Ben Paddon

Blog

  • The Dream Ends

    I’ll do my best to describe what I saw in my dream last night. It was an incredibly fleeting glance, but I got a tremendous amount of history and intent from it.

    Imagine one of the walls from your room gone, replaced instead by a dark portal to a region of unknown space. Through the portal you see only the immense head and shoulders of a large, bald demon. Its skin white, its eyes like galaxies, its mouth locked in a permanent open grin revealing thousands of tiny, pointed teeth. As you look down the throat of the beast, you see the very essence of infinity itself.

    Everything in your room is slowly being pulled towards this gaping maw. By “everything” I don’t just mean your bed, your clothes, your pictures on the wall, your clothes horse… I mean everything. The atomic structure of your possessions begins to melt away, a flowing stream of particles evaporating away from their original place and into the mouth of the creature. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the oxygen, everything pulled towards it. The string of atoms is almost beautiful in a horrific way.

    The space is left empty. Not in the sense that the room is vacant, but that this block of space is now devoid of existence. It is a void, bereft of substance, a room-shaped hole in reality. It is painful to look at, the eyes not wanting to transmit the view to the brain, the brain not wishing to process it.

    Content, the beast moves on to another room and begins the process anew. It is a slow process, but room by room, building by building, the creature intends to destroy everything. And once there is no more interior to wrap the exterior around, the reality of our world will simply collapse inwards, folding in on itself.

  • Technology Crisis

    BEN sits at his computer, ready to work.

    BEN

    Okay iTunes, give me something AWESOME to get me PUMPED for work.

    ITUNES

    Here, listen to Jonathan Coulton’s “When You Go”, followed immediately by “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” by Colin Hay.

    BEN

    (Gently sobbing)

    You bastard.

  • San Diego Comic-Con 2009

    I’ll be at the SoulGeek booth, which is booth #2517. We’re right by the Bongo booth (responsible for Simpsons Comics and Futurama Comics) and the Dark Horse booth (responsible for… well, tons of cool stuff).

    I’ll be sharing not just with SoulGeek founder and voice actor Dino Andrade (who webcomic aficionados will know as the voice of Skull the Troll in PVP: The Series). Joining us at the SoulGeek booth will be none other than star of not one but two Battlestar Galacticas –Richard Hatch! He’ll be right there sat next to me. Which will be weird.

    We may also end up being joined by Crispin Freeman, a voice actor who has made use of his talents in Hellsing, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Naruto. Which is pretty damned awesome.

    Michelle will also be wandering around at Comic-Con this year, so you’e got an opportunity to meet both of the writers of Boomer’s Day Off! What more could you ask for?

  • Ben’s Boomer’s Day Off FAQ

    I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about Boomer’s Day Off lately. Has there been a resurgance in its popularity? I’ve no idea. Anyway, I tend to get asked the same questions over and over, and I’m going to go ahead and answer them here as best I can before I climb into bed.

    Will there be any more episodes?

    Honestly, I don’t know. Michelle seems to want to do another one, and I’d love to do one if we can come up with an idea that actually furthers the story of these characters. There’s a lot standing in the way of us doing another episode, though – it all depends on whether the cast want to do it. It’s a huge ordeal getting everybody together, getting the make-up ready and so forth.

    What would the fifth episode be about?

    We have’t yet hammered out a concrete idea. Michelle had some rough ideas. She reads the comments on YouTube and the feedback we get through Steam, and where possible she tries to give little nods to stuff the fans want. One of the things people really wanted to see was Frank the Tank, and she spent some time last month looking into how we could do that. I’m perhaps a little bit more skeptical as to whether or not we could pull off a Tank on our limited budget, but anything is possible.

    Can you give me Tim’s/Michelle’s/Ben Dunn’s contact details? He/she is so awesome.

    No. Sorry. Michelle and I made our Steam handles available on the videos, and our email addresses are both publicly available, but that’s about it. I’m not going to give you Ben Dunn’s address or Tim’s phone number. (Yes, people have asked. Creepy, creepy people.)

    Are you going to boycott Left 4 Dead 2?

    No bloody way. You know how utterly ridiculous the entire boycott is? People are complaining about how the game hasn’t had any serious content added to it, but you know what? We got an entirely new gameplay mode and a map to play it on. For free. We’ve had hundreds of hours of entertainment from a game that cost us $50. Compare that to some games, which offer only six or seven hours of gameplay for $40-60. Some people claim that the development of a sequel shows that Valve had no faith in the original, but they started development of L4D2 almost immediately after they finished development of L4D. You don’t jump straight into developing the sequel if you think the game isn’t going to sell in the first place.

    Left 4 Dead continues to be an utterly fantastic experience and in all honesty I don’t expect the sequel to be any less.

    Are Tim and Michelle a couple?

    Nope!

    Are you and Michelle a couple?

    Nope!

    Are you and Tim a couple?

    Nope! I just let him jump on me sometimes.

    What else are you working on?

    Kill9 have a few projects in store for later in the year, and I’m not going to be involved in writing any of those. Kill9 will be doing a musical, and I’m considering auditioning for that, but I’m not sure my voice is quite up to par. We’ll see.

    As for me, I continue to roll on with Jump Leads (we’ll be at Comic-Con this year, more details to come shortly) and But, Sir…, and today I launched a new podcast called Ben Paddon’s Feeble Excuse wherein I interview people I want to talk to just for the Hell of it. PodWarp 1999 is more or less done but we may be doing a reunion special in the near future. And I’ve started drawing again, so there’s a chance I may launch a second webcomic – one I’ll be drawing myself.

    I think that pretty much covers every question I’ve been asked so far. I’ll update this list as time goes by, assuming anyone asks me anything that isn’t “wen r u doin part 5????”

  • Life is a Roller Coaster

    It’s difficult for me to express exactly what happened to me today in words.

    I went to Magic Mountain with some friends. This isn’t a particularly groundbreaking event in itself. It’s a theme park. That’s the sort of things friends do, is go to theme parks together. In particular we went to celebrate Ben Sweaney’s birthday. 27 years old. He drove down from Phoenix, AZ last night, crashed on my couch, and we drove to the park together this morning.

    One of the observations I’d made during the day was that while California does have some rather impressive mountains in it, there’s a lot of flat land – particularly around Magic Mountain. Having been to a theme park in England relatively recently, where the rollercoasters were surrounded by waterfalls and rockfaces and the like, riding the rollercoasters at Magic Mountain seemed a very different experience. Imagine a flat, desolate desert. Now imagine a rollercoaster in the middle of it.

    This didn’t really bother me much during the day – I overcaqme my fear of rollercoasters at this very park some ten years ago. But something very strange happened on the last ride we went on.

    In the ten years since I last went to the park, various new rides have popped up. Amongst them is Tatsu, a dragon-themed rollercoaster that, like Air at Alton Towers in England, rotates the seats 90 degrees before the ride begins, meaning that you face downwards as it takes off.

    Unlike some of the other roller coasters I went on that day, I jumped onto Tatsu with ease and excitement. I’ve done this before, I reasoned. This is a doddle. But as the ride began its ascent, my tune began to change.

    The thing about Magic Mountain is that it’s not just a fanciful name. Despite the vast amount of flat space surrounding the park, much of it is located at the foot of an actual mountain, meaning that some roller coasters begin at a high point and overlook large areas of the park. As we climbed up the ramp for that first drop, I became very aware of this fact.

    Fuck, I thought. This is pretty high.

    The ascent seemed to take forever, and we seemed to be moving further and further away from the ground. I started to seize up, my mind overrun with panic, fear, anxiety.

    What if the support on my seat breaks? I asked myself. What if I fall? Oh, fuck.

    The ascent began to slow, the angle of the cart began to level out. We were approaching that first big drop. Not wanting to close my eyes, I decided to fix my gaze at the shoes of the person in the seats in front of me.

    And then we dropped.

    The scenery, so much of it so very far away, whizzed below me as we rushed downwards. it whizzed around me as we looped, and flipped, and dived. It spun, and shook, and twisted, and wound, and after what felt like a millenia of my heart stopping, freezing, hoping that the ride would be over, I suddenly came over with a feeling of remarkably tranquility.

    If I fall, I will die, I thought. But if I’m going to die, I might as well enjoy the view.

    Suddenly my eyes wanted to be everywhere but locked on those shoes, and I looked. No, I didn’t just look. I’d looked while I was on other rides. On Tatsu, I saw. Mountains, trees, an artificial but otherwise impressive river. Nature. All of it below me. What a spectacle it was! What an incredible world we live in!

    Now, I know that experts design roller coasters, and more experts test them to death before they’ll even let people so much as look at the inside of the station. But if the worst should have happened, if the safety gear had failed and I’d fallen from my seat tonight, I would have been content knowing that this was the last thing I saw, that this was the last thing I felt. I mean, obviously the last thing I would have really felt would be the concrete as my body slammed full-force into the ground, but even still. Seeing what I saw, and feeling what I felt… I reckon I would’ve been content.

    All too soon the ride was over. I stepped onto the platform a little relieved but mostly disappointed – I wish I could have seen from the start. I wish I could have taken it all in. We should go on it again, my brain conspired, but it wasn’t to be – our group moved away from the ride, ultimately leaving the park entirely.

    It was a very bizarre feeling, and a strange way to experience it. I’m sure that there are people out there who would say it was God, but I don’t believe that. I believe it was something else. Something more. Something human.

    I’m broke, I’m unemployed, and I’m alone. But I’m alive, and I’m alive in this world of all palces. Of all the unlikely things to happen, this is me and this is where I am. Call me corny, call me soft-hearted, call me whatever you like, but I absolutely love this.

  • Computer Seperation Anxiety

    We’ve moved into a new house. We haven’t got any Internet yet and we’ve only just figured out where the movers put our computers, so it may be a while before I can get online to do things like update Jump Leads or write Ficlys or anything like that.

    I do still have my phone, and indeed I have my Skype account which routes calls to my phone if I’m offline, so I’m not completely out of touch. I wouldn’t mind some human contact at some point in the immediate future.

  • Disk Editing For Fun And Profit

    Amiga Power is the magazine that made me want to write about videogames for a living. I’ve since changed my tune, but it’s hard not to read stuff like this and not think to myself, “Man, that sure sounds like fun.”

    Disk Editing For Fun And Profit

    Easily the most harrowing aspect of AMIGA POWER, the universally hated though vitally important task of organising games (as opposed to physically compiling the disks) fell to anyone who wasn’t icy enough not to care.

    Ten rubberingly-stretched days of crushing desperation would then happen to the hapless individual, on top of their usual duties of writing the mag, or subbing it, or being the Editor, with no safety net of a humorous feature to put in instead and everyone else treading round them carefully as you’d do with someone due to be executed on Thursday, at the end of which a set of games would appear as if wrought from the air by sheer mental effort.

    These would then be sent off to Kenny The Disk Compiler and by noon he’d have called back to report four of the games had custom loaders that would need two days to crack, three were A1200-only, one of the others needed 6mb of memory and anyway there was only room for that PD version of Pacman, provided we didn’t mind it split across both disks.

    Shouting would occur while everyone else ran away, and four days later the finalised disks would arrive with the duplicators, who would then lose the labels or spontaneously forget how to work their machines. Eventually, samples would be returned to the office, where they’d fail to work on at least the two most popular of the 790 models of Amiga currently on sale, and weeping would result, and kicking in of photocopiers.

    Finally, the okay would be given to copy thousands of disks, and with only a few days’ delay while the duplicators neglected to examine the fax or spontaneously forgot how to read, the issue and its shiny game-packed coverdisks would appear on the shelves.

    The pallid wretch who had pulled this off would then swear on the eyes of the orphan children of the world never to do it again until it was his turn.

    And why did we go through this stomach-clutching terror month after month? Because we cared. Do you see? Do you get it yet? We cared. Because we cared. That was the point. Because we cared. Do you understand? Is it clear? Because we cared. It was because we cared that we did it. Have you grasped that thought and do you hold it in your head, that we cared?

    Gagh. (Dies.)

  • Targetted Marketting

    Parky

    How does Google target ads to my website?

    Google automatically delivers ads that are targeted to your content or audience. We do this in two ways:

    • Contextual targeting
      Our technology uses such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, in order to determine what a webpage is about and precisely match Google ads to each page.
    • Placement targeting
      With placement targeting, advertisers choose specific ad placements, or subsections of publisher websites, on which to run their ads. Ads that are placement-targeted may not be precisely related to the content of a page, but are hand-picked by advertisers who’ve determined a match between what your users are interested in and what they have to offer.

    From the Google AdSense support website.