Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Monthly Archives: April 2009

Thoughts on being five…

Friday, April 24, 2009

Some musings by Nefarious from a recent notebook… They’re one of my favorite things that she does at school — a mix of word practice, creative writing, and illustrations.

james-and-the-giant-peach
This is James and the Giant Peach.

(Continued)

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Well, today is our last full day in this apartment, although I suppose we do officially have it until the end of the month. Tomorrow both this apartment’s contents and my storage unit will get moved to the new studio. We’ve been moving little things over in dribs and drabs but this will deal with the bulk of it. Nefarious has been loving the giant space. A full swing will go up soon, but in the meantime I hung a climbing/swinging rope from one of the I-beams, which are strong enough that I could likely winch my truck into the air from one.

rope-swing

It’ll also be nice having some pavement again — Caitlin picked up a couple boxes of sidewalk chalk (which we enjoyed many times in the past). I was really inspired by the recent “Chalk Flood” in Grand Rapids in which something like 30,000 sticks of chalk were given out to the public to decorate the streets — what a wonderful, and low cost, public art festival that’s much more community oriented than most street fairs and other somewhat analogous celebrations.

Timing was right when we finished off at the studio yesterday (getting new keys, feeding the fish, and so on) that we stopped by the park to see what food vendors were there. Since the weather is so summery now (although it was windy enough that Nefarious did end up borrowing my jacket), there was a hot dog cart, an ice cream truck, and a chip truck, so that was a very nice luck.

eating-ice-cream

The water at High Park is teeming with minnows right now. I don’t know if that’s natural or if the ponds have been stocked (people do go fishing in Grenadier Pond), but there were tons of them.

minnows

Speaking of breeding, Oddee has a good list on Medieval sex practices today that I think most people will find interesting. Oh, and did you know slow loris love getting tickled? Anyway, depending on the schedule of the cable company, I may or may not be online over the next few days.

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Apophis 2029: Another Javascript Game Experiment

Friday, April 17, 2009

There are a few bugs still, and I haven’t fully cross-browser tested it yet, but I’m prepared to show what I’m working on. It’s pretty resource intensive, so I doubt it’ll run in IE except on faster computers but it should be OK in Firefox and Chrome on most modern computers. It’s pure Javascript with no canvas element or plugins (ie. no Flash)… I think it’s an interesting exploration of what you can do with Javascript. As before, feel free to examine/use the source code.

Click either screenshot to load game… To be honest it’s not as fun as Bing-Bong! but it’s a bit more ambitious from a back-end point of view and has some interesting upgrades to the code (at full steam the game has fifty or so threads handling all the objects; it’s really fun).

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Teaser Image

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

I’m working on a new game which is sort of a missile command meets space invaders sort of thing. So far just drawing/scanning/design is done. I really like doing games based on my (on paper) doodly drawings. Tomorrow morning I’m off to deal with some medical stuff that may or may not consume most of the day, but I’ll poke around at this game over the next week as I have time… Our move is officially Tuesday so making sure everything in boxes has to come first!