Short for "Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades" - more or less the killer app for VR, for me, as the most absurdly detailed simulation of hundreds of firearms (real and... cursed) of any game, but also a game where you fight giant talking sausages that bleed mustard and recite bad meat puns.

The connection, though, between the BattleZone expack and this humble S3M file... lies in the credits page for HL2 mod, The Hidden: Source. hidden-source.com/team.htm

"Human" is an alias of Kochun Hu. Therefore, the track on Red Odyssey is a callback to Hu's days in the music scene.

The original song - modarchive.org/index.php?re... - gives the composer name "Human." ModArchive doesn't have an artist page for that. So I started hunting.

Kochun Hu has music credits on some very prolific games in the modern era. Volgarr the Viking and Halo Infinite, to name a couple.

Backslash marks were popularized by the IBM standards committee in the 1960s, which got rolled into ASCII.

Programmers took a liking to the symbol; quickly adopting it as the standard escape character.


*Forward* slash existed in the 18th century by comparison.

Gods, thinking about all of that and realizing, I've always had problems with "social emotional growth" - and _I'm not good at math._ I'm part of a class of humans that The Powerful find absolutely no use for.

Which is why I wish to live to see The Powerful cease to be Powerful.

You look like the kind of person I would gladly hang out with and intently listen to an earnest info-dump about your special interest.

Which is to say: No.

(disclaimer: i am not "girls" either)

This is why you have The Weasel Guarantee: any of my work, no matter how silly, is guaranteed to have been done By At Least One Human, using no AI generation models whatsoever.

At least if my shit comes from other games, I own up to that. My Credits.txt files are legendarily long.

I mean, I know the struggle! Drawing, modeling, or recording audio from scratch is hard! Gameplay modders would "benefit" the most from genAI if it worked as advertised, right?

Except, instead of work, it just steals shit, and (badly) insulates you from responsibility for that.

AI-generated assets in a gameplay mod is the only way you could possibly get any more lame than straight-up theft, because you're not even doing the theft yourself, you're letting a computer program do the stealing for you and then laying claim to the result.

It's not just wrong - it's COWARDLY.

I've also seen a damned lot of plagiarism in this field. Folks trying to pass off their Mondo Cool New Gameplay Mod as 100% original, when in fact they've gone and stolen the underlying code from another mod, and their sprites are barely edits of models from a mod for a completely different game.

Funny to me how it's because of him that I (and I'm sure handfuls of others) know a damn thing about game and level design from goofing around with ZZT as a kid, and yet, I feel like I know more about it than he does at this point. 😞