warning:  The following contains many spoilers about Braid.  I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time.  You have been warned!

I finished Braid last night.  I did cheat a little.  Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them.  Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved.  For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me.  Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out.  And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.

That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon.  To make a parallel in the paint world:  without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting.  In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience.  In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us.  Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1.  Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show.  The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there.  One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs.  “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.”  I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already.  It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lookin’ for the Pot ‘o Gold in Mehoopany, PA”] [/caption]

When I read this article in Digital Photography School, I posted the rainbow photo shown above as an example of how much I had to learn.  Little did I know how much traffic that would generate for me.  In just one day I got 172 views after having spent the past 26 days with 0 views in that period.  It shot up from a photo somewhere in the range of 25-50 views to 213 views as I write this.

Recently this photo was published by the Associated Press and has been getting a lot of attention on the interwebs.  It shows Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, an American solder in Afghanistan, after being hit by a mortar attack and only hours before death.  A lot of the debate participants seem to feel one way or another depending on how they feel about our war.  But I think the debate deserves to be much more complicated and nuanced because there are actually a lot of issues at play here.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Fun, outdoor games requiring a minimum of only two players”] [/caption]

Danielle and I went to Rockburn Branch Park today to throw a ball around and maybe ride bike.  We ended up not riding bike because we didn’t like the trail too much and my water bottle holder came loose from my bike.  So we grabbed our gloves and brand new baseballs (we lost our previous ball in the woods behind our house) and went out to an empty baseball field.  The fact that we had a frisbee was simply due to the fact that Danielle threw it into the bag.  I certainly hadn’t intended to play frisbee.  It was so awesome to have a whole baseball field to ourselves.  It did, at the same time, feel a bit weird to have that whole field to ourselves.  It was great to just run around and throw the ball.  Eventually our catching hands got really sore from having the ball slam into it.  We tried our best to get the ball to end up in the part that didn’t contain our fingers or palms, but it wasn’t always easy.  So I looked into the bag and we eventually switch to frisbee.  It was so much fun.  We were both uncannily good.  I think it was mostly because we didn’t have the pressure of really awesome players to make fun of us when we did fling the disc in very wrong directions.  Eventually the bugs were getting to be too much and we left.  Still, yesterday’s play at the park made the weekend for me.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Jen appears from across the lake”] [/caption]

Jen was no where to be found at the wedding location because she was actually across the lake for her grand entrance.  None of the guests at the wedding knew about this so everyone was very excited.  I went on to the docks to photograph her entrance.

Just signed up for this neat flickr-related service, Photojojo’s Time Capsule.  Twice a month they send you some photos that you took a year ago.  Here are the photos from  my first email from them, it’s pretty neat.  If you want to see what it looks like in the email, go here.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I *love* this photo because it expresses in a photo a lot about being a child.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“Need me to dig a hole for you?”] [/caption]

Going over photos that were moving from one views group to another on flickr, I discovered this photo that I really love.  I love how his head is cocked, I love the idea of a bird with a built-in shovel, and I love how sharp the photo came out.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Entrance to the Wedding Location”] [/caption]

Our good friend Jennifer Bonass got married a couple weekends ago.  The wedding was out in Chestertown, Maryland - out near Ocean City.  Since there’s only one bridge to get there, we left early to make sure we’d get there on time.  We got there insanely early (1-1.5 hours early) so I decided to take some photos of the setup to pass the time.  Turned out to be a great thing I was there early because the official photographer was with Jen and they were at another location so I was the only one to get these shots.  Here are some of my favourites.

A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another.  It got tons of hits.  Then I switched my server and it all stopped working.  Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over.  Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!