Frank, it looks like we can sell this "Emarks" idiot anything, but it has to be a very specific anything

I've been organizing my music collection today, and man, if Microsoft can look at my Zune's playlist history and music collection, then some marketing guy is scratching his head right now trying to figure out what the hell is my deal:

928 tracks of stand up comedy, an eighth of which is Bill Cosby
The entire discography of Combichrist (a Norweigan Powernoise group)
The entire discography of Tactical Sekt (a German electro-industrial group whose vocals are so distorted that I think they might be singing about politics and social injustice but hell if I can tell)
The entire discography of Qntal (a goth band with lyrics largely taken from medieval sources and is sung mostly in Latin and old German)
The entire discography of Andrew WK (a long haired dude who sings- nay, screams- about partyin' and feelin' good. One of these four isn't like the other.)
Assorted other obscure noise and electronic artists
About 40 80's Pop songs
The Best of Siouxie and the Banshees which has about 30 listens on each track because I accidentally left it playing overnight on loop once
Soundtracks to video games released over 12 years ago
The Very Best of The Foundations, the group that brought you classics such as Bring Me Up Buttercup and Baby Now That I've Found You
The theme song to "MacGyver"

I can't tell if I'm a marketing guy's wet dream or nightmare.

A short list of people I don't think I could be compatible with

- People who go to an ethnic restaurant and order french fries.

Specialist: Remove Water on the Knee, Operation!

Continuing on from a prior post, The Fat Man, I'd like to talk about another aspect of my life that defined my adolescence. In fact, this played a much larger role in determining the turnout of my life than an Asian man who looks good shooting people, but it is related to him.

In 1999, a revolutionary first person shooter came out, known as Half Life. Without going into too much boring detail, one of the most notable things about Half Life was the possibility of modding it. Users could, for free, change the rules of the game, design new maps, models, characters, and weapons, and with some dedication, nearly make a brand new game completely unrecognizable from the original base game. These "mods" could be distributed for free, and could be played by anyone with an original copy of Half Life.

Half Life had the benefit of coming out at a time where 3D engines were getting just robust enough to display things that didn't look like a mess of ugly polygons, but were not complicated enough to require some sort of genius degree from Genius Technical Institute to develop for them. Any group of high school students with enough dedication, talent, and caffeine could make a presentable mod that people would play. As a result, Half Life became 100 games in one. In addition to the basic Half Life single player and multiplayer games, there were dozens of mods ranging from good to awful to be downloaded and played. Some went on to be a great success- Counter Strike, for example, is arguably the first game to influence the glut of "arcade realistic" FPS games we see all over the place today and one of the most famous online multiplayer games of all time.

Due to the saturation of the modding community in Half Life, nearly every genre was covered. There were Counter Terrorism mods, fantasy mods, WW2 mods, Action Movie mods (I'll touch on this), and even a Revolutionary War mod. Nearly anything you could think of, and someone (or several someones!) had realized their dream and done it.

One of the larger categories of mods was the Action Movie mod. These games took influence from Hong Kong gunslinging movies, The Matrix, Die Hard, and so on. They predated commercial releases under similar genres like Max Payne. The running theme of these games was simple: You could dual wield pistols, you could dive around and do 'stunts', you could play as your favorite action hero, and style was always rewarded.

For a long time, the two main action movie mods were Action Half Life and The Opera. I forget which came first, but both were released around the year 2000. At heart, they were kind of unrefined and had that clunky, awkward control system that reeked of amateur development at that time. However, they were still awesome. No other first person shooter had really done what these games had done, which was allow you to play an FPS that looked like an action film.

Action Half Life was more focused on action movies as a whole, featuring maps taken from movies like Commando and The Terminator, with some nods to Hong Kong influenced locales. The focus was very straight forward- pure deathmatch, whoever gets the most kills wins. The controls were a bit off but it was certainly the best of its time.

The Opera was more influenced by Hong Kong blood operas, with emphasis placed on bonus points for stylish kills. It didn't quite work out though. The controls were really awkward and unforgiving, and the weapons were underpowered and inaccurate to emulate two master assassins fighting and dodging each other, much like a Hong Kong action film. However, these factors made playing it an exercise in frustration because you could never really get "good" at it.

The Opera and AHL dominated the genre for about two years, until a competitor arrived- The Specialists. Named after some crappy Stallone film (I think), The Specialists was mostly considered superior to Opera and AHL by anyone with a working brain. The graphics were fantastic for the HL1 engine, the weapons were all varied and incredibly fun to use, the control system was fluid and made sense, and most impressively, it featured the first known use of "bullet time" in a multiplayer game. Previously thought difficult or even impossible to implement into a multiplayer game, The Specialists took one of the biggest trends in movies and single player games of the early 2000's and implemented it nearly flawlessly.

I still remember the release date of The Specialists off the top of my head- October 29th, 2002. It made waves- big waves. It was fast, innovative, and best of all, absolutely fun. Taking a huge amount of influence from Face/Off and The Matrix, The Specialists was the best deathmatch mod to come out for Half Life yet. Much of the playerbase of Opera and AHL jumped ship to The Specialists. The Specialists team followed up with a patch two months later, 1.5, which further improved the already fantastic game.

What exactly made The Specialists so great?

• The powerup system. All across each map random powerups would spawn. They'd grant things such as double magazine size, double fire speed, high jumping, grenades, and bullet time effects and could be used any time after you picked them up. You would never know what powerup your opponents would have, and it made for a hectic, tense game. The two bullet time powerups were the core of the impressiveness of the game. One was Slow Motion, which would put all players in your vicinity in a slow, cinematic pace with slowed down sound effects. The other was Slow Pause, which would put all other players to a near halt while you had your way for two full seconds. In later patches, the slow motion and slow pause effects would become true bullet time, and you could watch your bullets fly through the air as you fired them.
• The stunts. The game featured a pretty strong showing of stunts on release (dives, somersaults, rolls, and flips) with an innovative implementation. The height and length of your stunt would depend on how high your cursor was aimed when you began the stunt. Higher tiers of stunts were limited to having a light loadout of weapons, meaning you had to trade off being highly mobile for only carrying a light submachine gun or pistols. As the game matured, several other stunts were added, including wall dives, wall flips, wall runs, and the famous Matrix dodge. Bonus points were granted for getting kills during stunts, which made for a great incentive to look cool while taking people down.
• The weapons. The Specialists carried a huge arsenal of famous movie weapons, ranging from the Berettas used by Chow Yun Fat and Bruce Willis, to the MAC10, Mini UZI, and MP5s seen in many mid-80's films, to the M60 used by Rambo. What was special about this, however, is whenever a player would spawn, he could choose any loadout he pleased. You could essentially design your own role every time you spawned. You could be a John McClane type character, carrying a submachine gun with a Beretta for backup- you could be a John Woo type character, carrying 3 pairs of pistols, all dual wielded- you could gear yourself up like a SWAT officer and carry an assault rifle- you could even go weaponless and fight with your bare fists. I believe the final weapon count of the last release of the game landed at 32 unique weapons.
• The fun. It was simply a fun game to play. Even if you were terrible at it, seeing good players in action doing mindblowing stunts while getting headshots was exciting.

Naturally, I loved the game. I played it obsessively for about a year because it was just so fun and refreshing. I learned how to animate the first person weapon models used for the half life engine and submitted my own modifications for The Specialists to community sites. It was a fun experience that I haven't before or since felt- taking the models and textures given to me by other developers, and working with them to bring the weapons they had modeled to life in a pair of virtual hands. It was difficult, as I had to self teach myself how to do it and work with a crummy piece of shareware known as Milkshape 3D, but for the first time in my life I felt truly industrious as people liked my work, even if they shouldn't have (it was pretty bad.)

Finally, one day in early 2003, I was approached by the leader of the team. He had seen my work and my dedication in bringing third party resources to the mod, and asked me to join the development team as a beta tester. For the next two or three years, I worked with a team of other volunteers to really bring out The Specialists' potential.

Most of the people on the team were high schoolers, like me, which made for some interesting team dynamics. Almost everyone on the team, for the most part, was a lonely, immature individual and it made working with others difficult at times. When The Specialists hit the big time and became truly popular after 2.0, a large glut of internet jerks polluted the pool of players. Games weren't friendly anymore like they were on release. If you got a stylish kill, you were twice as likely to be called a fag or a cheater than you were before. People would carry on about how you were playing "wrong" if they didn't like how you played or the weapons you used. Forum regulars became increasingly frustrating in their entitlement complexes, and would become incredibly condescending and rude if the development team made any changes they didn't like.

It was a rather thankless experience, the only reward being the knowledge that we had worked on and helped to create something we loved. We pressed on and released several patches, which culminated with a final patch, 3.0, released two and a half years ago in 2007. By then I had largely dropped out of the Half Life scene, having become bored with the game after playing for four or five years and moving onto college. By then, Half Life 2 had come out and seemed like the next big thing.

Unfortunately, Half Life 2's engine, the Source engine, was a hundred times more complicated than the Half Life 1 engine. It looks a whole lot better and does a whole lot more, but as a result it's much more difficult to mod. Only now, four years after Half Life 2's release, are mods really being released for it. It's not like the old days where a team of four high schoolers could belt out a mod in a couple of months and make something revolutionary. Dozens of people with actual training and development skills have to put in years to make anything worth presenting anymore, and I find that upsetting. The Specialists was a project where I truly got to express my rare creative side and feel like I was a part of something in high school, a time when I felt isolated and alone. I worry that with the closing off of the third party modding teams to anyone without specifically honed skills, the scene is going to lose out on motivated but shiftless adolescents- like I was- who need direction and fulfillment.

Without going too deep into it, The Specialists had some other major effects on my life. Without TS, I would have never met my best friend of five years. I think TS may have been the deciding factor in me getting my current job, as my interviewers sounded very impressed after I explained it to them. Finally, without TS, I think the three or four years of my life I spent dedicated to it would have been squandered.

So what's the state of The Specialists nowadays? Well, most third party mods for Half Life have largely dwindled in player population, TS included. It's difficult to find a good game. Any server with people in it is either a 24/7 lobby map server, which is basically a big ugly green box based on the lobby scene from the Matrix and isn't fun to play, or a roleplaying server, where people take all the fun things the development team provided and throw it away so they can pretend to be a baker or some stupid crap.

However, occasionally a server will sprout up that isn't either of those things, and is just playing pure deathmatch without weird mods added on, and isn't on ts_lobby, and has people in it. And it's an absolute joy even 7 years later after the first release. Often you'll find old timers who remember the early days of TS, and they're fun and courteous to play with. They're often confined to only 4 or 5 people as well, which makes for an intimate and fun game where you're not constantly being mowed down and have room to breathe with your stunts. I've gone back to playing when I see those servers up, and I have a blast. It's one of the few things I can truly feel nostalgic and just genuinely happy about. It brings me back to a time where even though I was alienated and awkward, I was content that I had a part in something exciting.

If you're interested in trying The Specialists, a copy of Half Life can be had for $9.99 on Valve's Steam content provider service. The mod can then be installed for free by downloading version 3.0 from http://www.specialistsmod.net. You probably won't see in it what I do as it's quite dated and difficult to find a proper server that isn't running horseshit server side mods, but it will always have a special place in my heart.

Here's a trailer for the final release of the mod if you'd like to see what it's about without going through all that trouble:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSqvYioc658

Get Out of the Way, Mark 2

I made a post a couple months ago bitching about people that stand in the middle of cramped busy hallways, making an analogy that standing in the middle of what is essentially a busy street is not a good idea.

Not just once, but twice this week have I come across people on the RIC campus just standing in the middle of a crosswalk, talking to people, and not moving while traffic piles up behind me.

Jesus Christ. Do you have no sense of self preservation? Are you dense? Are you just trying to piss people in cars off? You get to a crosswalk, you do exactly three things in this order:

1. You look both ways, like your mother should have told you to. Preferably while wearing a sweater.
2. You give a small wave to the gracious owner of the prehistoric Ford Taurus who has decided not to blow past you and instead let you pass.
3. You show your appreciation by hustling ass to the other side of the road with the knowledge that it's not too late for me to blame an incident on my shoddy brakes. In fact, I was under the impression that unless you have polio, it's the law that you have to do a weird, exaggerated Andy Capp jog across the road to indicate that you're hustling.

Here's what you don't do, in this exact order:

1. Just walk into the road without looking.
2. Saunter straight ahead, ignoring the owners of the motorized, metal behemoths that you've given good reason to be run over by already.
3. Turn around and stand in the middle of the road to talk to someone behind you.

There are plenty of places where someone with nowhere to be can stand around. I can think of several off the top of my head: in line to get tickets for an Aaron Seltzer film, a political rally for a third party presidential candidate, Arby's, an opium den, and Alabama. Yet they keep managing to end up in my way in the middle of a hallway or in the middle of a street. Impressive.

What's in Your Head? In Your Head? Zombie, Zombie

I've always had to try really hard to meet people if it wasn't otherwise forced. I still remember being in third or fourth grade recess, just sitting and watching the other kids play, and being too shy to ask if I could join in.

School and college have a built in mechanism for this kind of weakness in that you just naturally meet people in classes- more often than not a teacher will require you to work with someone else at some point, and if you don't know anyone else there it will be a stranger. I met a few friends in college this way. Even with this mechanism in place it takes me so much effort to say "I could use a partner" instead of sitting around looking helpless until I went and did the assignment by myself or someone tagged me.

With school coming to an end within the next year, I'm starting to worry that I'll lose my last means of meeting people outside of my own pre-existing social group. I'm so anxious about the prospect of going to a bar or a party without a lot of familiar faces around me, trying to hype myself up to actually attend something either involves a mild panic attack, copious alcohol consumption, or both. I still think the furthest I've ever been outside my comfort zone in this respect was introducing myself to someone in a class that I incidentally and independently knew from MySpace, who ended up being a pretty cool person.

What's the cause of this? Is it just the universal human condition? Impossible. Naturally shy? Maybe. Is it my personal self-consciousness- a latent fear of being judged? If it is, I'm not only doing a disservice to myself, because I can tell that the people I meet aren't "judging" me most of the time, but I'm doing a disservice to the people I meet, because my brain is attributing this judgmental attitude to people who aren't displaying it which is just unfair. Even basic pattern recognition should tell me that my worst fear should be fear itself.

It's only in the social realm where things fall apart. At work, somehow these problems fade away- I'm confident and have a kung fu grip hand shake. So I don't know how or why that distinction occurs.

I'm hemming and hawwing around the point of this post (I'll go back to writing about people who make me MAD ON THE INTERNET and Hong Kong action stars soon enough), but it boils down to this: if at any point it seems like I'm making excuses and blowing you off, I'm really (probably) not trying to be a jerk. My brain is jabbing my chest with a sharp stick and telling me I'm out of my comfort zone, and it takes a lot of time and effort to jump that hurdle sometimes.

And as if I should explain in advance, this post isn't being made in any particular attention whoring or other pity mongering mood. For those reading, I just wanted to share some of my common internal thought processes that sometimes I don't think I adequately explain.

If you insult me, I'll go ahead and buy Brand X.

Mac vs. PC commercials. Why are they still on?

What dismays me is that since Apple is still producing these moronic commercials, they must be working. I can't understand why, either. They're often misleading (hey you can't do anything on a PC but make spreadsheets, please ignore that Macs don't have any real games), insult the people they're trying to sell to, and feature one of the ball grindingest annoying people in the history of the world, Justin Long.

So why do these commercials persist? I have a couple theories.
1. Insecure PC users are shamed into thinking they're not cool and immediately go out and buy an iPod or a MacBook or an AppleShit or whatever's being hawked this time- the electronics equivalent of going out and buying a sports car during a midlife crisis.
2. They're a call to arms for Mac users to be annoying and smug about their purchase of expensive electronics.
3. Justin Long is Satan.

Really, there's no reason why the Mac vs. PC commercials should be effective at all, much less for the years they've been around for. It's the one commercial series that has convinced me to never purchase a product from the advertiser. The iPhone's features certainly looked alluring, but the company culture and sneering Starbucks attitude behind a number of its proponents have set me on a path of never owning anything by Apple short of them curing cancer with their next handheld.

They are fundamentally a company who has preyed on the uninformed by selling overpriced and inflexible computers under the guise of "It just works." Yes, a lot of things "just work" when they can't do much of anything special. I only know one Mac owner who even owns it to use it for the things Macs are reknowned for being good at, which is graphic design. I can't speak for their iPod line, which from what I understand has really been nothing but an ordinary MP3 player with a fancy logo ever since their first generation, and the iPhone, which admittedly is kind of neat.

Of course, Apple has proven their arrogance again by publically claiming the iPhone has better games than the PSP or DS, which is yet again a dishonest attempt to cash in on the uninformed and insult the intelligence of people outside their userbase.

Historically, however, it seems that companies that advertise how bad their competitors and their users are instead of actually promoting their own product all eventually bite the dust in one way or another. During the early 90's, Sega's misleading ad campaigns largely focused on the inferiority Super Nintendo, while Nintendo's campaigns largely focused on their own games. End result? Sega's "on the offense" campaign worked for a little while, but eventually went under a couple years later and stopped producing consoles. The Nintendo brand is still flourishing, and the Super Nintendo is now usually considered to have been far better than the Genesis in graphics, sound, and game selection. The Pepsi challenge campaign of the late 80's to late 90's suffered a similar fate after initial successes, and Coca Cola is currently leading Pepsi in the market share.

With any luck Apple will follow suit and humble their advertising after losing some market share, but I suspect if this happens the entire sham will fall apart. Part of the allure of owning an Apple product in this century is the image associated with it- being an "individual", a "free thinker", a "pioneer". If Apple stops selling superiority complexes embedded in electronics, I bet they'll go the way of Sega when image-mongerers look for their fix elsewhere.

Attn: Hollywood and Game Developers

Stop putting this thing in your movies and video games:
It's stupid, ugly, impractical, and uninspired even by Hollywood standards, but ever since Counter Strike and The Matrix became popular every first person shooter and action movie has featured this stupid thing. Stop it.