Growing Pains

Time seems to move a lot faster than you think. A year or two ago, I can't remember anymore, I was playing this game called DUST 514. It's a first person shooter set in the EVE Online universe that would eventually connect to EVE directly and allow a shared open market between games. It was to expand EVE Online and open it up to new players by giving them a more familiar, somewhat less complex game in the FPS genre.

The idea at the time, was since EVE Online was beginning to connect to DUST 514 more and more over time, and the virtual space politics were just as juicy as ever, is that I would make myself a blog and cover the DUST side of things, since many EVE players stayed strictly with EVE. That's where the old site name and my username here comes from, Guile Sbarge, my DUST character name. Me and ol' Guile went through some shit in our time. Faction Warfare, helping out EVE guys by capturing territories for them and planning ahead for the bright future of DUST. By this time, the PS4 had either just come out or was about to come out, and thoughts of "Is DUST going to the next gen in the PS4?" began flooding the appropriate channels. It was announced as a PS3 exclusive, but surely that could change for the better, right?

Well, not quite. One, DUST was pretty terrible. Every update added new features and items, but made the game run worse and worse. The matchmaking was broken for a month, making it nearly impossible to play with anyone. The game was buggy, extremely buggy. The game was laggy. The game was poorly optimized to such an extent that memory leaks would occur on an hourly basis, requiring our corp take a few minutes of break time after a series of games so that we could all reboot our consoles. It was bad, but we stuck with it, because CCP had all of these intricate plans laid out and knew exactly where the game was headed, and would make sure it got there posthaste. It was going to get better, right?

Well, not quite. At Fanfest, CCP's yearly convention celebrating EVE Online and it's players, CCP holds a panel for Eve Online and DUST 514 where they discuss the future plans and content. During the DUST 514 panel for that year, they decided it would be better to ignore DUST all together and announced this new game, Project Legion, doing everything DUST does, but better, because fuck you reasons.

Despite the fact that it was a brand new game, they decided to tell us about Legion through their DUST 514 channels. The executive producer for DUST 514 actually posted a huge write-up on the DUST website about how super cool Legion is going to be and also fuck DUST 514 lol while also explaining that DUST would exist independently.

 But fans knew what this meant. DUST was dead, and in its place would rise Project Legion, probably just as shitty as DUST. Even if the reality is the game will probably never really take off and end up with CCP canceling DUST and forgetting it ever happened.

You might be wondering "why do I bring this up?" Because a similar situation has occurred. This time, much more dramatic and much more retro.

THE PAST, THE YEAR 1984

Podcasts That Kill is now podcasts that was killed. No, it's not some new-age punk-rock name change, it's a temporal reboot. Like in the song Iron Man by Black Sabbath where a giant monster comes in and destroys the world so this guy discovers time travel and sets off to the past to make sure he can warn people but ends up becoming the very monster that destroyed the world in the first place. Really meta shit.

 I just wasn't satisfied with the podcast. I didn't feel like it was heading in a direction that would make it stand out. It was the definition of static. There were also internal issues like scheduling conflicts, personality clashes, and not being able to ensure the audio quality between episodes. I'm not the kind of person that can accept "good enough". I was happy with my shitty little blog back when it was just some hobbled together layout and no domain, but I realized I had a lot of fun doing doing stuff for this website, so I kept up with it. I bought a design, I ended up buying a domain thanks to a friend offering me a job, then for some reason doubling his original offer(Seriously what an idiot I would have done it for free!). And so I made it what it is today, which isn't much, but it's mine, and that's important to me. Though one thing is sure, I tried to do too much too fast, and that's what the podcast was.

 It started out as a fun little passion project between friends, but it quickly came to feel like work. I was never sure when we were recording because my co-host would never tell me when until "when" was "right now let's go". Because of this I didn't feel like I could prepare for it. I didn't feel like I could go into it "ready". Crippling hunger, barking dogs, trains or sirens in the background, I can usually plan around them, since I can just look outside and get an idea if the dog is outside or not, and of course hunger is as simple as eating. But I could never get an idea of when we were going to go, so I was never on point for it. So I came to a decision: The podcast is dead for now. I was busy working on a brand new graphic for the podcast while also trying to get it on iTunes, so believe me when I say I was really excited to keep going, but it just came to a point that I couldn't do it anymore.

"Good enough" isn't good enough to me. And while I'm sure it would never have been the best podcast in the first place - that's not important to me - having fun with friends while also having some internet listeners seemed fun. Having fun with something that's yours, with your friends, something no one can take away. That's success to me.

THE FUTURE, THE YEAR 1984

This is the graphic. I'm no designer so oh boy it was difficult, but I figured it out. This is what the podcast will look like when it returns. Because I hope to one day soon reboot the podcast, when I'm ready and able. Hopefully I'll be able to do better. Regardless of what I do or what happens, you know I'll always be here at Words That Kill. At least until Konami sues me and tries to steal my domain name.