Ok, here goes. I said a long time ago that I would start putting my ideas “out there” because I don’t have the resources to make them come to fruition. I contacted SickHead Games (a Game Development company) to see if they would be able to make this for me for a price I could afford. No luck. They said it would be between $100k and $400k. So, I have decided to put it out to see if someone would develop it just because I want to play it, myself. Here’s the email I sent to them. Maybe I don’t know how to pitch a game?

This will be a dark/neon-ish world [like a popular saber game] with new movement mechanics.  Stationary gameplay.  Start on a platform. In the distance you see neon “ropes”/”vines” either swinging or moving up and down.  You hold the left trigger and right trigger to pull YOURSELF back like a bow and arrow. Moving the sticks left/right will rotate you around the vine. Up and down will point you up and down. At the start, a translucent vine will be in your left hand. (This won’t show up when you are on a vine.) When you let go of the right trigger, both triggers release and you are shot in the direction you were pointed in, arcing like an arrow would arc.

When you are flying through the air and get close to the vine, the controller will vibrate, indicating that you have to grab the vine with your left trigger. Once you grab it, it may start moving down, some of the vines may start falling, so you must find the next one to shoot yourself to quickly.

You can shoot yourself in any direction. There will be walls that you must avoid, moving walls that have a hole that you have to shoot yourself through, some platforms you can stand on, the floor may be spikes that will kill you if you fall. Setup will be left/right handed, so you can choose which hand pulls you back.

Also, there should be the ability to turn on and off a dotted line that will show you where you will be shot to.”Thick” air (volumetrics?) should make it so you only see the next vine in the distance. (or whatever is around you that is the same distance) The vines should produce a low neon-ish hum when you are near them. The game should allow for different maps to be purchased and installed [like a popular saber game] as well.

Eventually, I would like multiplayer and for the game to be customizable so people can share their maps. This should also include textures with alpha channels so there could be actual “vines” or chains, etc. (This part can come later, but may affect how it is coded to begin with.)

While upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, I forgot to uninstall 2 modules that were incompatible. So, when I ran update.php, I was stopped by the errors. Here’s an easy fix to get it to a place where you can uninstall the modules:

Go to the module’s folder and open the [modulename].info.yml file, take out the core: 8.x line (or comment it out with a #), and put in:

core_version_requirement: ^8.8 || ^9

save, then run the update again. This allowed me to get to the backend, and uninstall the modules.

If going back in time means that you show up exactly at the location that you left, you might be in space, or in a tree, or if you leave in a building that hasn’t been built, you may appear in the past way up in the air. Or you may appear in the liquid hot magma core of the earth.

If you were going to take money back in time, you would have to find “old” money, as the bills look very different today. Even the change (quarters) may look different. No one would accept today’s money even 10 years ago.

I am in love with Nikkialiah!!! She made me cry! I am not sure if she goes by Nikki or Aliah, but she has caught my attention in a big way!

This song showed up in my youtube recommendations, and you know me, I love songs with odd lyrics, and this title alone spoke to me.

So… click.

Played it on a loop for a while, an underlying sadness mixed with joy over the lyrics, then wanted to see if she had any others that would speak to me. This next one had me actually crying. Not with laughter, but with joy of hearing not only her voice, but my own thoughts coming through her.

I immediately wanted to help her, so I went and bought one of the T Shirts that read “Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave” from her shop.

I will buy both of these songs when they come out. She reminds me of a time when I was writing music with only two tape recorders and a tiny casio keyboard. Get that idea down on tape before it leaves!

I read a quote that said, “If you don’t show it, it can be erased.”

Immediately, that struck a chord with me. I have been holding on to invention ideas, game ideas and songs, poetry and philosophies for years, thinking that I didn’t want them to get “stolen” on the internet. A few years back, I released some of the songs and tried to get some of the inventions started on kickstarter-type sites. But I am not really a social media-type individual, so they didn’t go anywhere.

I have been considering posting the stuff here to at least have the waybackmachine index them for posterity, since we never know when the end is going to come. Covid has changed how a lot of people view life in general. I guess it has changed my perception as well.

So, I am going to trot down memory lane through my ideas and “stuff” and try to put them here as posts. Some of these things are inventions that I want to see made because I *want* them, myself, and couldn’t find them on the market.

Posts to come soon, hopefully.

During an interview recently, someone asked if anyone ever approached and said “you are a role model”, and if you should feel any pressure with that kind of responsibility thrust upon you.

Here’s the answer that should be given.

People should not look to one person as a role model and mimick them. They should take the best from all people and emulate each of those things that someone got “right” and blend them into a new role “representation”. In other words, your role model shouldn’t be a person, it should be only certain best actions from everyone. That way, you can become the best of everyone, and that will inspire others to also take the best of you and keep blending.

People are not perfect, so you might end up being disappointed when the one role model you chose fails at something.

I have been a fan of CocoRosie for quite some time. The minute I heard Gravediggress, I was hooked. I am always up for finding something unusual, and they fit that niche. When I found out that they used children’s toys and odd items for instruments, I appreciated their music even more.

They haven’t released much in the past couple of years, and now that Put The Shine On is out, I think it was well worth the wait.

To all my fellow Neneh Cherry fans, this album feels like it belongs right in between Raw Like Sushi and Homebrew. It has the raw rappy feel in spots like RLS, and the melancholy haunting music of Homebrew. For that Homebrew feel, listen to Slow Down Sun Down.

In Lamb and the Wolf, you can hear the gravel knocking around in her throat in the “always the same” repeats. It invokes a Kim Carnes overtone.

There are only a few albums that can be listened to intently for message and nuance, while still being able to be put on in the background for ambiance. This is one of them.

Since people are quarantined and have to “entertain themselves” at home, I predict that in 9 months (Dec 2020-Jan2021), you are going to see a huge baby boom. Good luck!