Jason Z. Christie's Blog, page 3

Steam Twin-Stick Round-Up: Enter the Gungeon, One Shell Straight to Hell, Geometry Wars 3, Orbital Invaders

Every once in a while, a game rolls out that is just pitch perfect. Enter the Gungeon is just such a game.

It’s a twin-stick shooter. It’s a dungeon crawler. It’s pixel art. EtG knows what its strengths are and plays them up well.

Graphically, it’s cute and engaging. Deceptively so. Because what lies beneath is a tough and complex bulletfest. Your character may be bouncy and full of smiles, but it has one mission. Kill everything that moves.

You’re given a choice of four characters, with a fifth available only in co-op mode. They each have different weapons, abilities, and default items, and exploring those choices is itself engaging. While your default weapon never runs out of ammo, there is a wait-time for reloading, which becomes a serious factor in the heat of battle.

After an important tutorial level, you enter a randomly generated series of rooms and face increasingly challenging enemies. I say the tutorial is important because there are a few skills you definitely need to master if you want to survive. You can flip tables to use as cover and even push them ahead of you, and you can dodge roll out of the line of fire. I daresay the game would be impossible without the ability to roll through the barrage of oversized projectiles fired at you.

The dungeon aspect also has everything you would expect. Random weapon drops and power-ups, keys, chests, locked doors, shops. There are pits that can be crossed, or more likely, fallen into. Most intriguingly, there are secret doors that can only be revealed if you have the right weapon. There are even teleport areas that let you warp to other areas of the map, saving you from a lot of traveling through empty rooms you’ve already cleared.

It’s rare to find a game that does two entirely different things, and does them both extremely well.  The gameplay is great, and the random nature of the dungeons insures nothing gets too repetitive. I even encountered two entirely different bosses in multiple playthroughs of the first level. And the bosses are tough, making the enemies you meet up to that point seem like mere training targets by comparison. Beating even the first one is a real accomplishment.

EtG is full of details that add to the overall polish of the game. Sometimes you have to make a choice as to whether you pick something up in exchange for what you’re currently carrying. Re-enter the room you left an item in, and you’ll find a note from an enemy, thanking you for leaving behind something they can use against you.  The weapons and special items are diverse and numerous. A Molotov cocktail, for instance, does great damage…but will kill you, as well.

Likewise, there are a ton of enemies, and they possess a wide range of characteristics. Looking at the included ‘Ammonomicon’, there seems to be a staggering number in the game, slowly unlocked as you progress. That’s really encouraging, as the game is plenty of fun with the handful you face at the start. I see a ton of replay value in this game.

If you do happen to beat EtG, there’s already a sequel, Exit the Gungeon, as well. But that will take some serious effort. I can’t say enough good things about this one, and it’s a steal at the $5.99 I got it for on sale. Do yourself a favor and buy it.

One Shell Straight to Hell is an interesting shooter that incorporates RPG elements and is heavily story driven. A bit like the comic/series Preacher, you play a priest who favors bullets over acts of contrition to solve problems.

The first level involves a spooky mansion and rescuing a woman’s possessed daughter. It’s all nicely atmospheric and darkly lit and doesn’t take itself too seriously. You pick up on that when you start getting attacked by chairs, pianos, and rugs.

The woman herself serves as a guide and also functions as an AI partner, doing some shooting of her own, on occasion. Her narrative initially pushes the story along. The dialogue is decent. It’s occasionally funny, but not exactly over-the-top hilarious, sometimes lapsing into self-awareness and breaking the 4th wall. One tiny aspect I didn’t care for is that your companion repeats her scripted lines each time you enter a room. It destroys the illusion slightly and would have been better if she only said something once.

It’s all quite playable. You can heal yourself by praying, but that will take a few seconds, so don’t count on it in a major battle. You can also unleash a holy blast of sorts, doing damage to anything in its radius.

The game is well done graphically and has a tiny twist that’s almost unnoticeable. Everything is constructed of tiny voxels, rather than being traditionally 3D rendered. An interesting and curious choice, but it works.

There is ammo to collect, of course, and the occasional gun to be found. But there’s also a crafting element, and the ability to reclaim rooms by ‘repairing’ them. Creating objects such as bear traps and reclaiming rooms becomes a necessary part of your overall strategy.

Eventually you’ll encounter things like spiders, which emit a poisonous gas that lingers for a few seconds, and a large demon of some sort, which is keeping the woman’s daughter hostage. Defeating it moves you on to a second, much tougher phase where the enemies attack you in larger numbers.

It gets tough, and so far I haven’t fully completed the mansion level. I will, though, because it manages to keep you interested in the story, and what lies ahead.

One Shell Straight to Hell is a good game, easily worth a few bucks, if you’re looking for a shooter with a bit more thought behind it.

There's not a lot that can be said about Geometry Wars 3 that I haven’t already said in my review of the original Geometry Wars, except that it’s ten times better.

The playfields are wildly inventive, at times giving a nod to Tempest, Super Stardust, and even the original playfield from the first game. The level progression and goals give you a lot more to play for than just a high score. Honestly, it just makes the first game seem silly and quaint by comparison. 

Most interestingly, there is a group of people who play it by not shooting. If you really want a taste of bullet hell, check out pacifism gameplay on Youtube. No actual bullets involved, but wow. These people score more than I ever will, without ever firing a shot.

This game is big, with staggering graphics and level design. It’s tough, but fair. Endless replay value here, and it’s a must have game if you love twin-stick shooters. The series is so good that there is a push for Geometry Wars 2 to be ported to the PC, as it’s only available on the Xbox consoles. If you don’t have this one already, pick it up.

Speaking of Super Stardust...

I picked up Orbital Invaders, because it looks like a nice Super Stardust type game. I love this style of gameplay, obviously, and this has a nice, unique look to it. 

Unfortunately, there has been nothing I can do to make it actually run. It's in my library, I remain hopeful, but thus far, I haven't actually been able to play it. Pity. 

I could get my money back, but that feels like a dick move, taking back a dollar or whatever I got it for from an indie coder. I have contacted the developer, but I don't see any progress being made, and I'm not the only person who's had this problem. Buyer beware. Maybe you'll have better luck than I did.

(Lightly) Trolling Terry Pratchett, Bruce Campbell, Jean-Louis Gassee and others

Trolling is a much maligned, little understood artform.

Never has this been more apparent than when a recent article I published to Reddit went to the front page, resulting in 70,000 blog hits. Aside from a bemused minority, the comments were generally from people appalled by the very idea of being a troll.

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what trolling is. Trolling is not hurling racial epithets, threats of violence, and jokes about banging your mother. That’s griefing. Trolling is not merely offering an unpopular opinion. These mischaracterizations have led to today’s negative attitude against anything associated with the word troll.

In reality, trolling is a more-or-less benign form of joke writing. Humorous fictions presented as reality. At the very least, that is how trolling began. Even Wikipedia gets it wrong. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll)

A great example of this would be the Rectilear Kitten troll. (https://www.wired.com/2001/02/fbi-goes-after-bonsaikitten-com/) 

This simple webpage with a few photographs led to an FBI investigation. It detailed the process of growing a bonsai kitten in jar. From the first sentences, it was utterly absurd. But that didn’t stop the less clued-in members of the Internet from promoting a wide-spread campaign of outrage against the site. Years after, Snopes even published a fact check on the matter. (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bonsai-kittens/)

So who is the villain here? The author of an obvious joke website, or the early-stage Karens who were unable to distinguish parody from reality? One recipe for bonsai kitties recommended using a Klein bottle. That is to say, a bottle with no openings…

Sad to say, the Internet is not much more sophisticated about trolling than it was back then. In some ways, “cancel culture” has made trolling even easier. It’s now trivial to provoke an outraged reaction in many circles. A good example of this would be the troll group G.N.A.A., which has affected American politics in the present day, when a recent political staffer was revealed to be a member of this obvious group of pranksters. (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senior-biden-campaign-cybersecurity-expert-participated-in-racist-internet-troll-group) 
The G.N.A.A. has been characterized as a terrorist group, for fuck’s sake. A terrorist group who’s early membership requirement was getting a first post on a Slashdot article…

These absurd reactions are why people troll in the first place. Even groups that consider themselves too sophisticated to be trolled can fall victim to their own biases.

One of my most recent trolls of the past few years managed to snow the entirety of Ancapistan, the anarcho-capitalist on Facebook, many of whom are trolls themselves. I befriended an young gentleman named Anand, and through a series of posts and backchannel communication, managed to convince the group that Anand was a sockpuppet (fake identity) of mine. We let this controversy build and swell before letting everyone know that they were hoodwinked. An epic trolling of some seven hundred people who thought they were above that sort of thing.

A few weeks ago, one of the most harmless trolls on the Internet was doxed and then swatted. Osvaldo12 can scarcely even be considered a troll. He writes funny, harmless tweets. For that, he was almost killed.

Again, who is the real menace, here? People who write funny stuff, or those without the capacity to understand the humor?

It’s become popular to attribute literal terrorism like swatting to trolls, for some reason. But that’s not trolling, it’s an act of violence. The conflation probably began when a group of 4Chan people started “pranking” the managers of fast food restaurants into breaking all of their own windows over fake gas leaks. Could that be considered ‘trolling’? Perhaps by the most extreme definition, but it’s hardly the norm.

Being open to interpretation, trolling can lead to a wide variety of reactions, some of which are unintended. While many people saw the essential humor in my site Reptilian Watch, I also got a lot of email from people who sincerely felt that aliens were disrupting their lives...

One of my more impactful trolls, although short-lived, involved a fake movie rumor website. The idea was to start rumors that would drive fanboys nuts, and just possibly get some movies produced as a result. Hollywood Inciter was a collection of joke movie ideas peppered with a few actual new releases. It somehow led to interactions with Terry Pratchett, Bruce Campbell, and editor/producer Stuart Kincaid. That’s a lot of reactions for something I spent a few hours on, at most.

Pratchett personally responded to my rumor regarding “The Colour of Magic” being produced by Peter Jackson. “Not bloody likely”, he said. Nevertheless, it was made into a mini-series a few years later. 

Likewise, Mr. Campbell emailed me to tell me that Evil Dead 4 “ain’t gonna happen”. It sort of did, though, via the remake. 

Stu contacted me about Repo Man 3, and sent me a copy of “A Texas Tale of Treason”, which recounts the attempt to produce Alex Cox’s Repo Man sequel, “Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday”. Cox famously revoked the rights after production had gone on over a year.

Great guys, all.

Now, I possibly did give the CEO of Be, Inc., Jeal-Louis Gassee a slight panic attack when I emailed him about some potentially fake Be, Inc. documents regarding a BeOS-powered AR gaming system. What I sent when he replied back were my own silly designs, and rather than being upset, it led to a discussion of the feasibility, and this hand-written note he later sent to me. 

A great sport, JLG is. He took my light-hearted ribbings on BeDoper well, also.

While trolling is a pretty broad umbrella, the best it offers, and by the definition many of the old-school trolls most accept, it is a literary artform to be celebrated. Internet performance art of the highest order. 

Reddit is the new Usenet

I won’t bother explaining Usenet again. That glorious time-waster of old still exists, but I haven’t been there for sixteen years or so. It’s my loss, I’m sure.

But I do waste a lot of time on Reddit. And it’s occurred to me that there are a lot of similarities there, and that’s probably one reason I enjoy it. The other reason being it’s the only place I haven’t been booted from yet.

Reddit has anonymity. Reddit has the option to create a group of interest to you, if one doesn’t exist. It has community. It has variety. It even has a very anemic version of cross-posting. Memes, trolling, flaming. I can’t see bothering to explain what Reddit is, either, but the similarities are there. It’s all in an app that works pretty well. Free, easy to download and install. In some slight ways, Reddit is a better version of Usenet. Erm, with ads.

And yet…

Reddit is the anti-Usenet.

The anonymity brings out the absolute worst in some people, in a way Usenet really didn’t. People will follow you just to downvote everything you do. They will scour your easily accessible posting and comment history to see if you’re the sort of person they should agree with, or vilify.

You can be banned from one group merely by being subscribed to another one. The hivemind is all-powerful, here.

While you can have multiple accounts, if one happens to get banned from a group, and you post there using another account, even accidentally, you risk getting everything nuked.

You can flame people to a degree, but calling someone a ‘donkey-fucking ass loafer’ is likely to incur a ban.

Trolling and sarcasm are lost on most people there. Irony is dead, and the app’s widespread prevalence leads to the worst sort of lowest common denominator posts.

In short, Reddit is a watered-down, crippled, and censored Usenet. When you say it like that, I can’t even see why I enjoy it at all.

Groups involving design, coding, and art are probably Reddit’s biggest strengths. 3D Modeling, graphic arts both analog and digital, audio creation, and programming groups are full of good information, helpful people, and stunning examples of the state of the art. Stick to these if you want to be productive. They generally welcome examples of your work, and tend to be supportive in various ways. Unless you’re an author, somehow. The writing and book groups are only good for theoretical discussions. If you dare to include a link to your own work, even inside of a blog post you publish and link there, you’re likely to have it deleted. It’s a pretty terrible form of gatekeeping I don’t understand.

General interest groups like NextFuckingLevel, MakeMeSuffer, and PublicFreakout are rather readable, and benefit from the curation of moderators. Lots of content, most of it excellent. Thankfully, there is no shortage of subreddits like these. Others fall into circle jerk areas. MenWritingWomen occasionally has some humorous material, but it now seems to uphold anything a man writes that involves women as terrible. NotLikeOtherGirls likewise delights in mocking any woman who makes a post somewhere on the Internet celebrating her individuality.

Finally, any large political group is absolute poison. Unless you tend to agree with 95% of what USA Today publishes, they should probably be avoided at all costs. The largest libertarian groups are fifty percent socialist, at this point.  Even most anarchist groups on Reddit instead espouse communism, and any dissenting opinion is dealt with harshly. PoliticalCompassMemes somehow manages to be the one group in which all sides operate more or less harmoniously without being any sort of larger echo chamber.

Meh. I don’t need more time-wasters, but thinking about all this has me seriously considering installing Forte’s Agent newsreader. I suspect what Thomas Wolfe said will hold true. You can’t go home again.

10 Tons Twin-Stick Triple Steam Review (plus one more!)

This review represents about 80 tons of games. That’s quick mafs.

So I lumped these particular games together because they’re all twin-stick shooters from the same developers and/or publisher. And they represent an interesting progression, from a game design and publishing standpoint. They share some common elements, and it’s a great example of how to build upon previous successes. Somehow, they manage to include a few “what not to do” things, from my standpoint, some unrelated to gameplay.

Crimsonland seems to be their earliest work in this area. In comparison to the other games, it’s pretty spartan. But it gets the job done. Everything is tiny, there are no obstacles or walls. The playfield is basically a desert, or dirt, and slightly larger than the screen. No walls, no bases, nothing like that. Just you and enemies. It is detailed, for what it offers, You leave tiny footprints everywhere you go. And, true to the name, great splotches of blood and bones. This is all done in top-down 2.5D style. I guess it more or less qualifies as pixelart, but not really. Everything is just small.

There are a wide variety of enemies, I haven’t encountered them all yet, still playing it on the first available level of difficulty, which requires you to beat the game in full before starting out on a more difficult challenge. Zombies, spiders, other…things. Each have their own characteristics, so it’s not just cosmetic. A later level includes spiders than split into two smaller spiders each time you kill one, iterating several times, until you’ve shot yourself into a screen full of them. They don’t kill you on contact, though, instead inflicting some damage each time you touch one. Get overwhelmed, of course, and you’re dead.

If it sounds simplistic, it is. But I’ve played this one the most out of the three so far. It works well and shows the promise the dev team had early on.

Adding a lot to my interest in playing it, they’ve included a ridiculous number of perks (powerups) and weapons, as well as including an achievement system. It’s addictive and varied. The weapons all have unique characteristics. The perk system can award you whatever you pick up via a token, and the gameplay often gives you a choice between multiple options, letting you tune your gameplay to the specific situation encountered. It’s very polished for such a small game. Well done.

Later rounds introduce little generators that constantly make new enemies and destroying them becomes an important factor. Let them go long enough and you’re faced with an impossible number of things to fend off. It’s also done with a fair amount of humor and good writing, and that’s always a plus with me. Not laugh out loud funny, but interesting and humorous.

Is Crimsonland a good game? Yes.

Is it a great game?

Also yes.

If I had to level any criticism here, and being an erstwhile critic, I suppose I do have to, Crimsonland starts out slow. Literally slow. It can feel bogged down, playing on the introductory levels, until you grab a speed powerup. But this is by design. Later levels wouldn’t feel as fast, otherwise. It lets you plan and strategize a bit, rather than run around in a mad dash shooting without thought. This is, of course, rectified by playing in a more advanced mode. But by forcing people to play through at a lower/slower difficulty initially, I can see this turning a few people off, who want fast action from the start. It probably would have been better to let veteran players access the harder settings from the start.

The first two worlds, divided into sub-levels, are also fairly easy. Only once or twice was I overwhelmed before I reached the end of the second set. At which point, it gets hard enough that some sub-levels require a few attempts. It’s a balance, and they’ve more or less pulled it off, playing it in the longer term. It probably could have ramped up the challenges a bit earlier. The first two worlds mostly serve to introduce the new enemies and allow you to unlock weapons and perks.

Like the weapons, the perks have a lot of variety. More than the weapons, even, with all sorts of add-ons. My own favorites generate additional perks, or cause the perk tokens to gravitate toward you out of a crowd of enemies. There’s a lot of thought behind this overall system.

Oh, my only actual criticism toward this game, and Ten Ton in general, is the Doom knock-off cover art. Just bad form, I feel, even for a group of budding indie game designers. The game stands on its own, and shouldn’t be invoking a more established franchise that furthermore doesn’t even have much at all to do with this one in terms of gamplay. Plus it’s just kind of gauche and low-class to do.

 

Crimsonland, it appears, begat the amazing Tesla Vs.Lovecraft.

I’ve wanted this one for a few years, since I saw a video of being run on the PS4, so I jumped on it as soon as I found it was on Steam. Not before getting its own sequel, though. But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.

Take all of the good bits from Crimsonland, remove any niggling bad things, and then make everything 10x better. That’s Tesla vs. Lovecraft in a nutshell.

Gorgeous. Enthralling. Challenging. I can’t say enough good things about this one. From the intriguing premise to the multi-dimensional maps, this game keeps on giving. Staring with the random quotes from the protagonists on the intro screen, Tesla vs. Lovecraft is about loving attention to detail.

The maps are medium-sized scrollers with plenty of obstacles, a huge departure from Crimsonland’s stark playing fields. The steampunk background graphics are lushly drawn. Bits of the levels are destructible, which makes each section play differently as it progresses. The integrated Tesla and Lovecraft mythos really ties the room together, dude.

One of the gameplay mechanics is a Tesla Warp that moves you forward a few yards. Helpful when you’re getting overwhelmed, it also allows you to pass through some barriers and fences and is integral to your overall strategy. And you will be overwhelmed. It’s considerably tougher than Crimsonland from the start.

You start off in a Tesla mech, with insane firepower. Fun, you say, and begin blasting everything around you to bits. But, unstable tech as it is, that lasts about fifteen seconds or so before exploding, leaving you vulnerable to attack. The suit can be reassembled by finding the various pieces scattered about, giving you another boost of firepower and invulnerability.

There are weapons scattered about, of course, and these are also necessary if you want to advance. Combine these with the perk system, and the game stays interesting, round after round. Actually, it gets more interesting as you advance. Enemies, weapons, and perks are all slowly added level by level, so the more you play, the more involved everything gets.

I can’t tell you exactly what all of these artifacts and perks do, at this point, I just know you need them. Play a level long enough and you’ll come across a nuke, which destroys everything in the surrounding area. Without these, progressing would be almost impossible. There are plenty of portals scattered about that keep generating new enemies, with no way to destroy them.

But run and gun long enough, and Cthulu appears. I prefer to think of it as a junior Cthulu. They’re the size of a monument or something, and can be eliminated with 30-50 shots or so, ending the round. I daresay you’re not going to do that with the actual chaos god.

There’s a map system for the levels, and it intriguingly holds three layers of gameplay. While it’s unfortunate, I guess, that some of them are DLC, it does give you something to acquire after you eventually beat the primary map. Or perhaps they are unlockable as well, it’s too soon to tell, for me. With the way everything builds up level by level, I expect there will be great new additions to the story and bigger boss-type battles in my future.

It's all very polished and engrossing, and I can’t recommend it enough.

 

Tesla Vs. Lovecraft leads us to Tesla Force.

I have read comments from people online complaining that Tesla Force is just more Tesla vs. Lovecraft. Like that’s a bad thing. In fact, it’s in many ways an improvement. There are now four playable characters, with women (Marie Curie and Mary Shelley) included this time around. Portals can now be destroyed if you manage to stay within its boundaries long enough. There’s more storyline involved with this one. There’s even more depth to the playfields, although it’s merely an added graphical element.

The cutscene art has changed in style a bit, but both games are excellently crafted as far as that goes. I do wish the theme song had changed, because playing both extensively makes me appreciate it a tiny bit less.

One thing I don’t like about it as much is that you now have to actively press a button to pick up a new weapon. This can be hard to do in the heat of the moment. It’s a very Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 change that I don’t agree with. It does stop you from changing weapons when you don’t want to, but I definitely prefer the mechanic of Tesla Vs. Lovecraft in this area. I’d say it’s a minor point, but it’s really not, seeing how important weapons are to the game. Given more time under my belt with it, I’ll probably get used to the change.

Otherwise, it’s a great sequel to a great game. Something else I’ll say about all three games is that it thoughtfully gives you the option to autofire with the right stick, or use it to aim and then fire with a trigger switch. When I first played, it defaulted to the trigger, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the other option, and never looked back. Overall, this is a more complex and involved version of an already great game.

Finally, I’ll add that there is a very good bundle on Steam that will net you both Tesla games and some DLC, and at a great price, as well. It’s probably your best bet if you enjoy this sort of game. I’m looking forward to playing these on a big screen instead of my meager laptop…

 

But wait, there’s more!

I also picked yet another twin-stick game from 10-Tons. I won’t fault Jydge for being a thinly disguised Judge Dredd game, though, because there aren’t many good Judge Dredd games. Are there any at all? I can only remember a fairly lame platform shooter game, and that was thirty years ago.

This one’s a bit different than the others. A twin-stick shooter, sure, but with enough differences to put this one in another class entirely. Rather than just blasting and running, you’re given tasks like recusing hostages. Hostages that die if you shoot them. Or shoot the explosives around them. You’re likely to fail the first few rounds until you adapt to the semi-stealth tactics. Which is an odd approach for a Judge Dredd style character, but it works. Another mechanic that took some getting used to was that it is slightly more realistic in the way you aim. You can walk backwards while shooting, which is sort of a crucial feature of twin-stick games, but you have to take aim first, and then start backing up. It makes sense, although it’s a bit off-putting to learn in the heat of your first rounds.

While it’s not as lush as the Tesla games, it’s all very well-drawn, with lots of detail. There’s a bigger emphasis on ambient lighting, here, and that adds to the feel as well as being part of the level design. Or so I recall. I’m still joystick-deep in Tesla Vs. Lovecraft at the moment. Check this one out if you want a tiny bit more strategy than just running and blindly firing. I look forward to spending more time with this one once I beat the others.

Ten Tons is shaping up to be one of my favorite game houses of late, and I'm interested in seeing what else they have on offer. 

Ten Tons Ltd. website.

(Re) Finding (Captain) Nemo

 

Painted by Patrick Griffin

As is sometimes the case, I found myself out of things to read. I located a few Barnes & Nobles classics around the house and picked up Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. But I also had 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. How much did I actually remember of that book, I wondered? After all, Mysterious Island is a direct sequel. So I decided to re-read Leagues, instead. Because once I started thinking about it, I realized I couldn’t have been older than ten when I first read it. This is not a book for ten-year-olds.  I doubt I absorbed much of it, at the time.

It was also of interest to me as I have long since written an homage of sorts, Hurricane Regina, as an intersection between Verne, Clive Cussler, and Robert Heinlein. His classic was the most murky in my mind as I did so, and I was curious as to what similarities existed beyond the most obvious.

I’m glad I re-read it. I had my first ‘duh’ moment before I had finished with the biography included before the actual story. He wrote it in French! This seems wildly obvious, but I had never considered that until just a few weeks ago. This affects nothing, and everything. How odd that such a basic fact can evade knowledge. Consequently, I realized I had a lot to learn.

Never underestimate the value of a, now maligned in some circles, classical education. Mr. Verne piles on scads of oceanography, geography, history, engineering, Greek and Roman mythology, marine biology, and so much more, to the point of near exhaustion, at times, that you cannot help but walk away from this novel more informed than you were before you read it.  I don’t know many college graduates in this day and age with his breadth of knowledge.

Granted, it’s a bit heavy-handed, at times. The descriptions of marine life by genus and species sometimes feels like cataloging. This is often counterbalanced by very poetic prose. It’s a curious mix. Of course, this is all in perfect harmony with the lead character, himself both a scholar and enthusiast. His conveyance of location, direction, time, speed of travel, and depth is similarly detailed in its ultra-realism, and contributes greatly to the overall immersion you receive. Although Verne’s travels abroad were all above sea level, Leagues gives the impression that he himself had indeed spent a considerable amount of time exploring the ocean’s depths in person.

Verne also manages to establish himself as an early proponent of ecology. Numerous passages exist lamenting overfishing and the despoiling of the ocean ecosystems by man. At the same time, the crew of the Nautilus gleefully kill and eat almost every creature they encounter in abundance. It’s a convergence of theory and practice that I’m not sure he was aware of as he wrote it. Teary paragraphs decrying the destruction of ocean life are met with scenes of hauling in great nets of wildlife to stock their seemingly infinitely accommodating larders. Not even birds and quadrupeds are safe from their lust for dietary variety. Of course, their hauls are but a drop in literal oceans, in terms of scale.

His characterizations are not the most fleshed out personalities in literature, to be sure. Robert Louis Stevenson basically called them all Mary Sues. For the most part, they seem to exhibit bravery and apprehension, and little else. They do tend to have slightly more depth than I am giving them credit for, but not by much. This is simply not that sort of literature. The protagonist is primarily wonderous, his sidekick servile and loyal, their Canadian compatriot angry and dissatisfied.

Captain Nemo himself proves to be the most enigmatic of the characters, driven by events that are merely alluded to, and is alternatingly gruff, expansive, mysterious, and vindictive. He is a true anarchist, albeit not of the most principled sort. Sometimes motivated by self-preservation, he’s also at times suicidal. He’s also a bit of a pirate, although the riches he plunders are the possessions of others only in theory. I get the impression that he was perhaps the inspiration for Ayn Rand’s character Ragnar Danneskjold.  Nemo is easily the most complex character, taking center stage while at the same time remaining in the background for much of the novel. Nowhere is the dichotomy of his nature more apparent than in the scene whereby this champion of the ocean slaughters a huge pod of sperm whales because he thinks they’re assholes.

In terms of pacing and suspense, Verne is spot on. He manages to convey the feeling of being confined and losing your sense of time quite well, and also shows how if affects the characters involved. There are numerous events that break up the monotony, compelling you forward with genuine concern for the outcome of each.

As an early work of speculative science fiction, Verne is amazingly on the mark. There are very few things he got wrong in any real sense. The workings of the sub are complex but almost entirely accurate. His understanding of the value of electricity is impressive. It doesn’t matter that his view of battery storage was unworkable when he wrote the novel, in terms of size and output. They did become feasible. He speaks of the possibility of a land mass in Antarctica, which was at the time only a theory, although actually planting a flag at the exact location of the pole would have been unworkable in terms of geography without a lengthy and perilous trek on foot. Most fascinatingly, he talks about the few existing undersea telegraph cables connecting the U.S. to Europe, able to transmit information with a delay of .32 seconds.

Even as a study of etymology, this novel has value, with words that have changed meaning or spelling over time, primarily with things like ingulfed/engulfed, and to-day/to-tomorrow.  As scholar Victoria Blake, who wrote the forward of this edition notes, it is not without error. The relative density of steel to water is off by a degree of magnitude. She attributes this to a likely translation issue, but as a researcher/literary historian, I would expect her to clear this matter up fully. Most distressingly, the very last page refers to “Captain Nero”, and I’m pretty sure that is not intentional. Come on, B & N. Do better.

Another extremely interesting detail I leaned when reading this again for the first time, the word squid is never used, except as a footnote included by Blake. The Nautilus and crew are in fact attacked by what is called a giant cuttlefish.

If I may be so bold and pretentious as to level an actual criticism at this work, it would be the ending. I haven’t read such a slapped-together deus ex machina device since Tom Sawyer wanders into the end of Huckleberry Finn. There is great peril as the protagonists seek to make their escape, gripping suspense, and then boom… it’s over. They’re safe. Mr. Aronnax himself, the principal character, doesn’t know what happened, or how. I realize writing an epic novel like this one is a labor, and I can definitely relate to wanting to wrap something up when you are near the end. But surely a work of this scope merits more than a half-page conclusion. Verne’s editors, instead of making him remove crucial pieces of Nemo’s backstory, should have demanded a more fleshed-out ending.

So, how does my own oceanic novel relate to this classic tale?

I won’t even pretend it’s in the same, erm, league, of course. I made no attempt at hard science. My own mysterious captain and his impossible sub are definitely tributes. Both are driven by unknown motivations.  The crews of the two subs are similar in that mine are clones, and Nemo’s are almost entirely without personality or dialogue. And there are giant squid in both. And that’s basically it. It’s an homage of sorts, but I’d like to think the story itself is my own. Without the groundbreaking work of Mr. Jules Verne, it is unlikely that my own novella would even exist.

Onward to The Mysterious Island I go…

Verne's Cartographies

Preview the audiobook of Hurricane Regina, read by Kenneth Lee.

 

 

The Time I Turned Into A Shape-Shifting Reptilian

This one got me kicked out of school…

In times of great stress, via periods of not sleeping, possibly as the results of various…factors, some people can experience momentary bouts of…unwellness.

I am apparently one of those people.

The first time it happened in full, I was living in Oakland, and visiting Berkeley on a daily basis. We were in between jobs as a domestic couple at the time. Domestic couples generally run large private estates together. But we had tired of Orange County and decided to check out the San Francisco area.

Probably a mistake.

I remember we took two hippie kids to a Dead show that they needed a ride to. We were appalled that they referred to us as “yuppies”. It was certainly not our view of ourselves. We did have a brand-new jeep, and I had taken to wearing two rather ostentatious gold nugget rings, so I guess it was understandable. Most of our clothes came from Nordstrom’s.

Berkeley is a wild place, and I invite everyone to check it out. Get on a plane, go there, experience it. Then get back on a plane and leave. I swear, they pump crazy gas into the air, there. Everything is graffitied in Berkeley. The street signs are all bent and twisted. It’s a psychedelic experience even while sober.

While we looked for a new project, I had taken to street theater, to a degree. As was the fashion of the time. I wore a big leather top hat that had a Mad Hatter style label on it that said “Da Mayor’. And declared myself Mayor of Berkeley. This is utterly commonplace behavior, there.

I mostly hung out on Telegraph Avenue, ping-ponging between two CD stores that are big in the area. I would buy CDs from kids going in to sell them, offering them $3 each. They would reject my proposal, then come right back after the stores offered them something like $1 each. I would then get a weekend booth at the Oakland Swap meet and sell them for $7 each.

It was a good hustle, and one we ran again later in Louisiana, opening the third used CD store in the state, and that was even more successful.

Still, it was a bit of a culture shock, northern California. One weekend I had some books on display. Not to sell, but as conversation pieces. The Emperor Wears No Clothes, which Jack Herer had signed for me in Newport Beach, and The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

“Ooh,”, a kid said. “Anarchist Cookbook! Someone stole mine. Want to trade some herb for it?”

Sure, why not?

At that point, he opens a large manila mailing envelope, and pulls out a handful of sacks. In front of literally hundreds of people. To us, it was freaky. It felt like waving it around at the mall or something. But no one batted an eye.

I soon took to selling CDs during the week, as well as buying them. By setting up a folding table on the sidewalk. I based my actions on a recent court ruling that declared that speech related items didn’t require a business license to sell, as it was a restriction on free speech. Good luck discussing court rulings with police.

So they shut me down, and I went to the library to do some research on the laws. What I learned was that Berkeley has this law on the books from the 60s or 70s: “The Police In Berkeley Shall Make Marijuana Smoking Its Lowest Possible Priority.”

Which explained why people would smoke a joint on the streets and wave at cops, who would wave back. Jaywalking was more serious. A dog pooping on the sidewalk was more serious.

But the existing laws, despite the recent ruling, only allowed people to sell hand-crafted goods on the street, and then only with a street vendor’s license. And there were only 200 of those in existence, most given to people who had disappeared.

Hippies, amirite?

Things got progressively weird for me. Or, rather, I did.

This culminated in me staying up all night as I read “The Library Policeman” by Stephen King to my wife in full. It probably took eight to ten hours. She went to sleep. I did not.

Another odd thing about northern California is the lack of air conditioners. So, while the only sound in the apartment was the occasionally cycling of the refrigerator motor, I looked outside to see an entirely silent car slowly going down the street, with one person going through all the open vehicles to steal stuff. I made eye contact with the driver.

By dawn, I was pretty spun.

There was a construction dumpster across the street, and it started making noises. A bum came out of it, white-faced, looking quite like death itself. Naturally, I confronted him about his presence. And he said the strangest thing to me. At least I think he did, I can’t be sure.

“Anything in the streets is fair game.”

Which was actually more or less true, and innocuous, but it didn’t sit well with me.

He left at my request, but I was amped up. I took a 2 x 4 piece, and wacked a few street signs with it. It sounded very much like gunshots. And although this wasn’t East Oakand, it was Oakland. G-rides started driving by. I gave them the universal t-pose “You motherfuckers want some?” gesture indigenous to the west coast.

They in fact did not want any.

Two Jehovah’s Witness types walked up.

“Are you guys FBI?” I asked them.

“Yes,” they said, straight-faced.

Oh, dear. This was not a good Saturday.

A few hours later, I had convinced my wife to drive us back to Louisiana. I wanted no part of California. So I dumped a few thousand dollars’ worth of books in the garbage, we packed what we could fit into the jeep, and left.

In broad daylight. With no air conditioner. This is an important detail because we always drove back and forth at night. It’s unbearably hot, otherwise.

I woke up in Bakersfield, after getting a tiny bit of what I really needed, sleep. My mind was ablaze with delusions regarding car colors, symbolism, and all manner of wrongthink.

This episode culminated in me punching out the windshield. Throwing my rings out the window, along with some music I had recorded and lost forever.

Then jumping out and stripping naked, running down the Bakerfield highway barefoot. I jumped on semis. Threw up gang signs. Four lanes of traffic as far as the eye could see were backed up. Military vehicles, everything.

And no one did anything about it for 30 minutes or so. But when you get .45s pointed at you, you can kind of come back to reality a bit.

A bit. All this is just prologue to the real story, here.

It happened again, years later, at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

I woke up on the couch one day, butcher knife under my pillow. That’s odd, I thought.

The next thing I knew, I was sleepwalking across campus, clad only in blue Adidas shorts. Looking not unlike a young Charles Manson.

I made it almost all the way across the entire university, which is sizable, and was accosted by the school security. Who pepper sprayed me. I hadn’t actually done anything illegal. But whaddaya gonna do? Ultimately, I ended up missing too many classes to finish the semester. But I still had my campus apartment.

Understandably, the school wanted me out. But had no actual standing to evict me. So they talked to my neighbors and devised a plan. We were called into some chancellor’s office, where they raised an indiscretion that was so absurd, we actually laughed, thinking it was some sort of joke.

“Your daughter came outside, put a dildo on her forehead, and said, ‘I’m a unicorn’.”

Erm, no, we didn’t own any dildos, thanks.

But it was enough, railroading or not, to cause us to have to leave.

So we moved into one of my wife’s family’s rent houses about 30 miles north of Lafayette. As we were unloading our stuff, along comes this girl named Sandra. Sandra was an ex-stripper turned crack smoker. And she was with some guy with a bandaged hand. As wild coincidences go when this sort of thing is happening, he was the father of the girl who had colluded with the university to evict us. At the same time we were in the offices getting thrown out, he got his hand crushed pretty badly. And someone shot his German Shepherd that he had had for ten years.

As Sandra was leaving, she leaned over and said in the voice of my boss from work at school, “You take care of yourself, okay?” It was a little unnerving. She had the mannerisms of Deborah as well. Just for that few odd moments. This is all perceptual, of course. Or so I would prefer to think.

I went into the bathroom. Looked in the mirror. For a half-second, I not only looked like Deborah, but I had scaly green skin, and reptile eyes.

Okay…

That night, my wife and daughters slept at her parent’s, as I was pretty out there. That night I had a dream. A nightmare, I guess? I was chased through some dark city projects at night by a reptilian Stephen King the size of a refrigerator…

But I started getting better, and the next day they were back. The next week, we drove by campus.

And got pulled over. Separated. Questioned.

“Where were you a week ago?”

She explained that we were at our house, far from Lafayette.

“Okay. You guys can go.”

“Hol’ up. Why did you do this?”, she asked.

“Because a girl got her head cut off in the campus apartments the night y’all left…”

Um, wow. Okay.

So, people used to ask me later, “You were a pretty promising UL student, and you just disappeared one day. What happened?”

“Well,” I would say as a joke. “They claimed I bit one cop and punched the other in the stomach, but I distinctly remember turning into a dinosaur-type thing and eating them.”

Haha.

The kicker of all this is, it all happened *years* before David Icke and the shape-shifting reptilian phenomenon swept the internet. The best I can come up with is that it was partly influenced by the movie Species. A reptilian classic.

And, as I like to say now, “There is no such thing as shapeshifting reptilians…but if there is, I probably am one.”

Here's my "Haha, Reptilians" website Reptilian Watch that I ran many years later, when David Icke became a phenomenon. On archive.org. Kinda haha, anyway. Half-haha?

I write sci-fi and fantasy, among other things, often loosely based on real-life experiences I've had. Check out Hurricane Regina, narrated by Kenneth Lee. It has some pretty good high weirdness.

The Time I Dissed Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts

 

When I used to go to University of Lafayette, my main running buddy was Techno Nick. Nick was tall, and cool, and awkward, and wore bell-bottom jeans at all times. We used to get high, all day every day, and worked together in our little student IT jobs at the business college.

One day we came in and saw the other IT kids trying to run CAT-5 cable through the ceiling panels, because we were upgrading from coax Token Ring networking. It was probably our first day on the job.

They were running a single strand at a time, removing a ceiling tile, shoving it down a few tiles, replacing it, getting down, moving the ladder.

Nick and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

We took all eleven cables or whatever it was, tied them to something. Nick poked his head up through the ceiling, and threw the whole bundle down the length of the hallway to the other lab. Basically completing hours of work for them in a few seconds.

He came down, and the head of the COBA IT department was ecstatically grateful.

“We’re going to…” I began.

“Lunch?” she said. Knowing full well that I meant we were going to get high.

So Nick and I brainstormed on various projects that we never quite put into action. I was already swamped with what I was working on at the time.

One of plans was the GUI for an operating system. I do remember that we had come up with the idea of menus that floated the most used option to the top, something I saw in some products a few years later, including Windows. But the one we were most excited about was a color Vectrex.

The Vectrex was a 1981 vector monitor cartridge-based gaming system. Black and white lines, like Asteroids. It only had about 34 games ever released, and we wanted a machine that would play Tempest. Color, in other words.

Things happened, of course, and we didn’t get past the dreaming and planning stage. Only later did I find out a prototype color Vectrex existed, although I don’t think the one people found even fully works. Lately I found someone on Youtube who managed to add color to existing Vectrexes, which is very cool.

But several years later, I found myself at Louisiana Tech. I wanted a more challenging school environment.

The first thing I did, though, was take over the radio station, KLPI.

I got elected into an unpaid librarian position. Basically, I was given access to the archive of old albums and could dig through them at will. I think it was in a dorm building closed off because of asbestos.

Of course I used it as a band practice area.

It was me, a kid named John who played guitar, and a cute, mousey red-headed girl named Margaret. Margaret played bass and had a Lemmy-style Rickenbacker that was as big as she was.

I played drums and sang some of the songs, with John and Margaret swapping vocal duties for various other cover tracks.

Most memorably, I sang  the D.R.I. song “Yes, Ma’am”, John sang some metal drinking song from a band I can’t recall (John was an alcoholic), and Margaret sang “Stripped, Raped, and Strangled” by Cannibal Corpse. With lyrics rewritten to be about guys instead of girls. It was a great little band, and she was really something to see when performing it. We were pretty great as far as thrown-together college bands go.

I also got keys to the station and used it as my personal jukebox.

I had my little radio slot, something like 10am-Noon or something. But I wouldn’t follow a playlist, do any bumpers, announcements, song IDs, station IDs, anything. I just played cool songs. What we were *supposed* to do was play the songs they told us to play, and every hour or so we could play one or two of our own choices. Yeah, no.

But we also used to be able to go in whenever no one else had a slot, and just play whatever we wanted. At least I did, anyway. I would go in at night, put on something like El-P’s first album, and clean the entire station.

We also had a dildo of a station manager named Will.

We started butting heads over everything I did, but mostly because he was crazy concerned with the FCC. Now, the FCC ‘Safe Harbor’ regulation actually states that profanity, to a degree, is okay in the off-hours of the night. But Will wanted to be in radio proper and wouldn’t listen to anything like that. One night I was playing the Machines of Loving Grace “Concentration” album in full, and I got a call from an angry Will.

“Did they just say SLEEP WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING FISHES TONIGHT?”

I hung up on him. Got on the air. “Hey, whoever that old lady is who keeps calling and complaining, you can go to hell.”

This all becomes relevant later on.

Because I needed a project. I’ve found that it’s a very good idea to take on one big project every semester, if you can find one. You push yourself, you generate some good resume fodder, and sometimes, you accomplish cool things.

This was the Top Dawg Business Plan Writing Competition. Great. Because the top prize was something like $5,000.

You needed a team of students, so I signed my wife on. In reality, she was a placeholder. I was up against teams of, like, five Indian grad students. Me, the perpetual freshman.

The project was a game company called Crash and Burn. The product, initially, was a multi-system luggable emulator. Essentially me and Techno Nick’s color Vectrex brought to life. But, much better, because it had a rotating monitor that could display horizontally and vertically, and ran ROMs from every possible working system. Pretty simple to throw together, really.

I got deep into writing a 54-page business plan or whatever it was. Hired a graphic artist to make some beautiful mockup posters for the presentation. When it came time for the first round of the competition, my project was easily the most viable, interesting, and potentially profitable.

I scored well in that round, and looked poised to win. Better yet, we had another month or so to revise the project based on feedback, and represent for the final round of judging.

Then came time for the station manager and others to audit the DJs.

“Please,” they pleaded. “Just follow the playlist for an hour or two while we audit you. We have to write up a report.”

Hahahaha. No.

My set that morning was Rick Wakeman’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”, and the first side of Venom’s “At War With Satan”, instrumental version.

Rick Wakeman was the keyboard player for Yes, and the whole album is a rock opera of amazing caliber. Mostly instrumental, it tells the entire Jules Verne story, punctuated by insane prog rock driven by some of the best synthesizer playing of all time. It was sampled for an LL Cool J song to great effect, and you can hear how it influenced the Beastie Boys' jams on one of their later albums.

Tubular Bells is an album-long instrumental in which Oldfield plays something like 43 instruments, layering and building to a massive climax. It was the theme song to the movie The Exorcist. Ice-T opened his first full-length album with it.

Venom was early British proto-thrash metal. And, an album-side instrumental, but right before the big solo part, oops, singer Cronos says, “Fuck the bastards!”

Slipped my mind.

So, my set and the audit ended, and they were livid. Will wrote me up and tried to make me sign something. I flatly refused.

“If you kids are going to try and flex on me over rules, let’s also start enforcing laws.”

Because theft was rampant, and pretty much all of them were guilty. Massively guilty. Any new swag that came in was stolen. The best CDs were immediately stolen. The actual station library was fairly terrible, as a result.

“John, don’t you have about 200 stolen CDs at your apartment right now?”

This didn’t go over well with them. As a result, I lost my radio slot. But I still had the keys for the rest of the quarter, and continued to do sets whenever I wanted.

Not content to let it rest, I started shit with the Vice-President of Student Affairs over it. “When I win this business plan writing competition, I’m going to sue your ass.”

Foolhardy, in many ways, of course.

I was extremely fortunate to have some major league consultants on my project. Not to throw names around, but they included some game console and computer designers, major electrical engineers, and game coders. One became VP of a division of Sony Games, and eventually the Head of Google Games. Another had a successful little website where he sold legal game ROMs.

“This is a cool project, but if you’re serious about it, you need to abandon the idea of hardware altogether. It’s for the big boys only, because hardware is a loss-leader. You can only lose money on hardware and try to make it up on software. The numbers aren’t there, and you should switch to a software-only model.”

So, I sadly and wisely ditched the hardware component. I rewrote everything incorporating the new software model. And it was a killer.

Basically, you would buy a disc for the Playstation 2, Xbox, Gamecube, whatever, and it would include the emulators and a selection of arcade and console ROMs. Then you could use the online component to connect to a server and buy additional ROMs. It would monetize the pirate ROM market in the way that Apple did with MP3s.

As I was writing the revised business plan, Nintendo’s patent for just such a system was announced. I was definitely on the right track.

But when I passed the woman who ran the business plan writing competition in the student union one day, she was looking at me as if to say, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” Because when it came time for the second, final presentation, two of the three judges had been replaced. The new guys had questions along the lines of “What’s a video game?” and “Why do you think video games would be profitable?”

Entirely playing dumb.

My greatly revised and improved, front-running business plan came in dead last, this time. Of four teams, I came in fourth. Even though their products and plans were pretty bad that year. The judge from the first round who stayed on was so upset at the railroading, he made them create an Honorable Mention category for me on the spot. He was visibly upset.

Not nearly as upset as my wife, who appeared in the school paper with a look on her face that could kill. A total and complete fuckjob.

But, oh, well.

Trip Hawkins had left Electronic Arts, and was looking to start a new company, with the terrible name Digital Chocolate. So I pitched it to him.

“It’s interesting,” he told me. “But I see too many problems with it, so I’m going to pass.”

The very business model that later became employed with great success  by Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. Another startup, Gametap, I believe, did something similar as well.

Several years later, I dug up the original email from when I had contacted Hawkins.

“It’s tough,” I wrote him back, “being a mammal among the dinosaurs…”

Bonus LOL: He ended up leaving that company, too. But not before predicting the death of the console market in 2012.

Silly dinosaur.

The Time I Blew A Potential Deal With Dreamworks

Way, way back in the early 90s, I was a huge Amigaenthusiast. The Amiga being the most amazing personal computer ever devised. Consequently, I also became a huge Video Toaster enthusiast. The Video Toaster was a broadcast studio on a card for the Amiga. It did pretty much everything you could have wanted. Switcher, 24-bit Paintbox, Character Generator, Video Effects, and 3D. To name some of the bigger features.

I didn’t have one at the time, but I did have a pretty beefy Amiga capable of supporting one, and plans to acquire one as soon as I could. What I did have, however, was their Revolution demo tape, which they sent me in the mail.

Mind. Blown.

Hopelessly entranced, I took it over to my SoCal pot dealer, Tom’s. Tom was a great guy, of course. A bit of a surfer dude type who did custom tilework. He also had a gorgeous girlfriend from the Philippines or somewhere. Super cool, nice, fun people. The house was so obviously a dealer’s house. Multiple trucks, pythons, a huge St. Bernard, motorcycles, endless traffic. He once grew a ten-foot pot plant in his backyard. In a subdivision. Pre-legalization.

Anyway, I put the tape on, and no one there paid the least bit of attention to it. They were more of a Motley Crue crowd or whatever.

But I watched it. As I had watched it ten times before. This time, though, something clicked in my head. I got a piece of a realtor’s promo notepad and sketched a simple schematic.

Camera out to Video Toaster in, add effects, Video Toaster out to VR goggles.

Simple, except there were not really any VR goggles to go around, at the time. I did manage to talk to an incredibly intelligent wizard named Leo. I won’t drag him into this yet again, but Leo wore a cape. Leo wrote commercial games. Leo wrote hardware drivers for video cards. Leo worked on major game console releases.

Naturally, I accosted him onboard the Queen Mary at an AmiExpo in Long Beach.

After I confronted him about the damn difficulty of his Roger Rabbit game, and the extremely annoying disk swapping, we talked a bit about VR.

“Oh, just get a few Sony Watchmen. Take them apart. Roll your own goggles.”

Leo was that sort of genius. Is, I should say.

So, fast forward a few years, and I was in the Honors Program at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I took two Honors classes that semester, and one was with a 30 year-old professor named Ty. Or, as he liked to be called, DixieFlatline.

Tyrone was a very driven individual, and this was his first time teaching an Honors class. “Push the kids a little bit,” they told him.

There were seventeen of us, and he immediately pushed eleven of them into dropping the class.

For the six of us that remained, he gave us an utterly incomprehensible graduate-level communication textbook, and a simple syllabus:  Write a graduate-level communication paper for publication. As freshmen.

He was very big on the idea of mash-up sort of stuff like the Heideggerian Phenomenology of the SugarBuster’s Diet. Stuff that was probably beyond the grasp of the people involved. But we all gave our topics, and he approved them. One girl’s was on Abortion…

So, I explained to him what I was already working on, and he approved that.

“Oh, like that movie Strange Days.”

“The what?”

I had to go and rent it.

At any rate, I went about writing the paper that I had really planned on writing four years later. It was a good stretch, for me. When you write something like that, you have your thesis, of course, and begin with a survey of the state of the art.

It was a great semester. The best ever. I had access to so many research avenues and learned so many things. At this point, I posit that Ivan Sutherland was a genius in the same league as Nikola Tesla.

One day I was wandering around campus as I often did, and found myself in the basement of the Apparel Research Lab.

Yes, this is a thing.

They had some rather nifty pieces of kit, An automated specimen cabinet that held 10,000 jars, all retrievable with a few keypresses. Machines to print fabric designs, and then cut them out automatically. And in one small glass room, the most expensive SGI computer I had ever seen, with a sexy pair of VR goggles sitting on a stand.

“Ho-lee shit,” I said. “Can I use that?”

“Ah, it’s broken,” my escort said.

I looked at the fan, and it was crusted with more dust and dirt than you would ever allow on your Gateway desktop PC. So sad. But the goggles worked… I had to write a formal proposal, but the next day I was granted access to use them. Score!

The final leg of my paper involved lab work and testing with real-world users, and then interviewing them. My classmates, in this case, as we were all in over our heads together.

So I lugged in about $10,000 worth of gear and set it all up. Amiga, Video Toaster, SVHS deck to make it all connect, a Sony color security camera for eyes, and connected it all to the goggles. It worked without a hitch. Using that set-up, I was able to key video onto the wall so that when the goggles were on, the wall was a display. Take the goggles, off, it disappears. Giant virtual screens. Then I put the goggles on a sixty-five year old woman, flipped a switch, and made her hallucinate.

Double success.

There was still some raver culture, and although the virtual display was cool, pretty much everyone wanted the hallucinogenic glasses shrunk down to Walkman size. So, we all finalized our papers. The abortion girl gave the most disturbing presentation I have ever witnessed. Five of the six of us turned in work and got our A’s. Here's mine.

“WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT?”, you don’t ask, politely.

My point is that a few years later, I cold-called Dreamworks (among others) until I got the ear of someone in a position to do something. I wanted to develop a concept theater.

A hundred people could walk into a theater at a hundred different times and watch a hundred different movies on the same shared screen. Pause, rewind, watch in groups. It could be entertainment, a school or university, arcade, and community meeting center all at the same time, and allow Hollywood to release their entire catalog at once. Netflix for theaters. The aging, dying theaters. I think Netflix, if it existed at the time, still shipped DVDs in the mail.

Conversely, you could develop a cable box that would allow an entire family to each watch different channels at the same time, on their wall-sized display, while still being able to interact with each other.

And the Dreamworks guy told me to write up a formal proposal, because it sounded interesting and doable.

That was the same week I started the Rhyme Torrents Project, an effort to legitimize nerd rappers for inclusion on Wikipedia. A three or four-year journey. Fun, ultimately, but pointless and silly, at the same time. Naturally, I threw myself into that project with both feet.

That’s right. I never followed up on the Dreamworks stuff. At all. Ever. 

The Time I Worked for a Crooked Cop

I was going to school in Ruston and needed a job. So I called an agency and got an administrative assistant job for $10 an hour.

For a cop.

I am not what you would call a police-oriented person. But I needed the money. Plus, it was kind of an interesting gig. I did web design, answered phones, authored a database. Whatever I wanted to do to help out, basically.

It was a one-person outfit called Heaven’s Watch. Ostensibly a police charity. That didn’t have charitable status, I found that out a bit later.

Immediately, the long distance service for the phones was disconnected.

I called the agency. “Hey, this guy isn’t paying his bills. You need to find me another job.”

“Don’t worry,” they said. "We are paying you. He pays us."

So, whatever.

The guy had a police cruiser that had a $12,000 paintjob. Eagles, stars, statue of liberty, 9/11 stuff. It was basically a patriotic country song come to life.

His hustle was taking it to fairs and the like, selling t-shirts, and collecting donations. The website was part of his push for increased revenue.

He was a big dude. I’m talking 6’ 6” or something, and probably 400 pounds.

The longer I worked there, the more anomalies I saw. More unpaid bills. Him gambling. Him…staying up all night.

I’ve run with my share of thugs, and I met some of his people. Clearly thugs.

The first time he had me cash a check in my name, for an “emergency”, I didn’t think too much of it. It was something like $2200. The second time he asked me to do it, I refused. In retrospect, I could have just cashed it and bounced.

But I realized he was trying to set me up for his embezzlement.

The months went by, and I ended up spending a lot of time alone, battle rapping on Yahoo chat. There wasn’t much to do.

It turns out, he owed the agency $14 an hour for my services. Which he also didn’t pay. And he had stopped paying the car note. All while bringing in thousands every month.

Finally, the dummy from the agency showed up in person to try and collect. Dude left his service revolver on the desk, pointed at him…

So the agency eventually called me and said they weren’t going to pay me anymore, and I had to quit. He countered with offering me cash. Which I accepted.

The first week, fine. He paid me. The second week, me and the guy who washed his car were waiting around at five P.M. to get paid.

He was a no-show. Wouldn’t answer the phone.

“I think I know where he is,” I said, and we drove to his father’s house. After I put all my stuff in my car. And changed the computer password to ‘asshole’.

His father owned the office complex which also housed the Department of Transportation office for that area. He was essentially waiting for his father to die to inherit his estate.

So he greeted us at the door, all smiles, and bum-rushed us out of there.

“Hey, guys. I forgot! No problem, let’s go to the office, and I’ll cut you guys checks.”

When we got there, he was enraged. So much so that the guy who detailed his car just jetted, unpaid.

I let him rant for a while, then said, “Bottom line, am I going to get paid today or not?”

He jumped up and stormed into my office. I guess he was going to throw my stuff at me, but all that was in there was his. All I could think was that I was in an office with an insane cop who smoked crack or did meth, and had essentially pointed a gun at an agency rep.

I decided to go outside.

So, I’ve dealt with angry cops. What’s far scarier is a crying cop.

He was going off so bad, between angry and crying, a D.O.T. employee came outside to smoke, and decided to stay and watch the whole thing. After he threatened to have me arrested, and I called his bluff, I decided to go, unpaid as well.

A week or two later, I talked to the Chief of Police in Ruston, who was a more reasonable fellow, and explained the situation. After telling him I was never paid, he talked to the guy, and came back and said, “Yeah, he’d like  access to his database and website.”

So he sent another thug with an envelope containing $400. What he got in return was a scrap of paper that said ‘asshole’.

I’m not sure if he ever tried it, or just wigged out further.

A month or so later, I got a call from channel 8 in Monroe. Would I like to be interviewed?

Hell yes.

My wife was scared, of course. Thin blue line of silence or whatever. But a lot of cops who knew what was going on were actually supportive. They just wouldn’t do it themselves.

I spent about five minutes on T.V. giving everyone the lowdown, and he was destroyed.

It turns out he was a $1 a year reserve officer. Essentially a role-playing volunteer. He wasn’t even supposed to own a police cruiser, they can’t be sold to civilians.

The car was repossessed, the fake charity folded, and I’d like to think he never became a full-blown officer.

Update:

Ack! So many hits! Check out one of my books on Amazon, please! 

Pageburner on Amazon. 

Here's the ONLY info I can find on HW and Stroud...and even that took some digging. Nothing incriminating, just an early mention before I got there.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/360348721/

"Union Parish Sheriffs Deputy Becky BeDoit-Fitzpatrick and Ouachita Parish Sheriffs Deputy Marvin McFarland show off the Heroes on Patrol moving tribute to policemen who died in the Sept. 1 1 terrorist attacks. The car, which is being driven across the country, eventually will be displayed in New York City. Mandy M. GoodnightThe Town Talk n L l i - ' i 111 . - 1 m no .n u i f . 3 By Mandy M. Goodnight The Town Talk POLLOCK - A row of seventh-graders peaked at the car with interest. Some even pulled out their cameras to take a photograph. The eagle on the front stood out as if reaching for the ones who ventured close enough. It took a little while before some of them noticed the names printed inside the stars on the car's front. They stared at one another trying to figure out exactly what the names meant. Heroes On Patrol had rolled into Camp Grant Walker Friday evening. The car is a movable memorial to the law enforcement officers who died Sept. 11. "It is important for the kids to see this," said Lt. Mathew Stroud of the Richwood Police Department. "What is standing in front of them is history." About 75 seventh-graders from throughout the state were at the campgrounds for a two-day Challenge Camp. "This will be a part of their history," Stroud said. "It is something special." Stroud and three other north Louisiana officers said they felt as though the policemen killed Sept. 11 were forgotten in the wake of the attention given the firemen. The officers wanted to send a car to New York but then decided to make the car a tribute to their fallen brothers. The car comes from Texas and is painted with a waving American flag that extends to the back of the car. The front has a giant eagle and the shadows of others surrounded by stars with the names of 71 fallen policemen and the departments where they worked. In addition, the four Louisiana officers formed Heaven's Watch, an organization of officers helping others throughout the United States. This weekend, the Franklin Parish Sheriffs Office will host the car at the Catfish Festival. Organizations and law enforcement agencies can host the car for free. Some of the highlights of the crosscountry tour include taking part in a Professional Golf Association event in July and escorting 7,000 Harley Davidsons into Beaumont, Texas, for a gathering. Eventually, the car will make its way to New York City for a memorial service in September and remain there for display. Mandy M. Goodnight: 487-6465; "

Trolling My Way Into An FBI Swab

 

UPDATE: A lot of people are calling this fake, for some reason. So I dug up an old post from my stalker: https://groups.google.com/g/soc.women/c/fxnD_6q46lc/m/UhuloqRap8oJ
I used to have a pretty big Internet footprint, back when the web was much smaller, and Usenet was king. I spent way too many years in school, flaming and trolling eighteen hours a day. Consequently, if I was ever offline for an extended period of time, it was noticed. 2002 was just such a time. I had graduated from LSUE, having spent an extra year there, acquiring useless transfer credits, and then moved to Ruston to attend Louisiana Tech University.

When I got there, I set up a new account. New ISP, new IPs, new Usenet account. And I decided to make a funny. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.

My first post was in all caps, signed with my wife’s name, and her real phone number.

“SOME OF YOU MAY KNOW MY HUSBAND JASON. HE’S BEEN ARRESTED FOR THE RAPE AND MURDER OF THREE PROSTITUTES IN THE EUNICE AREA. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION THAT CAN FREE OR CONVICT HIM, PLEASE CONTACT ME.”

Immediately, the email began flying, which I ignored. “Is this for real, bro?”, “Are you just fucking with us again?”, etc.

I got up from the computer and giggled, having successfully started another shitstorm. And walked into the living room.

“POLICE CONTINUE TO SEARCH FOR THE BATON ROUGE SERIAL KILLER…”

It was then and there that I got the feeling that I might have fucked up.

To make matters worse, I had previously attracted my very own insane stalker, who went by the name ICEKNIFE. The fact that I ran the hipster site Reptilian Watch didn’t help. Plus, I was in a somewhat edgy death metal band of some slight underground renown, Gortician.

Here’s a fun death threat letter I got from ICEKNIFE in the mail:

 

Anyway, as obsessive stalkers do, this dude was all over the CourtTV message boards, local news sites, Usenet, telling everyone who would listen that he had figured out who the Baton Rouge Serial Killer was, and throwing my name around every chance he got. Which was considerable.

I should mention that a girl had gotten her head almost completely cut off at UL before I left Lafayette a few years previously, and a female professor from Tech went missing shortly after I arrived in Ruston. Unfortunate coincidences, I assure you.

A month or two of this, and I got a call from the Monroe FBI field office.

“Mr. Christie, we have received 14,000 tips, and 15 were about you. We’d like to come and test your DNA.”

I explained the situation and said, "Sure".

The local field agent was a good ole’ boy, and we had a bit of a laugh at the circumstances. He was accompanied by a D.C. profiler. She was literally Skully. Tall, beautiful, redhead. And she was good at it. As he and I spoke outside, we moved around, slightly. She was always just outside of my field of vision. Like a ninja detective.

Eventually I spit in a cup, and that was the end of it. No, I wasn’t the Baton Rouge Serial Killer.

A few months later, I got another call from the same Monroe field agent.

“Mr. Christie, we meet again. I understand you work for Lt. Matthew Stroud. Would you be interested in giving grand jury testimony…?”

But that’s a story for another day...

Wow! Thanks for the reads! I'm an author. My books are full of crazy stuff. Radar Love on Amazon.

Or just check out Zombie Killa Part 1 of 6 (Audiobook) for free. https://soundcloud.com/the-original-high-c/zombie-killa-part-1

I also trolled my way into a Simpsons nod. And into Wired, Wikipedia, and IMDB.