Author Archives: Dennis

Gears of War

Gears of War is looking to be a truly fantastic computer-game that I would dearly love to play…on a PC. I don’t particularly like consoles, for various reasons, but I absolutely despise the controlers. Invariably I’m left wanting the accuracy and precision of a mouse, and I won’t get that with those gimped analogue sticks.

Father – Car – Crash

An hour ago I heard that my father had a terrible car accident while driving my car. Actually, he wasn’t driving it, but a good friend of his was, and he was in the passenger seat. The last thing he remembered was turning onto a road, and the next thing is that he was tens of yards away, on the ground, with police standing over him. He broke his eye-socket and his cheekbone and is pretty banged up, but relatively alright. His friend is less okay. He broke ribs, punctured lungs and other nastiness. He is in a stable condition at the hospital. My father, who wasn’t driving, refused to submit to a blood test until he knew his friend was alright, and was saved from arrest by the police by the ambulance arriving, the personell of which demanded the police uncuff him so he could be treated. When I spoke to him he had gotten a nurse to help him escape the hospital unnoticed by the police who are undoubtedly still there waiting for him, so that he could go home. He said he would go and sort things out in the morning, which means he’ll probably be arrested for a misdemeanor.

Anyway, he’s relatively alright, and “won’t be playing football tomorrow,” like he said, but my car is, again, like he said, “alright, except that the front part is no longer connected to the back part.” Bye bye, car.

[SRN] Lack of Skill

Over the last few months I’ve had these bursts of energy regarding the Shadowrun section of this website. I’ve got the design worked out, though I still lack some of the graphics I would want to use, and I’m closing in on the site’s navigation (though I’m not entirely sure that the road I’m going down is the right one.) However, the single-most frustrating thing is that I can’t put what I have in my head down in writing and code. Webpages are limited, and therefore I am limited. I want to do this in Flash, if it wasn’t so incredibly illogical and unreasonable a development environment. I wish I could do it just like the now-defunct Unreal Ideas page.

But that’s just the technical side, which is something I can actually do something about. The creative side is a lot harder. I was recently visiting DSF, which is more attrocious than ever nowadays, and someone was thinking of opening an in-character bulletin board (which, of course, got jumped on by SL James and his weird feelings of superiority regarding Shadowland.org, which is years out of date, with a terrible user interface), and I recounted my experiences of an in-character board; The True Façade, the creative brain-child of Brother Justice, who had more creative power in his pinky than I could ever hope to gather in my entire body. Granted, he had a great set of people to help him out (Bethyaga, 3278, Eliahad and even Brineshrimp to a certain extent). I could really use some of his mojo to turn my Shadowrun section into what I want it to be.

I got the idea from the latest Hitman-game, Hitman: Blood Money, where a rich dilettant who was attacked one day, long ago, which left him scarred and handicapped. He was convinced it was an assassination attempt, and became obsessed with finding out more about assassins, hoping to find the man who left him so crippled. Now, I haven’t played the game (yet), but I can see how this man, with his resources, would become the single-most knowledgable person in this field. And I wanted to do something similar. Someone who had been the subject of an unsuccesful extraction, who was then abandonned and left for dead by the company they worked for because they thought that it was a willing extraction. Confused and left alone, a search for answers finds that person delving deeper and deeper into the obscure, dangerous and secret world of the Shadowrunner. You see, in my game, Shadowrunners aren’t well known, don’t have trid-shows, and exist only because nobody knows about their exists except an elite few. (It doesn’t make any sense to me otherwise.)

So yeah, I want to mold a website into an archive of findings by this disgruntled and confused person, and there are so many things that come up, and so few of those I’m technically proficient enough to realise.