Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks lyrics, chords, for you

Tonight I took it upon myself to archive some Dan Hicks lyrics and chords compiled by Steve Ramirez, which were previously available only at the Wayback Machine’s archive of his website. They were hard to find. I have uploaded a copy of Steve’s index and all of his files, in the hopes that other fans of Dan will be able to locate them and benefit from Steve’s work a little more easily.

(This is being posted on April 1st, but there’s nothing mischievous or insincere about it, I assure you.)

If you aren’t familiar with Dan Hicks, his Hot Licks, or their work, you are lucky to be suffering from one of those problems that are very easily fixed.

Clashin’ and Typin’ with Emily Short

Only recently have I gotten around to editing and uploading a few episodes of CLASH of the TYPE-INS that Jenni and I recorded with Emily Short way back in September or something. Now they are all up, though. The episode where we play Bronze was crazy good, in my opinion: Some IF design-theoretical issues got brought up and Emily expounded on them with a cogency that Jenni’s and my antics often lack. If you listen to only one episode of our dumb podcast this year, make it Episode 10.

But you should listen to all of them! Why not?

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

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I have a new game! It’s a prequel to The Statue Got Me High. My intent was to make a little sub-game that would briefly explore one of the characters from Statue, but this game is actually about 153% the size of that one.

I think you can play them in either order, but whatever or however you play, I hope you have a  good time, and if you have anything to say about them I hope you’ll let me know!

 

My Wii Fit Trainer amiibo mod

Addendum, 3 September 2015: I did this project with a Wii Fit Trainer from the first amiibo run. I am led to understand that the reprints are better-constructed, and in particular the foot and the cast are glued much more securely to the stand. People who have executed this mod with the reprints have had to “club it straight off and mighty glue it,” albeit with gorgeous results. It’s still very much possible to execute this mod with your newer WFT amiibo, but you probably won’t have as easy a time as I did.
conceptThis is what the Wii Fit Trainer amiibo was supposed to look like.

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Labyrinth Doesn’t Make Any Dang Sense

Labyrinth is a movie for girls with hardly any female characters. That’s not the part that doesn’t make any dang sense; actually, the film uses this setup fairly effectively. The part that doesn’t make sense is the central conflict: Sarah Williams endures dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to rescue her baby brother Toby, whom she hates. Exactly how much sense this doesn’t make will be made clear at great length in this essay. First, let’s examine my claim that Labyrinth is a movie for girls:

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Roman License Plates

Panchero's Again, Naturally

The Best License Plate?

The singularity of this license plate was almost lost on me. I noticed it as I was pulling out of my parking space, and I thought: “Hey, ‘Civ 104’, like the 104th entry in the Civilization series! Boy, it’ll be a long time before they get to that one. Kind of like that other hypothetical Civ game, the one they’ll call ‘Civ CIV’, because it’ll be the one where the number of the game is ‘CIV’ in Roman numerals…” Continue reading →

The Tree Shaped Like A Monster

CHAPTER ONE

Heather and Nicole were in love. They sat under the tree shaped like a monster and spoke about the things of love. They got out a knife. They tried to cut their initials into the bark of the tree, but blood came out of the wood.

CHAPTER TWO

Then in Fall when they raked up the leaves that fell off the tree they found Heather and Nancy’s skeletons under the leaves.

The End

The Dark vs. Ghost Question: A Rope of Sand

This was a post on Google+, but it ended up being so long that I’ve convinced myself it belongs here too. It is an analysis of Pokémon types.

I was wondering what the philosophical distinction between Ghost and Dark Pokémon was, and my friend Zach said that Dark is evil, while Ghosts are dead. This sounded good at first, but as we thought about it it seemed overly simplistic. For one thing, it’s not totally clear that Ghost Pokémon are straight-up dead Pokémon. Maybe the better word for Ghost Pokémon is “spooky”?

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The Ascent of the Gothic Tower!

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When Simon Carless commissioned The Ascent of the Gothic Tower for the video games-themed StoryBundle from earlier this year, we agreed the game should be released on a non-commercial basis at some future time, and further we agreed that future time should be September. Friends, it is September right now!

You can now play Gothic Tower online or download the story file to play in a different interpreter if you insist. In either case I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it!