I have activated an RSS 2.0 Feed for the site today. It’s basically tracking the news posts, sending the full news text and links to the posts. I don’t know anything about what the previous ‘Blogspot’ page was doing, so feel free to give an opinion on whether the feed should give an abbreviated description, or any other comment concerning reading content with whatever news readers you have. If you have an opinion concerning RSS 2.0 vs 1.0 or Atom, we can entertain those as well.

I tested the feed with Firefox ‘Live Bookmarks’ and IE 8’s news feed reader, and it seems to work well.

Well here’s the interview link for those that are interested:

http://www.podcast17.com/transmissions/c15257

I was able to grab Craig (the voice of Dave) and Ryan (one of the animators who’s been with the show a while) at the last minute to come on the show as well. Unfortunately I was kind of low on sleep at the time, so I remember it as kind of a disjointed dream sequence. There are multiple spots where I completely lost my train of thought and topics bounced around all over the place, but the hosts tried their best to keep it in line I think. So sorry if I sound like I’m drugged when you listen to it. Also my internet connection can be rather horrid, it disconnected me entirely at least 3 times during the interview.

In other news, I’m working on the next Freeman’s Mind, though I confess I simply took some free time this weekend where I wasn’t working on anything, something I haven’t done in a very long time. As a result, I’m behind on everything, but I’ll keep working on things.

Youtube

Machinima.com

640x480 WMV (50MB)

Well here’s the next Freeman’s Mind episode as promised. This one is a little short, but my original cut was about 12 minutes, which makes it a potential problem with Youtube, so I cut it down to the next stopping off point. Half-Life purists will be upset with this episode, as I’m continuing to act under the assumption that Freeman can do a pull-up.

Unfortunately the release was a little wonky for this one, so only the Youtube version is up, the streaming and download copies probably won’t be up until tomorrow. I’ll get the episode page up soon. Again, I plan to pick up the pace on this, so you can expect another one sometime this month too. I plan to make this the priority for now, but my secondary goal is to release the pilot episode I talked about next. I’ll reveal what it is once it gets closer to completion, so it won’t be a total surprise.

INTERVIEW:

Also since I’m having to bunch news together, I’ve been invited to appear on an audio show called Podcast 17. Each week they talk about everything related to Half-Life or the Source engine, focusing on mods in particular. I originally postponed these guys because I was working on the Civil Protection episode and didn’t want fans to think I was just screwing around talking to people. After I released it, they had to postpone me because of scheduling, but now it looks like it’s on again. Anyway, I’ll be appearing on the show live on Sunday, July 19th. It will be broadcasted at 10am (GMT -05:00) Eastern Time. They’ll also release an mp3 of the broadcast the following Monday or Tuesday, I forget. Here are some links:

Live broadcast link (on Sunday)

Podcast 17 homepage

I really don’t know what they’ll be asking me, but it will probably be tamer than something like The Howard Stern Show.

EDIT:
Looks like there was a limit on the live streams that no one knew about. Try this link instead if you still want the live feed:

http://www.justin.tv/henley

I have some updates and minor news for people. First off, I screwed up the credits for this video. I forgot to mention the Quake 3 music I use for the title theme, though that’s mentioned in every other episode, so it’s not a huge deal. What is a big deal to me though, is I got the name wrong for one of the models I used. I was looking at the readme.txt file that came with the custom model I downloaded and going by the credits listed in that, which was “Silverlan.” Turns out that’s not really the guy who made that model, he just did some entity work on it that I didn’t even use when making the episode. The real author is “SideEffect.” I’ll update the episode page to reflect this. My apologies to him, I usually try my best to give everyone credit for their work.

Speaking of the episode, this one has a few Easter Eggs in it that you may have missed:
-Did you spot the G-man appearance?
-I found the billboard ad entertaining
-(at least one user noticed this already) Pay close attention to the path of the black car. This was an accident I noticed very late in the production that I decided to keep, but minimize the impact of.

There will be more subtitles coming out this week, it’s a slow process for me as I’ve had about 90 different people contact me regarding them and I still haven’t replied to everyone. Thanks for your patience in all this.

I’ve been informed that several download links to both series are missing. I’m not sure why they’ve gone down, but I’ve contacted Machinima.com about this and hopefully they’ll get them back up soon. I hope to implement mirrors for the videos sometime in the future as well.

Finally, I’m continuing work on Freeman’s Mind, so just hang tight.

EDIT:
I screwed up somebody else’s name in the credits (Vecima) who did mapwork in this episode I wasn’t even aware of. Due to multiple credits errors, I’ve replaced the download links with the updated version of the credits and will be adding annotations to Youtube later to reflect this. This is what happens when I don’t get enough sleep.

Youtube

Machinima.com streaming (sound now in sync!)

800x448 WMV (77MB)

1280x720 WMV (188MB)

Well here’s the new episode finally. This episode is meant to be a “normal” episode for the series, something I’m not sure I’ve even done before. You should understand I’m always about 10-12 episodes ahead of where the series is actually at in my mind. After the last episode, I felt like I really owed you guys a normal episode, so you didn’t have any misgivings as to where I was going with the series. I plan for there to be some variety in the episodes, but if you ever wonder what direction I’m taking the series in the future, just come back and look at this one. It’s meant to be an anchor point in terms of style and tone for the series. While I plan to make some episodes that are scary, have a lot of action, more surreal, require a longer attention span, have a much more involved story, etc., the series will eventually come back to episodes similar to this one. It’s not my most impressive idea or even original one (I steal a bit from my own material as far as plot), I think it’s one people will like who are a fan of the series.

I’m very pleased with how it came out, though it still kind of sickens me how long it took to make. Animation is really a black hole in terms of time when it comes to these videos. Also just to clarify, I have not been working on this nonstop since the last episode, if I had, it probably would have come out sometime last year. On that note, Freeman’s Mind is next, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Episode 12 comes out next week.