In this final hour of 2005, I’m listening to American Edit and trying to keep my mind focused on a quest design test I’ve been asked to complete. Game design is the one job I’ve never bothered to pursue — while I respect, admire and am friends with several in the job, for every one that’s good at it, there are 10 more without any talent for doing much other than think Deep Thoughts about games and claim to have “dream games” that they’d make if only The Industry would lend them funding.

Sigh. But I was asked nicely, and it didn’t seem too hard in practice to come up with an idea that seemed worth writing down. Lately it’s been suggested that I need an attitude adjustment. This seems like the best way at hand to do something about that.

Here’s to 2006 being better. For all of us.

Right, so that game mod project I’ve been bothering most of my nearest and dearest about for the past year and a half? The one using a five-year-old game engine to remake a 19-year-old RPG classic?

Game on. 1.1 patch released tonight, though not all the bugs are fixed. By grace of our creation and of our fans, the past week has been pretty much all love.

I’m pretty well resolved that I’ll never get to work on another game project again. One free mod’s likely enough for me (and I’m not done supporting this one.) But it feels better than just about anything I’ve ever done thus far in my life, so here’s hoping it lasts a while.

Flying out tomorrow, will be back Sunday. Lazarus will be available for download by then.

Merry Christmas to all, and all its secular trappings.

Leave me alone. Only one weekend left before Lazarus launches, and I’ve got to pitch in as much as I can. Like, more than I have. Which has been a lot. Really. Though others have done more. Lots more.

Yeah, I need a new job, too. That’ll have to wait. Christmas is coming too.

Back from vacation. Just what I need, deadlines before I even make it back to work.

Oh well. I’m in such better spirits, I could almost care less.

I hated this movie, but I love Angry Alien Productions and the artist’s benefactor, Starz.

You’ll shoot your eye out!

We’re getting close.

Filefront (direct)
Putfile(direct)
FileRush

From the “Your Childhood Nostalgia Is A Load of Worthless Garbage” comes Patrick Stewart’s next shitty cartoon voiceover gig, as if “Steamboy” wasn’t enough. IMDB lists this as “a ‘midquel’, the story taking place in the middle of the first Bambi movie. It is your basic teenage angst tale…”

Yeah, a basic teenage angst tale about a DEER. I suspect he freaks out in a rutting rage upon getting his first antlers and gores Thumper and Flower, then narrowly escapes getting clipped by a passing SUV, the kind they didn’t have in 1942 when the original movie was made.

In Disney’s defense, however, there were apparently two other Bambi movies produced in the Soviet Union in the mid-80s, in the peak of the Cold War. Seriously. I suspect vodka was involved. Vodka is always involved in Russia. That and radioactive fallout.

My nieces got the DVD when it came out last year. My mom reported that it was remarkable how little actually happened in the original Bambi movie. They watched it after seeing The Incredibles, which was probably the wrong order.