Technology, Gaming, and Humor from the school of twisted perspective, a Fearsome Force, Two like-minded individuals born and raised on sprinkled megabits in corn flakes, taking 8-bit mega shits, and coming to the conclusion that the world better take a turn for the better before we all take a turn for the worse.
On the last day, they gathered for a group photo. They were videogame programmers, artists, level builders, artificial-intelligence experts. Their team was — finally — giving up, declaring defeat, and disbanding. So they headed down to the lobby of their building in Garland, Texas, to smile for the camera. They arranged themselves on top of their logo: a 10-foot-wide nuclear-radiation sign, inlaid in the marble floor.
To videogame fans, that logo is instantly recognizable. It’s the insignia of Duke Nukem 3D, a computer game that revolutionized shoot-’em-up virtual violence in 1996. Featuring a swaggering, steroidal, wisecracking hero, Duke Nukem 3D became one of the top-selling videogames ever, making its creators very wealthy and leaving fans absolutely delirious for a sequel. The team quickly began work on that sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and it became one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time.
It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.
On May 6, 2009, everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game’s developer, 3D Realms, told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel.
Front and center in the photo sits a large guy with a boyish face. You can’t tell from the picture, but he had gotten choked up when he made the announcement. His name is George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project for its entire 12-year run. Now 46 years old, he’d spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again. What happened to that project has been shrouded in secrecy, and rumors have flown about why Broussard couldn’t manage to finish his life’s work. What went so wrong?
This is what happened.
Broussard would not talk to Wired for this story. He was polite about it, but because his firm is being sued over its failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever, he declined to be interviewed, as did his cofounder and partner, Scott Miller. Broussard also emailed his former employees to warn them not to talk; many refused my requests, often because they remain friends with Broussard.
But enough were willing to discuss the game — almost all anonymously — that a picture began to emerge, aided by Broussard’s and Miller’s prodigious postings on discussion boards and a handful of public interviews.
Broussard and Miller met in the late ’70s in Dallas, during Miller’s senior year of high school. They would hang out in the computer lab, programming clunky 2-D and text-adventure games. When Miller was in his twenties, he invented the shareware model of selling games and formed his company, Apogee (which started going by 3D Realms in 1994): He’d break a game into chunks, release it for free on BBSes, get people addicted, and then charge them for the remaining parts. By 1990, he was publishing and marketing titles created by others. He quit his day job and brought Broussard on. They were a study in contrasts: Miller, guarded and quiet, became the savvy business dealer, while Broussard — a voluble, energetic, ponytailed presence who carried around a single notebook as his organizational tool — became the creative impresario, famous for an unerring sense of what was fun. In 1992, the duo published Wolfenstein 3D, created by a then tiny studio called id Software. It was the first game to let players run around a 3-D first-person environment shooting enemies, and it became a breakout hit, selling 200,000 copies. 3D Realms went from being a $25,000-a-month startup to a $200,000-a-month corporation. The realistic, lead-spewing shoot-’em-up was born.
By 1994, Broussard began concocting his own breakout game — one that would upend the conventions of the fledgling genre. Where other titles were gloomy and self-important, his would be brassy, colorful, and funny. Instead of playing as a faceless marine, gamers would play as Duke Nukem, “a combo of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold,” as Broussard described him. Broussard and Miller assembled a seven-person team to build the product. The pair had a knack for discovering talent: One of their recruits was a 17-year-old programmer from Rhode Island — barely out of high school — who created their game engine, the crucial piece of software that displays the 3-D world for the player. After a year and a half of work, Duke Nukem 3D was released online in January 1996.
Sales were explosive. The game was addictively fun and crammed with racy humor, including strippers you could tip (at which point they’d flash their pixelated boobs) and mutant pigs dressed in LAPD-like uniforms. Critics went fairly mad with praise. In most games, the world was static, but Duke Nukem players could interact with objects — they could get Duke to play pool or admire himself in a mirror (”Damn, I’m looking good!” he’d say). The title sold about 3.5 million copies, making Miller and Broussard straightforwardly wealthy.
In April 1997, Broussard announced a follow-up: Duke Nukem Forever, which he promised would outdo the original in humor, interactivity, and fun. The firm set no formal deadline, but Miller predicted the game would be out within about a year, “well before” Christmas 1998. “We see Duke Nukem as a franchise that will be around 30 years from now, like James Bond,” Miller told a gaming site. Broussard compared Duke to Nintendo’s Mario — a character that would star in title after title, year after year.
But the cycle that would demolish Duke Nukem was about to begin.
Broussard (front row, center) and the 3D Realms team on their last day.
Part of what caught Broussard off guard was the sheer speed at which videogames were improving. In the late ’90s, the processing speed of computer chips exploded, so each year programmers were releasing more and more powerful game engines — able to handle increasingly lifelike graphics, more enemies onscreen at a time, smarter artificial intelligence, and more objects that could be destroyed.
This ignited an arms race in game development. When Duke Nukem 3D came out, Broussard’s Duke Nukem engine — called Build — produced the best-looking game around. Barely a year later, though, it looked antiquated. Broussard’s key rival in the Dallas gaming scene, id Software, had announced its Quake II engine, which produced graphics that made Build seem blocky and crude. Broussard decided to license the Quake II engine, figuring it would save him precious time; programming an engine from scratch can take years. Though 3D Realms never confirmed how much it paid for the license — Miller referred to it as “a truckload of money” on a gaming news site — the price was said to be as high as $500,000. When the engine was released in December 1997, Broussard’s team quickly began creating game levels, monsters, and weapons around it.
Epic Fail
It was supposed to be the blockbuster sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Instead, Duke Nukem Forever became the biggest videogame that never was. A few key milestones. —Benj Edwards
Jan 1996 Duke Nukem 3D is released. The sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, is announced in April 1997.
Nov 1997 3D Realms shows off early DNF screenshots, targeting a mid- to late-1998 release using the Quake II engine.
May 1998 Trailer for DNF is shown at videogame industry convention E3. Fans and critics rave.
May 1999 The game isn’t shown at E3. Broussard says, “We’re sick of jumping through pointless PR hoops.”
May 2001 3D Realms releases its first video in years. “No, this is not some kind of sick joke,” the company Web site says.
May 2003 Publisher Take-Two Interactive says DNF will not come out in 2003; blames its financial difficulties on ongoing delays.
Dec 2008 3D Realms releases a new desktop wallpaper image of DNF.
May 2009 3D Realms shuts down internal development. Take-Two sues.
By May 1998, the team had created enough material to show off at E3, the annual videogame industry convention. Duke Nukem Forever was set in Vegas; in the game’s plot, Duke operates a strip club and then has to fight off invading aliens. Broussard showed a trailer featuring a dozen different scenes, including Duke fighting on the back of a moving truck, jet airplanes crashing, and furious firefights with aliens. Critics were awed: “It sets a new benchmark for making a 3-D game more like a Hollywood movie,” Newsday proclaimed. Broussard was clearly obsessed with making his product as aesthetically appealing as possible. When he brought a few journalists over to a computer to show off bits of the game, he pointed out the way you could see individual wrinkles on characters’ faces and mused over how to make his campfire more realistic. (”As soon as we mix in some white smoke and some black smoke, I think we’ll be there,” he said.)
Behind the scenes, though, Broussard was already unhappy with the results and was craving better technology. A few months after the Quake II engine was released, another competitor, Epic MegaGames, unveiled a rival engine called Unreal. Its graphics were more realistic still, and Unreal was better suited to crafting wide-open spaces. 3D Realms was struggling mightily to get Quake II to render the open desert around Las Vegas. One evening just after E3, while the team sat together, a programmer threw out a bombshell: Maybe they should switch to Unreal? “The room got quiet for a moment,” Broussard recalled. Switching engines again seemed insane — it would cost another massive wad of money and require them to scrap much of the work they’d done.
But Broussard decided to make the change. Only weeks after he showed off Duke Nukem Forever, he stunned the gaming industry by announcing the shift to the Unreal engine. “It was effectively a reboot of the project in many respects,” Chris Hargrove, then one of the game’s programmers, told me (though he agreed with the decision). Broussard soon began pushing for even more and cooler game-building tools: He ripped out the ceiling of a room at the 3D Realms office to assemble a motion-capture lab, which would help his team in rendering “complex motions like strippers,” he noted on the 3D Realms Web site.
Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.
But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”
“George’s genius was realizing where games were going and taking it to the next level,” says Paul Schuytema, who worked for Broussard and Miller heading up the development of Prey, another 3D Realms title. “That was his sword and his Achilles’ heel. He’d rather throw himself on his sword and kill himself than have the game be bad.” By the end of 1999, after blowing several publicly proclaimed release dates, Duke Nukem Forever was nowhere near completion. Half the weapons were still just sketches, and when a new version of the Unreal engine was announced — one designed for live, multiplayer online battles — once again Broussard opted to upgrade. Worse, former employees say, he did not appear to have an endgame — an overall plan for what the finished product would look like, and thus a way to recognize when it was nearing completion. “I remember being very impressed by the features. It was incredibly cool technology,” says the developer hired in 2000. “But it wasn’t a game.” It was like a series of tech demos “in a very chaotic state.”
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving — to “lock the game down” — and then spend a frantic year polishing. But Broussard never seemed willing to do that.
Mike Wilson, a former games marketer with id Software and 15-year veteran of the industry, suspects that Broussard was paralyzed by the massive success of Duke Nukem 3D. “When Duke came out, they were kings of the world for a minute,” Wilson says. “And how often does that happen? How often does someone have the best thing in their field, absolutely? They basically got frozen in that moment.”
Broussard was also cursed with money.
Normally, game developers don’t have much cash. Like rock bands seeking a label to help pay for the cost of recording an album, game developers usually find a publisher to give them an advance in exchange for a big slice of the profits. But Broussard and Miller didn’t need to do this. 3D Realms was flush with cash; on top of the massive Duke Nukem 3D sales, they had other products that were selling briskly, including several add-on packs for Duke Nukem 3D that they’d outsourced to another developer. (They even licensed their Build engine for a dozen games, bringing in more dough.)
So when Broussard and Miller began work on Duke Nukem Forever, they decided to fund its development themselves. They arranged for a publisher, GT Interactive, to help with marketing and physically shipping the CDs, but they took only a tiny $400,000 advance. (Later, Take-Two Interactive — famous for publishing the Grand Theft Auto games — bought the rights from GT Interactive and became the publisher for Duke Nukem Forever.)
Other game developers envied the freedom that Broussard and Miller had, at least at first. Developers and their publishers, indeed, are often at war. It’s like many suits-versus-creatives relationships: Developers want to make their product superb, and the publishers just want it on the shelves as soon as possible. If the game starts getting delayed, it’s the publisher that cracks the whip. Broussard and Miller were free to thumb their noses at this entire system. Indeed, they even posted gleeful rants online about the evil of publishers and their deadlines. “When it’s done” became their defiant reply whenever someone asked when Duke Nukem Forever would be finished. They even criticized their publisher viciously in public. In 2003, Take-Two CEO Jeffrey Lapin complained to analysts that Duke Nukem Forever was so late he had begun writing it off as a loss, and he predicted it wouldn’t be out anytime soon. Broussard erupted. “Take-Two needs to STFU,” he hissed in a dicussion-board posting, using the well-known shorthand for “shut the fuck up.” “We don’t want Take-Two saying stupid-ass things in public for the sole purposes of helping their stock,” Broussard continued. “It’s our time and our money we are spending on the game. So either we’re absolutely stupid and clueless, or we believe in what we are working on.”
Yet the truth is, Broussard’s financial freedom had cut him off from all discipline. He could delay making the tough calls, seemingly forever. “One day, Broussard came in and said, ‘We could go another five years without shipping a game’” because 3D Realms still had so much money in the bank, an employee told me. “He seemed really happy about that. The other people just groaned.”
The only serious pressure came from fans. Duke diehards were losing their minds waiting for the game, crowding discussion boards to pester the developer. (”Sometimes I feel like a thousand Dr. Evils are looking at us yelling ‘throw me a frickin’ bone here!’” Hargrove, the programmer, complained on 3D Realms’ Web forums.)
To keep fans at bay, Broussard decided to put together another trailer for E3 in 2001. It was the first peek at Duke Nukem Forever in three years, and it was genuinely spectacular. Duke rode on trains and in cars while blasting enemies. Wounded soldiers held their guts and groaned in pain. A pack of enemies attacked on Jet Skis. The trailer was the talk of the show. After four years of work, Duke Nukem Forever looked as good as any other game in development, and maybe even better.
The 3D Realms staff returned to Texas elated. One told me that the period immediately after E3 felt like the closest they came to shipping the game. “The video was just being eaten up by people,” he said. “We were so far ahead of other people at the time.”
But Broussard still didn’t seem to have a finish line in sight. “I was hoping for George to come in and say, ‘OK, that was great, we got what we wanted, let’s get this done now!” another employee said. “But he never did.”
The long grind began to wear on the staff. The Duke Nukem Forever team was unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke Nukem Forever, games had become bigger and bigger. It wasn’t unusual for a developer now to throw 50 people or more at a single title. In essence, 3-D games had grown up: It’s as if Hollywood had evolved from tiny hand-cranked three-minute reels to two-hour epic blockbusters in half a decade. Successful developers had disciplined management that set deadlines and milestones. Someone at the top carefully made sure every piece was moving along. Yet Broussard and Miller hadn’t changed with the times. They were still designing “with a 1995 mentality,” as one former employee told me — trying to produce a modern, massive game with a stripped-down little group.
After eight years of work, even Broussard and Miller seemed chastened by their failures. In 2006, journalist Tom Chick became one of the few outsiders in years to get a peek at Duke Nukem Forever. Broussard appeared nervous, almost contrite, about the delays and continually referred to an index card while talking about the game’s features. “We fucked up,” he told Chick. “Basically, we threw everything out and started again.”
Then a staff rebellion broke out. For longtime employees, the incessant delays posed two big problems. One was professional cred: Duke Nukem Forever was the only modern 3-D game some of them had worked on; if it didn’t ship soon, they’d have spent nearly a decade with nothing to show for it. The other was money. 3D Realms paid its designers less than many competitors, most notably id Software down the road. Broussard motivated them by offering profit-sharing. “Their business model was to pay the developers very low, but with a potential payday at the end that was pretty substantial,” says former employee Schuytema. As Duke Nukem Forever failed to arrive, so did that big payday.
By August 2006, at least seven people had left — nearly half the team — taking with them years of experience and institutional memory. “It was a waterfall,” recalls one employee; after the first employee announced he was leaving, another quickly followed, after which the rest all fled in a torrent. Some seemed openly bitter. “I left because I was burned out after working on the same project for five years without any end in sight,” former Duke Nukem Forever programmer Scott Alden posted on Shacknews.
Perfecting every detail, down to realistic strippers, takes time and money.
Ironically, the end was within reach, even if Broussard couldn’t see it. Raphael van Lierop, who was hired in 2007 as a creative director, was given several pieces of the game to play. It took him about five hours. Broussard was stunned; he’d thought those levels would take half that time to get through. “You could see the gears turning, with him thinking, ‘Oh wow — maybe we’ve got more game than we think,’” says van Lierop. Broussard had been staring at the game for so long, he’d lost perspective.
Van Lierop was excited: From what he’d seen of it, Duke Nukem Forever was so well developed — and so graphically superior to any other game in production — that if 3D Realms pushed hard for a year, they could release it and “blow everyone out of the water.” No, no, Broussard replied. It was two years out. Van Lierop was stunned. “I thought, ‘Wow, how many times have you been here, near the finish line, and you thought you were way out?’”
By then, even Miller’s two sons were making jokes about the delays. “Duke Nukem Taking Forever,” they teased their father.
The exodus of employees seemed to shock Broussard into action. By the end of 2006, he appeared to finally become serious about shipping the title.
Pressure was also building internally. Former employees told me Broussard’s relationship with Miller was slowly deteriorating over Broussard’s inability to complete Duke Nukem Forever. It’s certainly possible that Miller was angry that Broussard was blowing through so much money on the game. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller proclaimed he was “dumbfounded” that it had taken them so long.
To mount a final push to get Duke Nukem Forever out the door, Broussard went on a hiring spree. “Need more help. Must go faster. Scotty, we need more powah!” Broussard wrote in a discussion-board posting advertising the new design jobs. Within a short period of time, the size of the team more than doubled, from 18 to about 35. Many of those he hired were high-powered creatives, like Tramell Isaac, a 12-year veteran of the industry. “All of my friends wondered if I was crazy. Why would I go to 3dr?” he later wrote on his blog. “The funny thing is, I knew what I was signing up for … George made it perfectly clear in our discussions prior to me joining that this would not be a walk in the park. You got to respect the man for that.”
One particularly crucial hire was Brian Hook, who became the project’s lead, a central boss operating directly below Broussard. Hook realized the challenge ahead: He was inheriting “a fractured and demoralized project that lacked direction, milestones, or cohesion,” as he later described it. Hook, former employees say, also attempted something nobody had done successfully before: He pushed back on Broussard’s constant requests for endless tweaks and changes. And when Broussard complained, Hook held firm. He was the first employee to stand between Broussard and his beloved game, making it possible for the team to move forward without getting stalled by new requests.
On January 26, 2009, Broussard got on a plane to New York with a copy of the game to show the publishers at Take-Two. “Packing up to go visit our publisher and show them the game and cool sh!t to get them hyped and excited,” he posted on Twitter.
But the money was finally running out. Broussard and Miller had spent some $20 million of their own cash on Duke Nukem Forever — and their current development team would likely burn through another several million dollars a year. Miller and Broussard were forced to break their cardinal rule: They went to Take-Two with hat in hand, asking for $6 million to help finish the game.
In court documents both companies later filed, Broussard and Miller claim that Take-Two initially agreed, then quickly backtracked, offering only $2.5 million. Take-Two officials dispute this: They claim they were sufficiently dubious that they offered only $2.5 million up front, agreeing to give another $2.5 million when the game was completed. Either way, Broussard and Miller rejected the counteroffer.
With the negotiations at an impasse, Broussard and Miller decided the end had come. On May 6, they announced that they were disbanding all development at 3D Realms. They would continue to hire other developers to make other games for them, but 3D Realms would cease to create anything itself. Broussard took that last photo and then bid his creative staff good-bye.
Will Duke Nukem Forever ever come out?
Many observers think Take-Two is attempting to bleed 3D Realms dry until it has no more cash, then convince a judge to force Broussard and Miller to hand over intellectual-property rights to the Duke Nukem franchise to repay the $2.5 million advance. “It’s an IP grab,” says one Dallas-area developer. If Take-Two actually secured the rights to Duke Nukem, it might likely throw out the by-then-aging Duke Nukem Forever and simply hire new developers to produce new Duke games. But even without the suit, there is only a short window for Duke Nukem Forever to come out in its current form before it will have to be revised yet again, to keep pace with changing technology.
The Duke franchise is still potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite more than a decade of waiting, the excitement over the game is still remarkably high; its die-hard fans might be the most patient on earth. But if they want to play Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon, they’ll need more than patience: They’ll need a miracle.
Contributing editor Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about netbooks in issue 17.03.
Tongue firmly in cheek, University of Pittsburgh student Ben Korman has penned a column decrying the way turtles are portrayed and treated in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. series of games.
While the in-game amphibians reptiles in question are labeled Koopas, Korman notes that, “The playful branding of these enemies is semantic at best.”
He continues:
These games, first and foremost, graphically depict innocent, healthy turtles being slaughtered by the hundreds at the hands of human characters. The main character, Super Mario, is consistently rewarded for these atrocities.
Are we really to believe that shelled amphibians were simply chosen arbitrarily as the series’ most pervasive antagonists? Was Bowser, the chief nemesis in the series, portrayed as a belligerent power-tripping-maniac-turtle-thing with no specific message in mind? Is the shelled community simply a capricious victim here?
GP: Excellent satire which shows that we sometimes forget that games are here for our entertainment and that maybe, just maybe, sometimes we take them a little too seriously.
In a couple weeks the film 2012 will be released, and with its promise of big budget special effect laden scenes of mass destruction, and John Cusack moodily blundering his way through relationships while listening to indie hits form the 80s, movie nerds are creaming their saggy, unfashionable pants in anticipation. Alongside that, talk about doomsday prophecies have also reached a fever pitch, particularly those that relate to the so called 2012 apocalypse.
Apocalyptic warnings have always been attractive to a certain type of person - bearded men without jobs primarily - and now that a lot more people are unemployed (and presumably bearded), anticipation of a world where our credit card debts have been wiped clean by a horrible calamity is building. What’s a couple billion dead if it gets Citibank off your ass, right? So, to see if there was any truth behind this 2012 phenomena, and track down where it originates from and what it could mean, I interviewed some of the leading specialists on history, science and new age studies from around the world.
___ The Mayan Calendar
According to Dr. Jorge Estrada, an Archaeologist from the University of Caba, and an expert on Mayan an Olmec studies, the Mayans used a cyclical calendar, where every 144,000 days (approximately 400 years) constituted a unit called a “baktun.” Several Mayan records warn that after 13 baktuns have elapsed from year 0, “something” would happen. What that “something” entails is far from clear. Inscriptions seem to indicate that after the 13th baktun elapses, “Black… will occur” followed by the descent of “Bolon Yookte K’uh.” Who or what a Bolon Yookte K’uh is - aside from a terrible name for a baby girl - is at this point unclear. Inscriptions found elsewhere describe Bolon as a god of war, conflict or the underworld.
Artist’s representation of Bolon Yookte K’uh
So, to date the arrival of the apocalypse, we have to do a little math. Because the Mayans never heard about all the good work Jesus did, their year 0 is a little different than ours, and when that’s taken into account, the 13th baktun is supposed to elapse on December 21st or 23rd, 2012. Great. Because the holiday season isn’t stressful enough.
“I swear to God, I wish a tidal wave kills your parents.”
Dr. Estrada doesn’t put a lot of stock in the doomsday scenarios, but during our conversation, he did begin talking very excitedly about some new inscriptions he’d uncovered recently that shed some light on Bolon Yookte K’uh. His translation hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed yet, so take it with a grain of salt. The inscription appears to tell a story of Bolon Yookte K’uh meeting a “man-boy from the land of sparks and whispers.” This half-man apparently confronts Bolon Yookte K’uh on the day of reckoning. After that point, the inscription is badly damaged, and little else after that is legible, except for a glyph meaning “terrible violation.”
___ Timewave Zero & the I Ching
Timewave Zero is a theory once proposed by a man called Terence McKenna. McKenna believed that the universe has a sort of interconnectedness which ebbs and flows over time. Ultimately this “timewave” will reach a crescendo, at which point shit will go down. The exact nature of the shit is uncertain, though from his studies of the ancient Chinese text the I Ching, and a computer program of his own invention, McKenna believed that it would happen in late 2012. It’s worth pointing out here that McKenna’s theories have been criticized on the basis that he had never, not once in his life, not been on drugs.
Press F3 to invert polarity of horseshit
Still, his theories have been taken up by others, and I managed to speak to one of them. Daryl Kilsman of Santa Cruz, is an expert teleologician, which is a word I think he made up right on the spot. I also feel it’s worth pointing out that I’m pretty sure I could actually smell this man over the phone. Kilsman has refined McKenna’s work, and by converting the output from McKenna’s Timewave program into a series of I Ching hexagrams, like some sort of Ouroboros of bullshit, he claims to have found another message. This message, told in the maddeningly vague manner of all I Ching prophecies, simply states the following phrases “Purveyor of cracked scrolls,” “Heaven Beast,” “Danger,” and “Great Humbling Penetration.” Kilsman offered to share his interpretation of this with me, but by that point I had set the phone down to get some fresh air.
___ Geomagnetic reversal
Geomagnetic reversal is a term used to describe an event where the earth’s magnetic poles will flip over. There’s geological evidence to suggest this has happened multiple times in the past, and that it is in fact long overdue. There’s absolutely nothing to tie geomagnetic reversal to the year 2012 however, and whether such an event would be apocalyptic or merely a nuisance is again, completely unknown.
Because no-one of any repute at all will talk about this, I decided to take a compass, a globe and thirty three dollars to Madam Shandra, an “Attuned Plane Walker” and “Experienced Masseuse” whose flier ended up in my hands while researching an unrelated project. Madam Shandra greeted me warmly, and after I explained who I was and showed her I did in fact have thirty three dollars, she seemed eager to help.
After dimming the lights, Shandra consulted her astral companion from the Ninth Plane, Toby. Together they confirmed that there was nothing to be concerned of: the Earth’s magnetic field was fine, and would be for another ten thousand years. However, as I was handing over the thirty three dollars, Shandra seized upon my palm, very excited by a scar that I’d had since childhood. According to her and Toby, this mark implied that I was a child of destiny, fated to lead mankind during its darkest hour. When I inquired for more information, she told me that my complete fate could only be unlocked in the course of a special forty five dollar massage.
___ Galactic alignment
The principle behind this theory is that due to a slight wobble in the earth’s axis of rotation, the position of constellations in the night sky will shift slowly over a 26,000 year cycle. And, at or around the end of the 20th century, the constellation that rises during the winter solstice is Sagittarius, which happens to be the constellation hanging over the center of the galaxy. Lunatics have proposed that galactic energy will be beamed directly to Earth during this alignment. And, seeing that 2012 is close to the end of the twentieth century, it would seem proponents of this theory have decided to climb aboard the 2012 bandwagon of crazy.
I couldn’t find any supporters of this theory willing to go on the record; although someone in a related newsgroup did ask me to “STOP LEAKING BRAIN ZETA PROSPECTS OVER THE TORUS.” Browsing said newsgroup though, it seems these people claim the Mayans were aware of the cycles of axial precession when they devised their calendar. They even point out the existence of Mayan symbols like the Hunab Ku, which depicts a spiral pattern that could be a galaxy, and the Kwantk Phnag sequence, which they claim to be a representation of the apocalypse. This sequence depicts the Hunab Ku lined up above a temple, where priest/astronomers watch as a large bear forcibly has sex with a man.
___ Nibiru collision
This is where we find the real cask-strength crazy. Extra terrestrials have supposedly been sending zeta waves to receptive individuals on earth, warning that a rogue planet called Nibiru would soon arrive in the solar system, wreaking havoc. Whether it collides with the earth or merely rips us apart via tidal forces is unknown, possibly because it’s completely, completely made up.
I traveled to the University of Portland, where I spoke with Dr. Jennifer Feits, who studies people who have claimed to be contacted by extra terrestrials. Feits explained how these stories become self reinforcing as they spread throughout the community. Susceptible individuals will hear a story, then realize/claim they had a similar experience themselves. Basically these people feed off each other, their shared fictions seeming to give further proof that there’s some truth they’re peering in on. In her research, Feits has gone to some length to isolate such individuals, to see if their stories matched up when kept independent of one another. And in all cases but one, they never did.
The anomalous story was an interesting one. Several people have all independently told a vivid story of a an emissary from Nibiru, who for all intents and purposes looked like a grizzly bear, and answers to the name Balon. Balon travels to Earth, where he randomly selects a representative for the planet. This one is described as a foolish and vain man with thin arms. During their meeting, the representative angers the great space bear with his terrible manners and sweaty neck. At this point the space bear vigorously molests the representative in front of the whole world’s press and dignitaries. “Everyone felt very embarrassed for this pathetic figure,” Dr. Feits said, looking at me curiously. “Apparently he did not comport himself very well, either as a representative of humankind, or even as a man. Lots of weeping and wailing,” she concluded, grabbing one of my arms and squeezing it experimentally. After I wriggled out of her grasp, she continued her story with a shrug. “Anyways, after that Bolon decides that the people of Earth are too pathetic to even be worth destroying. He returns to Nibiru and the planet continues on its way, leaving humanity alive and unharmed.”
“And, uh, what happened to the Earth’s representative?” I asked.
Dr. Feits looked at me blankly. “Who cares?”
____
As you can see, the threat of a disaster in the year 2012 is both real and too great to ignore. I encourage all loyal readers to donate thousands of dollars every day to the Prevent-Space-Bear-Rape-Fund, which will provide funding for protein shakes, free weights and Krav Maga lessons for the earth’s representative as soon as he steps forward, along with forty five dollar massages for the administrator of the plan, who, until further notice, will be me.
Rupert Murdoch is going to battle against the Internet, bent on making readers actually pay for online newspaper journalism–beginning with his London Sunday Times. History suggests he won’t back down; the experts suggest he’s crazy. Is he also ignoring his industry’s biggest problem?
War is Rupert Murdoch’s natural state. When he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, in October 1986, he went to war against the hegemony of CBS, ABC, and NBC. With Fox News he crossed swords with CNN’s Ted Turner. At Sky, his satellite-TV system in the U.K., he went up against the BBC. He’s battled China, the F.C.C., the print unions in Great Britain, and, recently, most of the journalism community in his takeover of The Wall Street Journal. He relishes conflict and doesn’t back down—one reason why he’s won so many of his fights and so profoundly changed the nature of his industry.
Now he’s going to war with the Internet.
Rupert Murdoch’s digital-technology savvy is a source of hilarity in his family. Photo Illustration by Darrow.
It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the Daily News, the Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.
And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.
After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.
Usually, when hard-nosed director Quentin Tarantino releases a film, critics tend to either salivate at the prospect of more silver screen ultra-violent coolness, or writhe at the thought of this man sticking another blood-soaked fork down the throats of the general public. Either way, you can’t deny the cultural impact that Tarantino has had on modern day pop culture (especially since the release of the theatrical godsend that was Pulp Fiction).
His latest film, Inglourious Basterds, is set to turn the war genre of films on its gritty, dirt-stained head. And as a tribute to the release of this highly anticipated motion picture, we have 10 games that let you kill Nazis. These Nazi-hunting games will make you feel as ruthless (or even as callous) as Brad Pitt’s Hitler-hating character, Aldo Raine. Let the controversy ensue.
Trademarkia (www.trademarkia.com), the fresh, easy and intelligent way for people to create a brand, today previews its free service at TechCrunch50.
RT @TechCrunch From The TC50 DemoPit, Trademarkia (TM) Simplifies Trademark Search http://bit.ly/2SgWTV #GeekSpazz
Trademarkia was selected to demonstrate its product in TechCrunch50 – a showcase of the world's hottest new startups – from among more than 1,000 applicants in 26 different countries.
Where Trademarkia fits
Trademarkia is for busy people who want an effortless way to create a business name from the millions of trademarks filed at the United States Trademark Office that have now gone abandoned; receive email and SMS reminders and alerts on counterfeit brands; and find savings worth an average of $1,000 within minutes of use. People have really had only two ways to create a new brand in the past: come up with it on their own and hire a consultant. 6 million businesses in the U.S. need to create brands for their business, products, and services each year. Until Trademarkia, the option of creating a business name from abandoned names did not exist anywhere on the web because there was no way to find such names. Even when a good name for a brand was identified, verification of availability of a particular brand name required the assistance of expensive attorneys. What would the world be like if we couldn't "Google" information we did not already know? Such a world may have been our fate, had the prior holders of that mark not abandoned their ownership of it. Until Trademarkia, once fledging startups such as Google, Twitter, and Yelp (all previously owned brands) had to rely on expensive attorneys to find out whether previously expired brands were in fact available for purchase.
Startup entrepreneur and intellectual property attorney Raj Abhyanker considered these things when creating Trademarkia. "Trademarkia is essentially creating a market in which abandoned business names can be recycled similar to the now $1 billion+ expired domain industry." Trademarkia exposes the millions of historical business names, slogans and logos since the year 1870 that have now gone abandoned and makes them available for re-registration.
Trademarkia is the free, easy and intelligent way to create and manage brands online
Trademarkia is designed to be virtually effortless for the user. It applies a patent-pending technology and proprietary algorithms to compile business name data from all available sources into a single, easy-to-use and uniquely powerful online business name search engine. In addition, Trademarkia also offers a valuable service to businesses looking to protect the brands they already own. Trademarkia enables businesses, both large and small, to keep an eye on their competitors who try to file trademarks, domain names, and start websites which are confusingly similar to the brands that they worked hard to build and protect. Users simply indicate the brands that they want to monitor, and can receive free online reports and updates on activities of counterfeiters.
Trademarkia.com has been in private beta testing for the past few months, and is generating highly enthusiastic responses from early users. Trademarkia's management and engineering team is comprised of experts in Web technology, brand management and intellectual property. Trademarkia's product and market potential have attracted investment interest from both the venture and angel communities. "This is a great product! It is fun to find interesting brands on Trademarkia that can help my small business succeed," said Colette Pierre, a Trademarkia private beta user. "I recently registered my brand as a federal trademark, and it is important to the long term success of our small business to be able to monitor against companies trying to steal our goodwill. Trademarkia makes that process easy, and has already saved our company money."
ABOUT TRADEMARKIA
Founded in March 2009, Trademarkia.com is the fresh, easy and intelligent way for people to create their brands from millions of previously owned business names, slogans, and logos. And it's free.
Patent-pending Trademarkia technology does all the rest, giving users a unified view of all their brands in a single, easy to understand interface. Trademarkia provides detailed visibility into expired and abandoned business names, slogans, and logos; proactively alerting users about upcoming issues, counterfeit marks; and offering personalized suggestions for interesting brands. The service is accessible via the Web or cell phone. And it's safe and secure; Trademarkia is updated every day with fresh data, and offers secondary checking services to users.
For more information on Trademarkia.com's free business name creation service, please visit www.trademarkia.com.
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