within it.
"Highly uncoordinated. Why is your body made of flesh, while your dress is made of cotton? It should be one or the other." *presses button*
"Goddamn it," hollers the dragon, tossing another otherwise delicious cafeteria patron aside, "have none of you caffeinated yourselves?"
""An ego the size of the moon"?" laughs the empress, reading comments on news articles about her. "Not even Jupiter! You vouch my humility!"
The F2P app "Cookie Attack" insisted it was no game, but a warning from a future where Earth's mega-bakeries turned against their creators.
https://twitter.com/direlog/status/482835182500974592 – I have a lot of favourite 2014 tweets, as always, but this one's most memorable.
All those children's shows were fine preparation for adulthood. You, too, cannot come alive and be yourself unless no one else is watching.
You'd be getting warmer faster if you made your button-wide portal to Hell just a *little* bigger… suggests a voice from the other side.
You didn't think your body could have "plot twists", or its parts could have "character arcs", yet here you are, watching it all unfold.
The dungeon's medical wing prepares to vaccinate you against 200 days of non-stop tickling. Of course, it contains 1% of the active agent.
Your spilled drink slides up your chest, leaving your suit dry. The other guests pay no heed as it forces itself through your frowning lips.
"Planking-2015: the new, accelerated rebirth of planking!" *footage of prone teen growing moss while "NOT A TIME LAPSE" flashes on screen*
My first NY resolution (actually writing a freaking test suite for once) is going pleasantly.
How was I so certain that this would be the top autocomplete. Was it "vision".
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/29573988911/alien-soldier – Reminder: in 2015 we're all supposed to start dressing like this
I mean, they are using the Smash Bros. software for its intended purpose,
TFW you're watching a Smash tournament and instead of a play-by-play, the announcers are live-improvising a fanfic of the current matchup
Incidentally, I tried gaggling for AZERTY-comfortable Markdown dialects for research, but it doesn't seem like they exist?
I guess I must overcome this by letting similar alternatives be usable instead - like the º, which is available in both AZERTY and QWERTZ.
For instance, ` is used for escaping text, just as it does in Markdown. But it doesn't even exist in AZERTY! You have to press Alt-7!
One small disappointment with Twine 2 is that certain ASCII characters I used for some markup structures aren't available on some keyboards.
"You wizards are the true barbarians – seizing ancient force in infant fingers, putting noble winds and fires to tasks unworthy of cudgels!"
Rivers carry vast magic power from every land they pass through. Wizard duels on their banks are destined to end with a river burial.