"It's a big blue watery road"

Employee Profile: Quintin_Stone

Employee Profiles are back, and Quintin_Stone is the man for you! He's been collecting signature testimonials to prove his worthiness for a while now, although most of them are chopped short in a commendable show of humility.

"Quintin is both smart and attractive," raves site overlord Certis. "But there's more. If any of you try to touch him, I swear to God there'll be retribution. Site bans. That sort of thing."

"Good lord, I wouldn't have expected brilliance like that from that nemeslut Quintin Stone!" writes Fedaykin98 who, of course, was only joking. "I expected brilliance, and turbo-brilliance was delivered. Quintin is a Web 2.0-compliant brilliance content delivery system."

"I logged into Quarantine only to find that Quintin had broke into my safehouse overnight and chopped me to death with an axe. Of course, he typed me a stirring, hour-long soliloquy on the nature of death and inertia beforehand, so I couldn't really be mad. I just wish I could've saved it to read again later..." wistfully recalls a Goodjer, who wishes to remain anonymous.

This one was too long to sig, but nonetheless evokes a beautiful shared experience that Quintin often writes poems about in his free time.

The man has been buttered up enough! Let's get to the sultry Q&A action.

1. Who the devil are you?

I'm a 35 year-old narcissist with a Masters in Mockery and a PhD in Kicking Ass! Assuming my dissertation defense goes well. Of course only the first half of that sentence was true. For some reason I have a reputation among my friends as a liar. My shirt that says "I'm probably lying" doesn't help my case.

I've been married 11 years now (hi, Yellek!) with no kids and three cats.

2. What are you supposed to be doing during the day when you're reading GWJ?

Software design, development, and architecture, mostly. I'm the lead designer (of a dev team of two) for a small hospital software division inside a larger manufacturing company. So I get to decide what feature to implement, what bugs to fix, how things should look, that sort of thing. I also get to delegate to minions, which is nice. I'd close my office door and nap occasionally if I wasn't an insomniac.

3. How about family? Kids? Pets? Particularly meaningful inanimate objects?

We've been married a little over 11 years now and somehow we've managed not to kill each other. No kids, but three troublesome cats and my wife is angling for a fourth. (We used to have five but two passed away last year.) As for immediate family, I'm third of six kids and all but one of us live in the same general area, as do my parents. My wife's parents live in Seattle which makes heading out there for PAX convenient.

I'm very fond of my new car, which many of you helped pay for thanks to Cash for Clunkers.

4. What was your favorite game over the last year or so? Why?

I'm going to go with Left 4 Dead. It doesn't get as much play as it used to, but playing Versus mode with fellow Goodjers is still a blast. Especially with the snare-speak mod that lets you taunt your opponents after you've vomited on them or choked them with your tongue.

5. Which game are you looking forward to most?

That's a tough one. As far as multiplayer goes, I'm really looking forward to some Goodjer-on-Goodjer action in both Starcraft 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. Completely different games but both have great potential for some epic online play once you add GWJ folks to the mix.

For single player — and I still spend most of my gaming hours in single player games — I'm going to go with Tropico 3. People familiar with my creations in Dwarf Fortress or Railroad Tycoon 3 know what a fan I am of sandbox building games. The Tropico 3 demo really got me looking forward to the full game.

6. What is your fondest gaming memory?

Penny-Arcade Expo 09, which is also one of my most recent gaming memories. All those games, that huge expo hall, nerf celebrities, freeplay rooms, lots of swag. And meeting people you've only talked to online is always a blast. Then you get together, drink, play board games, or join an impromptu TF2 tournament. Good times, good times.

Except the nerd flu. That part sucked.

7. What is your most embarrassing gaming memory? If you hold back, we'll know.

From 1999 through 2002 I helped run a local LAN party with a lot of my friends. We tried to be very inclusive with the games we played and the tournaments we ran, so it wasn't all just Quake and (ugh) Counter-Strike. One of those tournaments was a single elimination Age of Empires 2 bracket. (It only had seven people participating, otherwise it would have taken several days to finish.) In my match, I'm playing against this kid and while I'm building up defenses and an army to attack him, things are pretty quiet from his end.

After a long stretch of little interaction (I wasn't a terribly aggressive RTS player back then), I get the sudden warning from the game that my opponent has started building a Wonder. For those of you not familiar with the game, a Wonder is a special building that takes a huge investment of time and resources to build, but if you can finish it in a multiplayer game you automatically win. So I take my troops and rush to attack him and my army runs headlong into a wall. A literal stone wall. And beyond that one, another one. He'd spent that initial time ringing his town with 3 or 4 layers of the strongest wall in the game. By the time I'd breached them all with my army and began attacking his town, he'd finished the Wonder and won the match. It was a terrible public humiliation that my friends like to bring up to torture me.

8. Finally, why do you play games at all? Why haven't you outgrown them?

Outgrown them? As immature as I am? Ha!

We literally had a Pong system in our house when I was young. That's how long I've been doing this. Pong, Intellivision, 3 kinds of Atari computer, 2 Nintendo consoles, Dreamcast, PS2, and uncounted PC iterations. I don't know any other way to live.

After not too long, this question won't even be relevant. College grads these days have no memory of a world without videogames and some of them probably don't remember the days before the internet. You've got grandparents and great grandparents playing the Wii. The stigma of adults playing videogames will eventually disappear completely. Just before the Robot Wars.

9. Thanks for taking the time to answer our hard hitting questions! Any last words?

This means I get to edit other people's posts now, right?

Ed note: No.

Spoiler:

Yes.

Comments

MrDeVil909 wrote:

This profile lacks Quintin with a large plastic sword.

IMAGE(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3536/3925765360_0a30ba6e3c.jpg)

Well played, sir. Well played.

I can't believe I missed this on Friday - dang infant daughter sappin' my Goodj time! The long-awaited return of Employee Profiles, and with such a handsome and charming subject! Congrats, Quintin, it couldn't have happened to a nicer nemeslut!

I will say that the resolution of the picture leaves something to be desired, in that you can't really focus in on Quintin's features clearly enough for Ramrod Club purposes.

HedgeWizard wrote:

Also, can the audience throw questions out? Why nemeslut? Are you a slutty nemesis? Inquiring minds want to know!

You've got it exactly, my good man - Quintin is a slutty nemesis indeed, and the portmanteau "nemeslut" is my one useful contribution to humanity, at least until my daughter grows up and takes the world by storm. Pester dictionary.com for its inclusion, will you?

Fed, you fill me with equal parts pride and horror. Nicely done. Now I feel the need to take a shower.

I'll be damned; I've been misreading it all these years as "nameslut." This would explain why Quintin doesn't go around giving his name to everyone.

inspiringsn wrote:

Well played Lobster, and just so it gets posted again...

LobsterMobster wrote:

IMAGE(http://www.freewebs.com/maybe_im_a_lion/chocoboVIII.jpg)

I missed this on the last page, and since it was feeling a bit leftout.. well, you know

Oh, and grats Q-Stone. Nice boat, too

I got my swim trunks and my flippie-floppies.

And here I am, stuck at Kinko's flippin' copies.

The boat engine makes noise, motherf*cker.

Its like a big blue watery road.