Welcome to Black Mesa

There are things growing up that you get inspired from. There are quite a few things that inspired me growing up, and one of the things was a video game called Half-life. There were several versions of that videogame. In one you are a theoretical physicist named Gordon Freeman who gets trapped in a situation where aliens from another planet and government forces who are sent to eliminate the aliens as well as any witnesses that include Gordon Freeman. Gordon has to fight the aliens as well as the marines who are sent to sanitise the facility. That character had an intense impact on me and made me want to do a PhD, the idea of a scientist who has to weild a gun and other weapons in extreme situation was tremendous for the twelve year old me. They actually don't make games like that anymore, or maybe that I'm partial towards that game. Other iterations of the same game had the facility security guard as the protagonist and one other iteration had the perspective of a young marine in the force sent to sanitise the facility. I loved the marine part, especially his team which composed of a heavy weapons specialist, a medic and a welder. The welder had a cigarette in his mouth at all times and used to light the welding machine with it. A few years later Half-life 2 was launched and it had much better graphics and physics then the previous game, but things were not the same, in my opinion it was not as grounded as the previous game as it was set in a dystopian future, though it is now I understand what they were actually trying to convey. Half-life is one of the things among uncountable many that inspired me and contributed to me becoming the man that I am today. I still remember I had the Children Knowledge Bank series from Pustak Mahal Delhi, which had interesting and curious things from all over the world. Then there were comics, and I had a lot of them. Comics were a rage back in the day and it was the time of Hindi comics. It is in corona lockdown that I came to know that they still publish the Hindi comics, or probably started again during the lockdown when people had enough time to fall back on nostalgia. I remember Cartoon Network, and I used to love shows like Dexter's Lab, though one of my most favourites was Johnny Quest among numerous others. Genndy Tartakovsky is my childhood hero, and so is Anant Kushwaha, the editor of the children's magazine Balhans and I especially loved the Chitrakatha issues of Balhans that used to come once in a while. I consumed comics, children's magazines, games and cartoons and later novels, and all that inspired me to write stories, and write in general. Though I now realise that in present political landscape, writing is futile but I still write my journal and update my blog once in a while, and write a story if I feel like it.