Tuesday 11th March 2003
This might be more of a News of the Stoopid than a What's New. Not that you can really tell the difference anymore....
For those who haven't heard about this amazing bullshit yet, we're apparently changing the name of french fries to FreedomFries. Why? Two reasons.
First of all: Duhmericans are morons who actually think chips come from France.
Second: France has failed to condone the invasion into Iraq. This hardly comes as a surprise. We went through the same thing back in 1986 when France refused to allow anyone to fly through their airspace on the way to Lybia. I'm still not sure what the French planned to do about it if we'd flown through it anyway; the last time anyone heard from them was forty-three years earlier when they handed their country to Germany and cried in the streets for mercy.
So. In retaliation against France's latest annoyance [we're apparently not accidentally going to bomb their embassy this time], we're renaming all French things to Freedom things.
Starting with the cafeterias in the House of Representatives.
'This action today is a small, but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.' --Representative Bob Ney, of Ohio.
North Carolina Representative Walter Jones concurs: 'I represent a district with multiple military bases that have deployed thousands of troops. As I've watched these men and women wave goodbye to their loved ones, I am reminded of the deep love they have for the freedom of this nation and their desire to fight for the freedom of those who are oppressed overseas. Watching France's self-serving politics of passive aggression in this effort has discouraged me more than I can say.'
Therefore, FrenchFries are now FreedomFries. Also on the menu are FreedomToast, FreedomBread, and FatFree FreedomDressing.
After dinner, of course, FreedomKissing may lead to the use of FreedomTicklers. Which may lead to most of us running off to join the FreedomForeignLegion.
Personally, I don't really care. Well, I care about this, of course; this is too idiotic to overlook. But, regarding the invasion into Iraq: I don't care. Do it or don't. If someone assassinates Hussein and prevents him from annoying me for another twelve years, I won't complain. That's about it though. I don't really care either way. Not enough to protest the War on Iraq, anyway.
Instead, I've decided to protest the War on Illiteracy. I know: it's odd that a novelist would protest the War on Illiteracy; but that's my position. Better Dead than Read. Reading is Fundamentalist. Burn Books, not Villages. Getting the idea here?
You're not buying any of this, are you....
Okay; let's move on....
Remember a few days ago when I mentioned that I'd have to find a new use for HellhoundRecords.com? I may have found it. And it coincides with the answer to a question we've been getting a lot of lately: whatever happened to the old RFG/RFD episodes, and will they ever be available again.
They'll be available again.
We're currently in the process of reverse-engineering and remastering the old shows. The current plan is to put together a sort of Best of Radio Free Duhmerica compendium, with the better bits from the better shows. In the future, we might go back and release the shows in their entireties on CD. Since I've got the URL anyway, I'll probably set them up for release through Hellhound Records.
Of course, there are about a hundred Hellhound Records out there. We'll just have the only one with the DotCom. Go us.
We're also putting some thought into CDRoms. There's been some interest in CDs of various largish things from the Grempire--oversized Flash intros and so on; if there's actually enough content of interest to push the limits on a 700MB CD, we might do that.
And, of course, there's Deadache. Or, there will be. One of these decades. This is something I'm actually planning ahead for: rendering the show at DVD quality and then mashing it into a smaller webfriendly version for downloads. The mashing part is, of course, half the current problem. There's only so much mashing you can do to half an hour of fullmotion video, and the result is something still unfriendly to dialups. So the potential to release the episodes on DVDs is looking like a good idea.
Regarding Deadache and quality issues, it's looking like the idea of emulating the newer GameCube games might be a bit too ambitious. Presuming we don't do the thing in DirectX by coding each movement--which would take years--we're looking at rendering times of over a minute a frame--which would take years--to make the show look like, say, Resident Evil Zero.
So I'm now screentesting a more simplified version--something like RE3 or Silent Hill. Less organic, less antialiased, and more like the Engrish games we're satirising anyway. The idea here was never to make something looking like Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, but to make something with all the logic and importance of FinalFantasyX: Random Encounters with BadGuys in a Tomb No One's Been in for Millions of Years.
Anyway....
Oh yeah. I meant to mention this before; and I'm not going to go find a way to slip it in up there. About Radio Free Duhmerica: we're about ready to start doing that again. We've tested everything out, and we can do it. The only thing we're waiting on right now is for Greenback to get stabilised enough in his classified location to patch in and be on the show. For the sake of argument, we'll say that RFD will begin again on 1st April. Which is nice since, if something prevents it from happening, I'll have a neat excuse all ready to use....
More Later....
--Gremlin