How you doin?
...Just discovered that it's... difficult to put ads into android games... and pretty much impossible to do without screwing the screen size, which stops you from having any viewable space with the UI included, which defeats the whole "game" thing...
So... it would seem that my efforts to make android games are pretty much useless, since I can't monetize the apps with ads,... and since the android market requires people to jump through flaming hoops to pay for apps, and they really don't like doing it, there's like... no way to make money at it.
Unless you're rich enough to hire people to do weird ways around the problem. Or are skilled enough to do it yourself.
I am neither.
So I feel like an utter failure. Like all my time was worthless, pointless, and whatever else.
...Right now, my life feels like a gaping black hole. I'm in a pretty dark place.
...Hopefully I'll feel better soon.
Seriously, try it.
For dinner tonight, I made this jalopy rice thing. And... it was awesome. So, just for my sake, and maybe the sake of anyone who likes good, simple food, here ya go:
2 tablespoon oil (vegetable, canola, whatever)
3 tablespoon water
1 handful of Tyson Grilled and Ready fully season beef strips
1 package Uncle Ben's Santa Fe Ready Whole Grain Medley
half a (15oz) can of black beans, drained (about 7-8 oz)
1: Toss beef strips, water, and oil into skillet, and cover until heated. while doing that,
2: Make the rice in the microwave, how it says.
3: When beef is thawed and heated, cut it into bits with whatever implement you're using.
4: Toss in the black beans, warm them up for a minute or so.
5: Take the rice out of the microwave and toss it in the skillet.
6: Stir it up, let the liquid reduce (if there is any). Eat. Enjoy.
Seriously, the Uncle Ben's Whole Grain Santa Fe stuff is friggin awesome. Both flavor and texture. The whole thing ends up costing like... $4.00 for the whole skillet, which is two meals if you don't binge. BAM! LUNCH AND DINNER!!
First Off, What the Hell?
Okay, so...
To fight all the spam that's been hitting the site over the last god-knows-how-long, I turned off the ability to comment for the vast majority of the internet. Nobody can register for the site, no more anonymous commenting, etc etc.
So I log in today and... there's spam in the queue again.
Which... bugs the hell out of me.
How? I have a fair idea... probably something along the lines of somebody else hosted with the same place I am infected my site with their shit again. (It happens like... two or three times a year.)
But alas! There's no new file, no modifications, no nothin... So... what, its running on their site and just casually infecting me? Can I do nothing to fight the deluge of crap?
Well, actually, there is. Get rid of wordpress. ugh.
I think I missed something there…
Okay... so there's this JC Penney commercial wandering about the webs... and people have called it sexist. Okay, fine.
"ZOMG!! It relies on horrible sterotypes!! It's SEXIST OMG!!!"
Yeah, I can sorta see where you're coming from. It portrays men as not really giving a damn about anything but boobies and butts... But even so it is a kinda-
What do you mean, it's sexist towards women?
...
From there, I just wandered around the net a bit, and most of the articles about it were level headed and downcrying the OneMillionMoms response, but there were still a good portion who also claimed the sexist slant, either siding with OneMillionMoms, or disagreeing with their response yet agreeing with their conclusion. Few were seeing it as using negative stereotypes about men. But, even amongst those few, the general response was "It's only insulting to men, and sexist to women."
So... Uh... I think I missed something here. Maybe the definition of sexist has changed so it can only be applied to things that are insulting to women? Even when... the women part of it doesn't have anything to do with implications or what have you? Just so long as it offends women, its sexist?
See, if there was a label on it that was like "ALL WOMEN CARE ABOUT IT GETTING IN AND OUT OF POOLS WHILE WEARING RED BIKINIS, BECAUSE WOMEN ARE SHALLOW"... See, then I could understand the argument of sexism. But when its playing a clip, from a movie,... not so much. It doesn't make any statements about women. It just shows a girl getting getting out of a pool. And then assumes that a man will be beside himself going "OMG BOOBIES!!"
So... its objectifying a woman? Okay... maybe...? But... that argument is... kinda vague. If she got out of the pool, turned the camera and said "You want this? Shop at JC Penney" then okay, I can agree. But... as it is... if that is objectifying women... then sunscreen commercials are objectifying women, too. ...And beer commercials... And summer vacation commercials, airline commercials, and anything else with attractive women in bikinis... so... what then? No bikinis... But technically, any commercial that uses a woman as an avatar for female consumers is also objectifying women. And from there...
Well,... eventually it all leads to hyper intelligent chimpanzees ruling the world.
So... what? Women aren't allowed to get out of pools? Or is it a video of a woman getting out a pool shouldn't be used in a commercial? Or is it that because the commercial was promoted to men it isn't allowed to show women? Or is it just that OneMillionMoms has a bug up its ass and is pandering to ridiculous things just to keep their name in the news?
Sure, a lot of advertising does objectify women. And some of that is really, really bad, offensive stuff. But when you blur the lines between what actually is objectification, and what's just tasteless... then you end up undermining the the significance of objectification, and turn it into just another mildly annoying condition of commercialism.
--------------- OTHER NEWS ----------------
Uh... I'm building a framework for my first game? Yay? Still haven't figured out what I'll do for Audio yet, though.
Arrrr.
As usual, I just can't leave this place well enough alone. Changed the theme again. Just got bored with the last one. Dunno if the comic viewer will still work.
Also, took out the forums. Yay or nay... I dunno. Either way, spam botting was getting horrible, so I figured I should finally do something about it.
Right, so, Android... right. Uh... Yeah.
The last few months have been rather annoying on that front. My phone, a Motorola Cliq Titanium, had gotten possessed by The Devil. And by that, I mean that it had suddenly decided it was going to start freaking the hell out and randomly activate touches all over the screen.
It made testing programs a pain in the ass.
It also made dialing the phone, answering the phone, and everything else a pain as well.
So, I've mostly just been doing the whole "Game Design ...in theory" thing. I've been working on getting game frameworks and stuff laid out
...in theory.
So yeah... nothing is actually done.
But, I just got a new phone a week ago or so. This time, it's a spiffy new LG G2x. Yay. So, I'm rocking Android... 2.3.3 (God, I can't believe I had to just look that up) instead of the Cliq's asinine 1.5 BS.
Although, while trying to exorcise The Devil from the Cliq, I did kinda install 2.1 as one of my last ditch efforts.
So the Cliq has 2.1 now. ...Still possessed, but hey, it looks better while its flipping shit, at least.
Yahoo! Answers is useless.
And it's being a bitch.
Something had been on my mind lately, for no real reason, and I finally decided to post a question about it on Yahoo! Answers, just in the whole maybe-somebody-will-answer-this-at-some-point sort of way. This was the question:
In AndroidOS, why is R.string.id singular, while strings.xml is plural?
This has just been bugging me lately: In Android development, you use resource IDs to grab resources (such as a String). Most of the time, the format makes sense: To grab a resource (say, thisimage.jpg) from the "drawable" directory, you use "R.drawable.thisimage". But in the case of Strings, the ID is more like R.string.hellostring, while the file for it is strings.xml.
Is there something going on behind the scenes where it ignores the 's' on the end of the files name? Or is it that the file name is irrelevant, it just comes down to what is declared as a String in the xml? Could I rename strings.xml to purplecowsfromvenus.xml and still have it work?
Okay, fine, but when I submitted it, Yahoo tells me my question has been deleted because it violated the community guidelines. Maybe the question was too well written?
Running Blind
Oh God, what have I stumbled into?
Alright, so, I started with Java. I ended up vaguely, mildly skilled with it, but Java was always intended as being a stepping stone to something else... So once I got confident with Java, I started poking around looking for the next stone up, and the options were Server-side skills, Desktop Applications, or Mobile App Dev.
Server-side looked like it needed a lot more time until it became profitable. So... Bleh. Still, it would be useful for the site... buuuttt... I needed money ASAP, so that option went into long term storage.
Desktop Applications, though, looked like it might have some payoff, so... Cool. I started down that one for a bit, but uh... the problem with it is that most of the references/answers/solutions/whatever were all written several years ago, and to get through to the current stuff, you have to really dig, you know? So it got pretty frustrating pretty fast. No worries though. But then, I start looking around for jobs in Java... and... well, honestly, it's a shitstorm. Pretty much all of the jobs for Java development have absolutely dick-all to do with Java. Instead, it's like, they're looking for a webdesigner to do their website, but since the last guy who applied had this "javascript" thing (whatever that is) on his resume... well, let's look for a javascript person... and the site that we're advertising on has a job title that says "Java Developer" and that's like... really close to this javascript thing... they must be the same thing!!
You get the idea.
Okay so, Mobile App Development!
Yay! Let's see, how can I use my newly acquired Java skills in the mobile enviro- *Reads Internet Articles* Oh! Hey! ANDROID!! Android uses Java! Sweet!! Let's go do that!!
And then there was bunnies and rainbows and bubbles and unicorns.
...Oh wait, no there wasn't. Because Android doesn't actually use Java.
F You, Internet. F. You.
See, Android uses the Java syntax and structure... but that's about it. So, switching from Java to Android isn't like going from San Francisco to New York, where there's just a few new things to pick up, but it's still the same language.
No, it's more like making the move from San Francisco to Barcelona. It's like... the only similarities here in language are that they still use nouns and verbs.
Okay, that's a little extreme. To put it another way, Android is still using the same structure and everything, but since the underlying methods and objects are different, it's like having to learn that this thing, this hotdog that you've known all your life as a hotdog is now to be known as a CylindricalMeatProduct. And while it has all the same behaviors as a hotdog, they're all named differently.
Way to make me feel like an idiot, Google.
For anyone who has worked with android:
Quick! How do I put text on a button?!? (The Android way, not the Java way)
Exactly.
On top of that though, Android has got a little storm on the horizon, particularly with App development progressively becoming more and more complicated as more handsets hit the market. I'll probably end up writing more about that later though.
Honestly though, it's starting to seem like getting into Android dev was a waste of time.
Comic Related News
So, there's been virtually nothing about the comic lately. Reason for that is: I still don't really have a way of drawing the comic. I was planning on just trudging through the piss-poor slowness of the laptop to get the rest of Issue 4 done, then tossing it up here, but the Fates have conspired against me.
I am however working on a java comicy viewer for the site, with some chat stuff. No guarantees, but so far it's looking kinda cool. If I can manage to get it up, there should be some happiness around here for once.
No ETA for the comic, or the new comic viewer, though. The comic stuff has to be packed around the stuff that has a slightly better payoff. Yeah, I know, it sucks.
Saturday Slumpy
Bah.
Has anyone noticed that on the VEVO version of Eminem's Beautiful, the lyric captions censor the word "shoes"? No? ...Didn't think so. It was rather specific wasn't it? Oh well.
Media 180
Just something off the top of my head:
I follow about 10 different news agencies... some local, some global, but mostly national. And, I just noticed something. It may be that I'm missing something, but it seems like there was a lot of new about politics, and about Americans were unhappy with the government, and how fucked up everything is, and bitch, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan, etc, etc, etc. And this has been going on for the last two or three years... So much so that I don't really remember when all the ridiculous amounts of political coverage started (hazarding a guess, I'd say the last year of Bush).
And I'm unhappy, damnit!
Oh, but there's always been a ton of political coverage, etc, etc.
But I mean... not as much as the last couple years... where it was like 2/3 headlines was: politicians does this or that, or political scandal, or so-and-so is a damned dirty liar, or Americans unhappy with government, or whatever.
And none of it was so much news as just like... the written equivalent of screaming at the top of your lungs.
And then, the last couple of weeks... suddenly...
nothing.
It's like a void.
Now, the only news about politics you hear about is a few mentions about foreign politics in the middle east, and republicans suddenly talking about how they support obama and "it's not their place to tell americans what to think" even though that's exactly what they've been doing for the last 10 months. But even then, it's still scant.
This smells kinda fishy. Kinda like there a group of people who were pushing to get certain things turned into news... like they were focusing on a small percentage of people, documenting their opinions and experiences, and then presenting it as the viewpoint and position of the majority.
Like... this group of people was trying to get something changed... perhaps get themselves in power... and then, they reached their goal... so now they don't have to spend the resources telling us the world is going to end.
...And of course I'm talking about the republican party. Duh. (I'm neither republican nor democrat by the way. I'm a Meat Popsicle.)
Unfortunately... there's a few problems with this: First off, they spent so much time whipping people into an unhappy fury that they've accidentally created a few segments of the population which are inevitably going to cause a backlash against politicians in general. No, I'm not talking about the Tea Party, because the Tea Party was just an objective oriented shard of the republican party, from everything I've investigated about it. I'm talking rather about the offshoots from the Tea Party. The Tea Party people who didn't fit into the Tea Party, or got kicked out of the Tea Party.
Second, unless they're planning on spending resources to convince people that things are better under them, people will eventually realize that nothing has really changed... And then next election cycle, their converts will flop back to democrats.
Blah blah blah. I forgot what I was talking about. Anyways, the talk of the Tea Party made me start humming a song... so... Music Video time!
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