Start to Crate and the joy of moving

By this point I'm almost exactly 2/3 through my thesis project. It's fascinating to look back and see how much ground has been covered since I started last february. When making the schedule for this project, I added in a buffer in between each section to account for unforeseen delays. Most of that buffer was gobbled up when I grossly underestimated the time it would take to model the various props needed for the project. But I figured, hey, we're still on track!

So as per murphy's law, as soon as I said that other stuff started happening. Some of it was bad news, like getting surprise-shafted by one of the recently changed courses at my school's department. Or the abrupt announcement that 'hey, the dept you're in isn't taking any more students, so you better finish soon.' But on the other hand, some of it was good news, like one team member getting an awesome job offer that necessitates a move to a new state.

The most recent good news is that Sonja, my audio technician in this project (and beautifully talented girlfriend outside the project) has officially moved in. We spent the weekend carting stuff from her place to mine and unpacking said stuff. It decimated any chance I had at working on the thesis this past weekend, but some things are worth the delay. Progress is still being made, and it looks like I might have the first clip of in-Source footage to show you soon.

In the meanwhile, I can share with you a bit of trivia that the moving-crate image above reminds me of. There is somewhat of a video game rating system called "start-to-crate" that was established by two game critics on the website Old Man Murray. Because item crates are such a common trope in video games, the website chronicled how long it took in each game to find the first crate, and used that as a metric to measure the game's worthiness. This cliche worried the developers of halflife2 so much that they made a crate be the first thing you see when you start controlling the character.

In a fun turn of situational irony, the creators of Old Man Murray, Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, are now Valve employees and fairly visible ones with the community, at that.

In a nod to the crate trope, I'm trying to figure out where in my short I can hide a packing crate. Any suggestions?