Thursday 8th May 2003
Okay. I'm back. Got busy with things again. Long story.
Top story this hour: christians are terrorists.
Some of us have known this for a while. Others are finally hearing about it officially. For example: CourtTV had a show on the other night about the Prisoners of Christ morons. Known also as the POC, since christians aren't smart enough to leave prepositions out of acronyms. Christians also lack the intelligence to realise that a Prisoner of Christ would be one of Christ's captives, not a captive who happens to be christian. According to the idea behind Prisoners of Christ, an Enemy of the State would be a state-affiliated enemy of something else. Which is not the case. As evidenced by the state incarcerating such Enemies of the State as the Prisoners of Christ.
Idiots.
The show focussed on Shelly Shannon--the idiot who failed to kill George Tiler, MD. Although it did have a neat, if self-defeating quote from fellow terrorist Paul Hill: [Shelly Shannon] is not Christ; but she does represent him.
I'll buy that. Christ is represented by terrorists. Noted.
Meanwhile, the clickable image to the right leads to a screenshot of another christian terrorist. jc_hate_crew_martyr. Also known as jc_hate_crew_anthrax, jc_hate_crew_chaos, jc_hate_crew_demon, jc_hate_crew_evil, jc_hate_crew_gimp, jc_hate_crew_satan, jc_hate_crew_sinister_minister, and wosk_wabbit_wifle. The entity behind all the jc_hate_crew_terrorist names is a christian idiot targeting those of us who aren't insane enough to be theistic by fecklessly trying to knock us out of the chatroom with PMBombs. While he fails to boot anyone, he definitely manages to disrupt things there.
So, I've decided that, like Shelly Shannon, jc_hate_crew_sciptkiddie represents christians. So this is the new situation. Until or unless I see evidence that jc_hate_crew_martyr has been killed IRL, all christians are the fucking enemy. Call that a bounty if you like. I don't really care. If christians, by omission of action, alow idiots like this to live and represent their cause, I have to infer that he's authorised to represent their cause, not unlike the terrorist who shot and failed to kill George Tiler.
Christians are terrorists. And, to paraphrase one such christian terrorist: if you're with the christians, you're against us. I'm officially done allowing for the casual christian who figures it's safe enough to be a christian for no particular reason, based on some weird slant on Pascal's Losing Wager.
I'm an atheist; this is my foxhole; I have no intention of losing this fucking war. Surrender or fucking die.
Let's move on....
I probably don't have to mention that I'm still working on Deadache here. I've been SDKing the living hell out of LightWave7.5 to get it to do a few things it wasn't exactly designed to do.All of which is technical enough that less than a dozen people alive are likely to be interested in the details, let alone have the slightest idea what I'm talking about if I don't start a tutorial with Step One: turn the computer on using the 1/0 button and let Windoze load for a few hours. Details aside, I've made some progress with it.
I took a day off to run through Resident Evil Two, Three, Zero, and One, in that order. Two, of course, failed to work for long. Either I need to get a new copy, or I need to get a new PS2. Or both. Three [Nemesis] is arguably the silliest of the epic. It's not quite as dumb as Survivor, but it has got the worst Engrish. It appears that this is not enough to make the device...to work. You'd think someone who spoke English--or even Duhmerican--might have played the game through before it was released upon its victims. It's also a lot of fun to deal with There is a ladder. Will you go up the ladder? There is shotgun ammo. Will you take the shotgun ammo? You have taken the shotgun ammo. Controller not detected; press O to continue....
PS2: live in your world; our world is full of idiotic questions.
A lot of these problems were solved by moving over to GameCube. Although, rumour has it that Res2 and Res3 are direct ports, still containting all the Engrish and singlemesh/limitedbone/texturemismatching from the PlayStation versions. I'm not sure about that yet though [I haven't cared enough yet to waste a hundred bucks on a pair of games I probably already have], since one review mentioned CrimsonHeads in Res3, which sure as hell never appear in the PSOne game. Not that it matters much now that there's finally a GameShark for the Cube. Which makes Res0 and Res1 a hell of a lot more interesting [I sprinted through Res1 from the opening cinema through the ending credits in five minutes by loading all the items into the crates at the beginning; of course, since I never so much as met Rebecca, let alone saved her, I got the ending where the mansion isn't destroyed].
So. Having gone through the games again, and noting the massive differences between Res3 and Res1, I'm back to wondering exactly how to make Deadache look. In case you've never actually played either of these, I'll show you the difference here.
ign.com has a few videos from each game online. Pick one, click on Videos, and have a look. If you're not subscribed to ign.com, you'll get cut off after a couple of links; delete the cookies ign.com bothers you with and move on to the next one.
Something to keep in mind is that Res1 and Res0 are actually created in LightWave, with pretty good characters. Which is to say that the gameplay doesn't differ much from the cutscene cinemas. In the case of Res3...I'm not sure what they used for the cinemas--possibly Poser or 3DStudio; the gameplay itself involves sprites whose limbs appear to be about four polygons each, with texturemaps which never quite match up to anything. We've come a long way with realtime since 1998, I guess.
Meanwhile, the other games, like SilentHill, HalfLife, and so on, all look a lot like Res3. Which makes me think that we should go with the singlemesh/limitedbone/mismatchedtexturemap look for Deadache. Which presents certain problems, of course. Animating characters with only a few moving parts looks a lot like making a stopmotion film with Star Wars figures. You end up with people talking to each other whose lips aren't moving at all. Which is, of course, funny to watch; I'm just not sure anyone will understand why it's happening.
One advantage, though, is that animating takes a lot less time if you're just moving actionfigures around and having them sort of point at each other while this weird telepathy is going on in voiceover. So I'm leaning toward Res2/3 and presuming that people will understand that I'm not the one who sucks at animating things.
Which reminds me. Those who have actually been here since the beginning of 1997 might remember Version One of gremlin.net. Which was a mess, of course. Mostly because I was about the only guy online with a 1600*1200 monitor back then, and I didn't realise that dropping a 1280*1024 image onto a website was a Bad Idea. So that's what I did. I had this massive image of an AT-AT at the top of the index.html, followed mostly by a bulletted list of things I was going to add next.
Somewhere over the years, I lost the image. Which was probably just as well.
In looking through old LightWave stuff recently, though, I found the original file I used to make the image.
The animation I made from it is pretty big. About fifteen megabytes. If you can handle that, click here to see it again.
More later....
--Gremlin