Hello everybody,

As you can read in Tormod's most recent missive, Zero Hour Productions is embarking on a new initiative - we're getting geared up to host and produce our own videogame streaming marathon!  This is a project that very quickly appeared on his radar (and now, ours), following our very fun, exciting, and productive (ha!) attendance at SGDQ 2017.  With the support and experience of friends already in-the-know (very many, at that; in particular, EnchantressOfNumbers), we have already made several significant hardware purchases, done a lot of planning, and built up plenty of internal hype to see this through.  As Tormod mentioned, our target date is mid-2018, with the contingency of proper hardware and software setup, a few test runs under our belt prior, and ample sleep.

In the meantime, we are also participating in this year's Extra Life charity marathon.  We will do our best to hit the full 24-hour span on the correct day (04 Nov).  More plans around this to follow soon, as it is a mere two months away.

With all the new goings-on, what better time to describe just how the "Zero Hour Productions" name came to be?  It's not a terribly long story, but one that bears some explanation.  Some 13 (or so) years ago, when I was but a mere high school student, I wanted to do something with all the odd projects and weird coding experiments I had accumulated.  I had typical high-school-level employment - enough for a bit of spending money and not much else - and thought having some sort of web presence would help in an untold future.  Hosting and domain names were relatively cheap, so I picked one out of the air that sounded neat - and thus, Zero Hour Productions came to be.

It was a simple affair: a collection of my modding efforts from Unreal Tournament, and the very beginnings of my dabbling with web development.  Not much happened at first, as high school turned into college, and college into the vagaries of adult life in a real world.  Then it started taking on more serious efforts, and new people - with Tormod on board, our (now dormant, but waiting for the right time) Seeking Infinity podcast took shape, and then some beginnings of game development, and then our current Insert Credit(s) podcast.  From there, we knew we would produce other things. 

Now, as for the name itself...when I was first brainstorming, I liked the idea of the word "Productions"; it sounded serious to my very un-serious high school brain.  Following that, my initial leaning was toward "Eleventh Hour"; but, after some thought, I didn't like the implication of things in their eleventh hour - or, in another sense, that they would be rushed, half-baked, or otherwise not be properly and carefully attended.  So, I swung toward the other side, to "Zero Hour".  To wit:  "a decisive or critical time", a time for beginning new things, making the first steps forward on exciting paths.  Never would my high-school-self have predicted those words to have a strangely powerful meaning so many years on.

Now, a zero hour for a new endeavor - it still gives me chills to say so.

That's all for now.