{"id":37,"date":"2004-11-28T11:59:38","date_gmt":"2004-11-28T19:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=37"},"modified":"2008-06-22T12:33:18","modified_gmt":"2008-06-22T19:33:18","slug":"happy-easter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/?p=37","title":{"rendered":"Happy Easter!"},"content":{"rendered":"

As those of you who know me well are already aware, I’ve been playing a lot of Half-Life 2<\/a> lately. I won’t bore you with the details, though I will say it is without a doubt the coolest game I have ever played. I haven’t been this wowed by a game since the original Marathon<\/a> came out. But enough gushing; those in the loop already know this stuff, those not in the loop most likely couldn’t care less.<\/p>\n

Anywho, the reason I bring it up is that I was tipped off to a really cool Easter Egg<\/a> near the beginning of the game. A digital display showing a bunch of data prominently displays the header: “42FF”. You can see a screen capture here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This will mean nothing to most people, but it does to me. See, a friend of mine is a medium-high uppity-up in the programming staff at Valve<\/a>, the company that wrote Half-Life 2. He is also in the family, so to speak, in that he is the husband of the sister of my wife’s brother’s wife. I have no idea what the title would be in this case: brother-in-law-in-law-in-law? Whatever it would be, we’re about as separated as family members could get, genetically; I’m quite sure that, if we were to have a child together, it would have the requisite number of fingers and toes. Plus we’d probably be awarded a Nobel Prize or something.<\/p>\n

Any<\/em>way, 42FF is shorthand for the 42 Freedom Fighters<\/a>, a loosely-knit group of friends and associates that get together for gaming, croquet and other wholesome activities. You may recall my having mentioned these people before<\/a>. As a tip o’ his hat to the group, my brother-in-law3<\/sup> managed to insert this little tidbit into the game.<\/p>\n

It’s not as though it’s such a huge deal, but it’s nonetheless pretty cool; like seeing a friend do a walkon on a popular TV drama. This game made over 100 million dollars on the first day<\/em> of sales alone. The game is selling better than anything else out there, and receiving glowing reviews everywhere you look. To have a personal message embedded in such a monstrously popular game is, well, just plain nifty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As those of you who know me well are already aware, I’ve been playing a lot of Half-Life 2 lately. I won’t bore you with the details, though I will say it is without a doubt the coolest game I have ever played. I haven’t been this wowed by a game since the original Marathon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roominations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}