Super Blockquote: Hewlett-Packard, Workstations Division
HP released upgrades to its swanky high-end workstations, aimed at animators and other top productivity bananas. More dreadful than the specifications, however, were the words of John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP.
Boing Boing Gadgets has deemed the standard HTML blockquote insufficient to reveal the expressive power of his business English. Hence, Super Blockquote, which arms you against the marketroid oppression of Thompson's prose.
the latest
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That last "of" was tough to get!
That is freaking awesome! Good job Rob.
Semiotix says, “The block quote (and hence the HTML tag)
“ are the descendants of the old-timey newspaper practice of
“ running a line of open-quote marks down the left-hand column
“ of a long quote, so that people wouldn't forget that they were
“ reading a quote and not the narrator. That always struck me as a
“ snazzy-looking device, much more so than just empty space at
“ the margins, and I never miss a chance to advocate for its return."
Thank you, Charles!
GabrielM, wait until you face the dreaded lone hyphen!
It's not all my work: Joel created the logo and the custom "Vaus." And everyone insisted on gameplay improvements like ball-angling, so that the game would actually be tolerable enough to play through until the victory graphic comes up
My ball got stuck at the top and just went back and forth. I couldn't get the last 3 words. FAIL.
Great, now I'm never going to get any work done now!
That was unexpected fun, tyvm.
Theresa could use that as a backup for disemvowelment, for when a commenter -really- deserves a 'point and laugh' session.
Having just read Pattern Recognition and Eastern Standard Tribe, I can see this as a way of marketing/advertising rather than shaming. But maybe I'm just craaaaaazy.
Needs work (ball only bounces off paddle at 90 degrees) but a nice concept.
90 degrees? What? Maybe I just had super accuracy thanks to my laptop's touchpad.
The sentences seem to have the same amount of information and relevance even with half the words gone...
Sentences have the same information and relevance half gone...
AdBlock: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/superblockquote.swf
lol - awesome. I had to turn off the nav bar in FF to get it to fit on the screen (of my EEE), though.
Is there a version which lets you pass in the text (say via the URL)?
Well done! Though it seems worth mentioning that the sounds and the story at the end are from the arcade classic Arkanoid, not breakout.
Awesome, though lacks a lives system.
Agreed that custom text (for Bush quotes and spammer text) and maybe custom images would be cool. It's pretty cathartic.
pshaw.. this game is going to be completely out of date in 2100
A few notes!
* You can angle the ball by bouncing it off the very edges of the bat.
* Passing arbitrary quotes to the game, bonuses and power-ups will be added the next time we roll it out.
* Watch for more exciting games in the BoingChoice Arcade.
HA HA HA HA!
"My ball got stuck at the top and just went back and forth. I couldn't get the last 3 words. FAIL."
"Needs work (ball only bounces off paddle at 90 degrees) but a nice concept."
Minor design deficiency - the top surface of the paddle has to be convex to prevent harmonic lock, or the playing field must have non-commensurate sides, impossible on any real computer graphics system.
Non-commensurate sides will be in the Intellivision version.
Stunning.
21 brillzo street.
Oh that was fantastic!
Last word standing: multimedia
Please do this again in the future. It was great fun!
You invent such a great toy for the elimination of pointless hucksterism and booshwah and waste it on a minor eruption of corporate twaddle?
It's an election year -- unlimited free targets!!!
my ball got stuck on the left side just going vertically up and down
Nice game, but I really thought the ball was OP. Could you nerf that? kthanxbai
so great!
breakout is my favorite game of all time
(sorry tetris)
I just had to say:
SHINOBI!!!!
and, @Deleet: Did you try moving your paddle around? Because you can change the angle of the ball.
The ball hit the left edge and got stuck in a rebound loop just moving up and down the left side.
Only got past the first 4 words.
On the next try it hit the very edge of the paddle and go stuck IN the paddle.
Methinks the hit detection be a bit buggy.
Outstanding.
This is the perfect treatment for this type of stuff.
I'd go with the name "Marketdroid" (i.e. Araknoid) rather than 'Super Blockquote', but that's just me.
The ball gets stuck in the edges, happened to me twice!
Ditto on #6's getting stuck in a horizontal back and forth :( Mine did the same with only the word "driving" left with the ball a scant 3/16ths of an inch above taunting me.
The back-and-forth stuck-edges bug is fixed. I never thought anyone would care to play it more than once! Refresh caches.
sweet
Genial!!!
pure beauty. this thing is crying: API, API, API!
@ Anonymous:
Thank God somebody noticed this was homage to Arkanoid, which is fifty times the game Breakout is.
This is the greatest text deprecation device since alt.warlord's glider cannons.