2012 - 1 - 18 / 1:04 pm / general
My Anti-SOPA, Anti-PIPA Ramblings
Today is the day of the great internet eclipse with sites like Reddit and Wikipedia going completely dark from 8 to 24 hours in order to raise awareness about two horrible, terrible things that are moving through the House and the Senate here in the United States: SOPA and PIPA. I just want to make a quick post as to why I'm personally opposed to the two acts, specifically SOPA for right now.
SOPA and PIPA's goals are to ultimately stop piracy, and they are mostly crafted through lobbying by companies like the MPAA, RIAA, and the ESA. Do you think your average representative has enough knowledge of the internet and computers to draft something like this themselves? Of course not. To them, the internet is a big truck, or whatever the MPAA tells them it is that month.
The MPAA steps into congress and convinces them that they are in danger of being completely destroyed because of internet piracy. They claim to be losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and their profits are dropping, and it's all because of people downloading camera rips of Jack and Jill. (Just kidding, I don't think anyone pirated Jack and Jill.) Oh, and the MPAA's claims are mostly bullshit.
The result is congress drafting horrendous bills that are absolutely overkill, and that miss the point completely. Imagine the problem of piracy being a fly on your friend's face, and congress's response is to launch a nuclear warhead at the fly, thus annihilating your friend, you, and everything within a 50 mile radius.
SOPA, and PIPA, will not stop piracy.
But what they will do is harm people like me. I'm trying to make a living on the internet, like a lot of other people these days. Every day we see new and exciting ideas and starts up emerge right here on the internet because of its absolute freedom and fairness. Anyone can just buy a domain name, rent a server, and launch a website on their own, but SOPA and PIPA threaten this freedom.
For a cooler, more visual representation of the problem, I suggest watching this video.
read more
2011 - 11 - 1 / 3:22 pm / general
A Month of Paleo
I totally forgot to make any sort of blog post for the entire month of October, but I hope I can make it up by going into detail on what I was up to for the month. While I was doing my usual thing of working on video games, drawing stuff, and playing video games, I also took up a new challenge: Whole30.
This story really begins two months ago or so, when I was getting worse and worse at eating any food that was remotely good for me. I was eating a lot of cereal and whenever I wanted anything other than that it was usually a quick trip down the road for some kind of double cheeseburger and fries or out to indian food for a gross amount of rice and bread, or down to the thai restaurant for a pile of fried rice. My diet wasn't exactly the greatest, but for awhile I felt totally fine so I didn't really see any need to put any effort into changing it.
Then by a combination of working on too much shit stress and eating too much shit I began to have a lot of heart burn and overall stomach problems that were pretty distracting, and I wanted to try and do something about it. My housemates sometime do the paleo diet, as well as a lot of my friends, so I figured it was time for me to try it as well. My girlfriend Corey and I decided to make October the official challenge of Whole30.
What the hell is Whole30? Well, it's like Paleo but with some additional rules and more strict versions of already existing rules, and it's supposed to last for 30 days. Whole30 basically means eating real food, which they define as meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and good fats. Foods with very few ingredients. Also no consumption of added sugar of any kind, processed food, alcohol, grains, legumes, dairy, and white potatoes. So my cereal and milk is totally out, as well as my double cheese burgers... no rice means no sushi either (unless I get the cucumber wrap but honestly I'm not too big of a fan of that) and no pizza... fuck.
Luckily Corey and I weren't totally alone on this. A lot of our friends in the area often eat paleo with a few exceptions here and there (In-n-Out, mostly) so we started off with a lot of resources. Our housemates usually make a lot of paleo food for dinner so started off borrowing all their recipes.
Warning: This post is going to be pretty long, so prepare yourself. If you just want to skip to the end where the most important stuff will be, that's totally cool.
read more
2011 - 9 - 4 / 12:52 pm / general
What I'm up to: September Edition
I just got back from PAX Prime up in Seattle and I'm realizing how little on post on my super fancy blog, so this post is going to be an attempt to fix all of that. I've been up to a lot of various things in the last couple months and I'm going to try to sum them all up in a single blog post, YEAH!
PAX Prime 2011
I just got back from PAX last week and I'm still feeling exhausted in all dimensions. Retro Affect had a booth in the expo hall to show off the latest build of Snapshot, so once again I got to go to a really cool video games conference thing with an exhibitor badge and feel all super cool and important. On top of that, Snapshot was selected for the PAX10 which means we got a second booth to manage.
We ended up bringing a total of 7 people to PAX in order to help keep up with the insanity of running two booths at the same time for 3 days straight. It was pretty intense but somehow everyone survived, and we got a handful of press mentions about Snapshot during and after the show. A lot of people are really excited about it, which makes me excited (and nervous) about it. Special thanks goes out to the Closure dudes, the PAX enforcers, everyone that played Snapshot, and our very own gold enforcer assistant for the weekend, Andrew. This guy went out of his way to get us headache medicine, eating utensils, and lunch throughout the weekend, so mad props to you dawg.
read more
2011 - 6 - 16 / 8:00 am / general
Cool Arts!
Hey! I haven't been posting a lot of entries in the old blog but I have been posting some new stuff in my art gallery thing. Here are some rad previews, but why don't you check em out RIGHT HERE!
I don't really get a lot of time to just chill out and draw, but lately I've been trying to make more time for it. Most of my time now is spent with Snapshot and other side game projects, and the occasional marathon of Starcraft 2 laddering or Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition online matches. Hopefully I'll have some cool stuff to post about in the coming weeks regarding one of my games, but for now this is all I got!
2011 - 5 - 2 / 9:59 pm / general
Depict1 Doodles
This past weekend I gave a quick little talk for a TEDx event over at ASU West. The talk was mostly about the story of making depict1 and turning it into a flash game and eventually getting it sponsored, and I drew some little illustrations for various points of the talk so I figured I would share them on the internet!
read more
2011 - 4 - 3 / 6:06 pm / general
Space Sushi Ties for 10th
The voting for the TIGSource Versus Competition has officially concluded (Well, it actually concluded a week ago or so but I've been too distracted to post about it) and Space Sushi tied with X-Bones, and Tetris Fight Club for 10th place with a whopping 6 votes. There were 80-something entries for this competition, so barely scraping into the top 10 is pretty decent!
The big winner from the competition is 0Space by none other than Teknopants. I know that local multiplayer is very rare, but if you ever get the chance to go head to head with someone on the same keyboard then definitely give 0Space a whirl, and while you're at it you can also give the other 80 or so games a chance too. (If you have an entire day to kill, I guess.)
The idea of versus was a great competition theme, but it kinda falls short because not a lot of players have the opportunity to play local multiplayer on their computers. The time frame of a TIGSource competition doesn't really allow for a robust online multiplayer system for these games, so I feel like not a lot of people really got a chance to play the games this time. Also each voter only had 3 votes for 80 entries, so there wasn't a good distribution of ranks among the results (A majority of the games tied for 58th place with 0 votes.) It's definitely a lot of fun to make a 2 player game, but the severe audience reduction is definitely noticeable, so whenever I make Space Sushi Deluxe, I'll be sure to include a single player campaign. ;D
about
Hi there, my name is Kyle, and I'm a 25 year old child with adult powers. I'm making video games and living the indie game developer life in Tempe, Arizona. Here you will find my thoughts, games, websites, artwork, and other stuff like that. I'm currently working on a big project called Snapshot, and also doing smaller side projects in Flash or Game Maker. If want to get a hold of me, use the form on the bottom of the page. Thanks for stoppin' by!
spotlight
blog stuff
categories
tags
- alec holowka
- art
- bill pullman
- blog
- depict1
- diet
- doodles
- food
- game jam
- gdc
- good times
- id4
- namiko
- offspring fling
- paleo
- pax
- pax10
- snapshot
- sopa pipa internet
- space sushi
- uat
- verge
- webdev
- winnitron
- yay!
archives
old sites
