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Education.com and my bank account #banking #thanksbofa

That feeling when you get your credit/debit card and you finally get your own bank account and can spend your own money on your own things…

…and then you realize you can’t manage your account to save your life and you run out of money before you can say “oops”.

 

That’s me.  And I’m bad at learning, so guess what?  Throughout my having a bank account, I haven’t learned how to keep anything under control.  So I’m having to stare at my $0.30-ish balance almost every week because I can’t Money.

Yay me?…

 

Then there’s education.com.  Oh my FUCKing god, no one over there even has a vision for better education (or so I’m told).  These guys deserve their own post, and if you want me to rat on them please say so.

 

So here’s my experience (and I’m going to end up ratting on them anyway):

 

Someone told me that Education.com is this horrible site that is incredibly lazy and has horrible games.  I was tasked with the task of trying out some of those games.

I found out I need to have a Plan to actually play those games.  So I made a plan, and started a free trial, after which I would need to pay 35 dollars each month to continue using the site.  Remember the 35 dollar part.

 

SO I played a few of their games.  And of course it was Pre-school up through 1st grade, so I played a lot of games with awkward animals and flat graphics.

Then I came across a game called “I Got Your Number”.

It was this game-show type Flash game, where a host (who was a dog), asked you math questions having to do with the hundreds chart (a chart with numbers from one to one hundred, ten numbers per line).  At first I thought the dog had a mustache, but then noticed that it kept flickering out of existence during some frames of the dog’s animations.  Then I realized it actually looked a lot like teeth.  Then I realized it actually was the host’s teeth, and the animators completely screwed up on the layering, and set the teeth to appear outside the dog’s mouth!  It looked awful.

 

So I played a few more games then gave up.  I responded to the challenger saying that it sucked, cancelled the trial and completely forgot about it.

Now pay attention.

 

Fast forward a week or so.  Note that I hadn’t actually heard anything from education.com, except the sad “are you leaving?” email that I got when I told it I was leaving.

 

In fact, here’s part of it:

—

Hello,

Thanks for giving Brainzy [the game] a try. We’re writing to confirm that you’ve successfully canceled your free trial and your credit card will not be charged.

—

Well, they lied, because my bank account got hit by the monthly payment from the Plan that they didn’t actually cancel.  Appearently they didn’t get the memo that when you cancel a plan, you’re not supposed to wait past the first charge to actually get to canceling it!!

 

I had less than a dollar remaining on my bank account.  Brainzy’s plan costs 35 dollars per charge.  Into debt I go!

 

And then even farther into debt I get shoved because the bank has this dumb, dumb, DUMB overdraft fee.

 

An overdraft fee is something banks have because they can’t figure out that keeping money in bank accounts is how professionals survive in the first place.

A week after going into a negative balance, the bank charges you about 20 dollars. To your bank account.  So now it’s even harder to get out of the red, and you’re left screaming at the bank clerk (I didn’t scream at the bank clerk, but I WANTED to).

 

I am lucky, however, as I have BillGuard, and have already started disputing with Education.com over the charge.

I don’t think I explained it very well to them though, as I just said “I forgot to cancel my plan.”, because I hadn’t actually checked because I thought people have decency.

 

Needless to say, I hate everything right now.

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PCFY Progress Update 3 – and Suggestions!

I am working on the lab…yes, the lab where Proffessor Oak is, who you usually get your Pokedex from.

 

Okay, so I should probably start explaining what actually I have and how I built it…

 

Basically, I was tooling around on the YoYoGames Sandbox page and I came across a game called “Perfect Pokemon Movement”.  It was basically just a showcase, and it had what the name implied:  Your character exibited perfect movement behavior a-la Pokemon Emerald/Sapphire…etc.  There was also a sign that had text, and it also acted exactly as in the games.

 

I mucked around in the code and found it was actually easy to understand…at least for the most part.  So I got the idea for the game, downloaded some extra tilesets, and began!

 

Now for what I actually have done:

 

Field movement

Text box behavior

 

Um…that’s it 🙁  No battle system, no story, no Professor Oak, no nothing.  But I’m aiming to break the mold for Pokemon games (watch, as soon as I press “Publish” I’ll lose motivation and never ever work on it :p), so I’m still thinking about what all I could put in it…and the battle system, teams, stats, etc is going to be the most difficult part (heck, it’s the one that’s going to take up the MOST space filesize-wise).

 

SO here, I am asking you to post suggestions of content, code workarounds, anything that will help me with the game!  And to avoid turning the game into a clusterf***, I’ll only accept ideas I really like.

 

And in case you didn’t catch or don’t know what software I’m using, it’s Game Maker Studio.

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Testing IFTTT automated posting from WordPress

IFTTT isan automation service which automates certain Internet tasks with an IF-THEN behavior.

 

For example, the way I’m using it here:

IF any new post appeares on WordPress, THEN post a link to it on my Facebook page.

 

I was going to have this post with my PCFY Progress Update 2 post, but for some reason IFTTT has TWO Facebook services (FAN pages and USER pages), and I picked the wrong one. >_<

 

So now I’m sure I have it so, let me press Publish and see what happens!

 

…and it…didn’t…work…I think I have WordPress set up wrong…um…

 

god damnit…it’s an authorization problem…I’ll have to get back to you guys on this…sorry, no IFTTT for WordPress yet. 🙁

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An idea.

Just gonna talk about stuff because I haven’t posted here in forever…again…

So a couple of questions that’s just been nagging me since I was born basically…

1.  Why are NES games so hard?  Were they BETTER at games in 195-whatever or was that just due to limitations (pixel-specific collisions instead of collision boxes or circles)?

2.  Why were they bouncing back and forth with the quality of games (Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot came out BEFORE Bubsy 3D, as hard as that is to believe)?

I kinda want to start a series on youtube to just try and explain it…but I have a better idea.

What if I create a series that explains the technical aspect of games?  Not game-play or sprite style or anything (well, maybe some of that), but how big the sprites are, why the games runs at 15 FPS at this one point, how detailed the models are exactly, how the game calculates things at the hex code level (probably), etc.

What do you guys think?