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A Short Story

Monday, August 20, 2007

Spatter. 

That’s the name for blood splashed on a window.

They always get it wrong in movies. To get the splash of blood they show, you need to cut an artery. Better yet, a deep chest stab will leave a splash of blood on the ceiling. If you cut off a limb, the blood gushes out in time with the heartbeat. Jet…Jet…Jet…Jet

Those are the only ways to get the kind of blood spray they show in the movies. Every time they show some guy get punched and spit a wad of blood they’re just being dramatic. A punch will leave drops of blood maybe five millimeters across. From a baseball bat, the drops are about two millimeters across. From a gunshot they’re even smaller, nothing but a fine mist. (Continued)

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Email Killed Communication

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Spending a year doing production work for Aspyr taught me a lot. The first lesson I learned was how to write email. The second lesson I learned was how to write email. The third was how to read email, and the fourth was how to write email.

Starting to notice a trend here?

Communication is the lifeblood of any organization, with it the beast will thrive and without it there will be an atrophy of thought. Email has done more to change communication than any thing since the invention of the telephone. It’s also something not taught in school. There they focus almost exclusively on formal writing which, while useful, isn’t that great for the types of information communicated in business.

With that in mind, I’m starting this series of posts summing up many of the lessons that I was forced to learn. Hopefully I can convey enough of these lessons that other people will be helped and maybe even save myself a few headaches in the future.

Continued on page C18- (Continued)

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Bad Communications From QA

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

When working on a video game there are certain absolutes. You will be overworked. The deadlines will be coming up too soon. And you will have someone breathing down your neck telling you to hurry up.

No department is immune to this, not even QA– the department that supposedly does nothing but play games. When QA gets stressed, you start seeing comments, bugs and questions coming out of the department that just make you stare dumbfounded at the words on the screen.

Continued on page E3- (Continued)

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NPCs of the World Unite

Friday, August 10, 2007

Just do it somewhere away from me.

Seriously, I’m tired of dealing with you people. The annoyance of realizing 20 minutes after meeting someone that he could be summed up in one short statement is kind of depressing. I don’t need to deal with that, and besides maybe if all of you formed your own town somewhere it could finally prove some nice little debates that I’ve had. “If the entire town is NPCs, then when no PCs are around does the town cease to exist, or just the people in it? Or maybe they can achieve this kind of half life thing where they’re all observing each other, even.”

Continued on page E7- (Continued)

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In the Beginning

Friday, August 10, 2007

There was nothing. And then the Word spoke itself into being.

Realizing it was unfulfilled, the Word spoke into being creatures to hear it. And wanting to honor it, the creatures wrote the Word into stone.

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