Scientists Go Online

Here’s an older story for our latest featured item.  Scientists Go Online is one of Friendly Garg’s earlier tales using Half-Life and the traditional image story format.

In this story, Luther and Walter begin bickering over on-line gaming skills one day and decide to play a round of Half-Life’s Deathmatch.

To access the game, they use a piece of Black Mesa technology that transports them into the game.

Originally, a part two of this story was planned.  However, due to a personal lack of interest and a feeling that the story had run its course, FG decided to drop that second project.

Check out this and other Image Fiction from the Image Fiction page.

Basically, there is a section for novelized original stories, novelized fan-fictions, collections of original & fan-fiction shorts, original shorts, and fan-fiction shorts .

This will help divide up the page so that viewers may tell if they are about to read an original work or a fan-fic based on a game, TV show, etc.

The exception to this new format is the Collection group.  Collections are several one-shot stories that have a binding similarity.  For instance, my collection titled Mod Fiction is thus far two fan-fic stories I wrote based on our own mods GargArena and Cat-Life.  And I might add more shorts at a later time.

The second Collection are two new submissions by Syrus Rayne.  Untitled Stories is a collection with, at this time, two original one-shot stories.

So if you’re looking for some good fiction, stop by our text fiction page.

Okay, that isn’t really shocking… I’m just glad we finally got past all the teasing the writers were doing over the past year.

The real news is…

Two new game comics.

You read that correctly.  Today I have made available two new short comics.

First up is the first episode of a new comic series called “The Sniper Chronicles” by Radu Iceman.  This first issue is 14 pages of comic goodness that introduces a zombie plot.

Stop by the Game Comics page to read “Episode 1 – Australian Zombie” today.

The second new comic is something different I wanted to make after reading a month old message on the Concerned forums.

As I have been working on a model reskin pack for a little while now… I thought this would be a good time to try out the team concept and play around with the new skins.  I also had two new wire mod / gcombat “props” for future movies that I wanted to show off.

All in all, this inspired me to create a new sub-section for the Game Comics page.  I call it “Web Events Archives”.  Anyone can make a Web Events Archive, but the premise is that they are based on real forum events… no matter how loosely.

To read the first Web Events Archive, “The Signal“, a 10-page comic loosely based on actual forum events, simply stop by the Game Comics page.

I had many plans for the future and began work on a Comic Strips page as one of the additions.

Since this was such a new idea for this site, I was rather surprised when a new comic strip was submitted.  I did a little digging and tracked the author back to TWHL.

The Mesa Times by Daubster

The Mesa Times is the creation of one of TWHL’s staff, Daubster.  It is a Half-Life comic strip that takes place before the Black Mesa incident.  Daubster made it and posted it on TWHL initially with plans for a future website that never materialized.  One of the forum members at TWHL posted our link and suggested that he submit it here.

And so, The Mesa Times by Daubster is today’s featured comic.  Learn how the G-Man developed his speech impediment, learn what happened to the donuts, learn how Gordon got his assignment in the test labs, and learn what the scis do in their spare time.

In fact, it was finished in April.  Written by SquirrelKing, the original Full Life Consequences was epically scrambled.  According to SquirrelKing’s profile and forum posts when it first appeared at FanFiction.net he was learning English and used the writing to help.  He also demonstrated some more simple concepts in writing and imagination, which would lead some of us to the conclusion that he was also very young.

Originally, topics about the series were posted in forums such as the fan fiction forum on PHL.  The story was ridiculed and people such as myself often defended him by pointing out the likely age and ESL issues.  The story was also picked up for a rather famous YTMND “epic reading of an epic fan-fiction”.

This story was amusing and the reading made it great.  A second story appeared as well and then the story remained “to be continued?” for years.

But in the past couple of years, YouTube has brought even more attention to SquirrelKing and his fictions.  There have been several flash animations, gmod videos, and even hand drawn animations depicting the first two stories and some of the other works including Halo: Halos in Space, and Metal Gear Solid: Fight of Metal Gears.

Most notably, Icton Entertainment (creators of the Idiots of Garry’s Mod videos) made an adaptation of both stories.  These adaptations were fairly amusing and worked quite well.

Now, by this time SquirrelKing had been inactive for years.  Halo: Halos in Space 2: Aliens attack was his last story which was published in August of 2007.   Suddenly, a new chapter in the Full Life Consequences saga appeared in February of this year (2009).  Do the math.

Most notable about the later 2 chapters of Full Life Consequences is the recognizably deliberate effort to make them “so bad its funny”.  It is possible that someone may have obtained the account and finished the story.  But I think it is more likely that SquirrelKing was responding to his internet fame.

Basically, there are too possibilities.  Either SquirrelKing was a less successful artificial character, like Peter Chimera, or he was legitimately a kid trying to write and practice his writing that has since turned into a “sock puppet” or fake writer due to internet fame.

I happen to think that he falls into that second possibility.  Why?  Mainly because if this was always a fake writer, he did a terrible job setting up the character.  Using Peter Chimaera as an example, the author created a character that could not grasp the English language and didn’t know much about his subject matter.  Sounds a lot like SquirrelKing right?  The difference is that Chimaera is supposed to speak English as a primary language and not have spent much time reading or understanding the plot of his subject matter.  In short, he’s a newbie, a llama, and a childish writer all rolled into one.

Conversely, SquirrelKing started out as a kid who was learning the English language and seemed to have at least some understanding of his subject matter.  He was believable as an author.  That is, believable at first.  With his latter stories, such as the Halos in Space tales, he seemed to be trying to make bad stories.  And since he suddenly reappeared his two latest stories feel even more forced.

Irregardless, the stories of John Freeman, and eventually his son Henry, are funny.  And the Icton videos are fairly popular, well made adaptations that have undoubtedly been the reason for SquirrelKing’s reappearance.

In fact, these are popular enough that many YouTube patrons have been trying to beat them to the cliched punch by making adaptations as soon as a new chapters are ready.

I won’t bother you with these wannabe-Icton videos… instead I’ll just link you to the real thing.

The complete saga:
Half-Life: Full Life Consequences
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs

Half-Life: Full Life Consequences 2 – What has to be Done
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8yHguvYYyQ

Half-Life: Hero Begining
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NiCYPrAoB8

Half-Life Full Life Consequences: Free Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULWgEnnmcv4

Most visitors that remember the site from those early years think of certain key image stories.  Specifically, the Barney Time Series or, on occasion, one of the other team-made plots.  But some of the best, most creative stories were fan-made.

In this case, I’m thinking of a story by R. Tarrman.  “INVASION”

Invasion by R. Tarrman

The story follows an unnamed scientist from an undisclosed facility that looks a lot like Black Mesa.  When he awakes in the locker room to find blood and death have filled the halls, he becomes concerned.  Then he encounters aliens and knows that his only recourse is to travel into the Black Mesa Research facility and find a way to stop the Xen invasion.

Of course, as with most of our stories, this one is based more around humor and is no where near as dramatic as it sounds.

This story is a 31 page image story on the Half-Life Stories page.  The majority of the jokes appear toward the end of the story when the scientist joins with Barney the security guard to stop the aliens.

When all else fails… turn to the Holy Book of Final Fantasy!

Invasion

Well,  with this new site I would like to include a feature from time to time as well.  But I don’t really want to use the old widget.  Instead, I’d like to make a new monthly or even bi-weekly feature.

That said, here is our first edition.

——————–

Tonight’s feature is our first text-fiction, an entry from almost five years ago.  Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party by Ghost Calhoun.

Originally posted on the PHL forums, this story is a script style short fiction.  It still stands as a fairly humorous story about Barney Calhoun’s 30th birthday and the Black Mesa/Xen surprise party.

When this story first appeared, Friendly Garg had started to seek potential fan-fiction authors to add to his website.  At that time, Friendly Garg’s Stories was a PHL hosted site and home to image stories.  He had started to expand his interests and over time, the site would move and become known as the Garg-o-holics, but the fan-fiction aspect would be dropped.

This was one of his first findings during that first expansion.  FG quickly posted an offer for Ghost Calhoun to join the story team as a text fiction author and other stories were written and scouted.

Unfortunately, any and all of the other text fictions of that era, there were only a few, have been lost.  But thankfully, this little gem still exists and was restored to the site.  BWL Development presents… Barney Calhoun’s Birthday Party.

Chapter 16: Illuminating Darkness is up and available for your reading pleasure.

View it on our site or on FanFiction.net
BWL Version
fanfiction.net Version

I delayed posting this chapter due to the work needed in rebuilding this site after I took over.  I then had to make some new content which included HL2 stories and Disorientation.  Finally, I have updated and hope to make the next update much sooner this time.

Also, I am planning to make all of these chapters available as text files soon.  I will likely include them in a zip file and update it as new chapters are added.  This way, when someone wants to print off the story, they can have a nice clean text document.