Web Comics

Above, a strip from Married to the Sea.

Web Comics. Bite sized entertainment. Sometimes witty, occasionally insightful, always ridiculous. Need there more be said?

Favorites:

Wondermark
Married to the Sea
XKCD
MS Paint Adventures

and the daddy of all, Ryan North's magnum opus:

Dinosaur Comics

(if you Google his name and stalk him via image search you come across ROFLCon, best Con evar)

Mini game demo with jQuery and HTML(5)

I was inspired by Dextrose's Aves engine and a Google Tech Talk by Paul Bakaus to play around with HTML5/javascript to build a little game. Paul is spot on when he says the technology is ready for it, and because HTML was built to be visual and javascript is event oriented, the wedding of the two is surprisingly efficient for game creation.

Here's a little mini-game I whipped up over the course of a few hours.

To play, click the board to move your defender. Stop the 'invader' balls from reaching the yellow ball (the mothership) by running into them. Reload the page to play again.

http://www.clumsyfingers.net/projects/game/tableit/index2.php

This will not work on non-HTML5 capable browsers. You will need the latest Firefox, Safari or Chrome. As of this writing IE does not support HTML5.

I'm hoping to take this idea further and possibly build a light-weight engine around it (using my limited game programming knowledge from college). It doesn't work well on the iPhone 3G (which the game board was sized for), so optimization and usability are still significant (and interesting) challenges to deal with in making js/html5/css a viable option for multi-platform development.

jQuick Note

$('#idofdiv').function();

is the same as

var obj = document.getElementById('idofdiv');
$(obj).function();