Ross Scott

I've been asked before in some emails what games I like to play. Here are some general trends for those that are curious: Stuff I usually like: -Action RPGs in general (though I have difficulty getting into Bethesda's stuff) -Graphic adventure games (they're not dead, they're just niche status now) -FPSs where I like the theme (it's hard for me to be much more specific than that) -RTS games that don't require a psychotic level of micromanagement -Scary games -Some science fiction or fantasy / supernatural elements -Games with good writing (I consider this very, VERY rare in the gaming world) -Games with adult themes (I don't mean X-rated or overly gory, I mean ones that are really targeted towards a mature audience mentally. I consider these extremely rare as well) -Racing games with scenic locales (wooded mountains, tropical islands, futuristic cities, etc.) Stuff I usually don't like: -Turn-based anything -Anime-themed games -Games based on movies -Cartoon-ish graphics -Games based on actual wars (WWII, Iraq, etc.) -Shooters without any sort of unreal element to them (mutants, aliens, demons, etc.) -Unemotive voice acting -Games with writing straight out of a bad hollywood movie, or even a saturday morning cartoon; full of clichéd dialogue -Games that get hyped to hell and back -FPSs so old I can't aim with a mouse -Racing games on actual raceways (F1, NASCAR, etc.) -Games with a subscription fee Games I currently have installed: -Midnight Nowhere -Tzar: Burden of The Crown -Hard To Be A God -Penumbra: Black Plague Games I'm looking forward to playing: -Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance -Starcraft 2 -Risen -The Witcher -Gothic 4 -Nehrim mod -The Journeyman Project 2

Here's some examples of some mini-reviews I did on some semi-obscure games if anyone's curious. I encourage people to make posts like this if there are any you want to praise or warn others about. Some of these weren't that obscure at the time, but I think most of these have faded off the radar present day: Quadralien: [Puzzle] Old-school puzzle game, has one PC Speaker music track, but it's pretty cool. The game feels kind of surreal, you're controlling these robots on a space station that's going to hell and you're trying to clean up radiation and dump coolant into the system before everything falls apart. Sort of feels like a Space Chernobyl. This game doesn't hold your hand at all and gets pretty hard towards the end. I had to use a floppy drive emulator at the time so I could save my game. Pretty cool game if you're into this sort of thing. Mage Knight Apocalypse: [Action RPG] I wanted to like this game, but didn't. The storyline isn't very interesting. The gameplay had distinctive classes and some interesting elements, but for an action RPG it felt awfully slow. I ended up using a trainer to make the pace go faster, which helped some. It's definitely a grind and not the most fun of them. Some of the map design was pretty good looking, but the whole game has a psychotic level of bloom which I hate. I ended up giving up on the game maybe about 60-70% into it. I doubt the ending would have blown my mind. Revenant: [Action RPG] This game can be hell to get working properly on a modern OS, especially with 3D acceleration. I've only played the beginning of it, but I like the intro, it has good visuals, okay voice acting, interesting storyline, fantastic music, great atmosphere in general. The gameplay seems to have some novel features, though it may be one of those games that is trying to be "innovative" for its own sake. I plan to come back to this game and finish it eventually, but its compatibility is so poor it may have to be through a virtual machine. Reacts differently to ATI v. Nvidia hardware. Overclocked - A History of Violence: [Graphic Adventure] This game isn't the best, but has a few redeeming features. It creates an incredible sense of anticipation, like things are going to get really really bad, but never delivers on it. The visuals and music are great, animation can be a little clunky. I remember the voice acting being good. What I like most about this game is the protagonist has a lot of personal problems, feels very human, and is kind of dysfunctional in general. He's having spousal problems, financial problems, drinks too much, yells at the help at the hotel he's at, breaks furniture by accident, almost gets in a bar fight, etc. I like seeing characters like that, but I have a dark sense of humor. I found the ending to this game funny.

I saw this lecture on Youtube a little while ago that I thought was pretty interesting. It's by an economist about the current state of our economy, where's it headed, and what our possible options are. It focuses on our current debt levels and ramifications of that especially. Some of this was over my head, but a lot of his logic on different economic issues I was able to follow and found it quite interesting. If anyone has more of an economic background, I wouldn't mind hearing some more opinions on this. It's about an hour long however plus 30 minutes of questions. I watched it in chunks spread out over a few days. *Warning* some people may find this EXTREMELY dry, if you bore easily, don't watch this.

Many people aren't aware of what's meant by "peak oil." I'm using it to refer to the point when our oil production is at its maximum. What happens AFTER that point is a big unknown, but it's probably not good. Here's some general information if you want to know more about it - Good Wikipedia Article This is a little dated and I don't agree with everything that's said here 100% (especially regarding the energy comparisons), but it explains the concepts behind peak oil pretty well. - Civil Protection: Oil's Well the video I created (and the ONLY video with a "message" I ever plan to make) that sums up what peak oil means. It was originally made for an environmental contest where I had to list a solution. In reality I'm not sure there really is a solution to this unless everyone were to lower their standard of living, which I don't see happening voluntarily. - The Oil Drum - Website with a TON of information on this, though it can be hard to sift through a lot of it.

About a year ago on the blog I said that I think we might be facing major oil problems starting by about 2015. If anyone's wondering where I came up with that prediction, here are my sources: Article 1 (The Guardian) Article 2 (MSNBC) So in one article, that's The Guardian giving a report about how the US Joint Forces are saying there's a potential for a big problem by 2015. In the other report, it's MSNBC stating that Kuwaiti scientists applied 47 different models to predict that oil will be peaking by 2014. I don't see either group as having a real agenda to create some sort of oil scare. In the case of Kuwait I think the reverse would be true. But even if you don't believe that, you can always look at the existing data yourself (this graph needs to be updated though): Source is from the IEA from November 2009 I don't put much stock in the future predictions, but you can see from the past data that we've been more or less plateauing since 2005. This hasn't really happened before in global oil production, it's more or less gone up ever since we've started drilling. To me, this says that it's likely to start going down after a while if we're plateauing right now. Also more recently I found this, although this has been suspected for a long time: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there so people don't think I'm completely crazy saying we're probably going to be in trouble by 2015. You can interpret the data how you will.

Peak Oil refers to the moment in time where the world produces oil at its maximum rate. After that, it starts to dwindle off, where lots or problems can occur. You can always check out Oil's Wellfor a little more information on what this means. I've seen some counterarguments that we're not really going to face any big problems regarding our usage of oil and I wanted to post some rebuttals to that: Argument: Human ingenuity and technology advancements will find a solution. This is a faith-based argument and I think people who make this argument are either extreme optimists or else are somewhat ignorant as to the scale of the problem. While it's true we have made tremendous technological advances in virtually all fields and overcome many barriers, the scope of this is gargantuan. There's currently no technology or infrastructure plan or combination that can replace our current oil use needs. It would take something out of science-fiction to solve this problem via technology without a massive reduction in population and consumption. I consider this comparable to having faith that human ingenuity will solve cancer, AIDS, and aging by a certain date. If this was really a problem, we would hear about it in the media more. The media generally reports on the most interesting topics that are happening in the present. There are many examples of problems that were predictable and forseeable by a small niche of people researching the matter, but weren't known to the general public until after the fact. Some recent examples of this are the real estate bubble, the Enron scandal, the dot.com bubble, and the threat of Al-Qaeda. In 2008 oil prices hit an all-time high, but then they came back down. If we were starting to run out of oil, the prices wouldn't have come back down. Right now (2011) we're currently plateauing as far as our production. What happened in 2008 is demand outstripped supply, causing the price to go up. Our production did not change substantially afterwards, we essentially hit a ceiling. What did happen is that the high prices caused many people to cut back on their usage, thus lowering the demand. Combine that with the economic recession and that's the main reason oil prices haven't stayed high or kept increasing. We're likely to see a repeat of this cycle a couple times. People have been saying we're running out of oil ever since the 70s, but we keep discovering more and we still have plenty of oil today. The people in the 70s were right actually, from an American perspective. U.S. Production peaked in the early 70s and has been declining since. Since then we've imported most of oil to make up the gap. If we had to rely only on US oil, we would have been in trouble a long time ago. World discovery of oil peaked in the 60s and has been declining since. This time we can't just import more oil because it applies to the whole earth and not just the U.S. Here are some dates to help explain it better: U.S. Discovery peak: 1934 U.S. Production peak: 1970 Global oil discovery peak: 1964 Global oil production peak: (debatable, it's been plateauing since about 2005) We have at least 1.3 trillion barrel reserves of oil, enough for at least 40 more years at our current rate of consumption. Yes, we do have that much in potential reserves. However it's not as simple as that. In the past century, we've already drilled the majority of the easiest-to-extract oil in the best locations. A good portion of the oil we still have left is heavier or sour crude instead of sweet light crude, or is in costly areas to extract, such deepwater offshore drilling. This means that it takes more energy (and money) to extract the same amount of oil. This causes prices to increase and makes it more difficult to keep up with our current demand. We're not going to suddenly run out of oil one day. What is likely to happen though, is that prices keep rising and rising for oil, which in turn has a direct impact on all kinds of things. Modern food production is very dependent on petroleum products for fertilizer and pesticides. Anything that needs to be shipped across the country or from China will be affected. It's likely to cause a real economic meltdown first, which could really turn our society upside-down LONG before 40 years from now. I can't predict how we will react in that situation.

The layout for the website has been in a temporary state for many months now. I have some ideas about the website layout, some of which have been implemented ,but there are probably people out there who have much better design ideas than myself. I want people to be able to easily access the news, different sections, subtitles, and especially the videos in an easy manner without getting distracted by too much information. I essentially want viewers' eyes drawn to the right areas. From a graphic design perspective, I generally like the dark theme here of black and dark greys with light and some gradients. If you're into graphic design and/or have a good understanding of wordpress, feel free to propose changes here, posting mockup screenshots especially. If I like the design or elements of it, there's a real chance your layout design could become the new one for Accursed Farms.

I've received several emails from users asking about buying T-shirts. I actually have an arrangement (if they haven't changed their mind) with Machinima.com about creating some of those. It's another one of those things I haven't gotten around to yet, but it will likely be coming in the next couple months. My original idea was to have one of each of the show logos, then users could vote on which quote they liked best from Freeman's Mind out of a selection of 10 I picked. If the shirts sold well, then more quote shirts could get made. They will contain some artwork along with that (designed by me and created by Juju Chalmers) to go with the quote. I'll post details on it as a news post once it gets closer to a reality.

Since this is bound to come up, I thought I'd state my official policy on music sharing for the forum. Soundtracks tend to be more of a niche interest with people, game soundtracks even more so, to the point where I don't think rigid copyright rules really apply for discussing this. If you want to share songs or soundtracks with other people, I have no problem with you linking to Youtube or some other giant streaming service where the song is available. At that point, the giant corporation running the site is more liable than anyone here I think. For linking to actual files, I'd say if it's a soundtrack that's easily obtained and is for sale, it's probably not a good idea to link to it since that's more clearly piracy against the company that put it out. If a soundtrack was published for sale at one point, but is exceedingly rare or difficult to find or obtain, I'm more open-minded about linking to it. For soundtracks that were published, but are literally impossible to find a legitimate copy of now, released one time for free online by the publisher, but later taken offline, or never had an official score released at all (and are ripped from the game or obtained through other means), I feel it is your DUTY to share music of that sort that you think others might appreciate. When music reaches that phase, it can become endangered of being lost to oblivion. I hate seeing that happen to good music. I feel that rare soundtracks should be treated the same way as abandonware is when talking about old games. Purposefully using copyright law to allow good music to die I think should be considered a minor crime, even if it's not.

One of my pet projects before I started working on Civil Protection was to try and organize my music using a more intuitive system. I've had several ideas on this, but nothing that's been fully satisfactory. In general I don't want to have to think about music when I want to play it, just select a general style or mood and have everything that plays be similar. I came up with the idea of having custom genre tags for the rock/metal/industrial spectrum of music that I listened to that worked out well. The basic idea was I came up with different categories of music I thought sounded well together based on a general theme. I was going to try something similar for electronic music, but for something like soundtracks, there's so much diversity, it might lead to way too many categories to be practical. I've had some other ideas regarding soundtrack organization like having some sort of tree graph or music “map” where I could just pick a “region” of music and have it work from there, but haven't found much software to accommodate that. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to try and get any insight from other music freaks who want to better organize their music besides just clumping them together by soundtrack or composer. If you have any good ideas or know of good software for this task, post it here. I'll be making this a sticky thread since this is an ongoing pursuit of mine.

UPDATE: I've spent most of today working with new volunteers helping to build a forum in phpBB and it's very close to done. The lead behind it (Jexius) was pushing to launch tonight, but said he had to go to sleep very soon, so I decided to wait since a few features were still missing and I didn't feel like risking a second botched launch in a row. The forum looks FANTASTIC, and I found a good theme that matches the site well. It looks like all user registration info will still be preserved and it's possible old posts and comments will transfer over, though it may or may not launch with that feature. If all goes well, the forum will be up sometime tomorrow afternoon / evening. - - - Well last night's attempt at the forums was less than stellar. Before I give it a second try, I thought I should get everyone's opinion on what they want. My original goal was to migrate all the news posts and comments over to the forums and not make people re-register. That still is an option, though it's apparent the software being used may have a few more bugs to be worked out. The software we tried last night is called Simple Press, a forums plugin for Wordpress. It has a boatload of features on it and is actually pretty customizable. On their showcase page, they have multiple examples, some of which look pretty decent, so the potential for it to look good is there. The only wonky thing I noticed with it was that their search engine interface is a little strange, but other than that I think it's pretty decent software. The main alternative I've been offered help with is phpBB. This seems like a solid forum interface that many people are probably familiar with and I'm sure there's a lot of support for. However this option means that you may have to re-register on the site and that all the old posts and comments probably won't be carried over to the forums. I still do want to phase out the comments system on the main page so that all new commentary is directed at the forums, but beyond that I wanted to see how important re-registering and old posts were to everyone. I've put up a poll. I'll go with whatever the winner is, unless people make really compelling arguments for another in the comments section. So let me know what you think, I'm still eager to launch the forums and have more involvement on the site all-round. [poll id=2]

Ugh, Well we ran into MAJOR bugs upon launching the forum. It's currently been taken offline to try and fix things. A lot of the comments to older news posts got locked as part of launching it, but I've unlocked a few of the recent ones. We may try again tomorrow, we'll see. To everyone who did post comments, they will still be there when the forum goes back up. In the meantime I'll be finishing up The Tunnel.

The official forums are now up! You can click on the link at the top to access them. Not only are these in a traditional forum format (as opposed to Vanilla mentioned earlier), but all your login information and comments have been preserved. If you are registered on Accursed Farms already, your information will carry over into the forums. You may notice the page design seems a little different now. This redesign was necessary in order to accommodate the forum plugin. I still consider the entire design in a temporary state and you're welcome to propose a different look or layout, I've already created a thread in the forums on the topic. The forum design is also NOT FINAL, it should probably be considered to be in an alpha or beta state. There are multiple problems with it and at the moment that will be fixed in the near future. Some of the known ones: -Color scheme for text, backgrounds, etc. is not final at all, some minor text may appear as black on dark grey -Forum layout still needs some work as well -Some forum icons are displaying incorrectly -User avatars currently aren't functioning yet So lots of cosmetic things, but the core functionality of it should be good. Since the majority of the last 24 hours were spent JUST on fixing things like the color, I was worried how long this might stall things, so I decided to launch the forum anyway. I've been eager on getting the forum launched for a while since it allows people to participate more in discussions than just replying to news posts. I'm not worried about the bugs, I've seen other examples of what this forum software can do and it's quite impressive. Don't worry, it will look better than it does now, I promise. Comments are now disabled on the main page since I think it would just create redundancy. Now if you want to comment on a news post, you'll be redirected to a thread containing the same post. This applies to future posts and all posts made up to this date. I also mean ALL posts as all the old news posts from the old blogspot location have been imported over. To reduce redundancy even further, news posts will be sorted into different categories. For official video releases, those will get filed under “Civil Protection,” “Freeman's Mind,” or “Other Videos” accordingly. Everything else will be under “General News.” The forum topics are based on your input so far. Additional ones can be added if there's a large enough demand. Also as my first abuse of power, I've added a section for stuff I'm more specifically interested in, even if it may not relate directly to the videos. Some of you may notice there's no subtitles section in the forums. That's intentional. The subtitles section will be such a big thing in itself I didn't want to launch it at the same time as the rest of the forums. That will go up a few days from now with its own news post on that. Big thanks goes to David Donaldson for putting this all together (DaveD in the forums). He runs Fugcraft.net, the unofficial minecraft server of Fugworld.com, a Team Fortress 2 Community. I also want to give thanks to “Jexius Something” and Luke McKee for also coming up with functional designs, though theirs weren't the final version. I've gone and started a few threads in the forum, but feel free to start your own there. I'll likely get more involved in the forums after the next episode is completed. If you spot any problems with the forum (besides color scheme and layout), either private message DaveD or else start a new thread about in in the forums. Enjoy! EDIT: Several major bugs are cropping up. David is trying to fix it the best he can so far, but I'm getting pretty tired, it's possible some fixes will have to wait until a little later. I appreciate your patience and I'm confident this will look a lot better in the near-ish future.

Hey everyone, I've been very busy lately, lots of stuff has been going on though I've probably appeared to be dead on the site. I haven't caught up on all the comments yet, but here's a rundown of what's been happening: INTERVIEW: A few weeks ago, Machinima.com contacted me about an interview. I've been trying to postpone everyone asking about that until "The Tunnel" is done (more on that below), but I couldn't really put off Machinima.com since they're the largest reason so many people watch my videos in the first place. I was told it would go up a couple weeks later, and here it is a couple weeks later and some viewers have spotted it and have been helpful in posting it in the comments. Here's a link: Video Interview with Machinima.com This is the first I'm seeing the footage as well, it appears they stretched my face. It was actually filmed entirely blind on my side, I couldn't see the host I was talking to, so if my behavior seems odd, that's why. I think this is my first video appearance on the internet. I've been kind of avoiding that since I don't look like Freeman these days, but hopefully people will keep watching the videos anyway. I've been saving a lot of money on haircuts in the meantime. FORUMS: I've had some dynamite responses regarding the forums, but have been incredibly busy, with replying to everyone being on the "to do" list for day after day. The reason they're not up is probably my fault at this point, but I'll get to it soon. THE TUNNEL: This is why I haven't been active on other things, "The Tunnel" is getting DAMN close to being done, I've gotten some good help and I think it's a real possibility that ALL the audio will be done this weekend. After that, I should be 24-48 hours out from having it 100% done and uploaded. FREEMAN'S MIND: Time on this has been siphoned toward "The Tunnel" but it will be resumed immediately afterwards. OTHER: I'm going to be moving soon to a mysterious location for mysterious reasons in a few weeks, some of my time has been spent getting ready for that. That will disrupt production for a little while, but I intend to get "The Tunnel" and at least one more FM episode done before then. EDIT: It seems I was ambitious, the sound editing still isn't done, but a lot of progress had been made (besides myself there are currently 3 sound editors working on this, I'm hoping I don't need more). I'll have another update here once it's completed.

* * * EDIT * * * I've been flooded with promising offers in all categories since I made this post. I think if I get anymore I'll just get overwhelmed and will have to send a bunch of rejection emails to new people. I still need to review all the emails and reply to everyone. Thanks to everyone who contacted me about this or was planning to. The exception is that I'm still accepting help for the forum integration. While I have received a couple hopeful emails, more input / offers in this area won't hurt, especially since the forum still isn't up. * * * EDIT * * * I was hoping to avoid making this post, but I feel like production is getting stalled some again and I need more help to get things done. Help is needed in multiple areas and I would appreciate anyone who might be able to give me a hand. Unfortunately my managerial skills are still lacking, so choosing who to pick for working on different tasks may be a bit haphazard, but I'll try and reply to everyone who contacts me. Any work that gets used will receive due credit. If you've contacted me once offering help with any of these areas already, feel free to contact me again. Here are the sections I currently need help with: SOUND EDITING: I'm going a little crazy about trying to finish "The Tunnel" and right now the biggest area that still needs work is sound editing and effects. Right now if all the sound effects were completed, I think the episode could be completely finished in 24-48 hours. I'd really like to get this done in the next week if possible. Otto Beumelberg has been doing a fantastic job on the scenes so far, but as this episode is the longest one to date, I think it may be a bit overwhelming for one person (myself included). Nowadays usually just the dialogue is recorded in-game for Civil Protection, with everything else being added in editing. You would need to have experience doing volume balancing, position mixing, and providing different sound effects as needed (it won't be anything too exotic). Some reverb mixing may also be needed, but the levels for the remaining scenes are relatively light. I will ask to listen to some prior example of your work to get an idea of your skill level. While speedy work would be great, I'll be more concerned with how the final result sounds. FORUM INTEGRATION: I'm eager to launch the forums as soon as possible, but some of the people working on it have become busy and there's still a big problem to solve before they do get launched. The basic problem is that I want to have news posts that are made in Wordpress to be duplicated as threads in the forum somehow. Ideally, they could be sorted into different cateories related on the topic. If you know of how to accomplish this, please let me know, I could use the help. I believe we're going with phpBB for the forum, but I've heard BBpress can also be good. As long as you can achieve the functionality I'm after for the forum, I'm open-minded as to what software is used. Comment and user crossover information would be desireable, but not required. VOICE ACTING: Some of these won't be required for a while, but I wanted to try and start auditioning people early in case it takes a while to find someone. These will probably all be one-time roles I'm afraid (for now), but they will get your name in the credits if they're used. You don't have to actually match these character descriptions (though it will help), just be capable of sounding like them. All roles are likely to require some degree of shouting. Having some means of voice chat is preferred, but not required. Here are the character descriptions: 1. Male, age anywhere from 30s to 60s. Sleazy sounding character, preferably with a stereotypical New Jersey accent. Should sound somewhat older, bossy, and aggressive. I'll need this role sooner than the others. 2. Black male, age from later 20s to 40s. Just a typical black american accent. No stereotypes will be involved for this role, but the character model will be black, so the speaker should have a characteristic black voice. There are some inflection differences from you honkies. 3. Female, age 20s to 30s. Looking for a standard "Valley Girl" accent, not too young-sounding. Nothing too overdone, just having the obvious accent. Here's a I found of it. - - - If you can help me in any of these areas, please send me an email to [email protected]. I haven't forgotten about everyone else's emails either, but emails related to video production take priority with me over more casual ones. If you emailed me a couple months ago, there's still a good chance I'm going to reply to you, I'm still far behind on that.

Here's a bit of an update as to what's going on with the forums. Work has been progressing on the forum, but we've run into some setbacks. The problem is trying to find a balance between the interface and features. My original plan when the site was relaunched was to eventually transition over to a forum with all the comments and entries carrying over. This is currently possible using the "Vanilla" web application which is compatible with Wordpress, however I can't say I'm fond of the layout. It doesn't follow the traditional forum layout and I find it a little confusing visually, like it's a news feed page rather than a forum. Since the forums are something I plan to use as well, I want something my brain can process more easily. The other main contender for the forums so far is phpBB. This has a layout I'm much more accustomed to, but I've been told it doesn't have as many features and integration with all the current posts and user login information may not be possible. I'd really hate to ask people to create a new login AGAIN, so we're still exploring the options. Ultimately it will come down to what I think will work the best for the long term. To clarify some more, here are some screenshots I found of both forum layout styles: Vanilla: While Vanilla does have forum categories on the right side and posts on the left, I feel like it doesn't make the most use of the screen space and it might not be immediately obvious that this is a forum and not just more news posts. phpBB: This has a much more familiar forum style, makes more use of horizontal space, I generally like this kind of layout for a forum. These aren't necessarily the only two options for forum software. I also found an article which lists an absolute ton of forum plugin options, though I'm too web illiterate myself to know what's best: http://www.wpmods.com/which-forum-script-should-you-use-with-your-wordpress-powered-website If anyone out there is knowledgeable about Wordpress and forum integration and is interested in helping, please contact Zachary Reidell ([email protected]), who put a lot of the current website together and has been doing almost all the work on this so far. I'll of course give credit to anyone else who helps get the final forum launched. Also, I may as well announce now that I'm planning on phasing out comments here once the forums are launched. There are multiple reasons for this. With the forums, discussions will be more targeted. So if you have a specific question or comment, you won't have to just reply to the latest news entry. Another reason is I think it will lower the redundancy of comments if there's a primary place to comment in the forums as opposed to the homepage AND the forums. Finally, I'm getting more comments on the homepage now than ever before. Within a few days it's in the hundreds, and as I make more videos it's possible it will increase. Thus having actual forums will make things more manageable for me in the long run. My goal is to have all the news posts (hopefully past ones all the way back to 2006) duplicated as threads in the forum so commentary can continue there. In other news, my voice is now better and I'll resume working on Freeman's Mind sometime tomorrow. EDIT: After waking up coughing about 20 times this morning, my voice may not be as well as I thought. I can talk normally, but I don't know about parts where I have to shout yet. Unfortunately Freeman tends to shout a lot. I'll see how things go.

Download 672x384 WMV (74MB) Here's Episode 31. I think the writing is a little better here than the last one, I was rusty having not done Freeman's Mind for a while. Some of you may think I've been manipulating the enemy AI for this episode or the past two, but I haven't. While it's not the case in all episodes, the enemy behavior for the past few has been exactly how it played out in the game. The next episode I think will be more exciting. Unfortunately I'm sick with something at the moment and it's affected my throat, so there won't be anything voice-related until it gets better. There's no shortage of other things to work on however. "The Tunnel" is getting really close to done except primarily for sound effects, plus I still want to get the forums and more subtitles up, and respond to the many emails I've received. As soon as my throat gets better, I'll resume recording and update the progress bar, though there's a real chance you'll see Civil Protection next before the next Freeman's Mind episode.

Download 672x384 WMV (81MB) The lull of Freeman's Mind is over, here is Episode 30, with more that are going to be coming all year. Thanks to everyone who emailed me, letting me know it got posted. I think this one is pretty average, though I tend to think that about all the FM episodes now. One interesting bit of information is that all the radio chatter in this episode is as it was heard in the game. Many audio embellishments are added to the episodes, but that wasn't one of them. For the near future, my attention is a bit divided between The Tunnel, Episode 31, and miscellaneous stuff like forums and subtitles. So if one area lags, it's a safe bet I'm working on another. I plan to continue using the progress graphic to the right for future episodes so you'll know where things stand. I'll have more to say once "The Tunnel" is out. EDIT: I screwed up and forgot to normalize the final audio volume, so the Youtube version may be too quiet. The downloadable copy has been fixed however. EDIT 2: I uploaded Episode 31 to Machinima.com a few days ago, but as usual, I never know when it will go up.