I want to take a minute to tell you a story about a musical expert.

A friend, and soon to be co-worker, of mine (we’ll call him Brian) recently told me to check out Jonathan Coulton on my nondescript portable media player management software. I brushed his suggestion off as just some silly song that I’d laugh at for a bit then promptly forget. Brian pestered me to check out some of his stuff a few more times, so I gave in and listened to some of his stuff. I’m glad I did. His music reminds me of a mix between Presidents of the United States of America and Barenaked Ladies. If you like folk/alternative music give it a listen.

I fell in love after hearing 3 songs. First, was a remake of Baby Got Back that reminded me a lot of Boyz-n-the-Hood by Dynamite Hack. Next was a song I heard a while ago but didn’t know who wrote it. It’s called Code Monkey and it hits quite close to my heart. Third was another remake; Bills, Bills, Bills. Having heard Baby Got Back I was confident this would be awesome. However, when he fired up the banjo, I couldn’t contain myself. I had an eargasm right then. Other notable songs include Tom Cruise Crazy, I Hate California, Skullcrusher Mountain, and First of May.

You can find some of this stuff on his podcast, Thing a Week. If you’re financially blessed, you can hop by his site and purchase all his music - including songs not offered on his podcast - for prices comparable to iTunes’. Additionally, the songs on his site are DRM free. Good deal!

Note: Don’t subscribe to Jonathan Coulton Project. It’s done by some fans who add video to his music. Mostly they aren’t even video, just pictures that match up with the words Jonathan is singing. While I’m sure he appreciates the fan support, the ‘videos’ are pretty bad (thus don’t deserve italics).

Edit: apparently italics show up as bold in my new theme. Bummer.

I poked around the DS code, attempting to remove the player icon from the map layer and make it into a sprite. I didn’t get very far. It probably has something to do with my brain being fried from the week before. I’ll poke around a bit more later.

In other news, I’ve been homebrewing more than just DS games over the past few months. I started a batch of homebrew hard cider in October of ‘06, and it has finally finished aging. It tastes delicious! $40 worth of cider for a mere $15 in materials. JOY!

A week without updates. It’s almost as though I’ve been working my ass off. Between working 50 hours last week, setting up my shiny new web server, various TV shows that can’t go unwatched (<3 Planet Earth), and my marathon run of Super Paper Mario over the weekend, I’ve left very little time open for DS work. Believe me, I’m as disappointed at me as you are to not see any updates.

I got a lot of work done on the back-end of my web host - FTP and email (plaidman -at- plaidsoft -dot- org) are set up, all my image files and project files stored around the interwebs are now safely stored on my wonderful little host. Now that all that is taken care of, I can resume development of IQDS. Without any reasonable excuse, anyway.

I’m going to petition George to add another hour to the day. He can assign and adjust Daylight Saving Time willy-nilly, I’m sure he can do this for me.

In today’s wonderful story, we find out about how Tim grew legs.

Long before the trees and water, before the dinosaurs who played basketball, even before Earth itself, there was nothing, except fish. Space fish. These fish swam freely in the nothingness that existed before everything, and they were alone. Or so they thought.One of these fish was named Tim. Tim was a very curious fishie, and he liked to explore the far reaches of space. On one such exploration, Tim found a shiny object. He was puzzled by this object, because it didn’t look like a fish, and he had only seen fish his entire life. In fact, no fish had ever seen any non-fish object in the history of space fish. Being a curious fishie, Tim touched the shiny thing with his fin, and out popped a genie.

“You have summoned the great Wobin Rilliams, magical genie of the fish-space-topia. I shall grant you three wishes,” said Wobin.

Tim thought for a bit and said, “I wish for a thousand wishes.”

Wobin slapped Tim across his fish-face and said, “Don’t be a douche. Haven’t you heard any genie stories? I kind of assumed that everybody knew not to wish for more wishes by now. What is your first wish?”

Tim stared at Wobin’s feet. “I wish for feet like those,” Tim said as he pointed toward the genie’s feet. Unfortunately, Wobin took the wish quite literally and gave Tim feet the exact same size as his own, which were a lot larger than the tiny fish. Tim walked back to his school (school of fish, not the place you learn) to show off his gigantic feet. Tim’s friends made fun of his oversized feet, commenting on how he tripped over them, and saying he should become a clownfish.

“I’ll show you!” Tim shouted as he walked back to the shiny object and touched it.

“You have summoned the great Wobin -”

“Yeah, I know,” Tim cut Wobin off, “I’ve come to use my two other wishes. I wish I didn’t have these stupid feet.”

The feet disappeared in a cloud of smoke. “And your final wish?” asked Wobin.

“I wish for all fish to blow up.” Tim and all other fish exploded in a huge ball of fire and brimstone.

Scientists have documented this enormous explosion as the event that created the stars, planets, and ultimately humanity as we know it. We call it the Big Bang.

Join me next week for the epic tale of the man who ate too many peanuts. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Three cheers for IQDS updates! I got the second layer drawing the player icon and it can move around and lay bombs and stuff. I’d like to thank Blur, PUSA, and Great Big Sea for keeping me sane for this release.

After 10 hours programming for work, and 7 more for fun, I’m really quite tired. There’s a screenshot for those who don’t want to venture a full download. If you do want to try out a demo, it’s available in the DS Projects section of this site. Download it and have minutes of fun!

Here’s a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. Marvel at my wonderful graphic design abilities.

Don’t eat too much candy or you’ll throw up.

I updated template.zip to include documentation about the changes from the default DevKitPro template and how to set it up with Code::Blocks. I also changed the filename generated by 7zip to make them shorter. May not seem like much but documenting the stuff you do is a bitch and I’m glad I got it done. I really hate when I really need documentation and I don’t have it, and I don’t want others to feel the same way when looking at my stuff.

I’ve been working on IQDS in bits and pieces. I would like to do a bit of refactoring to extract some more commonly used procedures - like setting up a screen to use a specific graphic mode, etc. - and move them to a separate file that I can use in all my projects. I have made some changes here and there already but not enough to warrant a release. I have some *gasp* free time tomorrow so I’ll be able to work on that.

Now I just need to find a way to work on IQDS and play Puzzle Quest simultaneously.

On this very special second Tuesday with Flannel, I am going to tell you the real story about the Birds and the Bees.

Three thousand years ago, when the dinosaurs invented basketball, there were just two teams: Landosaurs (different from Land O’Lakes) and Flyosaurs. The Spectatosaurs found this very boring, just seeing these two teams play basketball over and over. The two teams decided to split into two divisions each - the insects and lizards. The Flying divisions (the Birds and the Bees) completely dominated the Land divisions (Roaches and Rexes) in every game they played.

One of the Birds, by the name of Corsin, proposed the question, “I wonder who is actually the better team, the Birds or the Bees?” The question was answered with a series of 1000 different sporting events, including pickleball, track & field events, and, of course, basketball. After playing best out of five for all 1000 sports (this epic battle lasted 2969 years), the Birds and the Bees were tied 500 to 500. A 1001st sport, Extreme Sitting Around was used as a tiebreaker. The best of five series lasted for 13 years, and the Bees came out the victors.

One year later, in 1988, the Bees changed their name to the Hornets and moved to Charlotte. In 2002, they moved to New Orleans, and are known to the world today as the New Orleans Hornets.

Next week, I’ll tell you the wonderful story about how Tim grew legs.