BaDmAn has organized a sort of celebrity deathmatch session this Saturday.
Many of the original dev team will be joining in deathmatching the Original SiN.

Details on Ritualistic

Wings Over The World!

Just watched "Things To Come", and I think I've found THE best movie/book on which to base a game!  It has nearly all the fundamentals...

...it has World War II (as portended, and quite accurately),
...it has zombies (the infected),
...it has post-apocalyptic,
...it has sci-fi!

Seriously, though, it really is a great movie (1936) and book (1933), and the accuracy of Wells' predictions is eerie.  Flying Wing bombers ;)

"Nice toys!  Nice toys they have these days!"

There's an interesting scene near the beginning of the movie.  It's Christmas in Everytown and a family is sitting around the tree, opening presents.

Then I remembered hearing my mother and father say that to me and my brother often, too, and now I've seen two generations of upgrades in toys myself.  I have said the same thing with each advance. That expression, about toys, is like a meter closely tied to the advance of technology. 

We were delivering our Tribal Reviews a few weeks ago.  Gary was in the Air Force.  When he knocked on the door to enter the conference room for the sitdown part of his review, I said "Enter, Sargeant!".

Being a proud and permanently-programmed veteran (why is it okay to say "vetrin", but my spine seizes in distress when I hear the word "nucular"?),

I know it's not true for everyone, but the military is one of the best things I ever did for myself.  It added so much to my personal sense of worth and accomplishment...

...but that's NOT what I was thinking when I was in bootcamp!

Gary's entrance sparked an immediate memory of my time in Great Lakes.  This picture is of my company's graduation, but this is not the company I started in.  About three weeks into my tour, I was put in sick bay for flat feet.  After a week there, I had missed too much training and was moved to another company that had started a week after mine.

I do have flat feet, and they were killing me (marching for hours a day in new boots aint good for any feet, let alone flat ones), but actually this trip to the infirmary was a desperate attempt by me to get the hell out of there!  It didn't work, thankfully.

Anyhow, my first company was lead by a real tough son-of-a-bitch CC (Company Commander, aka Drill Instructor).  One of the first things you learn in bootcamp, of the thousands of things you learn, is how to properly enter an office, just like Gary did, and then stating your name, rank, etc, and reason for being there.

We were two weeks into training and I had to stand my first fire watch.  In the military, you have your normal duties, which in bootcamp are 14- to 16-hour days of marching, classes, and vaccines, ...and you also serve in a rotation for guard duty at night.  We were called about once every two weeks for fire watch.  This is a 4-hour stand, and I pulled the mid-watch (4am-8am).

At 5am, I had been standing for an hour at parade rest there in the barracks.  Suddenly I hear "Recruit!  Bring me my coffee cup!".  The CC, named Chief Shanks (yes, that was his real name), had an office in the barracks, but would start the day with the other CCs in an office at the front of the building, just down the hall from where I was standing.

So, I go into his office, find his coffee cup, and proceed to the front office.  Now keep in mind that I'm just a scared teenaged punk who's brain hurts from gallons of information and rules being poured into his head, who's mentally stressed out and in almost constant fear much of the time, and who's body is physically wracked, ...and I've had maybe three hours of sleep in the past twenty four.

So, I have the cup and I bring it to Chief Shanks and the room of fellow company commanders.   I remember thinking at the time that I was glad I found the cup to begin with.  The panic of wondering what I would do if I couldn't find the cup in his office had me hyper when I first went to get it.  I walk it right into the front office, ...no knocking, no asking permission to enter, nor three paces in, nor salute, nor announcement of name, rank, reason, ...nothing.

The Chief almost hit the ceiling!  Having me, one of his recruits, fail so badly in front of his peers added to the Chief's rage, I believe.  After berating me for ten minutes, with the other CCs watching the morning entertainment with audible enjoyment, Chief Shanks had me run around the compound twenty times, ...boots, belt, night stick, helmet and all.

Navy bootcamp tries to imitate the regular service, naturally, so many things are replicated from life on a ship.  The front of the building, where the CCs met, was fashioned like a Quarter Deck and served to teach us how to properly board a ship.  Most everyone enters and exits here.  I returned to the Quarter Deck after my little jog.

It's now 6am and most of the barracks staff are showing up.  Chief Shanks has me lay belly down on the floor, right in front of the flag that everyone salutes as they enter the building, and make pretend I'm swimming with my arms and legs.  I'm also yelling "Help!  Help!  Sharks!".

God, I'm laughing so hard right now, ...but then, not so much laughing ;)

Oh ya!  ...while all this happening, Chief Shanks is pinching my legs and adding a few "Feel the sharks, boy?  Swim!".  These weren't love nips, either.  The guy was definitely a little too dedicated, me thinks.  I have nothing but fond memories now, though, and that is sort of strange, ...how we humans seem to have this love of being led and conforming and all those military type things.  It's like that Stockholm Syndrome, I guess.

We would miss (including me) Chief Shanks when he left, and mostly because he was such a son-of-a-bitch.

Two days later, Chief Shanks was mysteriously removed from our company and we got a new CC.  Why?  ...too dedicated with another recruit!  We learned that Chief Shanks was reassigned because of what he did to a recruit from one of our sister companies that shared the same building.

Bootcamp will fuck with your head, and it makes people flip out sometimes.  Evidently this recruit entered the barracks and not only refused to salute the flag, but also said something like "Fuck this!" as he flipped the finger towards the flag.  Chief Shanks happened to be there, and this did not make him happy!  He took the recruit into the head (bathroom) and flushed his head (cranium) in a toilet thirteen times, ...once for each stripe on the flag.  I guess this was too extreme for the Navy.

Here's a worthwhile link, ...to a real good interview on SiN Episodes!

Okay, ...one of our artists found this link today while researching "hair" on the internet.  I love the internet!

Toward the bottom, "tits teen Hugetits strips"...

...I'm almost there, ...where I can say that I've seen everything.

...HUNGRY!

I'm still trying to figure this out...

Last year, I helped Toly (you can call him Ray) with a song called "Anime Govno".  It means 'Anime is Shit', and not the good shit, like from California.

I sang a little back-up for the song,  ...the "anime govno!" part.

Next time I want to sing back-up for her --->

This is almost as big as Ken Harward winning the Joe Dirt (David Spade) Mullet Contest back in 2001!

We went live tonight with pre-orders for SiN Episodes: Emergence ;)

...get it here!

For instance, what I've been calling the Arabic system was really invented in India 200+ years before the Arabs got it via merchant relations.

Many other cool facts, highly recommended!

This is something I don't think I've ever witnessed in anybody else I've met in my life...

...I have a unique mode of handedness.  I'm not exactly ambidextrous, but I'm not exclusively left-handed or right-handed, either.  I use both hands, but for different tasks.

I do remember getting cramps when drawing with crayons as a child, and switching hands to continue.  I can do most things with either hand, but there is a preference for one side or the other, applied to specific tasks.  It's not exclusive, the agility versus strength thing, as the world has directed certain things to the right hand (scissors, mouse, etc.).

My eyes are the same.  When I do that check for eye dominance (make a circle with your hand, hold it out at arm's length, focus on something behind the hand and through the circle, and then close each eye to see which one is actually looking at the thing), I find that my left eye is preferred.  However, when I aim a gun, I use my right eye.

Actually, I think most of you are weird using only one side of a perfectly functioning pair.  That "other" hand inside the mitt at the baseball game, ...it does a pretty good job of grabbing the ball out of the air or off a bad hop.  Why not give it a chance more often?  ...just seems weird to me.

Also strange are the things that require seemingly equal control with both hands (baseball bat, golf club), yet there is a handedness to them.  I understand picking a side and then getting comfortable with it.  Sometimes I get out-of-practice cross stepping in one direction or the other at ice rinks that don't change the rotation of skating.  Being ineptly and permanently tied to one side or the other, though, ...seems weird.

The strangest to me is watching handedness people eat.  You will actually go through the effort of switching the knife and fork from one hand to the other, just so your dominant hand can have control of a simple slicing motion.  Then the switch again so the dominant side has the fork again.

The Dickens of Computer Gaming

As we near the end of our first installment of SiN Episodes, it seemed serendipitous to recently catch a biography special about Charles Dickens.

Dickens is one of the most celebrated English writers, we know, but he is also famed for popularizing serial distribution of novels, ...that's the cool part, ...episodic publishing!

 The first installment of The Pickwick Papers came out in 1836 during the middle of the Industrial Revolution.  This new paradigm in publishing set Dickens apart, and its wide popularity was profound and trend-setting.  As a result of this popularity, serial publishing grew remarkably.

So much of the biography sounded familiar and fitting to the current conditions of our digital entertainment today.  I won't be surprised to soon see the same shifts in the gaming industry.

In Dickens' time, many people lived paycheck-to-paycheck and couldn't afford to buy an entire book, typically 21 shillings.  They could, however, afford to buy one in smaller, separate 1-shilling sections over an extended period of time.

Dickens uniquely added one more advantage to his publishing model which I thought was interesting.  While there were a few other novelists writing in serial fashion at the time, Dickens was the only one who wrote his chapters AS they were published.  The others wrote the entire story before publishing the work in sections.  Dickens always felt closely tied to his audience and he was keen to listen to their feedback.  He used this feedback to guide future installments,  ...which is exactly our plan for SiN Episodes.

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