I do feel silly at the thought of getting on a soapbox to talk about the “plot”, “themes” and “creative inspirations” of a work best known as “the funny sound effects game” - but it is also the work through which I first developed an interest in the sorts of storytelling themes which fascinate me to this day, so I am nonetheless bound to it.
- they/them
The dream of a gently woken lamb. Each blade of grass as it lies down. Sibling to those other blades you might have heard of. I've been described as "resilient; optimistic; patient."
Non-binary, agender, transneutral, neutrois. Begrudgingly attached to another word for my gender group starting with “N”.
You might know me by a pen name, and you'll find I've got another profile under that pen name.
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in reply to @joyeuse's post:
If the world thinks of Half-Life as the funny sound effects game now, I think less of the world
One interpretation of history goes like this: The secret is that multiple generations have now grown up saying “Half-Life” to mean “Garry’s Mod”. The author of an irreverent fan-game, disinterested in any of the subject matter which interests me, has for longer than not been the de facto arbiter of “canon”, and the results are unsurprising.
(Note also the Garry’s-Mod-ification of terminology in Half-Life’s scripts as the franchise wore on with less and less involvement from its writer - “AR2s” in HL2Ep2, “metrocops” in HLA. I will argue that later usage of Ken Kesey’s term “the Combine” is a clear example of a related effect as well.)
So anyway, haven’t you heard? Don’t you know about the passports? About the sounds that get made when you drag physics objects together with the physics gun? About the wacky vocalisations they got the Subgenius Master of Church Secrets to make into a mic? How’d they come up with any of that? One of the lead creatives alongside Marc Laidlaw was Greg “Coomer” lmao
Funny thing is the sound effects aren't even "from" Half-Life. They were just licensed from a commercial sound effect album by Valve. That's why they keep showing up in TV and movies and stuff.