As part of the “No Blogger Left Behind” Act, I’m required to do some studying every day on the Internet’s #1 information source. And so I found myself reading about Peanuts.
You probably knew about such characters as the misfortunately-named Rerun, so called because his older sister Lucy didn’t want another younger brother (she didn’t want any younger brothers). He’s easy to remember since by the end of the comic’s run he had pretty much became the main character. But did you know that Rerun drew “underground comics” and got suspended for school for sexual harassment? I must have missed those strips.
I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Charlotte Braun, the female doppelganger of Charlie Brown, who was removed from the strip after a scant 2 months. Turns out that the fan reaction to her introduction was so negative that Mr. Schulz responded to one person’s letter with a morbid depiction of her imminent demise.
There’s also 555 “5″ 95472, whose dad was apparently one of the forerunners in the paranoia-about-the-government-issuing-us-all-numbers trend and decided to beat everyone to the punch by naming himself and his entire family after a string of numbers. Poor kid.
Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that when I read Peanuts in the late 90s, I just assumed that it was weird (the paper would run old strips with weeks full of Spike doing little besides sitting next to and talking to cacti) because he was old and senile. I hadn’t realized that Charles Schulz was crazy from the very start.
Whenever I get into a clean install of Windows, there’s a specific set of programs that I install immediately in order to be able to do everything I want to do. Over time I accumulate other programs and will install applications that compete with other things that I normally stand by, but the things I am about to list are the tried-and-true programs that I go to first. My girlfriend asked for my help because she is facing a clean install of Windows on her computer, and I figured now is as good a time as any to get started. So here we go:
Continue reading ‘A Look Inside My Windows’
That’s right, I’m giving away the location of interesting… things on the internet. Perhaps you should take advantage of that? The Sci-Fi channel is offering up the full pilot of a cartoon called The Amazing Screw-On Head based on a Mike Mignola property. Mike Mignola is, of course, the creator of Hellboy, which is a great comic book that you should read some time. The pilot has demons, robots, and Abraham Lincoln. What more could you ask for? This “free pilot of a good show” thing is a much better deal than, say, that $1.99 pilot of an aborted live-action Aquaman.
Anyway, go watch the pilot for Screw-On Head. If you don’t, I might just have to put you on notice.
Well, Casey can’t have all the good links to Flash games, so I present to you Four Second Frenzy. It’s a bit like WarioWare; in fact, a few of the games seem directly ported. However, there’s a neat mix of new games, too, and I like that it’s a twenty-six person collaboration.
You may be familiar with Grow, Grow RPG, and Grow Cube from when we linked to them in the previous incarnation of this very site. The creator of these toys has released a preliminary work-in-progress version of Grow Nano, which appears to be a speed-clicking game at this point and will probably prove difficult to any of you without mice. Good luck!
Also, give his game Tontie a try. It’s like Whack-A-Mole on steroids and it’s a lot of fun.
In the same vein, I had somehow missed out on the Hapland series despite the fact that there are three of them. How did these pass me by? The world may never know. They’re kind of like the Grow games in that you have to figure out the sequence of events that gets you to your goal, but they’re very different too. Check out Hapland One, Two, and Three.
On the commercial front, the indie puzzle game Eets can be purchased from their website for $20. It’s got a bunch of puzzles and there are even more created by fans and staff on their website that can be downloaded once you have the game. It’s a lot of fun and is of exceedingly high quality for being a small-press game. There’s a trial for download from their website, so give it a try and see if you like it.
Eets is a little more action-oriented, so it’s kind of like a cross between the games previously mentioned and the fantastic sidescroller N, which has been described as being similar to Lode Runner with physics and cool death animation. N is available for free, too! That’s a lot of time just waiting to be killed.