Where the Magic Happens

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So yeah, it took us a bit longer than usual but we managed to kick out a new podcast this week. The different thing about this one was that I got to take the reigns of the editing of the podcast subsequent to recording. It’s a lot different than I expected.

One of the things that probably helps one out while doing this is a good initial recording. Obviously when first doing a podcast there’s going to be a lot of stuff that gets edited out, but Urbo and I have been doing this for a long time now so our uncut originals are pretty clean overall. Well, for the most part. That makes the job easier, so my first experience with cutting together a whole cast went pretty smooth from my end of things.

For those who don’t know, Warp Drive Active is done as a recorded Skype conversation using a handy piece of software called Pamela, which lets us actually save the audio stream of a Skype call. We record both ends of the conversation since the local voice quality’s always going to be better than the remote’s, but for the most part we use a single side to do an edit and cut in bits from the other if the quality requires it.

The only downside to doing it is the fact that you actually have to listen to the whole podast raw file from beginning to end, to make sure you’re cutting out bits that should be cut, and that process alone can be a pain in the butt. When the finished product is over two hours, you can imagine how long it takes to listen through a huge raw file from beginning to end. I figure I should start taking notes on time indexes that I should revisit to work on instead.

At any rate, I watched a couple of Indiana Jones movies while doing this, so Urban’s QA on the final cut found a cut that I forgot to make. As an aside, that new Indy movie was a huge pile of crap.

I use Audacity for my editing while Urban prefers the more commercial Soundforge, and while Audacity is a bit more rough around the edges it’s an extremely capable piece of open source sound editing software. I’d have no issues recommending it to anyone with the caveat that you should make sure you’ve got enough free space on your drive (the project files are quite large) and that you save often. That’s not so much of an issue for Audacity users I find, Urban sometimes kills a whole podcast when Soundforge crashes and nukes the original files.

It’s a learning experience.

F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin

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The problem with EVE is that it can sometimes take a lot of time to accomplish something when you log in. So lately given the fact I’ve been so swamped with work I’ve only been able to mess around with games that give a shorter term payoff. I’m a pretty big fan of the original F.E.A.R., so getting the new one was a no brainer.

In terms of genre, this one’s a sci-fi anime-inspired j-horror first person shooter. It’s something any nerd would love to play really. It even has a very well done version of bullet-time, which makes the ultra-violent shooter action all the more sweet when you have the edge of slow motion.

It’s been oh… since Bioshock I think, when I’ve played a shooter this atmospheric. The city got blown to hell at the end of the first game, and making your way through it in this one is extremely well presented. The streets are totally screwed, with debris and dust everywhere. And as typical of the series it’s scary as all hell with all the horrific madness happening because of Alma.

Multiplayer’s nothing too out of the ordinary which is probably not a good thing, but if you’re looking for a solid single player scarefest in a sci-fi shooter form you should check this one out.

The Dark Wheel

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For those who don’t know, the third EON Awards are on right now, with voting in progress. There’s been some discussion on the EVE forums here about how some of the nominees were chosen for the various categories, so I figure I’d shed some light on the subject. Hopefully it will clear up some questions folks have been having.

First off you’ll ask yourself: what does he know about it? Lets just get this bit out of the way now: I was a member of the group involved in choosing the nominees. I realize some of the things I do for the community have ended up on the list, and I can tell you right now that I did not nominate myself or anything I was involved in, for any of the categories, with one exception: Player of the Year. Now, I did this as a joke and even made note of it in my submission. The reason was I personally didn’t think I could single out a single person who really stood out as a player of the year. Anyway, apparently someone else tossed my name in too so it got in on the ballot. For the record, there were 17 other candidates in that category alone.

I know you only have my word on this right now, but you’ll have to accept it unless someone else involved in the group comes forward to corroborate. Anyway, that’s all the ass-covering I’m interested in getting into right now, and it’s not why you’re here anyway. On to the process.

Things started with a list of ten judges, of which you now know one of them. No, I’m not about to expose the identities of the others so don’t even ask (publicly or privately). You’ll have to take it from me that each of them is a member of the EVE community, and don’t have any particular bias as a group. By that I mean that it’s not like half of us are in Band of Brothers, or something. Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at there.

Each of us were asked to provide six candidates for each category. For myself, decided on coming up with one or two that really excelled in each category (the aforementioned Me for Player of the Year thing notwithstanding) instead of coming up with one and picking five more based on some sort of arbitrary means.

Once the nominee list was submitted, it was compiled into a master list of everyone’s selections per category. Each of the people involved then voted on what six in each category they preferred. For the record, no, I didn’t vote for anything my name was attached to. The top six in each by votes ended up as the ones which you see on the voting site now.

So to summarize the process:

We each came up with six nominees per category
A full list of all selections was presented
We each picked six from each category in the full list
The top six picked ended up as final nominees

That’s all.

As to why it was done this way, I’m not 100% sure because I wasn’t involved in coming up with the concept. I do know however that it sounded a lot better than player-submitted choices, because those inevitably are more biased, easier for a large enough corp/alliance to skew nominations, and generally speaking a much larger target for whining from the community.

Anyway I hope that answers some of the questions on this. Whether this affects the way you vote is entirely up to each individual, I just figured it was good to have a bit of transparency. The reason why I don’t give up the names of the others involved is not because it’s some super secret conspiracy, but it’s just not my place to do so.