ERIC SHEFFERMAN <DOT> COM

There is a LOT that can be done with free online services — sometimes things that probably go way beyond what the service creators envisioned.

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… for adults.

I can’t say exactly how I stumbled upon Vendetta. I think I was looking at stuff about stop-motion animation and came across Powell’s site which had a mention of the movie. I watched. I was hooked. There’s so much about this movie that is just RIGHT.

Machine guns, blood, guts, two tough cops, and Santa Claus.

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NOTE: This isn’t about choosing one political side or the other. Any idiot could have said the following quote. Apparently some idiot did.

Mitt Romney ‘Shellshocked’ After Lost Election, Adviser Says

from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/mitt-romney-lost-election_n_2095013.html

OK — so let me get this straight. This dude thought he was capable of being THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and yet losing an election leaves him “Shellshocked” ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I don’t even know how many “?!” that actually requires at the end of the sentence. It might need more.

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A good headline should step into your prospects head and be part of the conversation — either by continuing a pre-existing thought or by creating curiousity about something new.

Although this wasn’t the main headline on the magazine cover, it was immediately attention-grabbing.

From the October 2012 Cosmopolitan magazine with Zooey Deschanel on the cover:

www.cosmopolitan.com

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It used to take some genuine effort to say nasty stuff to someone.

If they pissed you off, you had to contemplate it, get a pen and paper, write out your thoughts, fold it up, put it in an envelope, bring it to the Post Office, wait on a line to mail it, and then wait the 3 to 10 days for the Post Office to deliver it to the recipient.

Of course, this type of long drawn-out process also led to a lot of rubbing hands together and cackling with maniacal laughter.

Now it’s trivial to just leave a comment on their blog or on their facebook wall. That’s progress!

Letter to the Rolling Stones in 1966 via:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/09/your-road-manager-needs-poke.html

I spent a lot of time working on the Big Bird’s Hide and Speak game — and thus spent a lot of time listening to Caroll Spinney say the same few words from the game’s limited vocabulary over and over and over and over and…

Since that is now a few decades in the past, stumbling on this clever piece was kinda funny. It’s made with some of the soundtrack and graphics from the game and a bunch of other stuff and manages to turn a happy children’s game into a dark warning about nuclear war. Or something…

Yes, I still think in 6502 code.

I was looking at a video of the Atari 7800 game Ikari Warriors — a game that I worked on back in the 1980′s.

I was the one who suggested to Mike a way to build a board to install our own development system operating system on the Atari 7800 — which we then later turned into a NES development system (which made it about $10,000 cheaper than the official Nintendo developer system).

And I wrote the interrupt-driven code for the development system so that we could debug WHILE the game was playing on the system. The 7800 was connected to an IBM PC (compatible) (and probably running something super-powerful like a 8086 or maybe a 286). We wrote the code and compiled it on the PC and then transferred it over to RAM we had installed on the 7800 to simulate a ROM cartridge. The PC could issue commands to the development system which were processed on the interrupts so that we could debug in real time.

Big lesson learned — there’s no point in trying to save every last CPU cycle.

PHA 
TXA 
PHA

Winds up functioning very differently from

PHA 
TXA  
PHA 
TYA 
PHA

as the start of your interrupt code. Especially after a few months when you forget what you wrote and add in some feature that uses the Y register.

Oh so many bizarro errors that caused that were impossible to track.

Lesson learned.

I was very pleased with myself at how I had designed the game engine to make the bad guys move in zones, thus allowing sprites to be reused in multiple zones and thus allowing there to be a ton of objects moving on the screen at any time. No big deal now, but BIG DEAL back then.

I didn’t get to work on the final gameplay stuff since we then used our ability to make development systems to move on to doing Nintendo programming rather than finishing the game. It doesn’t look to me like it plays as smoothly as it had potential to.