Fan Novelizations of STAR CONTROL II Online

Back when I was a wee lad, my parents bought a personal computer that ran Windows 3.1 and one of the early games I had was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. The game had a more explicitly "fun" starship-combat simulator I remember playing with my cousins and a prolonged story-based game that I never actually finished--I just kind of wandered around in the spaceship harvesting minerals from planets to buy ships and occasionally fighting the bad aliens. Eventually, as what often happens with childhood toys, I lost interest and the original disks, if they're even still around, are buried in my parents' house somewhere.

(I eventually learned how the game ended sometime in college or post-college. I won't bore you with the details, but there is an actual storyline and sequence of events.)

Well over the last couple days I got curious about good old Star Control and did some digging online. There's actually a dedicated Wiki for Star Control and quite a bit on the almighty TVTropes. It turns out that there's actually a novelization of the game's storyline written by uber-fan Tommi Salminen. Two 400-page novels, one covering the beginning of the game where you arrive at Earth and find it under an Ur-Quan slave shield and the other covering the later part of the story, once alliances with different alien races have been made and the truth about the Ur-Quan's motivations is revealed.

Here's the first one, Groombridge Log. The second one is Eternal Doctrine. Although I'd have preferred more description of the technology, characters, etc.--that's a problem with fan-fiction, the writer assumes everybody knows what everything looks like--they're still pretty entertaining.

Enjoy!

The Geekly Oddcast On Reboots, Cartoon or Otherwise

In case you haven't heard, I'm in the new The Geekly Oddcast podcast with my friends Thomas, Nick, Daniel, and some other people I don't know as well. The second episode, which covers cartoon reboots, is the first episode I'm actually in.

Here you go!

Most of the programs we discuss on the podcast are shows I didn't regularly watch as a child, like Reboot or The Powerpuff Girls. However, I do remember regularly watching DuckTales despite, even as a preschooler or early elementary schooler, I found the theme song incredibly annoying.

(When I dropped that bomb that got a lot of people on the podcast aggravated. However, to prove my DuckTales cred, I will cite a VHS tape "Lost World Wanderers" Mom got me, which had "Dinosaur Ducks" where the gang visits a prehistoric lost world and "The Curse of Castle McDuck" where they encounter the Hound of Baskervilles. I also remember watching episodes featuring a robotic killer whale and Donald Duck in the Navy, as well as Magica de Spell and creatures that remind me a lot of Sirens from Greek mythology. My grandmother Quinn even took my little brother and I to see DuckTales The Movie: The Treasure of the Lost Lamp, which the Myopia podcast discussed here.)

The podcast got derailed some into non-cartoon reboots like Michael Bay's Transformers and Ninja Turtles films, which I enjoyed but the others didn't particularly like. That was probably my fault, since I didn't watch the main shows being discussed to the degree the others did. However, it did generate some good conversation and jokes. :)

However, there was one cartoon property I do have some familiarity with, and that was Thundercats. I remember watching the original show when visiting my grandparents, which would have been in the late 1980s, and I saw some of the Thundercats reboot on YouTube. Those episodes seemed a lot more thoughtful and sophisticated in terms of characterization and storytelling than I remember the original show being. Unfortunately, it didn't attract the attention of today's kids (despite being more anime in visual style), nor did it bring in the fans of the original. So it ran for only one season. :(

So if you like animation in general or you're a fan of the Myopia episodes dealing with animated movies, come check this episode out!

My "Save the GOP" Reading List

Last year I wrote a few thousand words on a political book tentatively entitled A Republican Party That Can Win California. I discussed some of the issues and themes I would touch upon in earlier blog posts on topics like the economic philosophy of distributism, ways conservative-leaning organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Boy Scouts can make themselves useful, and avoiding over-reliance on the Christian Right and religious politics generally.

I'm not sure if this book is going anywhere even though I've written several thousand words on it. I'm more interested in writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror than in being a policy wonk, even though I'd be darn good at the latter. If we're going to go with comparative advantage, I'd be better off focusing on my fictional pursuits.

But on the other hand, I do enjoy reading all these political books. So here are some of the books I've mentioned in previous blog posts and the lessons I've drawn from them.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution-One of the biggies I've learned from this is that many polluting industries are government-subsidized. If you want more of something, subsidize it, and pollution is something we really don't want. So abolish or drastically limit subsidies to oil, gas, etc. so that their "real" cost impacts the market. This doesn't even necessarily mean imposing unpopular new taxes, if cutting subsidies alone can do the job (and save the deficit-wracked government money too).

Unleashing the Second American Century-This puts a damper on a lot of the gloom-and-doom scenarios about America's future. Yes, this country has problems that need to be solved and sitting around chanting, "We're number one" when in fact we are not isn't going to solve them. However, optimism and a sunny outlook are a good way to win elections (see Ronald Reagan) and there are great strengths in this country, great strengths that proper policies can leverage. For example, spending money on science and research is a worthy investment in terms of productivity, jobs, attracting and sustaining vital industries, etc.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home-Author Richard Haass points out that many potential great-power competitors to the United States are suffering from various long-term problems (for example, until very recently Russia's population was declining), so the United States can safely focus on fixing internal problems without risking a rival state getting in too strong a position. It was probably from this book that I found the idea of stapling a green card on every foreign-born graduate of a U.S. college, a policy supported by none other than 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

The Second Machine Age-This had a lot of interesting ideas. For starters, it points out that technology is going to increasingly automate any job that could be considered "routine." This will have many consequences, including worsening prospects for those who are less skilled. As far as policy implications are concerned, the authors have several based on the idea that one taxes what one wishes to discourage and subsidizes what one wishes to encourage. A negative income tax--first proposed by Richard Nixon and supported by people like Milton Friedman--would ensure that consumption levels are kept up while avoiding the welfare trap. The U.S. already has the earned-income tax credit, which is kinda-sorta one. Meanwhile, there's a Pigovian tax scheme could be used to discourage pollution.

Whistling Past Dixie-This book makes the argument that the Democratic Party can win national elections without the South, including the counterfactual that if the Democrats had spent the resources they'd plowed into South Carolina in Ohio, they'd have won in 2004. The lesson for Republicans is they can't rely on just one region or cultural grouping for victory. Furthermore, given the demographic problems the Republican Party is predicted to have, not trying to bring more people into the tent risks bringing this scenario to pass.

Day of Empire-The book's thesis is that states that are more tolerant of differing ethnicities, religions, etc. tend to be do better economically. Some anecdotal bits include the Spanish expelling Jews and the Ottomans taking them in and thus benefiting from their skills and trading connections and the Nazis kicking out their Jewish scientists, who proceeded to come to America and build the atomic bomb. As far as American politics are concerned, Chua cites instances where so many talented people were abandoning their European homelands for the new United States that European governments attempted to forcibly stop them. If the U.S. had a more open immigration policy, we could continue our time-honored tradition of creaming off other countries' talented people.

The Devil in Dover-Opponents of the theory of evolution are, to be perfectly blunt, a political albatross and potentially dangerous to U.S. science education, which is going to be more and more important in an age of automation.

Game Change-It's been a very long time since I've read the book, but I do remember stuff Republicans can learn from. For starters, the choice of Sarah Palin to be John McCain's running mate. Whatever this might have done to get social conservatives on-board, it was a net loss elsewhere, especially given McCain's advanced age and health problems. The shenanigans on the Democratic side of the aisle can be an object lesson on what not to do--John Edwards' narcissism and refusal to listen to his aides' concerns about his affair, for example. And even remarks not intended to be mean can come off as such--see Harry Reid's comments about Obama.

Double Down-Some examples of what not to do, including the failure of Jon Huntsman--the candidate I supported--to campaign worth a rip. Huntsman was a major missed opportunity for the Republicans that year due to his various qualifications, but he failed to seize it. The fact "the base" would likely to be hostile to him wouldn't have helped things, but the fact he apparently believed it was beneath his dignity to ask people for money or criticize his opponents and his unwillingness to use his family money (when combined with the first issue) was all on him. Rick Perry's campaign collapsing due to some of the strange things he said while on painkillers after surgery is another lesson to learn from.

Pillar to the Sky-Yes, this is fiction, but it's very plausible, science-focused science fiction on how beneficial a space elevator can be. Not only would it make getting things into orbit significantly cheaper and easier, but running solar panels up the entire length of the elevator would make it a massive energy generator. If even a small tax percentage-wise were imposed on the energy generated from such a structure, it would make the government holding jurisdiction incredibly rich and allow for cutting other taxes, investment in worthy projects, etc. This also ties in with my blog post about a "space-industrial complex" to reorient the present military-industrial complex to cheaper, more long-term constructive ends without the political fighting and economic problems that outright axing it would cause.

There're also a lot of newspaper articles, blog posts, etc. that went into the project, but if I listed all of them, this blog post would get entirely too long.

On Sony, THE INTERVIEW, and Free Speech

I got into an interesting Facebook discussion with my friend Zaid Jilani after I posted this article about how both Republicans and Democrats are standing together against attempts by North Korea (or groups putting on a very good show of acting on behalf of the regime) to stop The Interview as a piece of uplifting news.

To make a long story short, Zaid said that this wasn't a free-speech issue, but Sony covering up for the incompetence of its IT department (Sony has been hacked before, on top of this recent bit of idiocy) by using the hack as part of a publicity campaign for The Interview, a movie that it feared would not do well. He did not see why he ought to give money to a company that repeatedly puts its customers at risk by failing to secure its electronics. To make a long story short, he said that Sony has been playing everybody rushing to its defense in the name of "free speech."

To be fair, he's raised some good points. If he doesn't want to see The Interview because that would be rewarding incompetence, so be it. And I could easily imagine any executive with any degree of intelligence following the dictum of never letting a good crisis go to waste. No less an authority than Forbes magazine agrees.

However, I disagree that it's not a free-speech issue:

*Most of the major American movie chains refused to screen the movie out of fear of extralegal violence, be it a threat of 9/11-esque violence (which might inspired some homegrown moron to attack a theater--I doubt there are North Korean commandos running around) or the more probable danger of hacking. The Sony hack crippled its electronic infrastructure--hacking isn't just a matter of embarrassment (racist Sony e-mails, nude pictures) but a real threat to one's business.

*For a time it seemed like Sony was going to bury the movie completely--they initially said there were "no plans" to release it on Video On Demand or DVD. Had that happened, the North Koreans would have straight-up silenced a critic well outside of their territory. It'd be like agents of the Nazi regime coming into the U.S. and waging a terror campaign to get United Artists to shelve The Great Dictator.

*An adaptation of the graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea that might feature Steve Carrell had the plug pulled on it in the middle of development.

*When a Texas theater chain decided to air Team America World Police in place of The Interview to show it would not be intimidated by North Korean threats, Paramount Pictures prevented them from screening the movie.

*The Associated Press theorized that the attack on Sony would deter Hollywood from making films featuring overseas villains.

These electronic attacks and threats of physical violence have unleashed a massive "chilling effect." People are being intimidated from speaking their minds, producing art, etc. by either a foreign regime, a private entity (a hacker gang trying to sound scarier than it really is), or a combination of the two (a hacker gang working for North Korea). Chuck Wendig explains it very well.

Zaid repeatedly referred to The Interview as a crappy movie. That's purely a subjective matter--I've loved movies like Skyline that had horrible RottenTomatoes ratings and disliked movies like Get Him to the Greek that had much better ratings. RT currently gives The Interview a 48% and a kind of middling critical consensus. I could easily imagine the movie being crap--I didn't really enjoy Wedding Crashers and I disliked Get Him To The Greek so much I turned off the movie 15 minutes in and returned it.

However, just because a movie is crap doesn't mean it isn't worth defending. I read parts of The Satanic Verses and didn't really understand or enjoy it, but that doesn't mean Salman Rushdie should have been left to the tender mercies of the Ayatollah Khomeini and goons inspired by him.

Furthermore, free speech is something that should be extended as broadly as possible to the most unpopular people to make sure everybody is protected.

For example, Hustler magazine is incredibly tasteless, vile, and sexist. It ran an ad depicting Jerry Falwell confessing to incest with his mother, it mocks female politicians by depicting them in sexual situations, one magazine cover featured a woman in a meat grinder, and apparently it had some kind of spread depicting a pornographic version of a concentration camp. Even if you don't have a moral objection to pornography, Hustler is garbage.

However, so long as Hustler's right to free speech, however vile, is protected, more prosaic incidents of artistic nudity (and I mean legitimate art) are in significantly less danger from Moral Guardians on the right (artistic nudity is sinful and immodest, and according to the Calvinists undermines the gospel) or on the left (artistic nudity is exploitation of women). And if history is anything to go by, these groups will impose censorship if they could. This applies to both social conservatives and social liberals.

The same goes for "hate speech." As long as the speech of definitely hateful people like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, etc. is protected, you won't have the kind of censorship of far more innocent things that "hate speech" laws in France, India, Poland, Britain, etc. have led to.

To quote A Man for All Seasons, I'd give the Devil the benefit of the law for my own safety's sake.

So I will be seeing The Interview as a matter of principle. If the movie sucks, so be it. If I'm giving money to a company that's too inept to protect its employees and customers, so be it. This is about taking a stand against appeasement and threats of violence, in defense of artistic freedom against crude coercion.

A Second Post About "The Interview"

Now it seems that the film The Interview will not be released at all, not even on Video on Demand, at least in the near future. Sony first abandoned plans to release the film after most theater chains in the United States refused to show it after the hackers (likely backed by North Korea) threatened 9/11-esque terror attacks. It seems more realistic that the greater danger would be hacking of customer credit card data and the like rather than physical violence (thus saith Homeland Security), but given how a judge has ruled a lawsuit against the theater in Aurora, Colorado over the shooting in the movie theater can go forward, that theaters might be concerned is understandable.

(The only solution I could think of would be for the government to agree to assume liability for this particular situation on the grounds of defending the citizens' freedoms against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That could potentially be very expensive and theater owners might not want the theaters full of cops--or if a municipality doesn't have enough police, the National Guard--as an alternative to simply not screening the movie. And they're a private business--if they don't want to go to all the trouble, that's their call.)

However, many movie theaters like the Plaza Theater in Atlanta were still willing to show the movie. I was actually planning on seeing it there as part of a "To Hell With Kim Jong-Un" outing. I am aware there is a risk (however minimal) of violence or (more probable) that my financial data might be compromised in a reprisal hack. Thing is, life has risks.

We are free because people in this country resisted bullies like the British Crown, the Klan, etc. not by cowering and hoping against hope the arrogant and the strong would show mercy. I intended to see the movie to show that I (and presumably the others who would see it with me) were not going to be intimidated by the Internet hired guns of some chunky despot in some unreconstructed Stalinist hellhole. And to all those people moralizing in the comments sections about how showing the movie isn't worth innocent lives, that if there was an incident the same people who condemned Sony for pulling the movie would condemn Sony for releasing the movie, etc., I would remind you that Allied bombing killed vast numbers of civilians living under German occupation in WWII and these same populations thought it was worth it to be liberated. Sometimes freedom has a price.

Then, when I was in the early stages of organizing my outing, Sony pulled the movie completely. One of my friends theorized that the hackers still had unreleased employee personal data that they could have released if further antagonized and Sony knuckled under to their threats to protect employees, which this article here supports. However, this article here depicts Sony warning past and present employees that their data is already out there. If that is the case, this was cowardice on Sony's part, since the hackers would have (foolishly) expended their leverage.

And Paramount is even worse. Some theaters decided to show Team America World Police instead to show they would not be intimidated by Fat Boy and his minions, but Paramount prevented them from screening the film. Paramount has not been hacked and now that the North Koreans' goons' tactics are known, precautions can be taken. And since it seemed the theater owners were making the decision to show the movie on their own, they're the ones assuming liability. This is an even more pathetic case of cowardice on the part of Paramount, which can't even plead coercion the way Sony can.

I've seen some people online suggesting that The Interview would be released later once the hubbub dies down, either theatrically or, to avoid security problems, by video-on-demand. It would be a good idea to give Sony a few months to a year to do the right thing, once the initial threat has passed. However, between Sony's "no plans" statement and this new threat by hackers, that might not be happening. If Sony tried to kill the movie permanently, this would be one of those rare occasions that I would support pirating it and spreading it so far over the Internet that all the threats and bloviations of Sony, Fat Boy, etc. would not be able to stop it. It would foil the North Korean regime's desire that people not see this movie and show Sony that bowing to the demands of hackers can cost them as well.

(And to anyone who says that'd be victimizing Sony twice, this would allow them to get their product out there and have an excuse to the people holding them hostage that they had nothing to do with it. Once the cat's out of the bag, the hackers might back off and Sony can release it legitimately.)

Judd Apatow has said Sony's actions guarantee the film will be seen illegally. Glad to see he agrees with me.

"Heart of the Swarm" Opening Cinematic

Got on Facebook a bit earlier than usual this morning and this is what I found. The opening cinematic for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm in all its glory.



We see just how terrifying and destructive a Zerg assault on a human world can be. We also see just how large the Terran battle-cruisers actually are. Based on their depiction in-game, I didn't think they'd be that big.

Enjoy!

Job Opportunity: Software Engineer

My friend Adam is recruiting a team for CareerBuilder and is looking for software engineers. Here's the link to the job:

http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/JobDetails.aspx?APath=2.21.0.0.0&job_did=JHS69C5WZC4GSRWBD96&IPath=QHKVGV0A

If you are interested in the job please email him directly at adam.edwards@careerbuilder.com.

(No, a spammer has not hijacked my blog.)

The Great Purge Complete...

Just finished removing Free Blog Hit Counter from the prior posts on the blog.  Given how there were 328 total and I'd posted relatively few new entries since I started the purge, this took about a month to accomplish.

(To be fair, I had other priorities, like writing "Son of Grendel" and having a social life.  I could have done it last night if I hadn't had a karaoke outing.)

And per Blogger, the number of hits I have as of a few minutes ago is 46,787 since I started the blog in February 2010.  When I purged the last of Free Blog Hit Counter, it said my blog hits totaled 41,000.

Bigger "Heart of the Swarm" Trailer

The other day, I found a new trailer for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.  Apparently it was revealed at BlizzCon.



Looks like the Dominion has shown itself untrustworthy, on a much larger scale that just sending in a bunch of Ghosts to kill Kerrigan like the earlier, smaller teaser trailer revealed.  Like, attack-by-capital-ships untrustworthy.  And Valerian and Warfield might not be coming out of that treachery alive....

(Sucks for Warfield, as it seemed he was on the level and even made Rayor commander of the entire Dominion force while he was having his arm fixed.  But if Valerian went into this intending treachery from the beginning, to hell with him.)

Some of the promotional material makes what's going to happen in HOTS sound really GrimDark.  Raynor has gone missing, while some artwork on the Blizzard web-site depicts Kerrigan with a reinfested arm. 

I hope they don't kill off Raynor and then have Kerrigan go totally insane and reinfest herself or, worse, have her think Raynor is dead, reinfest herself, and then have Raynor show up alive again and think Kerrigan is truly irredeemable even with the use of the Zerg-purging artifact.  Heck, with the dialogue snippet "the girl you knew is dead," this makes it sound like despite being forcibly de-Zerged, Kerrigan is still evil.

Wings of Liberty was a lot more optimistic than the first Starcraft and Brood War, with the Dominion public rioting upon learning of Mengsk's true evil nature and the Swarm decapitated and Kerrigan returned to human form.  That was pretty refreshing, considering how dark the first games really were. 

One can hope they took the darkest quotes and scenes from Heart of the Swarm out of context and strung them together to make the story sound a lot more GrimDark than it actually will be--some of the promotional material describes Kerrigan only remembering some of what she did as Queen of Blades and not liking it, which shows there's hope for her.  She does look pretty angsty when she's loading her rifle, while the Queen of Blades would have probably been joyfully homicidal.  Raynor is only missing, not confirmed dead.  And the new trailer depicts a lot of human-on-human warfare, including what looks like a military drop on a human planet. 

Ending the Second Great War with Kerrigan's Zerg and Raynor's Raiders holding Arcturus Mengsk to account for his many sins would be awesome, with the Dark Voice and his Protoss-Zerg hybrid army over the horizon.  However, some stuff I've read on Battle.net indicates the hybrids will be entering the sector en masse and they'll put the hurt on the player, so punishing Mengsk might not in the cards for a bit...

BTW, the soundtrack in this trailer is just awesome.

Promoting a Friend's Music

At a Presbyterian church retreat a few years ago, I met my friend Will, whose wife Carol was doing music composition at Georgia State University.

I went to see Carol's senior performance at GSU one night.  There was a piece that was all about the emotion of fear that I particularly enjoyed.

That's the first movement.  Here's the second:

Here's her web-site if you want to find out more about her:

http://www.carolmarieunderwood.com/

Getting the music uploaded was kind of a pain, since Blogger apparently cannot run uploaded audio files like uploaded video files.  I had to put the music together with a Facebook photo I took of Carol and make a movie using Windows Movie Maker.

Here's the link that taught me how:

http://www.consumingexperience.com/2007/06/blogger-how-to-upload-mp3-files-to-play.html

"Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm" Trailer Is Up

I found a Blizzard newsletter in my Spam box the other evening and it sent me to the following link.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/heart-of-the-swarm-preview/

That link in turn sent me to this trailer, which is also posted on the Blizzard web-site.



So much for the grand idea I had for an interquel novel taking place between the human campaign and the Zerg one. 

(I actually wrote a query and a long and a short synopsis, and e-mailed William Dietz, the author of Starcraft II: Heaven's Devils, to see if he could get me the hook-up with Blizzard.  He said with Blizzard, it's "don't call us, we'll call you."  And there was something on the site I overlooked that Matt Schafer found for me that describes how they don't accept unsolicited content.)

It seems the Zerg campaign begins immediately after Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty with a backstab by Dominion forces--Nova and a bunch of Ghosts bust in and try to kill or capture Kerrigan while she's still recovering from being, as some Battle.net people have put it, "fumigated."

Raynor at the very least survives to see Kerrigan obliterate her would-be assassins, but some of the promotional material asks the question "Where is Jim Raynor?"  Hopefully he'll survive.  Maybe I'm just being a hopeless romantic, but I'd like to see a happy ending for both of them.

Based on what we see so far, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of conflict between the Zerg and the humans.  Kerrigan apparently makes war on the Dominion forces seeking to cleanse Char and later wages "genocidal" wars with the Protoss (given how the Protoss exterminate the Zerg whenever they find them, it might not be the Zerg being the bad guys this time), but the campaign looks like she's reuniting the Swarm and assimilating dangerous wildlife to use their genes to create new Zerg war-breeds.  Something tells me it'll be primarily Zerg-Zerg and Zerg-Protoss combat, with the only anti-human fighting being at the beginning of the campaign.

Drat.  I was hoping she and Raynor would team up and take down the Terran Dominion once and for all.  I even had a scenario I suggested on Battle.net for a campaign mission where she brought down the Dominion Ghost Academy and found Raynor's son, who was taken as a child into the Ghost program, and brings him back to his father.  It would be a good tie in with the books--little Johnny Raynor is mentioned in Liberty's Crusade--and would tie the expanded-universe in with the actual games.

(Blizzard, if you do intend to use this plotline, don't junk it because someone else came up with the idea and you fear lawsuits.  I promise here, in view of the world, that I didn't suggest the idea to you.)

Nothing definite on the release date, just the usual "we've got high standards and we'll release it when it's ready."  Not that there's anything wrong with not releasing products prematurely--far from it--but I would like to know when it comes out.

(My computer can't run the first game as it should be run, let alone this, but I could always play it elsewhere.)

Help Me Find Broken Links...

This morning, I found that most of the links in my blog post about famous people I've met didn't work.  I've been using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer due to security concerns and apparently Firefox and Blogger interact in such a way that links I posted redirect to the Blogger edit page rather than the places I intended.

I reinstalled Internet Explorer, went in, and fixed them.  I also checked other links in blog posts made using Firefox and they seem to be fine.

If anyone should come across a blog post with links that are broken, please let me know so I can fix them.

For the foreseeable future, I will use Internet Explorer to make blog posts and use Firefox for my other web-browsing.  Hopefully if I don't use IE very often, there won't be security problems.

Anybody Got Suggestions for Improvement?

I attended a meeting of the Atlanta bloggers meetup.com group the other day.  Unfortunately, due to getting out of the office late and taking the train to the wrong MARTA station*, I missed a substantial chunk of the meeting.

*I went to the North Avenue station and walked several blocks when it turns out the Midtown station is right next to the restaurant.  At least I saved gas and didn't need to worry about my car...

I pick up some interesting suggestions.  One of them is to set up a Twitter account to accumulate followers and, I assume, cross-pollinate with the blog (refer Twitter folk here and blog-followers to Twitter).  I'll be sure to do that, but not right now.

The most relevant suggestion to this post, however, is to ask your readers for feedback.  So....

1. What parts of my blog do you all like?

2. What parts do you all dislike?

3. What are some improvements you think I could make?

Any comment would be appreciated.

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm Ending? (SPOILERS)

http://kotaku.com/5709838/ending-leaked-for-starcraft-iis-next-chapter

Found this online today.  Supposedly it's the cinematic ending for the Heart of the Swarm.  I can't copy the embed HTML to post the video here and in any event, given how Activision has yanked it from elsewhere due to copyright, they'd make me take it down sooner or later anyway.

If it's genuine, it must be an early version due to how crude the graphics are.  It does correspond with the information released early on about how Kerrigan, de-infested at the climax of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, rebuilds her power over the Zerg Swarm via mutations, since she is essentially back to being the Queen of Blades.  She sounds like Tricia Helfer, who voiced her in both her human and Zerg incarnations in Wings of Liberty, only without the scary buzzing aspect to her voice.

I'd rather this not be the ending, or at least the final ending. 

For starters, Kerrigan is infested once again, which isn't really necessary for her to control the Zerg.  In some of the canonical material taking place earlier, she was able to control individual Zerg telepathically while a Confederate Ghost.  Her removing the last of the psionic inhibitors the Confederates installed in her during the first game should be enough for her to control great numbers of them without turning her back into a bug.

Her leaving human space, and thus Raynor, behind, is also rather sad.  There's enough sadness in this world as it is.

Furthermore, what exactly is going on with the naked Kerrigan clone in the tank?  Unless whatever is being done to her causes her to psionically attack Kerrigan, cloning doesn't work that way.  If someone cloned somebody, they'd be identical genetically but a lot younger and attacking them wouldn't hurt the original genetic donor a la stabbing a voodoo doll.

Of course, she could be a "Chekhov's Gun" if Blizzard ultimately wants a happy ending for Raynor and Kerrigan.  Bug-Kerrigan could be killed or mortally wounded in, say, the final battle with the Dark Voice (which would be in the Protoss campaign, which takes place after Heart of the Swarm) and telepathically transfers her consciousness into the clone, which given her circumstances, might not have a mind of her own and could serve as a nice backup body.

Good to see Arcturus gets his, although I figured given his cunning and selfishness, he'd flee his crumbling empire with his hard-core loyalists and ally with the Dark Voice for revenge, the promise of supernatural powers, etc. and wouldn't be punished for his many crimes until the absolute end of the game.  Still, this is a fairly cool death--Arcturus cursing his enemies ("choke on the ashes") and Kerrigan gets a really nice "THIS IS JUSTICE!" death-scream coupled with (I assume) some kind of psionic attack to finish him off.

I'm wondering if this is a fake designed to mislead people, though, as some people seem to think.  Blizzard could release an abandoned ending or even cook up something entirely new to generate buzz and keep people talking during the long wait until Heart of the Swarm is released.  Some people on Battle.net seem to think it's an older ending for Wings of Liberty that got scrapped due to the whole "Kerrigan must save the universe from the Dark Voice" story element, which does not appear to be accounted for in this video.  One person even claimed it dated back to August of 2009, close to a year before Wings of Liberty was released, which if true, would be a strong argument in favor of it being an abandoned ending for the first game.

I did post some video here a few months back from Blizzcon 2010.  There's a piece of production art depicting Kerrigan as a human (wearing Ghost armor no less) summoning an Ultralisk with what looks like a swarm of Zerglings underneath it.  If I remember right, Ultralisks are fairly high on the tech tree, so she'd be well on her way to regaining control of the Swarm if she was able to control them.  And she isn't a bug again, at least superficially.

Another Blizzard leak seems to indicate Heart of the Swarm's release date will be during the "holiday" period (I'm assuming Christmas-ish) in 2011, which makes commercial sense.  I guess we'll have to wait until then to find out.

"Starcraft: Heart of the Swarm" Concept Art (spoilers)

Visited battle.net for the first time in awhile the other day and across across the following video.


Of particular interest is the following image, which was posted individually at the Starcraft Legacy site.

http://sclegacy.com/images/uploaded/blizzcon10/screencaps/sc2_art/sc2_art111.jpg

Looks like Kerrigan's post-deinfestation Zerg dreads are gone, although her hair seems colored somewhat differently (it's duller and more brown/orange than red) and in a different style.  She is wearing Ghost armor, though.  Some of the early discussion of "Heart of the Swarm" described Kerrigan "building her power through mutations," but at least in that image, that does not appear to have been the case.

(Let's hope it stays that way.  Her turning back into the Queen of Blades would be entirely too GrimDark and sad.)

The scuttlebutt about what "Heart of the Swarm" is going to be about involves Kerrigan building her power and regaining control of the Swarm.  The image looks like she's taking control of an Ultralisk, with what looks like some Zerglings nearby (all those little eyes beneath the Ultralisk).

Two New Blogging Friends...

One of the newer members of my Kennesaw writing group and a former member of that same organization have just joined the blogosphere.

Here are Alexandra Hughes and Rob Gilliam.  I will add them to my blog-roll tomorrow morning, because it's really late right now.

Alexandra gave me some advice about the proper length of first novels, while Rob has continued to critique my submissions despite having left the group.  Kudos to both of them.

Anyone Having Problems With My Blog?

Over the last few days, I've noticed that when I go to the main link for my blog (http://www.accordingtoquinn.com/), it gets a "cannot display this web-page" white screen.  When I hit "refresh," it loads normally.

I've tested this out at work, on a Mac computer, and I get something similar, with the suggestion the site must be very busy.

I haven't changed anything on either computer, so it's not something I've done that's been causing the problem.

Earlier this evening, I emptied the cache and deleted the cookies after seeing that as a troubleshooting suggestion on the Help page and it loaded normally on the first try.  However, after a bit of surfing, it went back to the same old problem.

Has anyone been having problems viewing my site?  If so, post them on the comments section of this page.  I'd like to get more data and try more solutions before reporting this situation to Google.

Lead Me Not Into Temptation... (Starcraft 2 Spoilers)

I said I wasn't going to write anymore fan-fiction when I was finished with The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, but an idea has occurred to me that would make a nice post-Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty story.

It's extremely derivative of the ending cinematic of the human campaign of WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, but that's part of what makes it awesome.

So here goes...

On Korhal, capital of the Terran Dominion, we see that the army has returned from the great victory over the Zerg at Char.  Ranks of Marines, tanks, fighters overhead, etc. form a gigantic victory parade headed by Prince Valerian Mengsk, General Horace Warfield, a Marine in black armor, and a Ghost.  The common folk of the capital cheer, throw flowers, etc.

The four of them lead the parade to the doors of the palace of Emperor Arcturus Mengsk and go inside, where the Emperor receives them in his throne room.

Then Valerian orders the doors to the throne room closed.  Daddy Mengsk starts looking a bit nervous.

Then the Marine and the Ghost remove their helmets.  It's Raynor and Kerrigan respectively.  Mengsk's Marine guards raise their guns, but Warfield orders them to stand down.  They do so.

Kerrigan gets a funny look on her face and snaps her fingers.  Two Ghosts who were hiding in-cloak around Mengsk's throne, fall down, de-cloaked and psionically-immobilized.  It turns out one of them is Nova.

"You're out of your league, little girl," Kerrigan says.  "Stay out of this."

"What are you doing?" Arcturus asks Valerian.

"Succeeding you," Valerian says.  He turns to Raynor.  "Commander?"

Raynor steps forward and draws the pistol he intended to kill Mengsk with but ended up using his one bullet to kill Tychus Findlay instead.

"I want you to see this coming," he says.

CRACK!

Given that there are hints in SC2 that both Mengsk Sr. and Mengsk Jr. are involved with Duran and his creation of an army of Protoss-Zerg hybrids, I don't think Arcturus will go down that easily.  Also, since in the first game, he said he would rule the Koprulu Sector or see it burn around him, I can easily imagine him and whatever loyalists he's got going over to the Dark Voice and its hybrid army if Valerian or Raynor looks like they're going to unseat him.

Still, the tyrannical SOB certainly deserves something like the above scenario happening to him.

However much fun it would be to write that, I should probably focus more on Escape from the Wastelands and other projects that could make me some money.  I've got maybe a fifth of Escape done after all.

Some Interesting Fan-Fics (Starcraft 2 Spoilers)

I've come across some interesting fan-fics lately and I figured I ought to share them.  Two of them take place in the aftermath of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, which some of my friends haven't played yet, so I'm putting the spoiler tags in the title so they don't read this article and get spoiled for the ending of the game.

The first one is Emergence, a crossover of the Draka and Mass Effect fictional universes in which some Prothean artifacts are discovered on Draka-settled Mars in the 1980s.  I do like many of the places it goes, even though, with a divergence from the canon timeline 18-odd years before the Final War (and some major consequences of the divergence, like the early deaths of Yolande Ingolffsson and Marya LeFarge), the Final War goes very similar how it did in the The Stone Dogs, the only major difference being the continued survival of Ceres (the Alliance for Democracy's capital in the asteroid belt) and the Stone Dogs-induced destruction of the Alliance submarine that, in the canon timeline, nuked Cape Town.

Despite this, there are some really awesome moments, like the evacuation of the surviving Alliance spatial forces through the mass relay on Pluto or the fact that on Samothrace, the Earth-like planet colonized by the Alliance survivors, they use old-school airships as a low-tech and cheap means of transportation, ironically like how the Draka used them to colonize hostile Africa early in their history.

This second one is entitled A Healing of Hurts and was written by JamesP81, who posted on some of my Starcraft-related blog entries.  It takes place after the scourging of the Zerg on Char and the de-infestation of Sarah Kerrigan.  I didn't like how he made the Queen of Blades some separate entity holding the human Kerrigan a prisoner in her own mind--the way Kerrigan behaves in StarCraft: Brood War indicates the Queen of Blades is essentially "evil Kerrigan," complete with her grudges (Mengsk, Duke, the Protoss) and her attachments (Raynor).  As a result, Kerrigan is a lot more responsible for her actions as QOB than, say, Captain Picard was for his actions as Locutus of the Borg.

(That being said, given the fact her altered mental state was brought about by being forcibly infested by the Zerg and the massive contrast in ethics between human-Kerrigan and the QOB, one could make a good case for temporary insanity.)

Zeratul showing up to essentially play psychiatrist also comes off as really deus ex machina, although to be fair, it is entirely possible he was on the Hyperion the entire time between him warning Raynor of the coming Armageddon Kerrigan will be necessary to stop and the victory on Char.

That being said, he did a good job depicting the probable psychodrama that will take place in Heart of the Swarm (Kerrigan's guilty feelings for the murders committed as the Queen of Blades, for example).  There's so much opportunity for character stuff taking place in HOTS; I hope Blizzard doesn't drop the ball.

The third one is Next Steps, which also takes place after WOL.  This one isn't as well-written as "A Healing of Hurts" and it also depicts human-Kerrigan as being asleep the entire time and not even remembering her actions as QOB until Zeratul probes her mind to see if she's really reformed or if she's indulging in some backstabbing scheme like she spent most of Brood War doing.  I also didn't like it's portrayal of Valerian Mengsk as betraying Raynor soon after the victory on Char (although he's manipulative like his father, he isn't evil like he is), the return of Fenix from the dead, Stetmann having some medical-ethics problems, and the author making Nova Mengsk's illegitimate daughter rather than using her canonical back-story.

That being said, there are some fun moments in this one, like a catfight between Nova and Kerrigan, Zeratul flat-out telling Raynor he historically has not been a very good judge of character when he wants to probe Kerrigan's mind, an extended confrontation between Raynor and Tychus prior to Raynor shooting him (in which Tychus points out how much he's sacrificed for Raynor and Raynor's acknowledgement of that), the possible ways Mengsk could secure his position in the aftermath of the revelation that he deliberately brought the Zerg down on Tarsonis, and an angsty Kerrigan using action figures to replay her torture and killing of General Duke.  Plus, although the author hasn't said so in his replies to my reviews, it seems like he is foreshadowing Kerrigan using her psionic power to take control of the Zerg again.

(Nova suggesting Kerrigan "call" the Zerg on Aiur and her angry response, the fact that creep tumors infesting humans respond to psionic attempts to slow their growth, and the fact that a gigantic Zerg attack that the joint human-Protoss forces intent on reclaiming Aiur might not be able to fight off is coming indicate something could happen relatively soon.)

Jim Raynor: Christ Figure? Spoilers...

I had a thought the other day that Jim Raynor, especially in Starcraft 2, is actually a Christ figure, in a particularly Reformed sense.

The main Scripture I am using for this is Romans 5:8, whose text follows:

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jim Raynor clearly loved Sarah Kerrigan in a self-sacrificing way (agape) and eventually intended to free her from the Zerg swarm.  Although Kerrigan, after her infestation by the Zerg, was less hostile toward Raynor than toward other characters, she still made war against him, especially when they were both after pieces of the Xel'Naga artifact or when Raynor and Valerian invaded Char to deploy it against the Zerg. 

This is similar to the Reformed position, based on their interpretation of Romans 8:7, whose text follows:

The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.

The Reformed believe that this means man cannot accept Jesus on his or her own--God must act on them first.  Kerrigan did not ask for Raynor's help in Starcraft 2, but was actively opposed to him.  And of her own free will as well--she was no longer under the control of the Overmind, but was acting according to her nature (albeit warped by the Zerg--a moral, compassionate person beforehand, the infestation destroyed her conscience and moral sensibilities and rendered her a de facto psychopath).

Other characters play roles similar to the Pharisees and Sadducees who opposed Christ during His earthly ministry.  Arcturus Mengsk tells Raynor "that treacherous b***** cannot be saved," which reminds me somewhat of the religious leadership that for the most part looked down on "sinners."  Raynor's friend Tychus Findlay and even the well-meaning Matt Horner are also skeptical of Raynor's insistence that Kerrigan can be saved.

The saga even has its own Judas Iscariot--Findlay himself, who is a mole for Arcturus Mengsk, albeit under duress (he's locked into a suit of armor that will kill him on command).  When Raynor and his personal guard find the de-infested Kerrigan, naked and dazed in the ruins of a Zerg hive, Findlay attempts to kill her under orders from Mengsk.  Raynor has to kill his old friend, who was his brother-in-arms during the Guild Wars and fought alongside him during the events of "Wings of Liberty."  This parallels the description of Judas as one who shared in Christ's ministry (Acts 1:17).

However, Raynor's story and that of Jesus Christ do not match up 100%.  Although Raynor risks his life, he does not die, and his love for Kerrigan is romantic/sexual (eros) as well as agape.  Mengsk is also the cause of the situation--he abandoned Kerrigan to the Zerg in the first game--rather than merely a skeptical religious leader.  Raynor also initially intended to kill Kerrigan in revenge for her murder of his Protoss friend Fenix, something he abandoned after Zeratul revealed Kerrigan's prophesied role in the defeat of an evil power that would, without her, take control of the Zerg and use them to exterminate the Terrans and the Protoss.

That being said, there are a whole lot of parallels.