demagogue

I think you've got the pacing down really well ... it doesn't drag, it hits all the high points, but it still keeps a logical sequence so I'm not lost (although maybe that's me having played it so many times, but most people who watch this will probably have played it). Also, the dissolves were done pretty well. Remember, there are more than dissolves though. Watch a movie and pay attention to the types of cuts ... there are crash cuts, fades, dissloves, back-and-forth cuts, also you might consider playing with the images themselves -- zooms, pans, etc -- there are lots of editing tools you might play around with. So I might encourage you to be creative and play with some more tools. It might be cool if, e.g., when you frob a newspaper or text that you throw up a choice quote as a subtitle, because the readables are such an especially nice touch to this game, and help fill out the story. This will probably become more important as you get to more interesting/important readables later in the game. As you already mentioned, the voice work needs help ... it's hard to understand and spoils the polish, but you already know this and want to fix it. So that's good. (My one piece of advice on that is to just use a generally normal voice, although well rehearsed and fluid; but don't try to force it too much to be artificially low or sinister or cool or anything because then it sounds, well, artificial.) I can say, though, that I still think it's a good idea to have good-sounding narration ... It helps fill in some of the non-verbal, action parts as well as fill in some blanks in the story or what's going on, and also to just fill in what's going on in the player's head when he makes some decisions. I noticed you left out some classic bits in Act 1 ... the drink machine complaint by Hermann (he wants his orange drink), the woman's bathroom bit. But I guess there's so many little side things that you need to be selective, and non-story stuff might drag down the pacing. I'd recommend to just try some different variations, though -- taking things in and out -- and see how it "feels", how it affects the pacing. For the most part, though, I thought you were cutting pretty well and had good judgment. On that note, from what I hear about editing, it's a process, it's all about picking at it a little at a time, over and over, getting the timing and pacing right, and the more you pick at it the better and better it gets. I think you have a great start with Act 1 -- it could still benefit from some picking, but even if you didn't add any more to it it's good for a "final" cut (just fix that voice work). I look forward to how you pull off future scenes.

Momentum is a stranger concept the more I read about it, too ... I mean, anything dealing with mass and movement generally gets stranger. And it all started off so simply. I mean, I think I generally get kinetic energy and rest energy. But when you don't take formal courses on it, there are gaps. I remember with special relativity, as you speed A up relative to B, and they have an elastic collision, even though the mass of A is increasing relative to B (b/c it'd take more and more energy to speed it up the same amount), time is going proportionally slower, so the energy exchange (the kinetic energy A would transfer to B in an elastic collision) ends up being the same. And -- in a probably very similar moment that you had -- that made me think just what the hell is momentum, then, anyway? Is this all just about how energy (in its various guises) is transfered around in "transactions"? And now I think about all the math in terms of "transactions", like all the particles or widgets come together and agree to an exchange according to the rules, and then go their merry way. It helps me "get" the math, but not so enlightening what a transaction really is. I read in the newspaper yesterday about the CERN cyclotron getting ready to go on-line, and how they hope to discover the Higgs particle, which is apparently the cornerstone to why things have mass and the last major missing piece to the Standard Model. And I realized that everything I think I know about "mass" seems so naive. I keep thinking no matter how much I read, I still have so far to go to have a good sense about what they're really talking about.

I didn't give you a link: http://www.machinima.com/

A sequel to X-Com is also going to be developed by Irrational, although it hasn't been specifically announced yet ... but there are enough clues (they control the IP; they are recruiting people with skills that, of all the IP they own to make a new game, only match with X-Com; their lawyer accidentally leaked the name; etc) that there isn't really any doubt left about it anymore. Mixed feelings about System Shock 3. It's so clearly, IMO, coattailing off the buzz coming from Bioshock, but the fact that they snubbed Ken Levine so pointedly, and *now* they come back ready to "care" about remaking it ... the whole situation just smells bad. (By the way, that article you posted was just repeating the now-debunked PCGamer article from last year (you can tell by its date). There has been some recent buzz about SS3, but I haven't read anything "official" coming out of EA yet ... although granted I haven't really looked for it. But anyway I'm not sure whether SS3 is an official "go" yet, or all this buzz is just built on the same bad article from a year ago, in which case EA hasn't publicly committed to SS3 any more now than then.) But, in any event, I have to agree it's energizing to see all this attention on PC gaming all coming together ... and with all those great titles. It's nice to feel appreciated now and again.

Your biggest audience, DX fans, will already know the story. But they might be happy watching it again if it was packaged together well, for the same reason some people who've played games sometimes like to watch walkthroughs of other people playing their favorite levels, just to see things from another point of view. That's your audience, I'd think. You could also add some story to it, dialogue for the in-game sequences, making it more in the line of original machinema, and if you have good voice acting and good dialogue, that could be quite fun to watch. Go to the machinema site and look around at some other projects that have been done and you'll get an idea of what works and what doesn't.

Yeah, that's the first thing that strikes you looking at it. It looks a little like a toy building, rather than a real building. Then again, that's some of its charm. It just depends on what you want to use the building for. If this were in an FM, I'd also recommend to work on the scale of those textures (unless there's a reason it should look a little surreally toy-like, like it was in a dream). But for this sort of test run/ experimenting/ play it makes for fun eye candy, so I don't mind so much. Great work in any event.

Oh, well cheers then. (I don't know why I read it that way...) Like I said, I agreed with everything you were saying, and it's interesting to hear the other little tidbits you had to offer. Yeah, I remember some of those things coming out about Harvey (and later Randy with TDS) ... sounded like trying times. I could only imagine. As for Ombrenuit's post, sounds to me like he was mostly just venting about his own gut feelings, intuitions and worries on the subject ... even when some of the sentences looked like they were trying to say something hard about "the way things really are" and what's "obvious", that's really the better way to read his post. He wasn't citing facts so much as feelings and observations.* I don't personally worry as much about this team falling into the trouble he foresees for them because I think game developers are, more than anything, professionals (artists, too), but primarily professionals in the job of creating good games. They'll respect canon, sure, but if it's a functioning team, they'll do what they have to to put out a good project. Like Unstoppable, I prefer thinking about it from the perspective of process ... here's a team with these people doing these jobs in this kind of environment. Does it grok? If something breaks down, it's usually attributable to some pretty concrete hitch in the process. Since I don't know anything about this Montreal team, really, I can only have faith in them. Later on we'll probably start getting more indications leaking through about whether and how well it's grokking. *Edit. A little in Ombrenuit's defense, I found this interesting bon mot that sort of acknowledges a little of what he was talking about, and how Spector dealt with it for DXIW, although it didn't turn out maybe as well as he'd probably imagined it would. Actually, this whole interview is interesting (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=53753) and makes me look a little more sympathetically at IW, at least from Spector's point of view.

Are you talking to me, Unstoppable? Anyway, I would agree with everything you said, so I don't see why you might think I had insulting assumptions, since they must be the same as yours, considering that I also did the research on DXIW's post mortem (do you think you have a monopoly on DXIW knowledge or something?), and again I would probably agree with everything you just said. Anyway, one source that I found particularly enlightening was Krypt's reflection on the Flesh engine (1, 2). It's what I had in mind when I made my last post. (There are a couple of other sources straight from the horses' mouths I could link ... but don't want to be bothered looking them back up right now. Unless you have an inside connection, I'm sure you are referring to the same sources. And if you do have an inside connection, by all means enlighten us! It's not like I'm in competition with you; I'm really interested in the details and am happy to learn more about what happened! I think we're on the same side here.) But so far as I know, they really did lose control over the engine as they handed it over to a programmer to get in dynamic shadows, and the guy apparently rewrote the whole engine on his own initiative and disappeared (well, was fired), which engine really handicapped them (I shouldn't have used the word "delegated" though; I meant more to refer to the self-initiative of a maverick programmer, so it was effectively like delegating, and because I was citing the fact from a blurry memory, but he wasn't an outside guy so it's not a good term for it. But the gist of the point remains, I think). But anyway, the post that I'm going to quote remains for me at the root, around which the other problems blossomed. Of course, there were other problems surrounding the development of DXIW and TDS, but this, IMO, was what turned them from run-of-the-mill problems into the problem scenario that became DXIW (e.g., I think that some of the interpersonal problems / leadership problems / lack of experience on the team / etc, as you rightly mentioned, wouldn't have been as much a problem if they had technology that was working more in their favor. Seriously, try to work with the Flesh engine and you'll see why it breeds frustration and why the TDS forum is all but dead at TTLG. But I recognize that these things were also problems that contributed in their own right. And I also agree with what you seemed to imply, that really at the root was a leadership problem that allowed things to get out of hand). And I can even agree DXIW wasn't even that bad. I'm happy they were able to get out what they could given the stories that came out later about what a mess they were having of it. Anyway, here's the quote that summed it up for me: As for this: I couldn't agree with you more. I'm giving them my full support, too, and have full faith they can bring back that old time DX magic.

Well, run-of-the-mill mistakes are one thing ... and nobody is immune, of course. In the case of DXIW, though, they got railroaded into an awful engine by delegating its development to an outside a maverick inside source that not only seriously f'd it up, but then abandoned them with it so they couldn't get support on it. And it wasn't clear just how screwed up it was until later when it just made practically everything a pain to do (as everybody working on TDS know so well) and they couldn't get into the engine to clean it up, which led to other big problems as time was ticking down, forcing them to make hard choices on nothing but bad options. If they get good technology and an organized team/leadership from the start, they're already halfway to a better game from the get-go (better potential, anyway, more flexibility, freedom, better choices, etc). Bioshock is an example where, once they got organized and got great technology, things leap-frogged so fast that gameplay was looking incredibly fluid and interesting right from the earliest builds, which makes all the other stuff (the game making part), so much better when everyone is cheering you on and every build adds more and more marvels to the mix, rather than there being a lot of bickering and at each other's throats as they have to cut-out more and more stuff with each build, gutting it.

I believe that the worst problems besetting DXIW were preventable (from what we know by later dev confessions), and if/when development starts on DX3, the first thing they should do is a post mortum on those problems and start a development plan that gets on a good track early.

I was actually going to ask about that in my post and left it out at the last moment. I hated when you multibrush in dromed having to fix all the textures when the order was off.

Sounds like a multibrush in Dromed. That's convenient.

I gathered the popular idea these days aren't that the universe is "infinite", but that it is eternal (as in eternally expanding). But it can still be limitless and not be a paradox, as I understand it. The idea is that "space" is only as meaningful as the stuff that takes it up. The universe is finite in the sense that there is a finite amount of stuff in it. And at the same time, it really doesn't make sense to talk about space outside of that matter, since the matter is what makes the "space" of it even meaningful. One interesting implication about the balloon idea coming out of GR that I recall -- that makes the point graphic -- is that, if you had a powerful enough laser, if you shined the beam in one direction eventually, if you had enough time, it would curve around and meet the source coming from the opposite direction, in about the same respect in which, if you had a marker and drew a straight line on a balloon it would eventually run back into the source. It makes the idea graphic that the universe is without limit but finite at the same time, that every point could be considered the "center" with everything else flying away from it at a roughly equal rate (and that being true for every point in the universe), and that the "space" of the whole is expanding over time, in just the same way as the surface of an expanding balloon, except that the surface is in 3D.

Haha, that reminds me of a school musical where the resident pyro kept spraying the guy next to him with hairspray every five minutes or so, and the guy would absent-mindedly shoo him away every time, mumbling "stop it" a few times, as he watched the musical. And finally, after about 10 squirts, maybe 40 minutes into the show, he lights his lighter and touches the guy's arm so that it explodes in burst of flame ... Whoosh! And the guy stands up and starts screaming and batting himself to put out the flames (which he did quickly; he wasn't hurt). But the whole audience and the actors on stage, who completely broke out of character, everybody turned to the burst and watched, dumbfounded, agape, shocked, as the guy kept screaming for a little while. The whole thing came to a grinding halt as everyone looked at him in shock, and this light-hearted musical just couldn't really recover. It was something of a farce watching the actors try to get back into character. It was wrong on so many levels that of course it was hard not to find the situation hilarious, especially as he kept screaming well after he put out the tiny flames. It's just something you should NEVER do or see at a high school musical. Man, good times. Ok, that had nothing to do with nothing ... I just had to tell the story after that cue, I guess. Maybe chalk it up as a comment on the reprehensible fixation of our culture on shock-value. For shame!

That (what Crispy just said) is the crux of the anthropic argument. I actually don't like it very much because it doesn't really explain anything and is hovering a bit in pseudo-science itself. More particularly, it doesn't really explain why the values of the universal constants are what they are, because apparently it is incredibly unlikely that the universe would pick just the right numbers to support carbon-chemistry (life) in the vast possibility-space of possible numbers it might choose ... the universe is old and big, but not really that old (only about 3x our own earth's age) and not that big (light can only travel so far in that time), and anyway the constants were set incredibly early on and, so far as "we" know, are consistent throughout the space and history of the (at least observable to us so far) universe. It doesn't really "explain" how those parameters were set just for our single, particular (not so big, not so old) universe to say, well, if they weren't those numbers we wouldn't be here. *Something* made the ball tip this way rather than the significantly more likely that way (whether "it" realized it was contributing to the formation of life or not), and we aren't really doing the problem justice to throw the anthropic argument back at it, IMO. If it really was a random fluke and the dice came up lucky, I'd like to at least see the random number generator mechanism that did the work. There's *something* there that did the work, a glorified random number generator, a seeding blackhole that naturally selected the number (Smolin's theory of Cosmological Natural Selection, interesting but I'm skeptical), or infinite inflation, in which the universe really is just a smaller part of a bigger universe, and the numbers periodically change in universe-sized clusters, eventually you are going to get the numbers that can support carbon chemistry (not sure about this one, either, though). Anyway, something should be behind the numbers, and any "answer" (like the anthropic arg) that just throws back the fact that a number was selected, end of debate, I don't see it is any much better than the other theories that merely end up explaining the question away by unsatisfying fiat.

@Spar, By the way, on entropy. As I understand it, entropy is a statistical artifact of the Brownian motion, at some level, in systems which statistically tends to wash out their organization in proportion to that randomizing motion ... but it isn't a hard rule in the sense that a system is logically barred from gaining organization over time. It's just astronomically unlikely, since it's such a small space that the random meandering would have to stumble into. And I've read somewhere that in certain very restricted domains is possible to observe a system gaining entropy. Well, I guess your idea assumes this, doesn't it? But anyway, this really wouldn't be time travel per se, would it. The causal chain a->b->c, etc, would keep marching forward as ever, time's still "running forward", it just might, at best, have the illusion of reproducing what a reverse chain might look like if one were to run the video backwards. It's sort of cheating, though, since it's not "real time travel". I'm not sure why you even need to bother (as a logical matter) with an inside and outside to the time machine; it's just a shorthand for which particles/fields are getting affected and which aren't. Time is still technically moving "forward" for both. And what is this "tipping point" of which you speak? You mean the singularity at the beginning of the universe? Why exactly does this flip the time scale and put us far into the future? I didn't think they knew yet, exactly, that there was going to be a big crunch, or how the universe was going to end. Although, for that matter, I'd think the time machine would just stop in any event, since it's job wasn't to run time back per se, but decrease entropy, and once it's to zero it doesn't get any smaller, so it stops. Anyway, this is all terribly new to me, so forgive me if it's an obvious question... ---------------------------------------- As for my own understanding of time travel, so far my thoughts on time are influenced by the book I just read on Quantum Loop Gravity. I'm going to completely botch this explanation, I'm sure, but it's worth the mental exercise to try my best to explain what I understood. At the most fundamental level, time is just a measure of things interacting, and every very basic interaction (of loops, or whatever is most fundamental) can be considered a fundamental click of time (like a Planck click). A fundamental interaction is just one which changes the state of a system at its most fundamental level, with nothing "below" the level of that change there to even change, at least as far as the physical state of the system is concerned (i.e., lower level changes -- and smaller clicks of time with them -- might technically exist, but then they would just be irrelevant to the state of the system since they don't affect that state in any way; so they'd have no real physical meaning). In that sense, every fundamental interaction is its own clock, and you could see how, in systems with a "fast" rate of fundamental interactions, clicks occur more often relative to systems with "slower" rates of interactions, where less interactions occur in the same period. So there is a sense in which time runs faster in some places relative to others. Note, the proper interpretation is NOT that the two domains undergo the same amount of time in the same period, with stuff merely happening slower or faster (the part of Newton that Einstein threw out with Special & General Relativity), because all that time means at that fundamental level is the measure of interactions happening. Ten clicks of time = ten clicks of time, from a system's perspective it's ten clicks older, regardless of whether or not one system gets through those 10 clicks before another system has even gotten through 2 ... in which case one system will be 10 clicks aged, the other just 2 clicks. There is nothing "in between" interactions, so to speak, that could even keep track of the time between them. Time is discrete, a "Planck click" of time is as fundamental as it gets ... which it would have to be (at least in this way of thinking) if gravity (and time and space with it) is to be quantized into discrete bits to be handled under Quantum Theory ... and this way of thinking gives you a foundation for special relativity, general relativity, and quantum theory all in one idea. It also has a certain intuitive logical appeal to it, as well. In this picture, every bit in the whole damn universe is running at a greater or lesser different rate, like a gazillion independent clocks in every drop of water, although physical systems still function, for the most part, as if time were smooth because tiny differences get washed out on the classical level so that they don't matter as far as the system's classical state is concerned (at least, they're supposed to for the theory to work), except that it gives you the weird time-things you get with General Relativity. Anyway, if you buy this way of thinking about time, then the sort of forward time travel you get in general relativity is easy. A system just has to put itself into a domain where less fundamental clicks occur relative to a system where more clicks occur in the same relative period, such as the earth/spaceship Twins example, where the non-accelerating twin appears to have undergone much more time than the accelerating twin when he returns to earth, who underwent much less time in the same "period" (as measured from the earth). A system accelerating relative to itself "delays" the clicks, so to speak (compared to itself without the acceleration), the more the acceleration the more the delay. But backwards time travel is barred for the simple reason that backwards causation is closed. Clicks can occur at different rates relative to one another, but once an interaction "clicks", it's done; it can't unclick, so to speak. There is no way another system could come into an interaction with the clicked system once the click is done. It's basically an application of the principle of locality. Elements have to directly "interact" to send signals, and a signal sent is a signal sent. This idea could also even cope with some bending of locality that you get with quantum theory, where you get a single photon in a quantum tangle interfering with itself to create an interference pattern, as long as you don't get backwards causation where it goes back in time to interfere with its previous self.

Yeah, the second video is sort of cute. I'm still not the biggest fan of the body shape, but it's true that they look much better moving around, and it doesn't seem as awkward. It doesn't look bad.

What Springheel just posted is pretty interesting to me to read, though. It wouldn't hurt to maybe quote some selective posts from the internal forums, like even just bullet point "I did this this week" sort of posts, here just to give a flavor of some of the inner workings of progress. It doesn't have to be so formal or regular, but it's nice on occasion. I don't think it's such a big deal though; the normal updates have been fine for what they are. I do hope, though, that you'll archive the development discussions after release, though, for posterity's sake, because I think it would be pretty cool to look into the reasoning or genesis of some of the mechanics after it gets released (even if it isn't such a good idea before release).

Yeah, our whole healthcare system is pretty archaic from the bottom-up. I don't think it has much longer to limp along before people really start clamoring for change. Coverage has too many gaps that too many people can fall through, quality is patchy even when you are covered, and costs are STILL outrageous! There really isn't a good excuse with the experience of other countries working so well.

Well, I think my basic point was that what is the case is in the mind of the beholder, and my intuition is that, like Saith was thinking, a character will develop around the PC (if that's the right term) here by itself, in people's heads, a name to go with the "face" (shadow / reflection, anyway) that most people (I'm guessing) will want to latch on to, even if they know it could be anyone, even if you try to sell it as the shell of anyone. They'll prefer it being someone, a norm which catches all the generic uses, which people making their own special characters would be departing from. Yeah, I guess it does assume the setting revolves around a single character, but part of that setting is all of the attributes of the PC that stay continuous, and part of that assumption is also people's natural inclination to stick a name to a face and be loyal to it. The branding is going to happen whether you guys try to sell it or not, is my guess. And I'm also guessing it actually won't be Garrett because the mass of people will probably want to play along with doing the "right" thing and understand him to be someone else (for a game about thieving, you have to admit the TTLG crowd is a pretty "nice" bunch of do-gooders, don't you think?), but someone in particular else, is my thinking. But anyway, aside from the copyright issues which I think are fine as long as you guys keep the stance you have, I guess it doesn't really matter what people think by themselves; the stakes aren't big enough to even make an issue out of it. This is just my guess as to what will happen naturally when the thing gets released; people will want to have a character here and stick to it by themselves. I'll be interested to see if my intuition is right or way off ... it's really a pretty blind prediction. Actually, if I really think about it, I'm thinking there's going to be big measure of path-dependence here. If there is an early FM that really establishes a character, or a set of a few characters, I think there is a chance one or some of them may really stick, or even if there's just a name (if you guys don't give him one, I can practically see the poll for it now), at least the name will stick, and maybe there will be groups supporting competing names vying for who gets in what FMs (are builders really going to make up a new name for every FM?), but over time I think it may whittle down to a select few or one. And he doesn't even need any back story, just as Garrett himself really doesn't need any backstory to make FMs work, and people have taken him in much different directions (e.g., G of CL vs G of Two Fathers); it's the name that sticks. Well, anyway, I guess we'll all see what happens.

Not necessarily. If the new character comes with his own ethos and, more importantly, his own name (as I personally think he should), I don't see why people wouldn't want to call him by his own name. There isn't any necessary reason why the gameplay has to be irrevocably linked to the name Garrett and the old Thief world names. People get the idea of multiple worlds these days, and this is just a different world. But esp if the name comes as part of the package, then that's the name you use for that guy. I mean, it's my intuition that once the name and things about the new world get into circulation it will catch on. It's fun to get a new story once and a while and I think momentum will build for people to play along and run with it. It's what branding is about, and if the world is set up thoughtfully then it sells itself.

Well, to my reading it was more like this project didn't bring out the best in his work, good as it is. It reminds me of something like Sellars getting famous from his fantastically brilliant performance in the Pink Panther series and then coming back and saying it was the biggest waste in his career, the script was awful, etc. There's gratitude for you.

Odd's opinion is a way of thinking that if you are sensitive to makes sense. If you don't agree with what he says, chances are it's because you aren't sensitive to the things that trouble him, not because you don't like his ideas per se, otherwise you wouldn't get in such a hissy over his abrasive style, which is just the way he writes to get a rise out of people, everybody knows it and probably rolls their eyes but just looks to see the few good ideas that come out the other end; no need to get in such a fuss. The catch is, though, it makes me think that at some level you really don't care about the way games are made in a way that could be not wrong -- of course, there's no right or wrong here -- but depressing. I can agree with the general point that not anything that can be done should, even though they generate raving cheers on the surface (usually literally "generating" them in the most mindlessly generic way). Ultimately, things like games (along with movies, books, etc) are all cultural products, although we don't always think about them that way. But they reflect the kind of way we want to spend time in a way that seems valuable to us, as part of the kind of people we fancy ourselves to be. And thinking about it that way, there really is a problem with the dumbing down of culture that is an old story by now, but still an important one to pay attention to. And I can agree that people that don't care one iota how stupid our level of culture get are complicit in the sad state of things. You can say it's all about "fun", but when you spend about a second's worth of reflection, you can see that not all fun is equal. A weekend skiing in Aspen with your best friends on the break before graduation is the kind of fun you remember for a lifetime. The fucking six hours I waste playing some awful 1984 hentai game just to see a 3 frame looping 16bit crap animation of a vaguly nude looking rabbit girl humping a frog is a waste of life energy of the highest order, even if I'll be damned if I give up the game before I reach hump time. And there is every shade of grey in between. You can call Odd "arrogant" based on style alone, but putting his absurd rhetoric aside (and he and everybody else can see how outlandish it is) the way I see it his mission is to try to push things in the direction of taking the higher road in this or that detail. And it's a worthwhile mission, although I don't agree that many of the things he suggests will really have the pay off he thinks they will, but some might if you really gave them a serious chance. But because most people seem to have the idea that all fun really is equal, I think it's worth tolerating the absurd rhethroic to have a few people that do care and would be happy, if you are going to force feed yourself whatever crap pops out of the pipe in any event anyway, to make sure that you are at least force-feeding yourself a balanced meal and not innane junk food.

You have to admit, or at least it's my opinion that as far as the first person genre goes, Thief gameplay is preferable to shooter gameplay. If you are going to have to do anything in a FP perspective (which is where you get your engagement with architecture, environment, exploration, etc), better that your tasks are oriented towards sneaking around and using the environment than just running around toting a gun. It allows for a much richer interaction, more you can do with your character in the world. The whole idea from the start was that Thief would be the anti-FPS, stay away from the enemies rather than run at them. I'm sold with the core idea; it's the implementation where things can go wrong, though.

Welcome to the Dark side.