Single player or Multiplayer!
It even plays itself!
Thanks to Nikki and Sergio for talking me out of having a violent image in this game!

An old file I found a while back, barely remember compiling the thing together but here it is for posterity. Some of it's from earlier times, aka 5 years back. Some of it was recently put together, aka 2 months ago. Might have some almost cursing so if you're offended by about to curses, then you'll probably play it anyway and be offended by it, as I did by my own product. In any case, enjoy the screenshot if you don't want to go through the "adventure" and such. Take care

For no particular reason other than a bit of annoyance at the difficulty of this game
(actually I got through, because I think for some reason my home computer was playing it a bit below speed) and because I actually like "flap" mechanics (see: Joust, and Balloon Flight), I made a parody mashup of Flywrench and my own Atari 2600 JoustPong in the thrill-a-minute world of: flywrenchpong
(You can also play it online).

It also features a homemade electronic soundtrack! (Made by slowing down and "wa-wa'ing" an Atari 2600 Supercharger .wav)

I think if I died tomorrow, the # of people who "get" the joke because of familiarity with both indy game flywrench and atari homebrew joustpong would go down by about 33%.

And yes, I made this exact same post nearly on TGQ and indygamer.blogspot.com.

Attachment	Size
flywrenchpong.png	2.91 KB

Collab with Increpare

This is a compilation of One Hour Game Jam submissions incorporating all of 1HGJ Vol. 1, plus every submission I made in 2018, plus a few bonus games.

I struggled to make this my last release of 2018, but as a first release of 2019 it's not bad either. Please enjoy!

It's back, and betterer than ever! This time I used a shell script to randomly select three Klipart sprites by fair chance! The script, for reference:

#!/bin/bash

for i in `seq 1 3`
do

	cd /montparnasse/libs;
	chosendir=`ls -d */ 2>/dev/null | shuf -n1`;
	echo `find $chosendir -maxdepth 1 -type f | shuf -n1`;
done

You are tasked with creating a game in two hours that uses all three of these sprites in a prominent role:

Ground rules: Minor sprite edits are fine, as long as you don't try to change the identity of the sprites. Also be sure you work all the sprites into major roles, preferably on the same frame/screen together at some point in your game. Outside of that, go nuts!

Do it this Saturday on the 26th, same time as Klik of the Month Klub!

Do eeeet!

You'll probably want to upload the game here when you're done with it.

Attachment	Size
0-Red Boxer-Stopped-0.gif	1.39 KB
0-Big Blinky-Stopped-0.gif	7.24 KB
0-Bee-Walking-16.gif	1.53 KB

---

Games made for Klipart Konundrum 2!

Learn how to prepare food properly the Marvelous Bacon way!

Marvelous Bacon will go through the 3 food groups, teaching you which toppings to use for which foods, and finally allows YOU to apply the right amount of toppings! Soon you will be a master topping chef!

I'm not certain, but I think the server running Glorious Trainwrecks may have been hacked again recently.

IMMEDIATE ACTIONS YOU SHOULD TAKE:
- You should NOT YET change your password on this site, as if it has been hacked, the attacker could still have access.
- You SHOULD change your password on any websites that you're using that share a password with Glorious Trainwrecks.

WHAT I AM DOING TO FIX THIS:
- I am going to create a new, clean Linode instance and migrate the site to use it.
- I am going to modify Drupal to use a more secure password hashing mechanism.
- I will tell you when this is done so that you can change your passwords here, if you wish.

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS GOING ON:
(Warning: gory technical details)
After the last time the site was hacked, I installed a program called rkhunter, which runs daily and searches for changes to the running system that have security implications.

On the morning of March 17th, rkhunter started to send emails that flagged something I had never seen before. This message has persisted since. There is no possible way I accidentally did anything to the server in the 24 hours prior, as on March 16th I was travelling all day.

[blockquote]Warning: Network TCP port 47018 is being used by /usr/lib/libice.log. Possible rootkit: Possible Universal Rootkit (URK) component
Use the 'lsof -i' or 'netstat -an' command to check this.[/blockquote]

According to ls, /usr/lib/libice.log does not exist. Neither 'lsof' nor 'netstat' show anything that has that port open. I can't connect to that port, either locally, or from an external machine. And rkhunter's mailing lists suggest that URK is very old and very unlikely to be seen in the wild.

It is possible that this is a weird false positive. If it doesn't go away after rebooting the server, then that seems very unlikely, since this is very dubious behaviour. I am being cautious.

One other thing happened that I find alarming: This morning, someone logged into my Facebook account from Taiwan. Facebook caught it, locked my account, and notified me. I had been under the belief that the password I was using was A) secure, and B) had yet to be leaked. Clearly it is now out there and associated with my email address, so I have a long slog of password changes ahead.

RE: password hashing, Drupal 5 performs by default an SHA-1 hash of your password with no salt. If you have a common password, this means that someone with access to our database could figure out your password literally by putting your password hash into Google. If you have an uncommon password, the work is slightly more complicated, but because there is no salt, it does not take an attacker much more time.

(I would love to do away with storing passwords entirely and switch to Mozilla Persona or something, but the chances of making that work with Drupal 5 are basically nil. I should be able to fairly easily switch to a bcrypted version of the SHA-1 hash of your password, which won't require a password reset and will bring us up to modern password hashing standards.)

Anyway, I'm sorry that this happened, and I'm hopeful that I can get us transferred over to a fresh, new, more secure server reasonably quickly.

I'm not sure who would want to read this or anything,
or even if I should be saying this at all
but here goes:

There's an irrational fear to share games online because what if no one plays your games or people don't care about your games and all you really ever wanted to do was to connect with people and engage in a deep sharing--

I made a dating sim where the player dates different versions of myself (there's a barista nilson, an art student nilson, and a "boy" nilson) for a semester project in the MFA (visual studies) program I'm in last winter. The game's ok, but what I truly love is watching people engage with the game in person. The game exists now on a Mac in the school's computer lab, and I'll invite people over to play it, or my friends will play it on their own, or (the best) strangers will try to use the computer and accidentally start playing (dating) a game that was left open from someone else (and then recognize me later in the hallway, lol).

A few weeks ago, at the stroke of midnight, my friend and mentor visited the school (there was a great moment where Mary says to him as she walks out the door "have fun dating nilson" to which he had no reference to at the time...). We sat down and he started playing/dating. A few minutes in, he stopped and said "what do you want to be?" I laughed because I laugh. "What do you want to be?" I dunno. He holds me accountable. "An artist, right?" Okay. "Is this online?" No. "Why not?" It's very silly to explain why the dating sim wasn't online for so long, but it can probably be summed up by the word fear.

When we presented our work that semester for the public, some people would play the dating sim, and then walk away from the installation, leaving the date in limbo, the stupid-looking nilson sprite frozen and abandoned (a boy stripped bare). This is part of the exercise of being vulnerable (and I would never ask anyone to pay attention to me for more than a few minutes). Being vulnerable is tricky.

I loaded the dating sim onto itch.io a week or so ago. I at first didn't know how to price it... Charging money for something immediately feels unnatural to me - this is ironic because I serve people 7 dollar drinks every day, but I'm afraid to ask someone for a buck to play this game. A game that I worked on for months, and poured my body and my spirit into... surely this is worth a buck, right? But even a buck limits access (and who is really even paying attention anyway?). One of my best friends bought the game for $4.20 (thank you), and I think maybe 2/12 free keys I gave out were redeemed. It's not about making money, but one of the things we talk a lot about in school is "artist legitimacy." Ugh.

I've been antsy af ever since. I asked everyone about prices. "Make it free or charge ten bucks." I ended up putting a meticulously phrased sentence on the game's page saying if anyone wants a free key, send me a joke or something, a feeble attempt to connect tossed out into the void. I even made a post on itch's new game forums, lol. There's no right answer, there's no good answer.

If I want to "be an artist" so bad, I need to learn to share. The first share is the most difficult. I made myself as vulnerable as I could, but my project lacks networking, marketing. How do people connect with a community, and grow that community?

The best way to play Untitled Dating Sim (first three dates) is in bed with your friends, preferably with the game projected (light) on a wall. The game's funny, yeah, but it exists as an intense act of sharing (something I had to get over). It forces people who play it to get vulnerable as well. People who play the game see what they want to see in it - my one professor who thinks I'm some post-modernist derrida huffing warhol troll sees the game as a joke on the player... others see something more gentle, almost romantic. Certainly human.

Should it even be online? And what do I do with it now? A part of me says I need to move on. "It's just a project, and it's done. It's complete." It'll always exist now, on my website, on that Mac (hopefully), on itch, in the few people's memories who played it. I guess this is the point where (as an "Artist") I need to start applying to "shows." I need to start networking. All successful artists say "I applied 100 times and got accepted once." What galleries want this dating sim?

I recently saw a dating sim at squeaky wheel, so "it's out there." "Being an artist" seems like a heartbreaking job, until at least you're satisfied with your level of network. I don't think about networking when I'm making. I want to make games that kids on the internet like, mysterious software that transmits energy to them. I want to send CDs of games, mail art, to like-minded communities. I don't want people coming up to me and asking me "how do I win?" (unless I'm making JRPGs, then please PLEASE ask me about strats etc)... I dunno... I don't really have anything to be bummed out about, lol.

I just bought Anna Anthropy's rise of the videogame zinesters on amazon, so that'll probably re-energize me~

You are an arrow, you move like a ball. You are... BALLARROW!!! Ahem.. well, yes, you are rotating, press "SPACE" and the arrow will move in the direction you are facing. Press "R" and will rotate faster.

Collect coins, avoid mines, aim for highscore.

Game completely made this weekend, only sounds used from stock.