News You Can Bruise for 2001 March 17

Bah! I have Lock and DoorLock<-Lock classes in Degeneracy, but I get warnings about Lock not being used when I instantiate only DoorLock objects. Fortunately a non-DoorLock lock is in the cards for as soon as I get DoorLock to work.

You can tell I'm running out of things to do to a game when I start implementing the locks on doors as separate objects. I'm only doing this because Mike saw fit to try "put key in lock" instead of the standard "lock door" and I pledged that I would, within reason, make every command typed by a beta tester do the Right Thing.

3.01 cheers for Kris, who, after many travails, has landed a CAD programming job at Dassault, the French CAD company with the bizarre website. "I don't think I could have imagined a better job," says he.

Oops, it was my fault. DoorLock wasn't actually extending Lock.

I have been officially sidetracked. I'm working on a new Web toy which will go into /features. Hopefully it will only take a few hours.

It's ready, but I need a graphic for it. I'm waiting on Mike.

Mike isn't around, so I went ahead and did a clumsy graphic of my own. Hopefully I can get him to do a better one later. Anyway, here's the new toy: The McSweenifier! It formats any piece of text in the distinctive style of the noted journal of puffery and parody, McSweeney's.

The original reason I did the McSweenifier was that I was trying to properly format this fake McSweeney's story, and I realized that it would be more rewarding to write a program to do the formatting than to mess with it myself. And here we are.