Null Station Chronicles title test
A special treat for anyone who follows this blog: the new opening titles for the video version of the podcast, before even the podcast subscribers learn about it!
Classic Game “Marathon” Free on Steam
Released in 1994, this game could be called a Doom clone. It used a game engine that couldn’t handle ramps, curves, or solid enemy models. You can’t even jump! But it still had great graphics and an entire short sci-fi novel hidden in terminals that gave you objectives and the plot. I played this *so* much and even helped with creating a makeover mod for it!
Available free on Steam.
“Disinfection Protocol”
I wrote this in 2019 for a charity anthology. A mysterious casket had been unearthed in Alexandria, Egypt; the editors invited us to speculate as to the contents. Copyright is back to me, now; I welcome reasonable publication offers! This does tie in with other works in my “Core Code” universe, including “Flight of Doves”, “Jewel Team”, and “Managlitch City Underground”; exactly how, would be telling!
I should never have looked so closely at the bones. [Read more…]
Weapons Test
More 3D printing! This is a scene from one of my short comedy films in which intergalactic bounty hunter Sammie Eden is helping test some dubious “armor” against even more dubious “weapons”. The Diorama was a present for the actress. The pieces are kit-bashed from all kinds of sources, and often heavily modified by me in the Blender software.
About Damn Time For Dancing
I have commissioned a custom avatar twice, each time for a considerable (for me) amount of money. Now that I’ve used VRoid Studio, I understand that each time that’s what the artist was using, and it was time for me to buckle down and learn it well enough to get the results I wanted. The artists I commissioned weren’t sure about simulating facial hair, adding the hair bow, or adapting the VRoid for Beat Saber among other things.
But now I have had a little practice. (Though it looks like I may somehow have deleted the save file, so the next incarnation may look a little different once again.) This time, the MeidoRanger looks even more like me and has a fun hairstyle that swings around while I move. And I figured out how to make the outfit glossy in Unity while I was adapting the VRoid for VR gaming use. I swear, I’m learning more about 3D modeling than I ever intended to!
I literally had to downgrade my Unity install: the feature that animates the hair and skirt doesn’t yet work with the newest. (Thankfully, one can have multiple installs.) The only way to get a bow on the back of my head was to lie to VRoid and claim it was oddly-styled hair. Of course, I had to fix the neckline since I have no maid dresses which show it, and I had to put on a second invisible skirt so that the apron tails would move separately. So many little things to do! Next, I plan to curl the fingers so I’m holding the sabers better. But of now, I’m really happy with this avatar, and plan to make videos with far greater frequency. I think we can agree, it’s about damn time.
Artificial Life on Mars
I couldn’t stay up to watch Curiosity, since I’d had a very long weekend, and an early Monday morning to head to. In fact, I didn’t manage to stay up until 10 last night. But I felt confident that Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ would tell me everything I needed to know when I woke in the morning, and they did. Well done NASA!
I spent some time at NASA Langley. Unless you know some of these folks you might not believe how hard they work at their jobs, how committed they are to expanding the scope of human knowledge, and how hard they have to fight against budgets and bureaucracy to accomplish the things that they do. This is one of the moments in my life that, however briefly, I’m proud of the human race. Let’s do more like this!
Goodbye to my TravelMech
Back in 2000, the Dodge Aries I drove at the time began to have suspension problems which would cost far more to fix than was practical. With a need to get to work, I found a 1979 Ford LTD III on the local market for $500, and got to enjoy driving a tank for a while. However, the idea of me driving a 20-year-old Ford appalled my father so much that he convinced me to let him help me buy my first new car ever, a 2001 Hyundai Elantra.
I got 12 lovely years of service out of that car. It's taken me to destinations ranging from New York to Charlotte, played nice on gas, had exactly enough room for my daily needs, and fit my driving style nicely. But over the decade-plus of travel, it clocked 175,000 miles, and this last weekend it had had enough. While on the highway, the engine developed a sudden catastrophic oil leak, and the engine tore itself apart before I could do anything.
Saturday afternoon, I sold the Elantra for a couple hundred dollars of scrap value. What else was I going to do, four hours from home? I found it difficult to let it go, I had to not think about it too much while cleaning out all the stuff I'd left in it over the years. But I'm driving a replacement already, a red Hyundai of the same model that my mom no longer needs, and it only has 40,000 miles on it. And I have to say, on today's drive to work I couldn't help but notice the much smoother, cleaner ride. It's true, there were a lot of things that needed fixing on the old Hyundai, some higher-priority than others:
* Short in wiring harness made fuel pump shut off on occasion
* Faint smell of fuel when tank was completely full
* Pothole bent front axle slightly, car never completely in alignment again
* CV joints on front axle wearing out
* Transmission liked to drop randomly into third gear and stay there until car restarted
* Dashboard clock flickered on and off
* CD player failed, liked to interrupt radio with error beeps
* Cosmetic body damage on left rear door, right rear bumper, hood
* Key fob would remotely unlock car, but not lock it
So maybe it was just the green Hyundai's time. On top of everything else, the license tags needed renewing. I certainly can't complain about how it held up to the years and the mileage. Still, that car was a companion, and it feels like a chapter has come to a close.
Traveller
That’s right, I’m not dead yet. I just haven’t felt like journalling at all in months – my creativity and ability to string words together has been darn near zero.
But sometimes, going through my old work will inspire me a bit. To that end, here’s a video walkthrough of the video game level I designed – an addon for Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge, a game still available for play on Mac, Windows, and Linux via the Aleph One game engine.
Designing game levels is fun… and doing something I haven’t done in years may be just what I needed to stretch my muscles a bit!
To Healthy Competition
Some of my fellow geeks seem surprised when they learn I’m happy that Android phones are doing so well. But even though I’m using an iPhone now, I’d prefer that it be a difficult choice; I may like Apple products, but I want there to always be someone out there that keeps them innovating, refining, and generally working hard to convince me that they should keep my business. There was a bad period in the nineties when Apple computers were beginning to… well, ‘suck’ is probably too strong a word, though plenty of folks used it. Now that the company’s doing so well, I’d hate to see them get lazy again.
So if you have an Android phone, and you really like it, I think that’s awesome and I won’t try especially hard to evangelize you. Don’t let them get lazy on you, either 🙂
