As a rule I generally resist attempts to goad me into commentary.  Those who know me well are quite aware that the best way to solicit my opinion is just to sit back and wait for me to pontificate.  It is in my nature to hold forth on matters pertinent and otherwise to such a degree and with such frequency that in no short amount of time even my closest friends and family will grow exceedingly tired of hearing the sound of my voice.  (A state which apparently I’ve never found myself in, though others are there often enough.)  Actually poking and prodding me for my opinion usually has the opposite effect.

That is why I was reluctant to respond to Pill’s goading over my brief comment to her on Bush’s diplomacy.  Coupled with this knee-jerk reaction was also the general rule I follow about not engaging in political debate with members of The Anvil raid, and most especially not my officers.  Given the extreme divisiveness that follows political debate in the everyday arena anymore it simply isn’t wise to tread into that particular mud-pit and expect everyone to behave calmly and rationally and not get their feelings hurt or egos bruised.

In this instance however I will make an exception to that rule and deny my own stubborn instinct.

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Blessed Internet, how I love your devious, twisted powers. I’m sure many folks have already seen the O’Rielly meltdown footage from his old days at Inside Edition (I had completely forgotten he worked that gig until I saw it!) Well thanks to the awesome distributive power of the Web and the hilarious creativity of some already anonymous and forgotten individual we now have a video that I probably shouldn’t laugh so much at - but I just couldn’t help myself. It got funnier each time I re-loaded it.

Please observe this, your official Content Warning. I for one am very glad I didn’t come across this link at work.

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After two and a half years of frustration one of my domains finally was released back into the wild without being immediately latched onto by the lecherous domain profiteering machine that controls modern name assignment. In celebration of this momentous (and apparently rare) occasion I have given birth to a new iteration of the old site.

The layout looks the same of course, and the features are half missing. I can’t find any of my old Movable Type database info, so nearly everything is lost in that respect. I do however have the substance of some of my previous commentary saved locally and will be working on getting those posts which might still be worth referencing and reading input into the new Wordpress digs I now enjoy.

Obviously I’m still toying with the template pages to get all the features back up and running inside of the design I established. I could just move to a new theme of course. I did consider it briefly. Call it stubborn if you like, but in the end I decided I like my old design too much to give up on it just because it requires some extra work to get this thing to play nice with my established layout. In any case you’ll have to bear with me over the coming weeks as I get features back up and running.

In the meantime - thanks for completely forgetting about me oh grand Blogosphere. It’s almost as though I never existed.

We shall have to remedy that.

One of the things which I most appreciate and enjoy about our team on the Starsiege 2845 project is how aware our leadership, and indeed most of our members, are of the great fallacies and dysfunctions at work in the games industry today. The elaborate waste, ingrained stupidity, bureaucratic nonsense, dreadful mismanagement, IP dilution, employee abuse, poor production values, and lousy QA policies – none of these unfortunate realities are lost on our team. As fans and artists we’ve watched with dismay as the industry has accepted a string of worst practices as a priori assumptions of the game development process.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to any of us to read this account from an EA widow who is having to cope with the human cost exacted on her husband by the publishing giant. They are in effect emptying him out of all his energy, talent, and love for the art of making games and are willing to planning on discarding him like a wasted prophylactic product when they have sucked every last useful drop of effort from him they can manage. Witness the status-quo for too much of the gaming industry:

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History never seems to happen quite so fast as our progressive pundits predict that it will, nor as fast as we would seem to like it to. Nevertheless it does happen. Paradigms are abolished in favor of new orders, industries rise and fall, governments do change and in retrospect we can often look back call the developments speedy affairs. While they are in process though they tend to take forever happening and never come in quite the fashion we expected nor on the timetables presented us by the insightful analysts who hold forth on such subjects.

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It is really a very typical sort of encounter for me. I’ve quite gotten used to it. I am standing in a store aisle lusting after some new technological toy when the lady in the purple dress suit approaches me and asks, “Excuse me, Sir. Can you help me?” It used to bother me, but I’ve worked retail in one form or another for a substantial period of my life and I’ve learned why it happens and come to terms with it.

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