Ellipsis Man…

Surprisingly underrepresented on the Internet. There’s this epic conflict, but not much else.

So here’s my contribution, a logo and an enigmatic warning…

Ellipsis Man is...

(Speaking of “…”, if you haven’t seen Dot Dot Dot yet…it’s pretty funny. Nothing to do with me or Ellipsis Man, though: it’s just one of those Internet-eating-its-own-tail things. I only mention it because lately I’m reminded of it whenever I think about ellipses for any reason. I suppose I’ll get over that someday….)

See, back in 1987, Apple made this weird little video, a sort of Concept Car for their vision of computing.

Knowledge Navigator wasn’t a product. It wasn’t an ad. Most people outside Apple probably never heard of it at the time.

(Personally, I heard about it through geek channels, and saw it in a science museum a few years later.)

But it’s obviously been lurking close behind Apple’s overall vision for decades. Look at this ad they just released, for Siri on iPhone.

Welcome to the future, Apple style. It’s right on schedule.

The toy store in my neighborhood, S.W. Randall Toys & Gifts, runs an annual LEGO contest. This year, my diorama, Diamond in the Rough, won third prize in the Adult category.

The first and second place winners were models of beloved local landmarks. I’ll keep that in mind for next year!

(I’m not complaining: there’s nothing wrong with playing to your audience’s interests, and they were good models, too.)

My scene was inspired by these pictures of giant crystals. (Not diamond, alas.)

I had so much fun writing Ka for the JayIsGames Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7 that when the CGDC#8 was announced, I decided to enter something again.

This time I wanted to try writing a Flash “escape” style adventure game. I had really enjoyed Mateusz Skutnik’s Submachine Zero. I wanted to make something like that.

Once the competition opened for voting, I found that my homage to an old archaeology-themed Submachine game was competing against…a new archaeology-themed Submachine game!

Submachine: 32 Chambers is a lot of fun, and handily dominated the competition. That’s okay, I hadn’t really expected my first Flash adventure game – written in about three weeks – to win.

In fact, it was an unexpected pleasure to have the privilege of losing to Mateusz Skutnik’s latest offering.

For one thing, I’d written The Sand Boxes because I wanted more games “like that” to exist. This way I got to play one I hadn’t written, too! (Did I mention his is great?) And since the winner had taken the same basic approach to game genre and the competition’s theme that I had, I felt like I was on the right track.

And of course, reaction to my game was generally positive. People played it and had fun, which is the real point.

The Sand Boxes was fun to create. It has some unique puzzles, and I think the photo-collage scenery turned out great.

You can play it for free right now.

The main URL is unchanged: blog.dan-efran.com

Links to old posts will have changed a bit. (There were only a dozen old posts anyway, so I think this won’t be too inconvenient.)

Have you noticed this one?

1. “please, sir, I want some more” About 67,700 results found by a Google search for the quoted phrase
2. “thank you, sir, may I have another” About 90,400 results
3. “please, sir, may I have another” About 160,000 results

Note that there are more hits for the third phrase than for the other two combined.

The first phrase is a quote from Oliver Twist. The second is a quote from Animal House.

The third phrase – the most popular – seems to be somewhere in between: a misquote of both?

Perhaps the mind recognizes the kinship between the two quotes and instinctively merges them. (I just did it myself, which is what prompted me to look up these (rudimentary) statistics.) Perhaps these two classic works about persevering underdogs now have equal weight in our literary heritage?

Please hop on over there and play it. Play the other entries too: I’m sure they’re just as cool as mine.