Here I go again . . .

Here I go again . . .
It's crazy the amount of time you can take up tracking down information on ICQ. If you start off with help of any quality at all, the leads multiply exponentially and before you know it a whole evening has passed - and you wind up somehow knowing a lot less about the subject than you did when you first set off on your journey.

Of course, that's what happens with any sort of research, which is why some people research their projects endlessly and never end up starting work on them. What the internet offers that traditional research can't is countless opportunities to drift off into long conversations which have nothing to do with the topic.

Fortunately for me, I'm interested in those conversations as well.

Unfortunately for everyone who reads this page, the fact that I don't have the sense to delay them until their proper time means I once again near midnight having bit off more than I can chew. Give me credit, however, that at least these days I am taking those bites.

You'll see some of that soon enough.

Many years ago, a distraught and forgotten Georges Méliès discarded some ninety of his films - nearly all of them - into the Thames. These were among the first films to employ the use of special effects. Most prominent of his works, thankfully surviving, is 1902's A Trip to the Moon. You may recall the comical image of an angry moon with a rocket embedded in its eye, common in any quick-cut retrospective presentation on film history such as one might see on the Oscars.

Years later, the major studios, faced with the threat of "talkies" - the first sound pictures - in their panic, despair, and smugness, similarly discarded hundreds, or maybe thousands, of silent films. Today they do not exist.

The negatives for today's motion pictures made today are customarily locked in a vault one full mile below the earth, in the Arizona desert. It took perhaps eighty years for this to become standard procedure.

I hate that our games have not yet reached such a standard. Yes, it's been what - at a very liberal estimate, fifteen years? Twenty-five by arcade standards. But oh, the arcade and even console crowds have got their acts together, often against the kicking and screaming of wooden-headed publishers determined to make a few dollars *someday* off of ancient, ancient intellectual property and source code.

You and I, we aren't even close. And don't let the smooth gloss veneer of the FPS and RTS communities fool you: Neither are they.

We're going to regret this soon. And the arcade / console weenies will be thumbing their noses for the duration of our horrified revelation.

We're going to discuss the long lost maps of prehistoric Subspace, soon. And if you have a heart it will feel pain by the time I am done.