Ivanhoe is a progressive metal band from Germany who have been around in some form or another for almost thirty years. All my knowledge of them comes from this This Toilet Tuesday, a quick Google search, and their new video. Sometimes words cannot do justice for what others are experiencing. You need, nay, must see things for yourself in order to truly understand what is happening. It is with this plea that I implore you to watch this video of lolbuttz proportions.
0:08: Dollar Store Rivers Cuomo.
0:13: Nah, no reason to get right into the actual song. Take your time.
0:18: Ivanlolz
0:21: Ivan-O-Face.
0:26: Now we know who buys those “Sexy Nun” costumes at Halloween. Other than porn directors.
0:28: No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no. NO!
0:31: SUNNO))) must be rolling over in their robes right now.
0:35: Dude, the Sunflower Deadvideo breakdown was last week.
0:42: His facial hair really draws attention away from every other thing that’s funny about this video.
0:46: Do they really have to be barefoot?
0:53: Hold this shot…hoooold ittt…..hooooooooolllllllddddddd iiiiiitttttt….
0:59: Science has no place in this video.
1:08: I would say that I’m lost on the concept of this video, but that would mean I care about it.
1:14: This shot is what happens when you let you the kid direct for a few seconds.
1:17: If he breaks out into the “Undone – The Sweater Song” I quit.
1:23: Oh fuck.
1:30: Sexy Nun trying to groove to Prog Metal with a green screen background. I just…I can’t…
1:36: I’m pretty sure hot-boxing in a confessional is a sin.
1:44: So the Sexy Nun gets to wear heels while the band is barefoot for some reason. It’s clearly a metaphor for society’s interpretation of..okay, I can’t fake it anymore.
1:55: Ivanhoe would’ve been better off pretending to be pandas.
1:59: Pandas can be metal.
2:00: They can also be Bloody too.
2:01: Like this guy.
2:06: Thank King Diamond that we included this shot of someone spraying something on something.
2:09: Just when you think it can’t get any more lolbuttzy…
2:12: “Wee-ooh I look just like Buddy Holly.”
2:19: He would look less ridiculous if he wore one of those rainbow wigs.
2:29: “Yes, Rivers Cuomo, I’ve wanted this for so…oh, it’s you.”
2:35: That’s the face of everyone watching this video.
2:39: “You know what this video needs? A sexy nurse! Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ve got a suitcase full of these outfits. Um, don’t ask why.”
2:44: Can’t tell if racist or just really vague effects.
2:52: Jeez, there’re still 2 minutes left.
2:57: “Time to take your temperature. I’ll get the Vaseline.”
3:03: Cool, a Butcher Babies cameo.
3:11: So he’s dreaming of sweating in the corner of a basement. Suddenly my night terrors don’t seem so bad.
3:16: Still no shoes, huh guys?
3:26: Oh, now they’re dead. That… sucks? I’m not sure how to feel about it.
3:33: This is the best video of all time. I take it all back.
3:41: I knew there was a reason I never liked taking Chemistry in high school.
3:50: From now on, when a video is unbelievably, laughably terrible, it will now simply be known as “Ivanhoe”.
3:59: The morning after regret.
4:03: Jeeeeeeeeeezus!
4:09: Sure, why not?
4:11: Okay, definitely racist.
4:16: Do we really need over 30 seconds of credits? Shouldn’t everything be attributed to Alan Smithee?
4:30: I doubt this is what Sir Walter Scott had in mind when he wrote Ivanhoe.
Ivanhoe’s new album 7 Days is out now via Massacre Records.
Learn how to cook, morons. Nothing infuriates quite like people who brag about their inability to cook. It's not funny, it's pathetic. And anyone who says it in my presence is full of shit because they're clearly making my blood boil. There's nothing to cooking. Like I said in my math article (Math doesn't suck, you do1), it's the act of following instructions...Continue reading...
Over the weekend I noticed an interesting design for a progress meter in a videogame. The % complete was listed in text in the middle of the bar and didn't move. But that text was the same color as the background of the bar that was filling up from left to right. It seemed like the background was going to make the text invisible once they overlapped, but instead, the text color reversed to be white instead anywhere it overlapped with the background.
My first thought was this: how can we replicate this design pattern and what might we learn along the way?
Here’s what I came up with, but make sure to check this demo on the latest version of Chrome to see everything working correctly:
The .wrapper will hold our elements in place, .bg will be our loading bar that increases over time and our .text element will be used as the percentage information.
Let’s make the whole thing CSS-only
A "real" loader on the web would likely be powered by JavaScript and reacting to actual data somehow. But while we're having fun here, let's make the whole thing, even the counting, happen just in CSS (SCSS for the looping help).
We’ll set up our variables and style the .bg element:
Perhaps we could have hidden the overflow and moved the background box with transform property instead (for performance reasons) but in this little demo I think it’s fine to animate the width property alone.
To update the content of the .text element with the correct percentage value we have to be a little dastardly and use a mix of pseudo elements and animations. First we’ll keep the <div> empty set the content of its afterpseudo element to 0% before defining an animation:
If this looks a little scary then not to worry! On the third line we add whichever number is currently in the loop (which we call $i) and make that a string by appending % to it and assigning it to a variable. Then we can use interpolation to make each @keyframe selector update the content property to the right value.
The Color Swap
Finally, all we have to do is set the color and the mix-blend-mode of our pseudo element and there we go; a pure CSS loader where the background color influences the foreground text:
.text:after {
/* This value is the OPPOSITE color of our background */
color: rgb(0, 255, 255);
mix-blend-mode: difference;
}
With the difference blend mode we have to set the text element’s color value to the opposite of the background. So if our background is rgb(0, 0, 0) we’ll need to set the text pseudo element to rgb(255, 255, 255).
I think this little demo helps us recognise how useful the mix-blend-mode property can be. There are going to be all sorts of instances like this in the future where interfaces can reveal information in ways we’d never have thought possible before.
Changing Text Color Entirely
The cool part of this technique is the fact that some of the text is one color and other parts of the text is another color. The reversing happens just based on what is covered and what isn't, even if it's just a part of a letter.
If you were looking for more of an accessibility-based "change the text color to make sure it has enough contrast" thing, Sass can also help with that.
Another Example
The XOXO site used mix-blend-mode: darken; quite a bit to to have backgrounds, shapes, and text all interact in subtle/interesting/beautiful ways that we haven't seen a whole lot on the web yet.
Browser support
The mix-blend-mode property isn’t well supported at the moment and neither is the animatable content property. So make sure to provide fallbacks if you decide to use either of these tricks.
Just wanted to bring to light some issues that have arisen recently to various fan-made content for Payday 2. Due to major changes in the code, many popular mods are now non-functional and the creators are having a hard time getting them back online or have either abandoned them altogether. Some of the bigger cases:
But perhaps the biggest news comes from pd2stats, a popular stat tracking site that has been continuously ignored by Overkill over the past year as they created their own stat tracking page, despite their promise to support pd2stats.
The full announcement, as found on their now dead site, here:
Greetings User,
If you are reading this then you are one of the few remaining people that actually uses my website.
I thank you for that.
However you are probably wondering why you see this letter instead of the site you were looking for.
If you have a moment then I will explain you why.
I will start from the very beginning.
About a year and some months ago I started building this site, in secret.
Once I got to the point that it was usable I released it and it was quickly picked up by Overkill and promoted.
Some months later I got invited to visit Overkill's Studios.
We talked about several things.
One of them was pd2stats and, yes, the fbi files.
Back then I was promised that the fbi files would not be like pd2stats, they aren't gonna be anything similar and they aren't intended to make pd2stats useless or kill it.
After the visit, I barely had any contact with Overkill for over 8 months.
About four months before fbi files release, I was promised again by Overkill that I would be informed about the fbi files and that I would have a hand in making it happen.
Four months pass, I heard nothing from Overkill until the announcement of the fbi files.
That's when it got evident that something went wrong.
I contacted Overkill through an employee that normally has nothing to do with any of this.
I am very grateful that he tried to help.
It was literally the only chance I got to get any kind of a response.
He got back to me and I was told that the team responsible for the fbi files was not informed about the existence of pd2stats or about plans that higher management in Overkill had.
At this point there still was some time and I was ensured that people have been informed about it and I would be contacted asap.
A week later, no responses. I contacted them again to be told that everyone is aware of the situation and I would be contacted.
Another week later, another message, this time I was simply asked if I was contacted yet. No, I had not been contacted.
Another couple days later, I informed them that pd2stats has now under 20 users (if you are one of them, thank you) and that 50% of the funding for lastbullet.net is now gone.
I am involved in developing lastbullet.net and as such I use the ads revenue from pd2stats for it.
Essentially at this point pd2stats.com was using more resources than it could make up for. Way more.
I have informed Overkill about the shutdown of pd2stats a week in advance. I also suggested that making pd2stats official or working together with the fbi files might fix this issue.
I will be contacted very soon.
Another week passed, no replies, seemingly no one cares.
And it turned out that Overkill does respond to other people about various matters.
So this implies that they are on purpose ignoring this.
I managed to contact them directly two weeks later (yesterday), to be told that there is no time for discuss this and I should wait another couple weeks. Meanwhile pd2stats is going down more and more. There seemingly is no point to this anymore.
We have now arrived at the present, with this distressing situation.
This is why you are reading this letter instead of getting to where you wanted to go.
If you would like to my work and the website, or if you still think there is hope, the spread the word, contact them. Maybe together we can make something happen at last.
Lastly here are some technical details for anyone that wants them.
The code of pd2stats is not gone. It just is not alive anymore.
api.pd2stats.com is still running. It uses resources and lastbullet.net pays for it.
For those who haven't seen yet, with the latest added Witcher 3 DLC, they've also added a very tongue in cheek tax man who comes around to harass Garalt. In actuality the taxman exists as an attempt to clean up an exploit that existed in the game where you could sell certain items at an exceptionally higher value than they're worth and make tons of money.
It's important to note however that the player can "opt-out" of this cleanup by lying to the taxman and claiming that they have never participated in this sort of evil deed. There's no penalty, and you actually get yourself a nice diploma for your "honesty".
This seems to me like a really clever way to call attention to the exploiters and even poke fun at the whole situation, but at the same time it can seem a bit immersion breaking. Do you believe it was worth it to add this in at all, or should they just have silently patched the problem and left it alone? How do you think this approach compares to other games that have dealt with exploits?
