It was my birthday yesterday, and like many birthday boys these days I received copious amounts of birthday wishes via my facebook wall. Now, most of us would admit that facebook has revolutionized the way we connect to and keep in touch with our friends. To be honest with you though, I was surprised at the number of random people from my past who took the time to comment on my wall. Of course I know that they logged in and facebook said “Hey it’s Mark’s birthday”, but they still took the three seconds to acknowledge that they saw said advertisement.
Like the sick bastard I am, my thoughts wandered and I found myself wondering if any of these people had an automated program that posted on the walls of daily birthday celebrants (I can’t accept that all of these people might actually give a shit about my day…haha).
Anyways, my conclusion was that it would be awesome if someone wrote a simple facebook app that would automatically post a message of your choice onto any of you friends walls on their respective birthdays. This way you could fool all of your important friends into thinking that you aren’t a selfish and incompetent fool.
Of course the core functionality of this application would be a simple programming task. However, more complicated versions could contain personalized messages for different groups of friends, and other various settings. Also, it would be nice to provide people with a meta-language that helped personalize messages. For example…
“Hey <user-firstName>, Happy Birthday\n\n
<if(today.isShortlyBeforeChristmas() AND user.group()==groups.HomeTown) then insert\”Will you be home for the holidays this year\”"
Haha…of course, you better verify your programming skills, or you might be sending your friends from China some very cryptic birthday messages. Either way though, I think that this would be a great way to avoid a daily and painful facebook process, while still including the necessary personal touch.
I propose a new version of the Turing Test, if you can write your automatic facebook birthday messages without anyone noticing that you aren’t actually doing shit, then you’ve created an intelligent machine…you monster!
New Super Mario Bros. Wii – 4 Things More People Should Be Talking About
Get Pumped!
When I found out that Nintendo was planning on releasing a new Super Mario Brothers for the Wii, I was pretty ecstatic. Nintendo has done a great job with the previous New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, and Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii is the 3rd best game of all time according to the review aggregator Gamerankings.com, so it was assumed that this game would be fantastic as well. News slowly leaked out about how great this game was, and a huge surprise was the fact that it would be the first Mario title to allow true simultaneous multiplayer. In fact, it seems that all news pertaining to the game has been examining this new facet of the game. However, I think that there are four other things that people should be talking about with less than two weeks remaining until the game’s release.
The Return of the Koopalings
Many of us who grew up playing Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World, not to mention the awesome cartoon shows based on the games, remember the Koopalings as Bowser’s mysterious, apparently motherless, children. Those of you who don’t, should probably watch this informational video:
That’s right, they’ve got badass magic wands and airships. What more could you ask for?? For some reason, these fantastic characters were replaced in later Mario games by this pathetic excuse of a creature:
Oh cool, a bib.
Sweet, just what I’ve always wanted to do, fight a baby. Bowser Jr. is probably the most pathetic excuse for a villain I’ve ever seen. Luckily for us, Nintendo is bringing back the Koopalings in all of their newly 3D glory:
So much cooler
I’m a little too excited about this, and even though they’re sharing the stage with Bowser Jr, I’m quite confident that fighting them will be just as satisfying as it was back in 1993.
The Penguin Suit
I don’t really understand why, but nerds love penguins. A solid percent of the shirts of shirt.woot.com are penguin related (see here here and here) and the mascot of the Linux kernel is Tux. Why wouldn’t we be excited for Mario being able to turn into a penguin?? This seems long overdue. Not to mention, Mario hasn’t had a good underwater travel suit since the frog suit of Super Mario 3. I’m excited to slide around and destroy a few goombas (and Luigi if he gets in my way).
The Difficulty is Through the Roof
According to several sources, Nintendo is taking the kid’s gloves off this time around – sort of anyways.
I've been training for this for 20 years now.
Apparently Nintendo has decided to reward hardcore gamers who have stuck by their system. The New Super Mario Bros. Wii is apparently, by far, the most difficult game in the series to date. After complaints about the simplicity of previous Mario games, this comes as welcome news, and it also alleviates concerns about the game’s “Super Guide” feature where the player lets the game’s A.I. finish a level for them if they’ve failed repeatedly. This opens the door for all kinds of good natured ribbing at your friends who have to use this feature to finish the game. Considering many of us have probably played previous Mario games so many times that we have to find ways to challenge ourselves, all this talk of teeth grinding difficulty gets me all riled up. Nintendo’s “Super Guide” feature allows hardcore gamers to sink their teeth into a difficult game without alienating any eight year olds or moms.
The Music
It’s certainly premature to cast definitive votes about the music and sound effects in the game, but from the videos thus far, it sounds great. Give it a listen yourself, and start counting down the days to the release: