Four Island

Remember when I said that not all of my Best of 2012 albums were actually released this year? Well, here comes one of those. Lights Poxleitner (or just Lights) is a Canadian artist that I've really heard of before getting into Tumblr and making some Marina & the Diamonds friends. One of my Tumblr friends, who is probably below the age limit for having a Tumblr but whatever, seemed rather fond of this strange artist. Her most recent album (released October 4, 2011) Siberia seemed interesting--at least, it had cool looking cover art.

Wouldn't you agree? I also gave the title track of the album a quick listen, and it seemed pretty cool, throbbing baselines and such (yeah I have no idea what that meant but I hoped it would sound cool), so I put the album on my birthday list, and promptly forgot about it to the swirling vortex of other assorted nothings I have going on in my life. A few months later, however, I found a belated birthday package in my mailbox, and inside was good ol' Poxleitner, so I gave the album a whirl, and I'm quite happy I did.

Lights has a very electric, very synthetic sound to her music, and the album has a nice flow to it. The high energy of Everybody Breaks A Glass, as one of the album's singles, makes you want to dance (as do most songs on the album), but it also just has that element of beauty to it, especially in the chorus. In fact, it's one of my favorite songs on the album. My other favorite song is the slow, peaceful ballad Cactus In The Valley, which sweeps you up in its emotion and carries you off. This song is actually fairly unlike the rest of the songs on the album, however.

Some other standout songs are Peace Sign, a fast-paced pretty song, and Heavy Rope, a slower, gentler song that feels like a wave washing over you. Really, this album is pretty great, except for the Suspension, And Counting..., and Day One. I also dislike the rapping in Everybody Breaks A Glass and Flux And Flow. I've gotten used to it now and I can't say it really detracts much from the songs but I really don't feel like it adds anything either. Nonetheless, Siberia by Lights is a very good album for the most part and I would definitely suggest it for someone looking for some new music. I also feel like I should give her other album a look since I liked this one so much, so we'll see how that goes. :)

Just a quick post to say, hey, I've finished the work I was doing on the website! Yesterday, after having spent some time looking around on the website after my Best of 2012 post, which was the only reason I've been on Four Island for six months, I decided that Four Island v6 was pretty ugly. I worked tirelessly through the night to produce the new layout that you can see with your very own eyes, Four Island v7!

While v6 was a heavily modified version of the WordPress theme K2, I wrote v7 completely from scratch, which was an interesting experience because I don't really think the WordPress Codex has enough documentation on how to make a theme. I had to pick through other themes to find out what I was doing at many times, and at others I just had to blindly feel my way around WordPress's Template Tags documentation to get a feel for what I was doing. I think it all worked out pretty well, though, and I think things look nice. Fun posts to check out include Annetenna, Using the Inflector, and Of Books And Memes, because they showcase some of the neat stuff the theme does like comments, pingbacks and syntax highlighting. Also, if you care to use the search box, it actually sort of works now. Thank you to Relevanssi, what a grand plugin.

Anyway, the Best of 2012 post will be coming up later (in fact I'll probably start writing it when I publish this) so keep your eyes peeled and I hope you all like the new theme! Leave comments, let me know, and try out the Wordpress.com-provided comment form which is kind of awesome! :D

Nelly Furtado is an artist I have long appreciated but have never really talked. Her hits "Maneater," "Say It Right," and "All Good Things Come To An End" from her album Loose are pretty well known and have been jams of mine for quite some time. However, I never really gave either of her first two albums a formal chance, and I ended up waiting for her next album to come out, which ended up being completely Spanish. Don't get me wrong, I did quite enjoy the songs "Más" and "Fantasmas," but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. The songs "Girlfriend In The City" and "Night Is Young" from her greatest hits album were my New Years anthem, but still, I needed a full Nelly Furtado album experience.

The Spirit Indestructible came out September 14th and it can't have been much later (though it was definitely in October) that my best friend and I ended up in a Target buying giant bags of candy on account of the fact that we're (by which I mean I am) massive candy whores. The CD section of the store enticed me. "Hello Starla," it whispered. "You haven't purchased a CD in a while. We've got some pretty little jewel cases for your shelf."

Still, it was only a 50/50 chance that I purchased The Spirit Indestructible: while I was dancing around the CD section of the store, I also noticed No Doubt's new album and I made my friend choose which album I should buy, and I proudly left the store with The Spirit Indestructible by Nelly Furtado, and a giant bag of sickening Wonka candy that I ended up throwing out a few days later because I'm a whore.

If you've been missing Furtado's catchy hits from Loose then The Spirit Indestructible is for you. It mixes her old, urban style from her first two albums with the modern pop style from Loose. Banging tunes like "Parking Lot," "Big Hoops (Bigger The Better)" and "High Life" make you want to get up and dance, while songs like "Miracles" and "Enemy" really set an emotional, yet still catchy, tone for the experience. The album has a very distinct feel to it and no song feels out of place. This is indeed the Nelly Furtado experience I've been looking for for quite a while.

Has everyone had a happy (and uneventful) end of the world? Well you're not quite safe yet: if I'm posting, it MUST be the end of the world. Actually, for a while I've been listening to music, yah know, and there's so much music out there that I enjoy. Last year I attempted to write a "Favorite Albums of 2011" post and... got a little sidetracked. Or lazy. Or busy applying to colleges. Who knows. Well, this year has been a very good year in music and I want to share the albums that I enjoyed the most. I just want to note, however, that this is not a list of the best albums of 2012, it is a list of the top albums that I experienced this year. Most of the albums on this list did in fact come out in 2012, but a few did not, so keep your eyes peeled.

We're going to start out with a shocker. I first got into Emilie Autumn way back in March of 2010 when my good friend Amelia taught me the ways of being an Opheliac (really, Mad Girl was the first song I heard, but I digress). I listened the heck out of that album, and I still do, as it's quite a fantastic album and one of my favorites of all time. However, after a few months, I thirsted for more Emilie. Where would I get my fix? Clearly I was too stupid to listen to her first album, Enchant, or listen to any of the scads and scads of extra material and oddities she had released. Oh no, I had to wait. But what was I waiting for?

I was waiting to be able to Fight Like A Girl. I had long known that Emilie's third album would be called FLAG, but through 2011, I was forgetting her. With nothing happening, she simply slipped my mind. My first shock came on April 11th when out of nowhere, the songs Fight Like A Girl and Time For Tea were released as a double A-side single and I gobbled them up like warm oatmeal. My second shock came on July 24th when also out of nowhere, Fight Like A Girl, the album itself, was released! It was a joyous day, and I purchased it almost immediately, and what was in fact quite nice about this transaction was that fact that not only did I get a digital copy of the album, but later I received a physical copy in the mail. How nice.

This album is a real doozy. You could compare it to Opheliac, but it's both lighter and harder at the same time. Beautiful songs like Gaslight wrap you up in a cozy blanket of fear, and, well, let's just say that I was very scared the first time I heard the song Time For Tea. This album is difficult to explain on its own. It's a concept album, telling the story of Emilie's stay in a psych ward after her suicide attempt, only the story is dramatized as if it occurred in the Victorian era.

Standout songs include Fight Like A Girl, If I Burn, Gaslight and Goodnight Sweet Ladies. The latter is especially interesting because it quotes both If I Burn and The Art of Suicide (from Opheliac), the latter of which is perhaps my favorite Emilie song. Regardless, this is a very good, very crazy, and very mixed album. I must say that I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Opheliac, but nonetheless, it satisfied my craving for the very talented Miss Emilie Autumn. For a while. You'll see.

Whoo, sorry I'm a bit late with today's post but today was a pretty busy day. Hopefully tomorrow is less so because Friday will probably be pretty busy and as Thursday is my birthday, it will be very busy :P. Didn't I just pick the perfect week to write a 7 day roguelike? Anyway, I did not get too much done today, but I did get the two things I mentioned yesterday done: you can now advance to higher floors than one, which get progressively larger in size, though the monsters do not yet get harder (need to make new monsters!), and I have also added an item system! Such fun! Let's see that picture!

Oh, wow, um, that is not the right picture. That's Patricia Hodge in Miranda. Sorry about that folks! Let's see the real screenshot:

Nice. As you can see, in this screenshot, I have pressed "i" to activate the inventory screen, and in the top left corner there is a list of my inventory items! You can press enter and use one, which means different things for different items: for the clothing, it means equipping the item (which can grant you defense and attack power (except for the crocs lol they're there for the lulz)), and the scroll of healing grants you 20 HP! How nice. There's also a wooden helmet on the floor right next to me.

Anyway, that's all I really have to announce at this point. Day 4 will likely consist of adding new monsters and items to the game. Until then, ciao! :)

Hey guys, it's day 2, and my game is coming along quite nicely now. I've actually got most of the core of the game done. Is it already time for screenshots? I think it is. First, a simple view of the start of the game:

Notice anything different about my game? Well, for one thing, I changed the color scheme to give the game a "colder" feel, and I think it worked. Second, the tiles have been changed to 12x12 instead of 16x16, which I'm not really sure why I was using because I was forcing 12x12 characters into 16x16 tiles and everything looked funky. This looks a lot cuter, and you can still resize the window and increase the size of the tiles. Next, there's a message window at the bottom! How fun. It tells you when people hurt you, among other things, which brings me to the next new feature: melee combat! You can actually hurt things now! There are now two hostile mobs, rats and spiders, which move toward you when you're in their line of sight. When you kill them, you gain experience, and when you have at least 1000 experience points, you grow a level! Nice. There's also a cute health counter in the top left corner now.

Now, that's a lot of work I've done in the last 24 hours, but it's not all. I've also added one of the main features that separates Frigid Earth from the other roguelikes: the rooms with the windows and the keys in them. If you don't know what I mean, go back to Day 1 and read my concept draft again.

Let's pick up that key, shall we?

Uh oh. All the windows shattered and snow is following you out of the room! Aaah! It's very terrifying. Every other turn that you are standing on snow, you lose 1HP. When you're not standing on snow, you gain at least 1HP every eight turns.

Anyway, I think I've made some good progress with my game. Most of the core is done, I think. The game only has one floor and there's no real item system to speak of, so perhaps those'll be my goals for Day 3, after which I can work on the intro and the ending and then new mobs and items that grant abilities and guys it'll be a lot of fun. Keep you posted! Check back tomorrow around 2pm for the next post :)

Hey guys! Look, I'm actually posting. I will (hopefully!) be posting a little bit more frequently now, due to situations and stuff awkward laugh. Anyway, I'd like to announce here that a little less than 24 hours ago, I started working on a 7 day roguelike! "What the heck is that?", you may ask. Well, basically, a Roguelike is a game such as NetHack (you've probably heard of that one) loosely based on the game Rogue, a game that usually doesn't have the best graphics (ASCII art is traditional!), a game that focuses on intricacy and replayability due to the fact that every game is different thanks to your local random number generator. A seven day roguelike is a roguelike that was written in exactly seven days. It's a sort of challenge, like NaNoWriMo for writers.

[caption id="attachment_3775" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Exhibit 1: A cat picture"][/caption]

Anyway, yesterday, I was sitting around, glum and bored, thinking about what exciting things I could do with my life now that my sentence of four years in high school has basically expired. I haven't really been doing that much programming lately, so I somehow came up with the idea of making a seven day roguelike! It's the perfect idea, because it'll keep me busy while also fitting into my short attention span. Look, a cat!

Anyway, after coming up with the idea of making a roguelike, I spent a couple of hours trying to think of ideas for a roguelike. Yeah, nothing was happening. My most interesting idea was this one in which a small penguin with 1HP followed you around and he could fish in rivers and get you food and if he died then you would be sad idk it kind of sucked. However, another idea struck me. Approximately two years ago, I mentioned in a poll of the week a game called "Frigid Earth," and interestingly enough, no one asked me what it was, though two people did vote for it for some reason which I cannot fathom. Frigid Earth is an idea for a roguelike that I actually came up with on December 31st, 2009, while avoiding my family members who were all trying to coerce money out of each other for some reason. I went and found my original concept draft that I wrote up two years ago, which I will reproduce for you now:

You start out in a barren, snow-covered area that seems to go on for miles, although the rushing wind blowing snow into your face does obscure your vision somewhat. Staying too long in the snow can kill you, so hurry. The sun is still out (which is why you aren't yet dead) but it is getting darker every minute. You have to hurry before the sun goes down otherwise you will die in the cold. Eventually, you come upon an abandoned tower, but the door is locked. There is a dilapitated village southeast of the tower which contains the key. You let yourself into the tower and you may (and should!) lock the door behind you to prevent the cold from following you. The tower is old and has no heating, but it provides shelter from the wind which warms you up a bit. The tower is mostly empty but for some random stuff lying around and a few mice. The clothing you find can warm you up, but make sure you choose carefully what you wear, you can wear at most 5 items and what goes on last must be taken off first. Eventually, you find a key, but upon picking it up, you hear a soft click. Suddenly, the windows in the room shatter and the cold starts coming in. Tiles adjacent to the windows will begin to freeze and once each tile is cold enough, the tiles adjacent to those tiles will begin to freeze as well. As with the outdoors, the snowy floor will decrease your warmth and may kill you, so you have to run from the advancing cold to the next floor. You may lock the door behind you to prevent the cold from following you. There are ten floors (including the ground floor) in this tower that increase in size and difficulty. Some contain holes in the floor, some contain traps. Some of the higher levels may even increase in number of rooms. The monsters will become more difficult and though you can gain experience by battling them, it is not easy to train due to the time limit. Once you reach the roof, an ending sequence is played and you win.

The main screen will have two parts. First, a 15x10 tile (32x32 tiles) game viewpoint. Second, room for three lines of messages (30 chars each) underneath that are the same width as the game viewpoint.

The outside world you start in will be barren and snowy. Broken remains of a path will direct you east and then south to a dilapitated village which contains a few broken huts generated roguelike. One will contain a key and another will contain a note mentioning a hidden tower. If you venture far enough north, a tower will suddenly appear before you (likewise, you move away, the tower will vanish). The door is locked, but can be unlocked via the key in the village.

Levels in the tower start out in an openish 20x20 room. The main staircase to the next floor will always be located in this room, but each staircase is protected by a locked door whoose key is located somewhere on the floor. There should be a few doors leading off of this main room that lead to roguelike generated small rooms and hallways which branch off even more. The floors will get more contrived and branch off a whole lot more as you get higher in the tower. Rooms can contain in-depth monsters and items. Eventually, you will find one of the rooms branch into a hallway with windows, a carpet and a key at the end. This is the key to the next floor. Upon picking up the key, a soft click will be heard and then all of the windows in the room will shatter, letting the frigid cold in. The cold will move exceedingly quickly, it will spread to all adjacent tiles every turn, so you must run.

The 7th floor will contain a room on the outside perimeter (in the corner) that is missing two walls and is covered in snow. Your first instinct may be to close the door and try to remove any cold that may have gotten through, but for players that have found ways to withstand cold, this room is particularily of interest. In the middle of the room is a pedestal with the Ring of Searching (which cannot be found anywhere else in the game) on it. When you wear this ring, any secret doors that exist will become visible when you walk by them. This is the only way to be able to use secret doors. Each floor contains a secret room containing a piece of a scroll. All 10 pieces form a story on how the Earth became so cold (it was a monster whose name will be decided later). When you reach the roof of the tower, normally, a floating rope will be present and you can climb it to enter a helicopter with rescuers in it and you will have been deemed to have "finished" (but not "won") the game. If, however, you have collected all 10 pieces of the scroll, the monster that froze the Earth will be present on the roof. If you defeat him, the world will unfreeze and you will win the game.

If you made it through that, congratulations. Basically, my idea is that you are the last remaining person on a planet that has become, for some unknown reason, too cold to sustain life anymore. You seek refuge in an old tower that you happen upon, where you find clothing and monsters. You fight your way to the top of the tower, where a helicopter will be waiting to take you away. Sound interesting? I think it does. :P For some reason, I'm enamored with the effects of cold weather.

Anyway, as I said, I have spent that last 24 hours working on this game, and I think it's actually going pretty well so far. Of course, the first day was just the core of the game: UI, movable player, random dungeon generator, field of view calculator.... Some of that stuff was actually quite complicated and I'm pretty proud of it, teh lolz. I've got some screenshots in case anyone's interested so far (click to see bigger):

[gallery include="3777,3778,3779" link="file"]

I'm actually quite excited about this little project. It's written in Java, so when it (hopefully!) gets finished, you'll all be able to play it regardless of operating system, and guess what! I fixed the issue where this game would take up all of your CPU time and cause your computer's fan to growl at you! You're welcome!

If you'd (for some god forsaken reason) like to check out the progress of my code, I'm actually using GitHub for this project, which is quite strange for me because I've never really used Git that much before. I'm used to Mercurial. Anyway, check out my Frigid Earth GitHub project. I'll keep you guys posted on the progress of my game over the next six days. I hope you guys are interested in playing my finished product! I know I sure am. :)

Lying perpendicularly in a bed one day, I surfed YouTube instead of doing an English project, and in doing so, I discovered Marina & the Diamonds's video, The Archetypes, which I am very surprised that I have not yet heard as I am a huge Marina fan. Now, listening to this very interesting track, I became inspired to write some poetry. Well, it wasn't only Marina, it was also my English teacher aunt, yesterday, telling me that April 26th was Poem In Your Pocket Day, that inspired me to write some poetry. Regardless, here are a few pieces of strange poetry that I hope you like. Don't be scared away by the first--it is definitely the strangest.

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Does something look, perhaps, a little different about my website? That's right, I've redesigned my website. Considering that Four Island 3 came out September 22nd, 2011, and that Four Island 2 came out June 13th, 2008, this is an amazing turnaround for me, and I'm very excited about this new incarnation of my website.

Four Island 3 used Wordpress, a very powerful blogging platform that I have admired in the past and which did turn out to be very appropriate for my website. The thing is, ever since realizing, when Four Island 3 came out, that my website badly needed to be simplified, I've been obsessed with this very simplistic ideal. Four Island 3 did not meet that ideal. Wordpress was simply too powerful for my needs. Four Island 4, however, is much simpler and yet, it gives me more control than Four Island 3 did.

Four Island 4 uses Jekyll, a simple, blog-aware, static website generator. It's actually a very cute little concept: you write a few webpages with some template code in them, create a folder for your Markdown-formatted blog posts, and run a command that generates your static site. Whenever your site changes, you run the command again and your site is regenerated. It's not dynamic at all, which is perfect for my increasingly old webserver. It's also incredibly simple, yet cute.

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Guys, it's that time of the year again: the beginning! You know what that means! Review posts! Yes, there may possibly be more than one this year! Now, one of my favorite things to do in the beginning of the year is enumerate the ten most popular quotes of the previous year. Well, guess what? Last year was awful quote-wise! What's with the slacking off, peeps? I wrote that beautiful Quotes DB for the win and no one's using it! There were only 9 quotes submitted last year with ratings higher than 1, so, well, it's a bit sad. But anyway, here we go:

9. #472 - Samson
8. #465 - Hurricane Irene
7. #463 - NO ONE MESSES WITH MY OVARIES
6. #456 - My Baby Is Erect
5. #454 - Fourie's Soul
4. #443 - Is This A Thing That Happen
3. #440 - Friday
2. #437 - Electricity

And now, ladies and gentlemen, drum roll please. The most popular quotes of 2011, with a terrifying FIVE upvotes:

1. #452 - Let's Get A Room

Yeah, last year was pretty awful. :P No, but really, I just think the Quotes DB is dying out for some strange reason. I'm the only one submitting quotes to it, and no one's voting on quotes. There was some really funny quotes posted towards the end of last year, and, well, they were never voted on. At least Hurricane Irene got in there. That's a funny one. And "Is this a thing that happen" is practically memetic---that needed to get in. :) Anyway, here's to a better 2012. Come on people, quote and vote! Help me fulfill my annual goal!

Oh, and if you were wondering about the highest voted quote overall, which I usually do talk about in this post, don't worry---it hasn't changed since last year. It's still #232 - Blank. God, we suck. :D