Dream Game: Star Citizen

Today's post has been a long time in coming. Like 22 years in coming. Accordingly, it's super long.

A little while ago, I got to cross a big entry off my personal, nerdy bucket list. I got some actual stick time in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. Now it may be hard to appreciate why that was such a big life moment for me, so let me rewind things a bit. Say about, oh...two decades ago, more or less. When I was a lowly little five year-old with a whole nerdy life ahead of me.

My mother wanted to move down to Houston, Texas, where my grandfather was "living" at the time. I say "living" because after spending a summer and a half in Houston, I've determined that no one actually lives in Houston. At least not in the summer. Instead, they melt and dip in and out of a constant state of humid, clammy heat stroke while shuffling from one climate-controlled environment to another. Living in Houston in the summer is kind of like living in a state of reverse cryogenic freezing: you're only alive and active when in confined, artificially cooled spaces; the rest of the time you're in a state of quasi-death. And that's forgetting the insane proliferation of cockroaches in the area--huge, impossibly numerous, and insidious. Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout. In any case, my family decided to move down to Houston. Out of ignorance. And my mother and I moved down there in May 1990 to start looking for houses while my brother and father tried to wrap things up in Illinois.

So the two of us moved into a small Houston apartment, and with no friends and only a handful of toys to play with, I immediately fell back on my favored tools of entertainment: pencil and paper. I up-ended a moving box and slid it against a wall in the corner, and then I began plastering images on my large, double-wide pad of drawing paper. The first drawing was a space battle, with X-wings detonating Tie fighters while Star Destroyers looked on helplessly. I taped that to the wall just above the cardboard box. I then sketched out the cockpit controls for an X-wing fighter, which I knew by memory (I vividly recall as a five-year-old considering every visit to the video store a tacit pledge to rent one of the Star Wars trilogy). The controls I taped down to the top of the moving box. Then, sitting in front of the wall, I piloted my hastily improvised space fighter into harrowing dogfights and epic space battles, hands holding an invisible control stick and pounding the scrawled out buttons in quick succession to realign my deflector screens and adjust my targeting computer. I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast. I grew up on Star Wars and old scratchy VHS recordings of Battlestar Galactica, and space battles have always kept me up at night.

"Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout."

Another life support function in Houston was the arcade. In a region where the summer is full of weekly reports of heat stroke deaths, parents are rather less eager to pack their kids into plastic tubes in outdoor playgrounds, apparently. So everywhere we went in Houston we tripped over the most God-blessed bounty of video arcades I have ever known. Places like McDonald's substituted their playgrounds with attached arcades, and shopping malls had elaborate, sprawling video game arenas that compared to nothing else I've seen in my life except the ill-fated Disney Quest ten years later. Yes, Houston may have been the worst region to settle, in my opinion, but once there those Texans accidentally made themselves a nerd haven where you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a video game cabinet.

At the shopping mall my family went to, they had a massive arcade that featured a bank of eight Mechwarrior simulator cockpits that were the precursor to the Tesla Pods I've raved about in the past. They had surround sound, multiple monitors, and banks of sexy working buttons and control surfaces. I was in love. But my ten year-old brother, in a pique of superiority, informed me that it was way too expensive: a five minute match in the simulators would blow half of my arcade allowance. "And besides," he'd tell me in that big brother way, "you wouldn't know what to do with all those buttons and controls. It'd be a waste of money." But for my brother, apparently, it was right up the future pilot's alley, and the fifth-grade schmuck would proceed to hop into matches and whoop and holler and throw his Mad Cat mech into the thick of missile-firing fights and laser-burning bust-ups. He'd even had the audacity to occasionally pull some of my share of the arcade allowance to get in extra matches, and I was stupidly ensorcelled enough by the explosions and sci-fi gratification of watching from afar that I would usually let him.

"I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast."

We didn't move to Houston. My family collectively bailed out on the humidity capital of the country after less than six months. But the glories of the Houston arcade scene and the dream of the simulator cockpit (also known as a simpit) have stuck with me ever since.

Which I'm sure you've guessed by now.

That was also the year that a certain game called Wing Commander came out. A space sim in which the player got to slip into the cockpit of a fighter and partake in interstellar wars, it was the ultimate boon to my fevered brain, letting me fire blasters and pull extravagant maneuvers to shake enemies off my six. The following year, Wing Commander II came out, and we played that one to death, too. And when I say we, I mean I would harangue my brother into booting up the game on our cyclopean* DOS machine and then I'd bumper-car my way through space until he'd get fed up and take over. Which was often necessary, because I could get Angel killed in the easiest of fur-balls. Not to mention I had a knack for blasting through missions by the skin of my teeth and missing all chances for extra objectives and commendations. It was great. And it lasted for just one more year before we converted to a Mac family and my gaming life shifted to real-time strategy games like Warcraft and, eventually, Myth. Even when Wing Commander got ported to Mac, I didn't get as into it. Maybe it was no longer being threatened by my brother for every botched Immelmann turn, or maybe it was that the game lost its mystique when it wasn't hidden behind an inscrutable DOS command line, but I didn't keep up with the rest of the series.

Years passed and I always looked back on Wing Commander fondly. My brother and I got into Mechwarrior 2 and tossed around simpit ideas until he got fed up with my "strategy" of attacking his Atlas-class mechs with gnat-sized Elementals, which often resulted in five to ten minutes of me hovering around him, unable to cause any damage but impossible to hit with the mechanical titan. My brother joined the Air Force and relegated all our nerdy past-times to me while he went off and, y'know, flew actual planes. The Wing Commander movie came out, and I stubbornly still enjoy it no matter what the rest of the world says. Heck, I'm listening to its soundtrack right now. But there's been nothing like those years in the early 90s, when the Mechwarrior simpits and original Wing Commander games were freshly ingrained in my fantasies. Both genres declined--the first reduced itself to more and more shallow action games, and the latter faded away in the midst of game developer takeovers. Playing a worthy simpit game remained fixed on my bucket list, but it was such a dim hope I was barely conscious of it most of the time.

Then I got to play in the Tesla Pods last year, and reality didn't even remotely quench the nerd-fire that burned for simpits. It heightened its roar, and within days of that experience, I started in on ludicrous plans of building my own sci-fi simpit. I could start with a cockpit, and then maybe build off of that into having a simulated bridge for a capital ship--that'd be the ultimate family gaming experience, me barking out orders while managing damage control and ordering my son to launch a fighter and keep the bombers off us. Oh yes, that'd be sweet. I researched games that might fit these lofty ambitions, looking especially for ones that had good mod support so I could conceivably rework everything to fit my vision of space. There were a few that looked promising, but I passed on all of them for one reason or another. And then, most ridiculous of all, I began researching the idea of making my own game. Sure, it would be clunky and ugly as sin, but I could always make it look like a stylized icon system, right? It'd be just like the Command School from Ender's Game.

Not even my boundless enthusiasm could BS me for long, though. That was an insane idea that would never happen. I'd never make my own game, and no one was making the sort of game I wanted. Nothing was going to come along and justify the huge effort of building a simpit, and nothing would be worthy of it if I ever made one anyways. The space simulator genre was dead.

Then last fall brought with it a new dawn. A project popped up on Kickstarter called Star Citizen. It was the first game in ten years that Chris Roberts would be making.

Chris Roberts.

His name had tickled my ears the first time I saw the Star Citizen campaign page, but I didn't realize what I was in for until I watched the KS video and virtually soiled my actual chair:

"They said I was dead. They said console was the future. Now they say mobile and tablets are the future. I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am a PC game."

Waaah! Glory shot of the Bengal carrier.

"And I am a space sim."

Oh, those first 30 seconds of that video grabbed me by my childhood fantasies and has not let go of me since. I can't watch it without getting excited. Chris Roberts was the creator of the Wing Commander franchise, and he was coming back to the game industry to make something gloriously ambitious. I pledged to the campaign immediately and followed the updates doggedly, as every new addition to the project's goals brought it closer to everything I've wanted from sci-fi gaming:

Sprawling, fully-realized ship interiors. Star Citizen is going to allow the player to explore larger ships, walking down the corridors and into the bridge of carriers and other capital ships. What's more, since the game is going to feature seamless transitions (ie, no load screens) from in-cockpit action to walking around your mother ship, the interiors of the ships are actually going to be consistent with the physical shape of the ship. Unlike the Normandy from Mass Effect, which is depicted as physically smaller and the wrong shape to accommodate the interior spaces you explore in the course of the game.

Out-of-cockpit gameplay. In addition to being able to simply walk around and idly explore in the innards of your big ships, Star Citizen is going to include a shooter-like experience for boarding actions. This integration and mingling of the two genres is going to be inspired, as you know I kept wishing for some space-combat crossover in the Mass Effect series and never got it. Now Star Citizen promises to give capital ship action, fighter brawls, and man-to-man gunfights in tight-packed ship corridors. It's like Chris Roberts has a checklist of my favorite recurring dreams. If there are cute redheaded witches, bottomless tubs full of spiders, and machine zombie hordes, it'll be official--he's ripping off my REM cycle.

A vast forking campaign based on performance and decisions. Long before Bioware ever gave you a non-choice at the end of an epic game, the Wing Commander series had them licked with a campaign that featured meaningfully divergent endings. Endings were based on direct plot choices and mission performance, so just barely clearing your mission objectives as opposed to wiping the board completely might change what your resolution was. They're going to be bringing that legacy back for Star Citizen, and since they've announced 50 missions for the main campaign of Star Citizen (called Squadron 42), I wouldn't be surprised if some of those missions were mutually exclusive based on what path you take your pilot through the plot. Tasty.

Persistent universe. The most exciting and lauded aspect of the game is Star Citizen's ongoing online experience. A variation of an MMO, Star Citizen proposes to let players shape a dynamic economy and play the game the way they want to play it. If that involves mining, trading, and exploring more than direct combat, that's cool with them. And that's very cool with me. I'm always a fan of games that let you go off the rails, even if I find myself not wanting to do so.

Playable capital ships. This was a later stretch goal met in the incredibly successful pledge campaign, and it promises to allow players to potentially gain control of ships as large as their mile-long carrier ships in the final version of the game. This goes hand in hand with cooperative and social play, as even some of their smaller ships are said to be nerfed if you don't have meat in all the crew seats. The 4-man Constellation ship, for instance, will feature two manned turrets and a detachable short-range fighter (a la the Serenity's two shuttles) in addition to the ship's pilot. Beyond that, you'd be looking at dedicated guilds needed just to get the most out of destroyer, cruiser, or carrier-class ship.

Mod support. With how great the core game is shaping up to be, and how visceral and engaging, I feel like this feature is almost perfunctory. But then I think about trying to model a full-scale battlestar in Star Citizen and scramble out in a viper (mk II, of course) to scrap a toaster onslaught. Ooookay...maybe I do still want mod support. And since they're talking about using that as a way to test the feasibility of fan-created additions to the game, I can definitely see me spending a lot of time turning some of my rough designs into something fully realized for this game.

Support for multiple monitors and multi-function displays (MFDs), TrackIR, and advanced controllers. And there it is. Star Citizen is going to support the ultimate simpit gaming rig with this simple promise. You want a three monitor display wrapping in front of you? Okay. How about a dedicated screen for your sensors? Sure. Joysticks, throttles, keyboards, and gamepads? Whoa whoa whoa now--you're a little nuts, aren't ya? That my friends, is a game that isn't simply worthy of the simpit I've been dreaming of these past 22 years--it demands one. Never mind that I'm a more artistic, fine detail sort of builder with minimal wood-working experience. Never mind that I've never wired anything like this before. Never mind that I will building the first PC of my very own from scratch to form the heart of the ultimate gaming rig (that I can afford). It is going to happen. It must happen. So let it be written; so let it be done.



Cloud Imperium Games is collectively working on realizing my dream game and the dream of tens of thousands of gamers all over the world. It's safe to say I'm going to be blogging more about the different aspects of this game in the future. I've already posted at least one article's worth on the subject of space mining in Star Citizen on the website's forums. I'll also be chronicling my progress as I work on my simpit and related projects for this game, so don't worry: I didn't run out of words with this article.

More's the pity, right?



*Seriously, Google spellcheck? You don't know the word 'cyclopean'?!?

Ender's Day

The Next Greatest Day

In the past decade, I've had a lot of lifelong dreams realized in a big way. The Lord of the Rings was realized in a hugely successful film trilogy. I got some seat time in a Tesla Pod. Captain America and the Avengers came to the screen in pure cinematic bliss. There's this little game called Star Citizen coming out that you'll hear (a lot) more about in the future. And while I'm sure there are several other unrealized things left on my nerd bucket list, the only one I can think of now is going to be checked off soon, too. Ender's Game is finally coming to the big screen. And today they are releasing the first trailer for it via a Google+ hangout and then adding it to Youtube.

For those of you haven't heard of Ender's Game, it's a psychological action-drama in a near-future science fiction setting, written by Orson Scott Card. Its title character is Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who at the age of five is sent to Battle School--an orbital military academy for child prodigies training to become the next crop of commanders to lead humanity in an imminent war with an alien race. The Battle School is full of bright-but-aggressive kids trained to have analytical and violent minds, and so a good portion of the book's drama revolves around how the students increase the stakes to their war games in their efforts to eliminate rivals.

Ender's Game is a great, introspective space epic, even though the actual physical space of the book occurs in claustrophobic, personal corridors and rooms. The descriptions of the Battle School's war games is well thought-out and described in gratifying detail, making a series of training exercises a tense part of the book's action as the school's administrators increase the academic and bureaucratic stakes of the games and the students increase the immediate peril itself. Friendships and concepts of personal identity are paramount in this book, though, as Ender is driven to the brink of severe depression and sociopathy by the trials he has to face, only to be dragged back by the wonderfully defined supporting characters. And Ender's older siblings, Valentine and Peter, develop into king-making politicos in a sort of vengeance against a society that passed them over for assignment to the Battle School. It's dense and yet full of visceral moments that keep the book moving along. And the ending is depressing, raw, and cathartic like a full-body scouring with a pumice stone.

When I was twelve years old and first read Ender's Game, I was immediately affected by it. I moved on immediately to the sequel trilogy, which was much more metaphysical melodrama than psychological military action-drama, but I still devoured the rest of the series. I moved on to a thematically parallel series known as The Seafort Saga, which is one of my favorite book series ever and is terribly difficult to find since the author's passing. But Ender's Game remained fondly fixed in my heart--when Starcraft first came out my Battle.net sign-on was Ender, and later I moved on to Homeworld 2 and became Mazer Rackham, Ender's predecessor from the book. When I first met my future wife, I was singing the book's praises to her in our second or third conversation. Heck, I even helped my junior high science teacher--who had originally recommended the book to me--write a screenplay based on the book.

"...the ending is depressing, raw, and cathartic like a full-body scouring with a pumice stone."

Which was itself in response to the first rumors of a live action movie adaptation of Ender's Game. Way back in 1999. Since then, the movie has been in production limbo that should be painfully familiar to former Duke Nukem fans, but at one high point Wolfgang Petersen was slated to direct Ender's Game. And then came delays, and I grew tired of farming rumors as Petersen fell out of the project's future. But now we're looking at a vividly realized film, set to come out November 1 of this year, and I'm hearing that same old music. Directed by Gavin Hood (whatthefrak?! Mr. X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Please no), with a James Horner soundtrack (hell yeah!), and the author Orson Scott Card co-writing the screenplay. Oh, there's so much mixed feelings going on in that one sentence, but if Gavin Hood can forgo the dumbing down of characters and conflicts we saw in Origins, then perhaps this movie might not only be a fantastic adaptation of one of my favorite novels, but the best full-fledged sci-fi epic we've had in years.

And on the subject of casting: Harrison Ford is going to be playing the Battle School's commandant, Colonel Graff, lending the film full of young unknowns some much-needed star power. And aiding Harrison Ford's character in the role of Colonel Graff's assistant? Han Soto. Damn straight. Not to knock Mr. Soto as an actor, but I guarantee you at some point the casting director just threw his hands up in the air "oh co'mon! It's Han Soto and Han Solo! We gotta hire this guy..." I'm also sure that after a week of constant Solo/Soto jokes on set, the whole thing got old real fast.

Ben Kingsley is playing Mazer Rackham, guaranteeing that between this role and playing the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, he is the nerd-daddy of 2013. The young stars making up the principal characters look promising, though casting actors so young and then throwing an entire plot behind their believability as military savants is a novel problem that Ender's Game faces. Whatever the case, Ender's Game promises to be big enough to get a whole new generation of readers picking up a great piece of genuinely thought-provoking science-fiction.

In the end, though, there are some things I absolutely require from this movie. And some of them involve minor spoilers to the book. If you're sensitive to spoilers I suggest you stop here, but at the same time Ender's Game is still a fantastic read and re-read even when you know all of the major plot-points. But I'm warning you anyways.

"oh co'mon! It's Han Soto and Han Solo! We gotta hire this guy..."

Still here? Good.

1. The Third Formic Invasion must be a lie. This is a big one, and it's one that the writers could easily be tempted to change. For most of the book, the characters all believe that the Formics--advanced insectoid aliens who nearly wiped out humanity twice--are on their way to Earth for round three of the Bugger Wars. In fact, it turns out that they've been preparing for Earth's counterattack. Ships in Ender's Game are slower than the speed of light, and so trips to nearby stars are a matter of years. So while the government has been proclaiming that the Third Formic Invasion is on its way to them, they're actually trying to prepare their potential commanders for the day they will have to remotely lead far-flung fleets in assault over alien worlds. This deception is key to the central trauma of Ender's life, and if they opt to glitz up the storyline by making the Third Invasion legit, the entire theme gets muddled and lost.

2. The kids must be kids. This is a tender requirement, because Ender's Game features kids from the ages of 5 to 12 committing some pretty brutal acts, and that generally only gets represented in shock dramas and horror movies, and Ender's Game will not be either of those. The cast is a little older than their book counterparts--in the book, they ranged from 6 to 14 years old throughout in the lionshare of the plot, and the movie's youngest principal is 14 years of age--but this goes back to storytelling more than casting anyways. The actors need to walk the razor's edge of portraying children who are fragile and prone to youthful excesses and assumptions, but still capable of acutely violent and tactical action.

3. Peter needs to be twisted. Peter Wiggin, Ender's older brother and a frightening childhood sadist, needs to be fully realized in his disturbed state to sell Ender early on as a frightened boy. Ender's Game and its parallel novel Ender's Shadow both revolve around making its protagonists spiritually stripped and abused in order to help shine a light on their own survival-based dependence on violence. For Ender, that motivating force is Peter, and he needs to be sick to be effective. Now, the flip side is that Peter grows up into a mature man who seems to have overcome his demons even as he assumes greater and greater political power. Because Peter, as twisted as he starts, is never supposed to stray outside the extremes of a child who can't get the love he needs.



So those are my first thoughts on Ender's Game. Be sure to watch the trailer, airing on Google+ and Youtube shortly.

UPDATE 5/7/2013, 3:53PM CST:
And now here you go. The trailer in all its teasing spectacle.

Almost 6 months!? OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Alright, this is not even funny anymore.

Nothing since April, really?

That's just wrong on so many levels.

So as you well know, I haven't posted on the blog here in nigh-on six months. Flippin' ridiculous. I haven't even logged on to Blogger in like four months, so early this morning I found a couple of comments with three inches of dust on them, still patiently awaiting approval. That ain't right, folks, that ain't right. Let's run down a few of the essential nerd-rants you've missed out on over the past 180 days or so.

A follow up on the Fire and Ice Convention. Geez, pal, go for the balls why don't ya? This was one of those 'next week' promises that I made that is now officially closer to 'next year' than 'next week'. And what hurts most is that I loved the con and want to be a cheerleader for it in the future.

About 30+ Movie Web Monday installments. Alright, if we want to get technical, those had lapsed from being a weekly feature long before the Great Gap of 2012. And for that, I blame Morgan Freeman. Enough said, for now.

Reviews of Snow White and the Huntsman, Underwhelming Spider-Man, and the Dark Knight Rises Falls Rises Falls, nope definitely Rises. I have a bit to say about these films. I saw them all on either the midnight showing or within the first weekend, and I can just kick myself for missing the opportunity to scam a few hits by dropping the names of more blockbusters on my poor, neglected blog.

Myth holidays. Apparently, I'm not the only one with a little enthusiasm for Bungie's long-past impeccable entry into the fantasy genre. People like that stuff, and by golly I've passed on the opportunity to cover the summer Myth holidays and their early harvest ones as well.

Kickstarter promotions. I've been bitten by the Kickstarter bug. Then it burrowed its head beneath my skin and wormed a long proboscis into my marrow, suffusing my entire being with a constant need to keep abreast of cool projects being presented directly to us, the nerd public. I wanted to talk about a couple of different Kickstarter projects that really got me excited, maybe getting you revved for them too while generating some slim cross-traffic. Well, there will always be more, but the ones that have already gone through weigh heavily on my blog-conscience.

So that's the butcher's bill. Pretty dang infuriating, isn't it? Ok, well, let's put things in proper order. This is the apology post, where I lay out excuses for those past lapses of blog activity and make a case for why you should have faith that this will be the last 30+ day delay in updates. But I'm not going to do that, because I'm cool, proud, and totally original that way.

I could blame the fact that my job in an unspecified tech field involving 3D printing has been progressively more draining on my creativity reserves, but that's BS--my creativity burns with the fire of a thousand suns with Joanne Whalley hues of auburn red hair and pouty lips...hmmm Sorsha...where was I? Oh, right, I'm an unflappable nerd. Seriously, I'm so nerdy that I've used it as a personal virtue in my last two jobs' interview processes. And even though my unspecified contract position is ramping up into an actual, in-company ID salaried job, there's no way it can be blamed for the malaise that has nuked this blogroll for the past half-year.

I could blame it on the house--since, you know, living in even a modest home like ours is a cursed burden on the owner in terms of housework, yard work, and generally deleterious ability to walk away from a problem project for months at a time without looking at it. But that's a load: I've been using my computer everyday for non-bloggy activities in the interim.

I could blame it on family--both immediate and extended. I've taken a trip to Canada, attended four weddings in this posting gap, and my wife and son don't exactly sit me in front of the computer to type a new blog post when I come home from work, now do they? But I'm not blaming them, because all of that stuff was awesome, fun, or eminently necessary. Or, in the case of my first visit to the socialist north, at least novelly eye-opening and a fun opportunity to share my unimpeachable Gollum impression with distantly related in-laws.

Or, if we wanted to look at really negative impulses from the past year, we could blame it on Mass Effect 3. I've been sitting on a 90% completed article about how much Bioware narratively junk-punched its fan-base over 6 months ago now. At first I was waiting for a token update after Bioware's release of the 'extended ending' of the game, which then turned out to be a much more dastardly and nuanced betrayal of the fans with a big obvious middle finger to critical gamers as the jerk-off cherry on top of one of the most half-assed game moments in industry history. But I won't blame them, because being pissed off can, in fact, be a great motivator for writing. As you will see in the future.

But I will level the blame somewhere this time. Really. I blame it on The Avengers. Because, as the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3, The Avengers was a pristine, polished, thoroughly researched and realized culmination of a fantastic series of movies. Sublime, in every glistening nerd-drooling moment. And I blame my long absence from blogging on it for being far and away the best movie in the genre and truly a great movie by any standard. So why blame it? Because The Avengers, hot on the heels on the loin-girding disappointment of Mass Effect 3, was the irresistible nerd-enthusiasm hitting my immovable nerd-rage. And it resulted in a full stop of my ability to rant (usually the outpouring of nerd-rage) or rave (the precipitant of nerd-enthusiasm) on my usual blog topics.

So then, what tipped the scale back towards writing on this blog? Guilt, of course. Guilt, which--like a social diarrhea--is the truest human motivator, that which separates us from the animals. Just last night I was at wedding number four of the year and speaking with family. Because my son was off running around and couldn't be my social shield at the time. Now, I'd just told my wife and my father (who feels it is his mission to serve as a human shot-clock for my blog updates) that I worried that people were still discovering my blog during my absence--that I was failing to hook new readers with fresh content while I dallied in the quandary of opposing forces of nerd motivators. Not ten minutes later, one of my aunts and a cousin began talking to me about my blog, and I felt the urge to purge myself of that guilt.

"...what tipped the scale back towards writing on this blog? Guilt, of course."

So here you have it: a fresh, toasty blog post, leavened with a triple-helping of guilt and left to warm itself on a slab of overly wordy dissertation. In pledge of new and exciting content, here's an overview of things I've done over the past six months that will be appearing in future posts.

Crying way too many nerd-tears and gnashing teeth in nerd-rage over Mass Effect 3. Over the past half-year, I've learned that I can't complain enough about Mass Effect 3's wretched plot turn. In addition to having a nearly prepared post on my first thoughts on the topic, I've been plotting a more thorough deconstruction that involves a complete critical rubric of the abject denouement to the sci-fi epic.

Watching a butt-load of Avengers. First I had three in-theater viewings of the movie over the course of its blockbuster release. Then I've also watched it about eight times on blu-ray since it has come out, including several partial viewings at work while pulling late night hours. And now my boy has gotten addicted to the cartoon version of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, to the point that when he woke up this morning he ran over to the Xbox, turned it on, and started chanting "I'n Man! I'n Man!" I'll definitely be posting a proper odor-beef-gravy-cheese review of The Avengers.

Playing in a frakkin' Tesla pod, tools! During an out-of-state wedding for one of my wife's cousins, I got to make an epic update on my bucket list by gaming in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. That's huge nerd points added to my lifetime total, and ended up being a sweet chance to share the moment with eight or nine family members, too.

http://getinthepods.com/pilot-experience/

Being immensely proud of my son for leaping years ahead in his development of advanced warfare skills. This is another one that is going to get a full breakdown later on, so look forward to an awestruck daddy post in the near future. But the skinny is that my son established a counter-intelligence routine to setup an ambush from an entrenched position and overcome superior opposition through guerrilla tactics, shock and awe, and biological warfare. Daddy so proud.

Actually shooting zombies. That's actually shooting, as in using live-fire weapons, not shooting actual zombies, which, you know, is impossible outside of the Chinese rural countryside. Just last weekend I knocked off another item from my bucket list by schlepping out to a shooting range in central Illinois and firing some real-life guns. Not too nerdy, you say? Well what if I told you it was a zombie-themed event in which I ran four courses firing at zombie-styled targets to help prepare me for holding off hordes of the undead? Yes, that's what I thought. Some cool video of one of the courses below:

Planning on throwing a slammin' Outbreak Party. With our first house bought and moved into, Missus Nerdery and I are planning a zombie-themed costume party at the end of this month. It's going to be an awesome time, and I'll probably post an article about some of the ideas, games, and prep before the party as well as some after-party coverage, as well.

Well, that's it for now. I'd like to get another post up and scheduled for sometime over the next couple of days, so please watch. Oh, and don't be shy about commenting. Getting comment notifications congratulating me on my wit and awesome is a great way to leverage both pride and guilt to keep me blogging faithfully. Filmatleven.

At least I didn't give any excuses, right?