Posts published during August, 2008

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August 17, 2008

One Story

John Montrage:
Odd as it is, I still remember a few strange details from my life as a shitfaced little punk. There were the girls and the beer, but they all kind of blurred together. A few moments tend to stand out though, fuck if I know why.

There was this one time I was in the shitter after an all night bender, nothing new really but for whatever reason I actually looked around. Noticed there were these ants on the floor, a whole fucking line of them leading straight up to the ass end of a fucking Dorito. I don’t know why the ants were so set on this one piece of shit chip, and it was in the shitter of all places.

I walked out to the kitchen to take a look around, see if they got into any more shit. Nope, not a single fucking ant in the whole kitchen. Went and had a look in my bedroom since I slept on the floor back then. Not a single fucking ant. So no ants where the food is kept, no ants where I ate the food, but a whole fucking line of ants trying to get at this one fucking chip in the god damn shitter.

Still don’t know why the hell they were there of all places.

Maxine Fields:
Why did I decide to be a Veterinarian? Ants. I know, why a vet and not an entomologist? Well I like working with animals, and maybe when you hear the story you’ll understand it a bit better.

Back right before I left for college I was in the bathroom one day and happened to look down. There was a whole line of ants, single file, marching very purposefully around the floor mat towards a single point. You see, I was living with siblings who had young children of their own and one of them had left the edge of a cheese chip in the bathroom. It was swarmed with ants, almost looked black from all the ants on it.

Of course, I immediately questioned why they had come to the bathroom in search of this food. You see, I was quite certain from earlier observations that there weren’t any ants in the kitchen, and I slept on the floor in my room so I would have known if any were there. So if the major food and garbage sources were left untouched, why here? Of course I began formulating all sorts of theories: maybe their nest was under the room, or they were simply passing through one of the other bedrooms. But the important part is that I asked why.

Over the next few weeks I kept noticing animals doing things and kept asking myself “why?” Eventually that thirst for knowledge dragged me through vet med school. By the second day of hands on I knew I wanted to deal with animals in a useful way. The rest was history.

Maxine Fields (Post Transformation):
I’m not so human anymore. I know it, I know a human wouldn’t do what I’ve done. They wouldn’t eat- they just wouldn’t.

But I’m still holding on a little, can’t quite cut that last tie. Strange it isn’t something human, something emotional, that keeps me this side of humanity. It’s ants, or rather a memory of ants. Of watching them walk across a bathroom floor and do something trivial, eat at a chip I think, and yet made me ask so much.

My rationality, I guess, that’s what keeps me tied down. Maybe we are just rational beings, maybe that is what makes us different. Then again, I’m writing this on tissue paper for fucks sake. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to live, two more died last week… at least that is the public information, who knows if it’s the real number.

We’re such fucking ants, but so are they. I just hope we’re in the kitchen here and not dying for the chip.

Jean Gerdie:
Hmm, you’re interested in the painting of the ants. Well, what does it mean to you? I see.

Well you’re asking the wrong person. Yes, of course I painted it. Doesn’t mean I know why they were in the bathroom. Well it’s more of a memory than a real creation.

Of course ants can move through bathrooms like that, I saw it. Yes bathrooms. No, they weren’t. Well, I don’t really care if it’s all that logical to you, it’s what I saw.

Well I’m pretty sure they weren’t under my bed. Because I slept on the floor, that’s why, still do in fact. Yes there were black ants where I grew up. Well your source is wrong. I know what I freaking saw asshole.

You know what, get out. Get the fuck out of my studio!

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Games can’t grow up.

I’m rather with Yahtzee Croshaw’s assessment from the Psychonauts review. But I kind of feel the need to take it one step further.

The games industry cannot grow up, since it’s customers still have not grown up. I’m not talking about age, I’m talking about being mature and less self centered. I’m sure that quite a few people finding this off GAX or through CoW are quite mature, but those of you who are take a step back and ask yourself if you really are the norm…

How is the games industry supposed to find the room to breathe life into new genres when the self entitled twats their selling too seem to spend all day screaming about useless things. If you have to choose between making people whine with a free system that generally works no matter how many users, or roll the dice on just how many people you need to serve and invest millions in something that will almost certainly fail, the choice is kind of obvious and you would make it too. If it’s a matter of nerf a class or watch your game slowly decay from perceptual imbalance you do it. If you can’t sell a game for so much as peanuts unless you’ve spent $20mi in graphics, but don’t see any monetary reward for spending more than a pittance on writing, you invest in graphics and tell the writers to bugger off.

There really are a few companies out there that really are trying to do their best by you. Kind of like politicians though, a lot of them apparently don’t lie their asses off enough to actually get people to pay them exorbitant amounts for shit and chips.

I’m not saying don’t criticise companies. Everyone has the right to criticise and be criticised. However the purpose of criticism is such that people can do things BETTER than they did before. It’s not valid to criticsise people for not doing the impossible.

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August 15, 2008

Casualties of War

Credit goes to Ysharros for putting it together.

Isn’t it great though?

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One Night

The little girl looked at the dark figure, but she couldn’t bring herself too. Her focus rested on the piece’s of the sheriff that were within view. Years of medical school screamed in her mind that she was going into shock, that she needed to get moving. It was the little girl that brought her back to reality, when she ran up to the dark figure happily screaming, “Daddy!”

She took a step forward only to be propelled backwards by a black tendril slicing through her upper left arm. She finally looked up into it’s face… and screamed.

It was a few moments of unbreathing terror while the dark hotel room came into focus. The walls around her were torn up and a burning pain suffused her whole left arm and right hand. Feelings of sliding skin and something hard crawled down her arm and through her hands, before the pain finally subsided.

She worked in silence packing up her few belongings, trying not to look at the destruction she caused in her sleep. For fifteen minutes she worked in silence, feeling stifled and claustrophobic, before finally opening the window and taking a deep breathe of the outside air.

First was the cold tang of the fall air, the sweetness of maple sap carried in it. Then something subtle caught her, something warm and sticky. A second later fire spread through her brain and body, all her muscles screamed to move towards it and the terrible sliding of her skin transforming returned extending to almost her entire body. She leapt out the window, propelled both physically and mentally.

Through the winding streets of the city she ran and jumped. Easily gliding over obstacles and racing over the narrow streets. As she got closer to the smell, the burning grew more and more intense, and more concentrated. The shops and apartment buildings gave way to warehouses, to empty spaces, to dilapidation. Through a broken window, into a near barren warehouse where some tarps and blankets were gathered into a rumpled pile.

A black figure shifted on top of the cloth, the pale, feminine, perfectly human, face starred at her unblinking for a few seconds. Another dark figure broke from the shadows at an entrance across the warehouse. Spines formed on her back and raised up into the air, the rival across the way returned the gesture. The two closed on each other, somewhere deep within her mind she wondered what this woman had been like before. They stopped to circle each other and size each other up, their spines were near the same size, their physiques similar, neither presenting a clear advantage.

Finally the rival moved in for the attack, swiping at her with whip like claws. She dodged most of them, but felt one scrape across her left side. Claws of her own formed and she struck with greater accuracy, ripping open a thigh. The rival charged in, trying to grapple her, but she hung back chipping away at their shoulders. When finally their momentum had curbed, she charged in shoulder first throwing her across the room and puncturing her chest with one of the spines.

A guttural roar welled up inside her, the spines on her back seeming to extend even further than they had before. The one time rival growled back, but retreated none the less, the superior candidate having already been proven. It wasn’t until she was sure they were alone that she approached the pitch black female who had drawn her there in the first place.

* * *

Jen stood over the body of the creature they had taken down at the hospital. It’s dead tissue would be useless to her studies, but the anatomy of the creature was more than enough to keep her busy for now. Extracting a few segments of what appeared to be black cartilage from the claws had already given them a clue as to their weapons.

The wounds on the creature were numerous, but that hadn’t seemed to stop it in life. Bullet wounds had healed on the spot and even lost limbs were replaced almost instantly. One shot had to have killed it, but with all the extraneous damage, it was hard to tell which one.

With a sigh, she picked up a stack of red rods and began mapping the bullet holes.

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Layout rework

Let me know if the layout is a bit easier to follow now.

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August 14, 2008

I’ve been busy

But it still isn’t to a working state just yet.

SW Wiki:Program.cs

I’ll leave it to your imagination, and the tags, as to what that code is supposed to be.

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Some Recent Painting

And in teeny tiny eyestrain-o vision for an avatar.

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August 13, 2008

Defying Age

I was listening to a brilliant TED talk earlier today, Why We Age and How We Can Avoid It, by Aubrey de Grey. In it he discusses the possibilities for how we may manage to overcome age in the future, and possibly even live forever. I recommend you go watch it, but the talk itself isn’t really what I want to discuss, but rather what I’m seeing a lot of in the comments.

Let me preface this a little; I don’t believe in a god, gods, godlike beings, deity, or anything of the sort. I believe that everything physical can be described by physical science though our current understanding may be incomplete, and that the watchmaker analogy is deeply and fundamentally flawed. It is flawed because it predicates a fundamental set of physical rules and relations, a natural law that is simply on a “divine” layer, which begs the question who designed the layer upon which the designer resides. Even if you could answer that question it would destroy the fundamental concept of most godly theologies because it would imply an infinite chain of gods… including at least one in our layer of natural law. Note though that I don’t ascribe to the title atheist. I am simply of the opinion that 99% of religions literally MUST be wrong due to their contradictory nature, and since I can know nothing either way, there is no point at all in worrying about it. (There will be plenty of time to consider god after death, assuming I don’t simply stop existing.)

Now that I have that out of the way, lets get to the meat and potatoes of the aging discussions. First and foremost, death is not a primary product of evolution. We were not evolved specifically to die, we simply had no reason to biologically evolve not to once we had a long enough life to reproduce. If we assume that our body will only die of age related complications in the 80-120 year range of life, then for most of our race’s collective lifespan we haven’t even pushed the edge of what evolution allotted us.

But the evolution discussion brings up another fundamental cross thought. Some make the argument that we should be evolving into optimal beings not staying stagnant at our current place. Natural selection has three requirements however, diversity, selection and replication, which means humans are no longer under it’s biological sway. Yes, we are diverse, yes we replicate, however we are no longer biologically selective outside of a very small cross section. At least in the developed world, more people live than die, and almost all diversity can be accepted along side the current mutations. Even the small portion of our population that could have been below the line for possible replication is being pulled up through the medicinal curing of otherwise fatal or sterilizing complications.

It may not be true for the entire world just yet, but we are only moving towards non-selection, not away from it. The reason why is because we have already been gifted with evolutions greatest gift, sentient intelligence. Our intelligence has allowed us to move away from biological limitations and through ideas and tools continue to evolve without hardly any reference to biology. Biology has already created the “optimal” species, a species that can optimize itself, and with good ideas we don’t have to wait a hundred thousand generations. If we really are a few decades out from the first steps in increased longevity, then we would have to be very poorly evolved indeed to ignore it.

Secondly, I don’t care if you think there is an afterlife and you assume that anyone who doesn’t must live in abject fear of death. It’s your burden to bear in life that you are such a presumptuous twat. Let me put it quite clearly, I do not fear death just like I don’t fear getting the flu. However, if you asked me which I would rather do, have the flu or be healthy, I’d rather be healthy, if you asked me whether I would rather live or die, I would rather live. Why? Because I can do more things that I care about alive than I can dead.

Along the whole afterlife lines, it’s great if you’re looking forward to dieing and going on that wondrous journey. I’m not. I really would rather live for as long as I possibly can in a healthy state, and if that means forever… great. You can opt out, that’s fine, you are allowed to have that choice, if however your not liking the idea of living forever means I can’t you can rightly fuck off.

I’m not going to mince words here, I’ve been suicidal for years and at the end of the day I’ve never thought of taking anyone else with me. If you feel the need to die at some point of old age, great, but return my favor and don’t try and take everyone who wants this stuff with you. Who knows, maybe even you won’t want to die right away when you actually have the option.

Finally, the sociological issue. I rather thought that a whole lot of what a bunch of very smart people were plying themselves to was to fix the sociology gaps by raising everyone’s standards. If you think that doing that is impossible… you are welcome to your opinion. The rest of us would like to have this option even if it is terribly expensive and hard to get at first. Those are hurdles we can deal with, who knows, maybe you’ll get loans to pay for it and your credit score really will be a life or death matter. Still I’m sure we’ll have lots of scientists working to make it cheaper and plenty of pressure to make it more available to charity organizations. Also, just because we aren’t solving all the worlds problem’s today doesn’t mean it’ll be impossible to in the future, have some hope in your fellow man.

Oh… one last thought on the comments. If the concept is to repair a large amount of the damage aging has done to your cells before they become a pathology, then you won’t have to wait 50 years to get reliable test results. In fact it should be as simple as comparing the cells before and after treatment, and maybe a couple years of observation to ensure that the cells are sustaining damage at the same rate as before the therapy.

My personal note on the talk, even if he is being optimistic on the time frame, I am still young enough to probably be in the group to benefit from this research. Kind of makes me wish I had money to help fund it.

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August 12, 2008

Some Sprites

Fond memories of Star General got me motivated to work on some artwork… who knows it may become part of a game sometime in the future.

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August 11, 2008

Star General

The game that started it all for me. No it wasn’t my first game, Xargon holds that honor, nor was it the first to really hook me, Jill of the Jungle. Star General was the game that made me sit there and say to myself, “I want to make games!”

Star General was an iteration on SSI’s Panzer General series, though I didn’t know that at the time. It was hex based space and ground warfare, you would have to move in and wipe out an enemies fleet, then bring in troop transports to conquer the land. It could be pretty punishingly tough at times, but the primary gameplay was always pretty simple. The game drew me in with how the races not only looked different but played different, despite sharing the same basic units across multiple races.

Most of all, just seeing the game in my cd case is enough to bring a smile to my face. A big thanks to allt he great folks at SSI for bothering to make the Panzer General Series.

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