1) I updated the website with a new look and feel for 2010, with a simpler update system for me, and a better system for permalinks. I also moved all the old pages into an archive folder, because after three years of updates and old links I figured it was about time to start fresh and clean. There are some CSS 3 additions and it looks fine and dandy on Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but I’m sure the 5% of my visitors using IE will be presented with something less than spectacular (I don’t have any Windows software, so it’s hard to say what they’re doing there anyway)

2) I uploaded Wholesale Hero build 263 to the website (available here) It is mostly working and ready for the world, but it definitely needs some beta testing, so if you would be so kind as to download it and send me feedback, I would appreciate it! I’ve played it pretty extensively during the build phase, but I’m sure there are still bugs that will pop up, so any help would be great.

3) 2009 was another busy year for Mojiferous Industries, with contest entries, contest wins (Most Creative Game and a bronze for Best Sound in uDev 2008 for Simoebic Dysentery), my first utility (FontUtensil), and what seemed like a never-ending build for Wholesale Hero. Atomic Combat and Desktop Cigarette continued to be the stars of the show, with 10s and over 100 thousand downloads respectively, and more and more people [and their bizarrely named countries] logging high scores in AC. The fact the “France” was finally knocked out of the top spot in the AC Top Ten amazed me, since I have never gotten anywhere close to the over 7000 mark that “Uri” achieved just last month. No one seemed to really care about FontUtensil, although the few people that have seen it in use or used it themselves seemed to value it, but I still have yet to get any feature requests or traceable bug reports (which means I should just call it a 1.0 release, but who has time for such things?) King Thor and I also entered Simoebic Dysentery another contest, and they have yet to contact me about my ability to post the new Simoebic build to the public, or for that matter, if they even received anything beyond my entry fee. We won’t see results from our efforts for another couple of months, but hopefully the time we squeezed in between school and work was enough to make a winning game of some sort… And then there was Wholesale Hero, which started as a lark and then became my semester project and now may finally see the light of day — I slaved unusually hard upon it, making sure everything not only looked okay but also functioned well, and I think the results have paid off. I wouldn’t hesitate to call WH the most complete game I’ve released: full working update system (thanks to Sparkle), a graphical theme I actually spent time refining and tweaking until I I was happy with it AND it looked okay, the start of a truly helpful help system, more than just basic sound (although music would be keen), a gameplay concept initially stolen from Motor Pants but refined and expanded to a point where my simple matching game is much more enjoyable (and with another game type added on), and a full-featured online scoring system that is much more robust and interesting than the simple one I developed for Atomic Combat. I have high hopes for Wholesale Hero in the coming year, and you’ll have to tell me what you think!
And so 2010 is shaping up to be another banner year here at Mojiferous Industries: still no money coming in, yet more strange games (KT and I are currently working on something that could be pretty interesting) and maybe some swashbuckling adventure!

Or maybe no swashbuckling, I am getting a little too old to be running around with a sword stabbing pirates.

—Mojiferous

Atomic Combat:
Is definitely just a game. I may have toiled over the artwork for many days and may have poured my all into the damn thing, but my goal was to make something playable (which is open to debate). There is an overwhelming pacifist statement in the game, since there is no technical way that you can ever truly win (you can survive and not be a loser, but forcing the surrender of your enemies without a single death is nigh impossible). Would I call it art? Hell no, but it is one of my best-realized games.

Desktop Cigarette:
I guess you could claim that Desktop Cigarette is some kind of a meditation on health and fitness, but the truth is that I am a smoker, I enjoy smoking, and although I would like to quit, it has not happened yet… No, instead Desktop Cigarette is a study in absurdity, a gadget with no function, a digital representation of a physical item that has no business being digitized. It was made as an aesthetic object and a curiosity.

Heatstroke:
Is just a poorly made, poorly realized game built around a horrible idea. There is nothing to see here, move along.

Lobster Petting:
Lobster Petting is another endeavor in absurdity, and nothing is more surreal and absurd than lobster petting. Unlike many of its peers, (like fart games or virtual staplers), there are a few things that I think distinguish Lobster Petting from a simple work of stupidity:
1) There is no real world equivalent, or at least there are no petting zoos with lobsters that I am aware of (however you could probably have the same experience at a supermarket lobster tank).
2) It is not cute. There is a good reason no one lets children pet lobsters: they are ugly little things, all slimy claws and eyestalks.
3) It is not funny at all. Strange, yes. Funny? No. At least not funny in a traditional jokey kind of way, nor in a stand-up, observational, snarky kind of way. Lobster Petting is funny to me because it is so serious, because it can’t really be serious, and because it is so far from serious. Does any of that make sense?
4) No one in their right mind would ever make another, or so I thought until someone I didn’t know ported Lobster Petting. However, no one is rushing out to make Tarantula Slapping or Antelope Mangling, because that would be absurd. I suppose even Lobster Petting’s existence is absurd. And now I’m talking myself in circles.
So there you have it — absurdity, in the form of a lightly fondled lobster.

Motor Pants:
The concept here may seem like another attempt at the absurd, but really, this was a failed attempt to make a real game that happened to be salted with my own flavor of strangeness and obsession with pants. In a rush to release the game, I skimped on the game play and logic instead of taking my time and it ended being a confusing mess of unplayable hoohah (the general unplayability probably also tends to make one think that I may have had artistic intentions, but in actuality I was simply being lazy). I recently started Motor Pants up to refresh my memory as to what it was all about, and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was confounded by my own game. Because of this, I’m spending my sweet ass time on Wholesale Hero, which in some ways is the successor to Motor Pants but better designed and infinitely more playable.

Simoebic Dysentery:
Nothing arty here, just a game about an amoeba and the body it lives in… Since this was a joint project of myself and King Thor, from concept to execution, I feel that it is also the most straight forward and least peppered with my weirdness.

Zoltan:
Ah, Zoltan. I believe Zoltan is the pinnacle of my artistic endeavors in the digital medium thus far. At first glance, you may believe that he is merely an appeal to primitivism, or a simplistic caricature of Neolithic religion. However, in my eyes Zoltan is so much more: an appeal to the rational, against the mysteries of religion, and all the absurdity that it embodies. He is all-knowing, at least when it comes to the weather, a feat accomplished through human ingenuity and technology, not through smoke and mirrors or the hokum of faith. He requires a sacrifice to function, sometimes money – my own nod to the business of modern religion – and sometimes a fish – a subtle take on the symbolism of religion without getting bogged down in trying to represent every faith equally. Of course there is also a priest present, to allow you easier contact with Zoltan, but he really doesn’t do much, and there is a book on the mysteries of Zoltan, a reference my own personal thoughts on some zealots’ ludicrous literal readings of religious texts. Even the all-seeing eye pyramid thing from the dollar bill makes an appearance. All of this is wrapped up in a serious layer of absurdity: grass that needs to be trimmed, a beard that also needs looking after, a drunken moon, a help file that is far from helpful… And finally the fact that the program does nothing at all, but is merely meant to sit there, look good and do its thing, and I think you’ve got a good argument for a piece of digital art. Or a worthless pile of dung.

There are others, of course – Wholesale Hero promises to be a rip-roaring anti-capitalist good time, no one outside of my friend P. Brown has even seen Modern Worker 2 (which mostly involves a malfunctioning copier and endless filing), and I have half-baked plans for things like Poaching Hero and Litigation! which should bring my sense of the absurd together with a more coherent philosophical standing.
I hope that this has made things a little clearer, because it took me hours to shape this into the semi-coherent mess you’ve just read and I don’t really want to do it again. Conclusion: Mojiferous Crap ≈ art.

2007 started out rather slowly, with Mojiferous Industries in nascent form, like some kind of billowy gas cosmic gas cloud swirling around inside my mind… and then sometime in March I broke down, adjusted my programmin’ slacks, took off my top hat, and proceeded to remake/remodel Lobster Petting for the 21st century… making a OS X version that had all the charm and usefulness of the original (e.g. none.)
March was followed by a lot of other months whose names I forget and by the release of of Zoltan!, the last word in worthlessness. I would like to claim that Zoltan is some kind of deep artistic statement, but even free-associating buccaneers would find that to be a stretch… Maybe with a graphics update and some better user-interface work… Maybe in 2008…
Zoltan! prompted me to actually make a working version of Desktop Cigarette, which was promptly broken a few months later when Apple released Leopard… So I “fixed” it, realized it was more broken than before, and just ended up making it a widget, like it probably should have been in the first place. Oddly, Desktop Cigarette (in all of its forms) has generated more complaints, more stupid questions, more angry people, and more downloads than anything else I’ve made thus far… (It did make me realize that almost all hardcore anti-smoking people are complete batshit insane nutjobs. The bile, hatred, and blind anger directed at Desktop Cigarette [and me] just because it is associated with smoking is enough to make me want to smoke three packs a day just out of spite.)
Somewhere around late April through September I disappeared while furiously working on the useless monolithic thing I call Atomic Combat… Intro movies, worthless animation, a slew of excitingly byzantine options, and an AI that seemed to have a mind of its own. After three months slaving over the thing, having dreams about weird code, spending days tracking down problems within an increasingly complex labyrinth of code, I kind of gave up: No one could figure out this giant spiffy turd I had shat out, and I couldn’t even start to imagine how I would get the stink off…
The horror that was my over-zealous and complicated idea led me to trim down and look for smaller, tighter programming options… and different avenues of inspiration. My friend Kloewer suggested I make a game about locking your dog or baby in a hot car- so I did. Heat Stroke was simple, quick, and basic. I think the sound effects, opening movie, and weird 50′s TV theme are a laugh riot; the rest of the world yawned. I expected people to complain, instead Heat Stroke kind of faded off into obscurity…
Followed closely by Motor Pants, my manless pants racing game. The damned thing makes no sense. The interface could be better, but how? Do I really want to waste a whole bunch of time making graphics for a pant racing game? What is the meaning of it all in the first place? Why match coins to propel a pair of pants???? I tried making an intro movie for this one too, but nothing came out- how do you illustrate the idea of “motor pants”? 3D pants racing around like some kind of really terrible console game? My first idea involved a pantsless dancing homeless guy, a plastic lobster, and fireworks, but I scrapped it as too expensive… So I guess you’re all stuck with the steaming pile that came out instead (like some kind of gelatinous smelly afterbirth.)
Oh yeah, and some time in October I launched Mojiferous.com- so that whenever I tell someone my website address I can spell, then politely explain why I have such a bizarre site name. Nothing says confusion like “Mojiferous”! It’s kind of like having someone badly translate for me all the time- “My client would like to use the steamhorn, as he is differential and gassy. Thank you!”

So that’s 2007 in a nutshell. It probably contained peanuts. I spent way too much time slaving away making useless doodads, had some really horrible ideas, and didn’t make one thin dime! 2008 looks like it’ll be just as useless, filled with even more horrible ideas, and even costlier than 2007! I am currently in the process of making Atomic Combat a viable and interesting game- more in the vein of Battleship than whatever the hell it was like before… maybe something boring and tedious… like solving differential equations. by hand… I would say something encouraging like “look for it in the next few months,” but who am I fooling? It should be “watch out for it! It’ll probably be a disaster!” (Maybe some feature involving beards or mustaches would improve it… yes… improved beards and mustaches… hmmm.) Here’s to poverty and insanity!

In other news, the Desktop Cigarette Widget has been holding steady at spot #33 in Apple’s Top Widget Downloads for a couple of days… I’m kind of proud of this fact. Go worthless junk, go!

–Mojiferous

So long for now!

–The Admiral

(Hell, maybe I won’t fix it and just attach an “Admiral’s Warning” to it.)

–Mojiferous

–Mojiferous

In other news, I also updated my website completely, in a spasm of busyness that started as a simple quest to make a better looking Desktop Cigarette page… I think it looks okay, but everyone will have to let me know.
I also have forgot to mention that I was interviewed in FM Magazine (the website is currently under construction) and had the .9 Beta version of Desktop Cigarette mentioned in Mac Fan Magazine (a website that is more built than the FM-Mag one, but is unfortunately all in Kanji…) — all in all, I’m always amazed that people other than myself are entertained by my trash! Thank you all!!

–Admiral Mojiferous J. Colossus, Esq.

–The Admiral

I also finished Desktop Cigarette in the few hours between the last post and this one. It doesn’t do anything fancy, so it was pretty easy. It should go up in the next couple of days, once I get around to making a web page for it, a readme, and all that jazz.

–Admiral Mojiferous J. Colossus