I wrote my first webpage during the reign of Windows 98, back when the time period and my own inexperience made such a sin excusable. Sure, Front Page would generate a bunch of surplus HTML (newer, hipper tools such as GWT do the same thing) and junk that didn't work on all browsers, but in retrospect it wasn't that bad and the ability to instantly see what the page would look like as I wrote it imbued a level of creativity in my first site which all later iterations have lacked.

One feature I really missed as time went on was being able to quickly preview different fonts to find the one that fit. “Google Font Previewer for Chrome” is a plugin for the Chrome web browser that brings back this ability; it allows you to quickly preview how certain fonts would look on a web page so you can find one you like. It also provides CSS snippets so you can copy and paste the result into your own stylesheet.

This tool is so nice its making me reevaluate every font I've been using on this website. I'd say something like “I don't know how I ever got by without it!” but one look at this page would reveal that for the lie it is since I clearly didn't get by without it. With this tool however there is now hope.

Download the plugin here.

I got this game in seventh grade and quickly beat it. I love it, but found like most JRPGs it was impossible for me to replay since I hate grinding.

A few years ago I moved to a large apartment that had two walk in closets (about four by four feet). The one downstairs was surplus, so I came up with the idea of hooking an outlet into the lightbulb on top, buying a bean bag chair along with a small table on which to put my ancient 20" TV and SNES and turning it into a classic game room. I'm not sure what gave me the inclination (maybe the hype for Mother 3, which had already been out in Japan for a few years) but somehow I started playing Earthbound one day and found myself completely enthralled by it.

I had recreated the perfect environment for replaying SNES games, but the tiny covey seemed made for Earthbound in particular. I remarked to a friend that the graphics honestly looked really nice an old TV, and he responded to me the way I might respond to someone claiming vinyl sounded better. I get that, I really do, but so much of the SNES's appeal just gets lost when you look at the images digitally, with their unnatural rectangular pixels squished into squares.

The best part though was the sound. I piped the SNES into two old computer speakers which for an SNES is impressive. The music in Earthbound is maybe its best feature, which makes sense when you find out the authors sampled and highjacked sources from everywhere - the game is the medium's best case for relaxed copyright restrictions.

As a kid I hated having to level up. I waited forever to buy items and always seemed to have inventory problems. I noticed as an adult these problems were gone- I discovered it was easier to get XP from chasing down fleeing enemies and instantly winning battles than I remembered, and the “for sale” sign (one of the most brilliant features in any RPG ever made) alleviated most inventory problems (maybe as an adult I just found it easier to let go of stuff).

With the incredible amount of attention Earthbound still gets I can see how a lot of people could be turned off to it by now. Honestly I had begun to think it was overrated myself, but after replaying it I honestly appreciate it more now than I did as a kid. Its hard to really articulate what the appeal is, except that Earthbound has a definite sense of place, like its a real world you're inhabiting. Videogames are naturally violent, since there has to be something to fight, and RPGs with their roaming monsters are no exception. However Earthbound still manages to exude warmth, like the Andy Griffith show. Most characters you meet are rooting for you, and even when characters are portrayed as weak, stupid or wicked the game still has empathy for them.

Unfortunately the primary feature of Earthbound which overshadows everything else to people who haven't played today it is how unavailable it is. I'm afraid this, combined with the unrelenting praise of its acolytes, may make the game seem phony and overrated. As someone who vehemently hates piracy, I think this is a game that should be pirated recklessly. Nintendo has pretty much closed the door on ever releasing it in the US again thanks to various infringement issues, so its hard to think who it would harm (there is an argument that by stealing a game you'd be less inclined to pay for a modern RPG, but I'm not sure I've played an RPG in the past ten years that's been worth the hours of my life I put into it, so maybe that's for the best). I also suggest playing it someplace cozy and quite, though if you can't spring for your own game room and real hardware at least use an emulator with a good full-screen NTSC filter and appropriate volume.

Check this out: Winston's Numbers.

Anyone who doesn't get the joke is no longer officially a Chicken Ranger. p_p

Well looks like the new implementation of Border Town, written using the cool Play! framework, just isn't cutting it.

Its sad because I really enjoyed experimenting with the Play! framework and the code that I've written so far in Scala is like a dream. I worked for nearly two years on a professional web site which used the JVM and came to really appreciate the technologies and was looking forward to utilizing that experience with my personal site.

Ultimately, however, I don't have the time or the computer to treat BT like its a professional job. I'm currently using a laptop that was white-hot in 2005; these days its fast enough for anything I do, except for Scala. This project made me realize that Scala is just too slow. I love it to death, I really do, but when you switch Play! (a Java framework whose claim to fame is the quick turn-around time) from Java to Scala page refreshes go from taking a second or two to in some cases half a minute and more if the JVM crashes due to lack of memory. I started the new version of Border Town in a Vagrant backed VM and had a good time hooking all the disparate components together with Bash scripts, but when I integrated Play! I had to start developing it on my host machine instead and only use the VM for infrequent tests. Even then, refreshing a page using Play! with Scala on my host machine with 2GB of RAM took longer than simple Java files hooked directly into Tomcat in my VM.

Its sad because Play! with Scala is otherwise so frickin' cool. The template language is based on Scala which means you get 100% type-safety in your views, which is amazing. Plus Scala is just a beautiful language which I've never had a chance to really dive into, and I was hopeful Border Town would present such an opportunity.

In the end though the overhead of setting all the garbage up to play with the site meant I never touched it. Silly errors that were one-line fixes got noticed, and then put off for several weeks as maintenance required a free morning during the weekend where I could turn on the Border Town VM, then turn on Play! on my host, and then remember how it all worked. Play! also used its own version of everything including its build system (i.e. no Maven or Ant) which was another layer to remember, and then when I went to deploy it on Tomcat I often found it broke due to typical Java issues such as a Jar getting included twice. If this had been my job or even something I worked on as often as I could in my free time I think I could've figured it all out and the time spent would've justified the productivity gains, but since that isn't the case eventually I just came to dread messing with the thing.

I'm not 100% sure what I'll do for the next version. PHP of course will have to be there. I hate PHP and never have “learned” it the idomatic, right way (assuming such a thing exists) but I'll be damned if the apps written for it like PhpBB and Wordpress aren't impressive. I'll start simple and see where I can go from there.