Winter 2012 Season

Scott Hardie | December 7, 2011
The new season is barely underway and I'm already having fun this season. I was tempted to display a little South-Park-style face for each player next to their name, but my time is very short at the moment. Now if I can just look at that page without getting Les Claypool's theme music stuck in my head.

Scott Hardie | December 8, 2011
The 1000 Club has a new member. Mike, congrats on the milestone!

Chris Lemler | December 8, 2011
Congrats Mike!!!!!!! Great accomplishment

Steve West | December 8, 2011
Wow! We're up to 10. Congrats.

Scott Hardie | January 9, 2012
Halfway through the season, eight players are tied for the lead. This is good; the finish will be well-contested. I look forward to seeing who can hang on to a perfect score for the remaining five weeks.

Scott Hardie | January 18, 2012
Originally, I had grander plans for our two-week comic book theme. Inspired by the fun that I had reskinning the page for Goo Noir last fall, my plan for "Mighty Heroes!" and "Disposable Villains!" was to skin the page to look like a comic book. This might have worked if I had stuck to fonts and colors like I did last fall, but somehow I got it into my head that the goos should fit together like panels on a comic book page, and the clues should be in word balloons coming from their mouths, and other stuff that's WAY too complicated to program for something that will only be played for two weeks. I spent about eight hours this past weekend working on the comic book theme, only to abandon it on Sunday night for being impossible to finish on time; it would have taken another eight hours before my complete plan for the page would have been realized. In web programming as in fixing dinner, I sometimes put much more on my plate than I can finish. (To be clear, I expected 4-6 hours when I started; I never would have knowingly committed 16 hours to this.)

Anyway, you can see how it wound up if you'd like. I wish that I had just gone with it like this; other than needing a thick black line around each goo, it doesn't look terrible this way. Oh well; lesson learned. If I ever attempt one of these page reskins again (and I do have another idea for one), I will create it in the code before putting that theme on the schedule and committing to it.

Chris Lemler | January 19, 2012
I took a look at it Scott and it looked really good...Nice Job

Scott Hardie | February 23, 2012
The page with all of the tournament goos is getting slower and slower, which is not just annoying: It could now influence the outcome of this tournament since players are landing guesses within seconds of one another, as players with faster connections have a real edge. To speed it up, I've removed last week's goos. I'll do the same again next week, probably Monday night after that day's guessing is complete. My thanks to the player who suggested this.

Samir Mehta | February 23, 2012
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | February 24, 2012
Thanks very much! I was only worried about the nuisance factor; credit for thinking of its impact on the game goes to the player who brought it up to me. We've talked in the past about how varying Internet connection times might influence the game, but I didn't really worry about it back when guesses tended to be minutes apart. This season's tournament is a different matter.

I might program it next season so that each tournament goo can be on a page by itself. But seeing as I don't have any staff large or small, I may have to scale back that idea. :-)

Steve Dunn | February 24, 2012
I like long load times because they protect my 9s record.

Scott Hardie | February 27, 2012
Next season: Zombies will rise.