I’m the one with the yellow pants.

Why, if such a remarkable thing were to exist, I could send Aunt Agnes a telegram from anywhere in the world simply by retrieving the machine from my jacket, keying in the message, and sending it on its way via radio broadcast. Perhaps she might even carry a similar machine of her own with which to receive my telegrams wherever she might be, whether seated in her parlor, or out in the country on a velocipede.

In fact, while we’re imagining such splendid ideas, perhaps this telegraph machine could be constructed in the shape of miniature typewriter, which I could operate with my thumbs. After all, this Morse code business is frightfully difficult to familiarize oneself with, and is furthermore rather slow, even once one has mastered it. I’m quite sure many gentlemen have already mused about composing and subsequently transmitting a telegram using a typewriter, so, Wilfred, just imagine, if you will, combining such a fantasy with mine of a miniature, pocket-sized telegraph.

Now that I’m considering it, the aforementioned difficulty with Morse code certainly extends to the interpretation of it. Those tones of varying length are endearingly droll, but they’re quite an ordeal to properly understand. Perhaps this miniature telegraph machine could interpret the Morse code all by itself, and write out the letters for me to read. Oh, but that might use an exorbitant amount of stationery over time. Hmm…eureka, Wilfred, I’ve got it! Perhaps a system could be devised to produce the letters with light, much in the same way those Lumière fellows from France display moving pictures of trains! I say, if such a machine could project letters onto a small portion of itself, the Morse code problem would be solved entirely!

Why, Wilfred, I reckon that before the passing of a century, some extraordinarily clever gentleman shall create such a machine! Of course, I’d surmise he might attempt to construct a radio-broadcasting telephone first; admittedly, the transmission of voice is quite a bit more impressive than doing the same with writing. By Jove, I do hope that he’d apply the resulting knowledge to building a mobile telegraph as well! There are several situations in which I would imagine the instant transmission of a short telegram to another person would be far more convenient than striking up a vocal conversation. But I do suppose that the capacity to either send a telegram or converse on the telephone from one single machine no larger than a pocketwatch would be a magnificent thing indeed. Perhaps it could even have a pocketwatch built into it, thus eliminating the need for one to carry multiple pieces of machinery to perform different tasks.

I say, Wilfred, such a machine would be rather sensational. Alas, it remains but a fanciful notion. Oh, good heavens; I’ve dropped my monocle in my tea.

Due to some technical limitations, such as the fact that one pixel is really hard to see, I magnified it by 600 times. With these extra 599 pixels of space, I decided to cheat and add some intro text, but all of the actual gameplay could theoretically be scaled down to a single pixel if you traded the mouse-based control for an analog stick.

I hope the game is relatively easy to figure out despite the limitations of the resolution. And because that was my goal, I’m not going to say anything else about it.

Hit the jump to play it, and to download the X11 Licensed source code:

Source

WARNING: This code is really ugly. Please don’t lecture me about how sloppy I am at programming. I already know.

• Flash CS4 source (might work in CS3): 27 MB .fla
• Actionscript 3 file (From Scene 2, Frame 1 of the FLA. Will not compile on its own): 22 KB .as

This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:

I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.

Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.

See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.

I’ve received some skepticism, sometimes based on first-hand accounts, about my theory that pirates will donate to support you if you just ask and make it easy for them. It’s based on the idea that no, they actually won’t.

This strikes me as unlikely. No pirate, hell, no person has ever publicly stated that they don’t believe people who work so hard to entertain us should receive no money in return, and that they’d certainly give money to an artist they support. I don’t think this isn’t happening because all of those people are lying. I think it’s happening because of a lack of education.

The phenomenon of indie artists putting a big “donate” button on their site is a relatively new one. It’s a reflex for many people to buy a movie from Amazon or buy a game from Steam. Donation is a bit more disjointed and confusing, and not everyone knows where to go. If it was downloaded from The Pirate Bay, there’s even more disconnect from the creator’s website. That’s what my new For a Living project is looking to remedy.

Go to the project’s page to download a graphic that you can place in your movie, game, or other form of visual media. It’s like an FBI Warning, except not about how stuff is illegal and instead about how food costs money.

I’m not sure how the same could be applied to music. Podcasts have audible credits and copyright information, so it’s an easy translation. For a music album, doing this on every song would get annoying. Fortunately, a lot of other factors are making it much easier for indie musicians to benefit from file-sharing, so there’s not a lot to worry about.