longwing

This is a late update from Friday, sorry for the delay in posting it here.



The scanner died halfway through the scan. I only have the first of two pages, cut off mid sentence. I’m trying to fix it, but you might have to wait a while for the last scan.

This is easily my favorite prop from Lee's box. It took quite a bit of work to put together, and came out absolutely fantastic. The intern may protest it's existence, but then again, he's not the sort to look at a prop like this and say "Oooh neat!" You can expect to see at least one more photo of the jar, this one doesn't really show off the prop's more horrific elements, and the 8 year old in me wants to gross some folk out.

Welcome to the "behind the scenes" section of the site. The latest page from Lee's box is scanned and uploaded. If you have any out-of-character questions or comments regarding the Darkened Heart, please feel free to post them here.

The latest page of Darkened Heart is now live.

1 - It's one of the best games I've ever played. Right up there with System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Thief 2.

2 - I feel a little guilty about that, like I lose some kind of Indy cred for liking something so phenomenally popular. At least ME2 earned its vast popularity, unlike some cultural phenomena.

3 - They let you import a Mass Effect 1 save game. The decisions you made during ME1 then come back into play for ME2. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes small. You get emails from the people you saved, that's awesome.

4 - Though not as awesome as the intergalactic sci-fi spam. A Batarian businessman has millions of credits tied up by the Citadel Bureaucracy. If you could just help him with the transfer...

5 - One of your crew performed Gilbert and Sullivan as a youth. Ask nicely and he'll give you a rendition of "I am the very model of a scientist Salarian", it's one of the funniest moments of sci-fi I've ever seen.

6 - I don't understand why people keep saying that ME2 has invented it's own Genre. It's a Thinking Man's Shooter. Granted, the category is tiny, but most of the ground in ME2 was walked by Deus Ex and System Shock 2 first. ME2 walks it better, but it's still the same ground.

7 - I feel really weird admitting that this game is as good as Deus Ex. I didn't think that was physically possible. I'll get over it eventually.

8 - If you don't feed the fish in your captain's cabin, they die. They don't tell you this ahead of time, just figured I'd warn any would-be fish buyers.

9 - The endgame raises some interesting issues regarding Transhumanity, which is a favorite philosophical subject of mine. From a Transhumanist perspective, you're kind of the bad guy. I'll cover that in a more cogent post later.

10 - The voice actor for Female Sheppard (Sheppard is the main character's last name) is about six times more awesome than the voice actor for Male Sheppard. Just sayin', the game's better when you play as a girl.

That's all for now.

I've been reading up on Racefail '09, a task both fascinating and deeply painful. I would strongly recommend these articles, and all associated linked articles, to everyone. I sincerely hope your reaction will not be nearly as personally wracking as mine.

Go read. It's worth your time. Not necessarily good or bad, but worth it. No seriously, this shit matters:

Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part I
Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part II
Taking One for the Team: K. Tempest Bradford

And that's all I'm going to say on the subject. The whole thing makes me angry, and it makes me tired. Every time I try to put voice to my place within this debate, it comes out as nothing more than wrath and venom and unbridled rage. I can hardly look at it. The words crush my heart in my chest and steal the breath from me. It's physically painful to read, even when it's right on point and absolutely correct.

So I won't. I can't come from a place of contribution. So I'm going to shut up and point you to the people who are contributing. If you really really really need to know my actual thoughts on the matter, you'll have to get me very drunk first. Good luck with that.

I'm debating website names. Sorry, no slick polls, those are for paid users only.

Names I have thus far:

Sunken Library
(sunkenlibrary.com)

Final Codex
(finalcodex.com)

I'll take votes for either, or suggestions for something entirely new. This will be the fiction site where I'm posting my most recent project (at first) and additional projects later. I don't want to lock it into a single project, so it needs to be generic enough to support a wide variety of (my) interests.

Thoughts?

You should see this.

Also, someone ramped a Nerf Vulcan up to 500 rounds per minute. Then they repainted it and added an aliens-style ammo counter. Brilliant.

Stealing a little news from BoingBoing, it seems that Kevin Werbach is a WoW player, and it turns out that his identity in wow wasn't hard to find.

He plays a Level 70 Tauren Shaman: Supernovan.

No, that's not the funny part. The funny part is the personality analysis, provided by the one who uncovered the information. Personality analysis... of a WoW toon... I'm not sure what's funnier, that there is an analysis, or that it's just about spot-on for Level 70 Tauren Shaman.