[TRENCHES] Thursday, February 21, 2013 - Pachyderm
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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.
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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.
Your username is a bit ironic for this post.
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
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.
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.
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.
I will always remember the importance of a good night's sleep.
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.
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.
HA ha good point.
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
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.