Mindburst Hickocks is, minus the occasional deviation from form, a repository of ideas I have had but could not find a use for. They are free for you to take and run with. In fact, please do.

Also, we now feature assignments.

6.27.2012

Flash games.

So sometimes I play games on the internet, and mostly I like them when they are tower defense or some permutation. I wish I knew how to pitch games to flash game design folks, but I don't, so here're two pitches for just anyone of variations on tower defense games:

Frogger, but you are the traffic.
You have some kind of garages or tunnels or any other thing that spawns vehicles. Maybe there's a multiplayer mode where you set up your level and a bunch of folks play as frogs. Player-frogs probably would be extra tough.

Middle School Miscreant. This one is a TD/RPG hybrid.
You design/control a middle-school aged thug in charge of a gang. You roam a neighborhood and as you level up you can recruit followers whom you can position/control. Folks try to leave their houses (homeowners, dogwalkers, young lovers, little kids with nerf guns) or to cross from one end of the street to another, and you have to scare them back to wherever they came from. Every time a person leaves your street (unless they're retreating), you lose rep. If your rep gets too high, cops start to show up. You have to hide from the cops' vision while still terrorizing the neighborhood. If your rep gets too low, other gangs start to invade your territory, and you have to fight them off. The other kids you can recruit will be good at scaring/fighting/hiding to various amounts. There can be a kid who can douse streetlights at night. There can be a kid who has a car that he can pop out of. Also you can buy things like cherry bombs and that your character can use. You can earn money by stealing cable boxes and lunch money.

6.21.2012

Fake fire hydrants.

Manufacture a line of fake fire hydrants that look real and feel real and not brand new but are a lot lighter than a bet a hydrant is. They should come in a few colors because different cities use different colors.

Then, people who need to drive places can toss one in their trunk and when they get their ideal parking spot, they can just plop the hydrant next to the car parked there, get it towed, then park, themselves, and put the hydrant back in the trunk. Also it would work as a placeholder. Pop it down next to your favorite space outside work when you go home at night, and put it away during the day while you're parked there.

Simple.

6.20.2012

Here is the idea, someone find the technology.

We should make a laundry bag that dissolves more or less instantly on contact with water. Consumers can just toss the whole thing in the was and avoid the TEDIUM of emptying the bag. It can turn into lint, and then when you dry your clothes, it will re-form itself in the lint trap, so you can just pull it out of there and fill it with your clean dry clothes.

For a bonus, it can have detergent in it for the first load. Oh, or better yet, it can last for maybe six loads and have enough slow-release detergent for those six loads in it. That way our consumers will have to keep buying them.

6.17.2012

Drunk per dollar.

I've always maintained that if I ran a liquor store I would add a section on my price labels that displayed the "drunk per dollar" of each beverage. It would just be PeV/Pr, where Pe is the percentage of alcohol, V is the volume of the container (in ml), and Pr is the price. Simple. Milliliters of alcohol per dollar.

But here's the thing, why doesn't someone make an app that does that? I mean, I know it's an easy calculation, but if you made a pretty-looking program with three little clearly labeled input boxes (you should be able to input the volume in metric or imperial and have it convert) and one button. Poof. Sell it for a dollar a copy. Send me 20%.

Also, since we're making a app for phones, make an augmented reality feature ("liquor goggles") where it looks for barcodes, reads them on the fly, uses the internet to find out the proof and size of the product from that, grabs the largest nearby number, assumes that's the price in dollars, and floats a DPD number right next to that. If phones have the megapixels and speed to keep up with a bunch at once, have it change the colors of the DPDs to easily rank all the numbers presented on the screen at a time. Boom. There's a product.
"I lost the passion for the blog. I am not built for blogging. I am built for intermittent, longer pieces, and successful blogging requires frequent, shorter pieces. YOU should have a blog. Mindburst Hickocks, that's the name of it. GO."
-Jason Michelitch
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