:TESTO:6/27/2006, 7:07 a.m. ET
The Dissociated Press

Mad Doctor Hrothgar is pleased to offer a new public beta of Loopback!™ from Heorot Labs (a division of Vikingland, USA), an exciting adventure in semi-constrained low-dimensional topology.

Loopback! now features multiplayer gameplay, within your LAN or across the world. It mostly works, most of the time. Download Loopback! today!



HEOROT LABS ignited the personal catapault revolution in the 1990s with Operation Catapault! and re-invented the tabbed folder-window in the 2000s with DragonDrop. Today, Heorot and Vikingland continue to lead the industry in innovation with their award-winning desktop applications and applets, computer science laboratory assignments, and delicious alcoholic beverages.

© 2005 Vikingland, USA. Some rights reserved. Vikingland, Heorot Labs, the Mad Doctor Hrothgar name and logo, Loopback!, DragonDrop, the DragonDrop logo, and Operation Catapault! are not really trademarks of Vikingland, but they could be. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:A 30 by 6 foot black slate wall, on one end
etched with the first amendment, the rest blank,
initially.

A groove near the base holds chalk. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I'm having a great time visiting my sister's family (both the part that we share and the ones she's recently adopted through her fiancee) in Virginia, just outside of Charlottesville. Last night I danced with a lovely young lady to a Twin Oaks klezmer band (the Vulgar Bulgars) in a Cville bar until my feet were blistered, having seen my sister star in an Arthur Miller play (All My Sons) with a community theater group. The performance was emotional, the acting solid, and the story engaging.

Today we went out to Free (the fiancee)'s land, out in the woods south of the city, home of his gourmet mushroom business and where the aforementioned family hangs their hats - my Sister and Free and his 3 kids (two sons and a daughter). They're all fantastic, sweet, brighteyed people. We drank mead (Free got me started on the brewing, and we both shared a bottle of our own) grilled chicken and vegetables, and I got to be an uncle.

I like being an uncle.

***

Loopback has had a makeover, both in mechanics and in UI.
The ball now correctly *reflects* its trajectory off the paddle (which is only different from direct bounceback if the ball has had its direction modified previously), and a sequence of single-player bounces are worth successively more points. Names and colors for the paddles are choosable, and (in a spurt of "Look, its OOPy") the number of paddles and balls is adjustable. (only two paddles are controllable, the remainder are "dead weight")

The balls' size and color also reflects the party in control and the number of combo-bounces it's achieved.

Hooray!

Go play more. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I spent 12 hours today writing a game in Java, which I had started with another 8 hours last weekend. It's done, or as done as it's going to be for now.  It's Pong on Wheels, which I shall dub "Loopback". The project started when some of my students were talking about how little programming they were able to do during the "Urban Video Game Academy" program last summer - they had followed cookie-cutter instructions to paste their way to a flash-based Pong game. This summer looks more promising, but it also got me thinking about what it would take to teach the skills to build Pong from scratch, and in so doing I developed the concept of "solitaire pong", which I decided was very boring, so I made a two-player game on the "solitaire" board, instead.

Long story short, go play a game. http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/Loopback.html

I find that I tend to focus on tasks, ideas, projects, in very intense stretches, where I do and think about nothing else. Drinking from a fire hose, etc. I should practice controlled bursts of inspiration - I didn't take a break today, barely stopping to make macaroni and walk the dog (who afterward very nearly choked to death on some street-detritus, which was a scary experience, and good for snapping me out of my single-mindedness, if harrowing for me and even moreso the dog), from 11 am to 9 pm, then (after satsifying myself that the dog wasn't going to stop breathing again) another two hours of fiddlling before putting the project to bed.

Yet not myself - I've got the buzz of the zone, the excitement of a mind where the project-pieces click and the thing makes sense as a whole. I need to decompress before I can sleep, so I will. Go find a friend to share a keyboard with, and play my game. :ENDTESTO: