Mostly Amusing Doom-related Stuff
OMFG. ROFL. Other well known annoying abbreviations. It will be days before I get over this one. It's about as rare as you like that my favourite game, one of my favourite web sites and people I've met in real life have any kind of intersection, but... there it is. For you see, "Kansam", one of the authors of this masterpiece, is none other than reformed Warwick newsgroup denizen Ian Morris (as people who were reading uwarwick.misc around mid-June 2000 might remember, when I posted a review of his wad Kansam's Trial (how'd you like that for a link, heh) ) The other author, as far as I can tell, is his brother. Here, you can find their amusing Doom site.
Some more stuff:
- My idea to make my own Doom map, the reworking of Slugfest (hmm that one didn't work so well) 9, is going quite well, I mean, there's one huge cavern with a walkway round it into which you emerge from a small stone building. There is however much work still to be done, the cavern needs a three- or four-fold size increase at least...
- I've also debianised BSP (a "nodes builder", you need one if you're making levels to tell the game how to display levels properly) (...and afterwards remembered Jez's idea to maintain a repository of self-built debs here...)
- Planet of the Imps updated today after about a month off
- A few days ago The Green Pile uploaded its sixth episode
- The picture of the pointy-haired manager in today's Dilbert was... well, just go look at it. My word...
Okay the last one wasn't Doom-related. So sue me.
PS Go read the first edition of UWARWICK.UMMGH here in which I trawl the internal Warwick newsgroups for funny shite and summarise it for readers of AAW.
It's the new newsstats baby, knock you down on your knees!
Heh I've always wanted to bastardise Newdoom's daft title EDIT shame you didn't do it earlier before they changed it to something more sensible then, you big fuckwit
Anyway FINALLY I've thrown together all the files pertaining to the web-based version of newsstats, written a couple of README files, and put the whole lot inside the newsstats tarball so those of you with an interest in this type of crap can see it. However I doubt very much whether you'd be able to do anything with it.
Let's start with the quarterly phone bill. Next to total time of internet calls, it read over 732 hours. Work that out: it's two hours short of 31 days. That's one whole month, out of three, was spent connected. You'd think I didn't have anything better to do, wouldn't you...
The guy who runs fubar has stopped posting on it because it's upsetting his girlfriend. This is the guy who took his webcam to class to take pictures of the sexy broad a few weeks ago, and also has an army of teenage girls helping him run the thing and generally being his bitches. Now he says his relationship comes before his site and yadda yadda. I say sod the girlfriend and continue with the site, because the girl will eventually dump you anyway:)
I have finally tried making a Doom map. I'm a very long way away from making anything releasable but you know. I'm using Slugfest 9 (Text) for inspiration, because while it's a relatively simple map, there's something about it that I really like. Basically, it's a long high walkway going through a big dark cavern. There are monsters on the walkway and on pillars and platforms around it and if you fall off you're dead. When I played it I wished it was a lot bigger, so I intend to make a massive version:)
A lot of fun was had moving Pete's site to Felix's server. Pete was fed up with his old web host so we made him an account and yadda yadda technical blah and now it's here. You want to carry on using www.petejakehall.com for links though, yeah? Well unless he gets www.petehall.com on Sunday, or something. Oh and why does Apache always die when it attempts to do a graceful restart after log file rotation? It's really annoying and I can't find any error message anywhere. The log file just stops abruptly, and service is lost until somebody notices and manually restarts it.
I will keep saying this but now I'm going to put "Experience of unix web server administration" on my CV. Yeah that crappy thing I was supposed to convert to HTML and put up here for you to laugh at. But sadly I read it first and thought "no this is too much of a load of shit" and couldn't do it!
Also I did something else yesterday but if I told anyone about it they wouldn't believe me. Feel free to try to guess though; if anyone gets close enough (very close) I will post it and give them credit.
Lllama, Inc. has this creepy skin. Felix made themes for his site and as an experiment basically stole this site design. It's pretty cool but incredibly creepy so I, well, I kind of asked him to take it down because it's just fucking weird:) However, I made him a title graphic for it which made him laugh and also it made Pete laugh so go see it before it gets nuked. You have to click on "The Realm of Lllama, Inc" in the side bar.
It is weird though. Like seeing someone else with your face. Nevertheless go give him some hits:)
Speaking of Pete he's having trouble with his web host, it's really, really slow and shit. We all hope it gets sorted out soon so we can continue to read all your Ananova links and stuff:)
irc.astrolink.org #warwick log, Oct 14 20:45:39 to Oct 14 20:51:01
<neoancient> you know rob, that's a very, uh, interesting blog entry from
the weekend.
<Pete> Ah, the subject has been breached
<Pete> Yeah, Rob - what the fuck are you on'/
<RjY> i still want to know how you're going to work them out
<Pete> We're all curious
<Pete> We want some
<RjY> Ool knows why i posted a 600 by 60000 black rectangle
<Pete> Wasn't it actually 10 x 600x6000?
<Ool> I can guess, but why you chose that is beyond me.
<RjY> well, 10 600 by 6000 ones, i couldn't make a 600 by 60000 one
without imagemagick running out of memory for some reason
<neoancient> i was thinking it might have to do with the bleak certainty
of death, maybe.
<RjY> well, basically, i'm going mad. that's the size of it
<Pete> Is the number of pixels relevant then?
<neoancient> or the smothering onset of darkness, perhaps.
<Pete> Or the bleak certainty of death
<Pete> Oh, we've had that one
<RjY> i cant deal with my problems and i'm going insane, and ool is
helping me by driving me away from the few places i have left to express
myself
<RjY> so i posted an enourmous black rectangle and then unplugged my modem
and told my mum to hide it for a week
<RjY> but that just made it worse so she gave it me back
<RjY> and here i am
<Pete> So you are
<Ool> Come back if you like. I won't do it again even if I have to
killfile you to stop myself.
<RjY> you said you'd stop before, i've got the mail to prove it, and you
didn't! leave me the fuck alone you're driving me fucking nuts
<RjY> along with everything else
<Ool> Actually, I said I'd stop that particular feud. I hadn't decided not
to say anything at all, but I will now.
Stop going on at me about the black rectangle already. If you need to ask about the black rectangle you don't get it...
Oh fuck this. Basically I'm just going fucking insane, I don't know why I do or don't do stuff and this makes it worse and I don't know how to fix it.
Now bugger off
<p><img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000><br>
<img src="stuff/black.png" alt="" width=600 height=6000></p>
One of my computers, my A3010, is 10 years old today. Happy birthday old friend:)
The others: My Risc PC was 6 on 18/7/2002; this one* was 1 on 25/9/2002.
*Being custom built it doesn't really have a manufacturer's model name. This makes it difficult to refer to. It needs a good hostname. Please send me suggestions!
Yes I know I haven't updated for ages. Figured I'd sit there for a week staring at posting charts being created before my very eyes. Anyway yesterday I got invited to a party and I had to go because the email had
PS: Rob, you have no excuse; we all know you have nothing better to do.
on the end. Bah. It's true but that doesn't mean you had to say it. Oh well. Highlights included the usual rounds of hair plaiting nonsense, a room-spanning chain of straws, arguments about pizza toppings, Sarah being drunk on wine and giving everyone a bit too much detail about everyone else and BDave shouting "YOU'RE CRAP IN BED!" at me from the next room.
Yeah, you probably just had to be there. Anyway. Here's some stuff about webnewsstats:
- Sometimes it doesn't update properly because Warwick's news server drops out for several hours (see the entry for 17/9/2002) This happened on on either Monday or Tuesday, I forget. I need to code round it somehow. But you know.
- Perceived success: It's been deployed for a week and the posting count has increased slightly; though whether these two things are connected is anyone's guess. I'd like to think so but then I would:)
- As for getting Elliot to post stuff, well, we have to find him something better than Google Groups. Drag Queen Muscled Mary University of London appears to have a news server so it's just a matter of him finding software that's set up to use it. I hope.
- I still haven't made up a source distribution. Sorry. Too damn lazy.
Speaking of news in general here are a couple of posts. Which part of "I'm only miserable if I think about this sort of thing" don't you understand?? I thought about it for a while but decided writing a reply wouldn't be a good move. That seems to have surprisingly happened a lot lately.
Bex (whose site is currently down because Freeserve cancelled her account, however she said she's getting a new one but that's not there either) sent round a list of well-known sayings completed by 6-year-olds. Here are my favourites:
- If you lie down with dogs, you'll... stink in the morning.
- The pen is mightier than the... pigs.
- Never underestimate the power of... termites.
- Happy the bride who... gets all the presents.
- If at first you don't succeed... get new batteries.
- When the blind leadeth the blind... get out of the way.
- There are none so blind as... Stevie Wonder.
I love my host's main page. The way there's all these addresses on it that end in master. Makes the thing look like there's tons of people working on it, when in fact all those addresses alias to root which itself is an alias to Simon.
There seems to be a trend at the minute for joke Doom megawads. You make a load of really, really crappy levels, you know, random walls, misaligned textures, display errors, hundreds of cyberdemons in a room the size of the exit chamber in E1M1. Then you hype it like it's the best new Doom release ever. For example, there was the recent 1337.wad (txt) and of course Mockery, which in some kind of ultimate irony, was never, ever released. Now there's Mock 2: The Speed Of Stupid. The team page is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.
Staying with Doom, Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse reviewed another Doom WAD, called 'arcade' (WAD, txt) This one was 30 identical levels with different collections of monsters in. I think it's meant to be taken seriously. In fact I ran through it in half an hour yesterday, only skipped a couple of the levels, and I thought it was quite fun. Oh well. Here's Doomworld's newstuff review of it when it came out just over a year ago.
Errr... that's it.
