[TRENCHES] Thursday, February 21, 2013 - Pachyderm

Geth

Pachyderm
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/phantasm2

He’d Got Home Before He Realised They Weren’t Really There

Anonymous

(I was just catching up on The Trenches when I thought of this story. Then I got to the strip entitled Phantasm. You guys do realise what you’re writing isn’t actually fiction?)

The first game that I worked on culminated in a 36 hour day for myself and the other tester working on it. I was trying to track down a repeatable method for our last, show stopping crash bug. I seem to remember his duty for most of the night, and following day, was sitting next to one of the coders to nudge him should he fall asleep.

It was hell, but eventually we found it, fixed it, shipped it and were sent home. We were even given the next day off!

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have driven that evening. I remember getting in my car and starting the engine. I remember waking up in my car and finding I was parked on the street outside my house.

I have no recollection of anything in between.

All things considered, I fared better than the other guy. He reported seeing cartoon rabbits in the road. Actual, cartoon fucking rabbits.

Wearing waistcoats.

He had to stop his car to let them get out of the way.

Sleep

36 hours is weak. In college I once stayed up for about 80+ hours to crunch in the last of my work for the semester. I didn't start hallucinating until hour 78. Though I know that feel about the car except my incident like that ended with a shattered ankle and arm. SO glad I found out about the sleep apnea like 5 years after that.

Henroid

2013 date stamp!

I truly don't believe how people go that long without sleep. I sorta managed it this past December, a 48 hour gig from the day I was leaving for Christmas (I stayed up all night to make the flight, which was booked in the wee hours of the morning) and my first day there. The plan was to sleep on the plane and I simply couldn't. So I was just up and awake against my will once in the presence of my family.

facetious

Sleep wrote: »

36 hours is weak. In college I once stayed up for about 80+ hours to crunch in the last of my work for the semester. I didn't start hallucinating until hour 78. Though I know that feel about the car except my incident like that ended with a shattered ankle and arm. SO glad I found out about the sleep apnea like 5 years after that.

Your username is a bit ironic for this post.

marsilies

Sleep wrote: »

36 hours is weak...

To be fair, the tale says it "culminated" in that, so he probably was already sleep deprived from long hours before that marathon.

Darth Waiter

My record is about 6 days; there were brief moments of micro-sleep throughout the experience, but you could never really be sure if you were hallucinating or actually sleeping.

In retrospect, it's hard to justify putting a bunch of marines out in the field with live rounds and no sleep for a training operation. The instructors got around the issue by rotating shifts; they got to pretend to be hardasses and would sneak off for coffee runs and power-naps while the training class got to sit there and suffer.

One guy actually nodded off while firing a 40mm grenade launcher. If I remember correctly, that was when the Easter Bunny called us a bunch of slackers and said, "Well, I guess you pansies need sleep or something."

I'm sorry, Sgt. Easter Bunny, I didn't know that humans could live off of nothing but coffee and lies.

Darkewolfe

My entire senior year of college was a blur like that. I was sleeping 2-4 hours per night at most. It was just weeks and weeks of bizzare, hallucinatory life.

Nowadays I can barely stay up past eleven. I have to get to bed so I can get up early and yell at the kids to get off my lawn.

Gaslight

I went my entire four-year college career without having to pull a single all-nighter. I almost did one just for the sake of doing it my last semester of senior year but it felt pointless. People were always staying up all night to complete major assignments they had invariably known about for weeks at least, or in the case of dreaded term papers, since the beginning of the semester. Why not just put in an hour or two of work each day starting a week or two before the deadline and get it done at a comfortable pace? The quality of your work will be better, you'll get better grades, and you'll be less miserable and less likely to get sick.

I say that and sound smug. But truly an all-nighter would have been nearly impossible for me because I am not the type of person who can sit down and write a whole paper or something in one sitting - my attention span is too short I suppose. So freshman year the first time I saw a requirement for a 15 page research paper on a syllabus this seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to me, having never written anything that long before, and I started with the approach of writing a page or so at a time well in advance out of fear. I ended up sticking with that that and it worked very well for me. I envied the people who could dash off 10 or 15 pages at once, but if I had possessed that ability I still damn sure wouldn't have waited until the night before to put it to use. Some people seemed to thrive on the all-nighter cycle, though. To each their own.

Gamer8585

In college I was pretty good at managing my time, which was good becasue I liked to stay up late and sleep in. However, I pulled an all-nighter once to get a paper done. It was definitly an A paper, I handed it in and took a nap as soon as I got home. The next week I got the paper back: "B-! WTF?!!" Turns out that in my sleep deprived state I forgot to finish and print out the Bibliography and that cost me 20pts.

I will always remember the importance of a good night's sleep.

Sleep

Gaslight wrote: »

I went my entire four-year college career without having to pull a single all-nighter. I almost did one just for the sake of doing it my last semester of senior year but it felt pointless. People were always staying up all night to complete major assignments they had invariably known about for weeks at least, or in the case of dreaded term papers, since the beginning of the semester. Why not just put in an hour or two of work each day starting a week or two before the deadline and get it done at a comfortable pace? The quality of your work will be better, you'll get better grades, and you'll be less miserable and less likely to get sick.

I say that and sound smug. But truly an all-nighter would have been nearly impossible for me because I am not the type of person who can sit down and write a whole paper or something in one sitting - my attention span is too short I suppose. So freshman year the first time I saw a requirement for a 15 page research paper on a syllabus this seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to me, having never written anything that long before, and I started with the approach of writing a page or so at a time well in advance out of fear. I ended up sticking with that that and it worked very well for me. I envied the people who could dash off 10 or 15 pages at once, but if I had possessed that ability I still damn sure wouldn't have waited until the night before to put it to use. Some people seemed to thrive on the all-nighter cycle, though. To each their own.

Hey I didn't say all my decisions around that time were good decisions. I was just saying 36 hours is like a long night of gaming, but likely not something that should cause hallucinations. Though as someone pointed out a long dev cycle culminated in a 36 hour stint I wonder how many 2 or 3 hour nights of sleep the guy put in beforehand. 2-3 hours of sleeps generally not enough to hit all the cycles for sleep so can often be discounted as sleeping.

Also the irony of the name is purposeful.

Hevach

I nearly made it through college without ruining myself... Some sleep lost here and there from stress but no caffeine benders to get through finals. But the last semester there my university changed the program requirements. Suddenly everybody in a science or engineering program had to go back and take bunch of extra credits of 100 and 200 level courses in their major and general ed.

I was really close to graduating, too. Two classes. Was going to be an easymode semester to graduation. Then I was faced with making it a full load followed by either half time the next fall or full time through the summer. FUCK THAT, I did all 22 credit hours at once. What the hell, I thought, it's mostly low level stuff. I only have to do good in the two important ones, the rest was low level stuff where D is for Diploma. Sure, I'll have a few in overlapping timeslots, but with online homework all I need is a couple understanding professors to give me alternate arrangements on the final.

Took me over a year to recover from what I did to myself that semester - not just sleep deprivation either. And to this day I don't remember what my capstone project even was.

JohnnyricoMC

Zero bars? So much for receiving a text message from Q if there's an emergency.

Sleep

JohnnyricoMC wrote: »

Zero bars? So much for receiving a text message from Q is there's an emergency.

HA ha good point.

ArbitraryDescriptor

He never said they'd receive it.

Gaslight

Tube's story about starting a new studio, hiring them as his QA team, the trip to see Cora's dad...

All of it is just an elaborate setup for Q to take his revenge on Cora, Isaac, et al. for the shenanigans that went on during their time working on Lawstar. All of it, just to lure them into this subterranean deathtrap.

Maddoc

Gaslight wrote: »

Tube's story about starting a new studio, hiring them as his QA team, the trip to see Cora's dad...

All of it is just an elaborate setup for Q to take his revenge on Cora, Isaac, et al. for the shenanigans that went on during their time working on Lawstar. All of it, just to lure them into this subterranean deathtrap.

The truth revealed.

Tube is Q

Gaslight

Wow, that was weird. Freudian slip?

If/when Tube does someday decide to end us all, obviously it won't be by luring us into a dank basement. More likely the live stream of some horrific game people have forced him to play for our amusement will turn out to be the video from The Ring or something.

Darth Waiter

Gaslight wrote: »

Wow, that was weird. Freudian slip?

If/when Tube does someday decide to end us all, obviously it won't be by luring us into a dank basement. More likely the live stream of some horrific game people have forced him to play for our amusement will turn out to be the video from The Ring or something.

When you see Nightwish, you die.

Smrtnik

My last semester of college I was getting 5 - 6 hours of sleep pouret night. Then last month 4. Then last week I was awake from noon Sunday to 6pm Thursday. Slept 6 hours to midnight. Then was up until 6 pm Friday. Then slept 20-something hours, went out and ate a mountain of chicken fried rice, and went back to sleep another 15 hours.