Oh man, every so often something happens that makes you really happy. This was in an email from Nelis:
I never showed up to your birthday in the end, despite saying that I would and you probably need cheering up. So instead of the few cans/bottle of Vodka that I'd have invariably brought from a nearby offie so we could all get trashed and more depressed ...
Behold! Your own SA phorum account!
Basically I read this, turned away from the screen and collapsed laughing onto my bed for about half an hour until I was nearly in tears. Damnit. And he's right, I do need cheering up. I'm quite close to writing one of my enormous dreadful angsty rants about how I can't do anything without screwing it up. Again. Heh.
A couple of changes to SNAFU: This weird shite, written by Graham was added and then I was reminded that since Bex got married this weekend (yeah, bloody hell) her surname had changed. I would credit the person who pointed this out to me, but his hatred of weblogs is well known, so I'm guessing he wouldn't appreciate it if his name appeared on one:)
DISC SPEED!
Yesterday it was like this.
$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hda3
/dev/hda3:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.11 seconds =115.32 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 35.53 seconds = 1.80 MB/sec
Today, I built a new kernel. And this happened.
$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hda3
/dev/hda3:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.11 seconds =115.32 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.27 seconds = 28.19 MB/sec
Heh I wish I could speed up my disc by a factor of nearly 16 every day. Many thanks to Iain for telling me what was missing from the configuration.
I took the picture off the front page for the following reasons
- It didn't make any sense because the source image was not a vulture but a marabou stork. I knew this but I liked it anyway and it got a good laugh so whatever
- Colour pictures or indeed any pictures at all don't fit in with my "white black and half a dozen shades of grey" colour scheme
- something else went wrong yesterday and suddenly it doesn't seem so funny any more :(
I figured not to delete it entirely so for now it's just linked in the nav bar thing instead, which I've slightly redone so there are fewer blank lines in it in Lynx
img-proud to be a vulture
Edit: removed and linked, 26/4/2003
Bang goes my chances of success in politics
- Go to fair
- Watch everyone else have fun and spend money. Score a couple of rides off Amy (her half of the bargain, mine was Easter eggs)
- Sit on grass and talk rubbish about random resemblances between the clouds and various things including the Playboy bunny symbol
- Go to Sarah's house
- Let's all be really girly and screw with makeup. Lime green nail polish, eww. Ribbons are tied into my hair, they look pretty. On the other hand Matt ends up looking like an explosion in a scrunchie factory.
- I'd told my mum I was only going to be out for an hour and it's been at least three now so I already know I'm in trouble. Sarah makes pasta and a load of other stuff I don't really like the look of, yet no-one can accept that I can eat the pasta with nothing but some salt and I get quite irritated by people going "oh go on, have some of this green stuff whose smell makes your vegetable-averted sense of taste feel ill"
- We leave Sarah's but FDave doesn't want to go home yet and gets Amy and I into the pub with promises of free drinks
- We go to his house, more free drink
- FDave's got us pissed and he's got a QuickCam.
It's a good thing I have no ambition whatsoever towards fame or power heh
Do you have a licence to play this
BSD style licences are cool. All they say is that you can do what the hell you want with this stuff as long as this copyright notice is included.
As I'm sure you can tell from listening to me for more than five minutes, I have a very low opinion of everything I've done. Therefore it suits me well to say my stuff's too worthless to have any kind of restriction placed upon it, but yes include my name so everyone can see how dumb the original author is.
Too dumb indeed, for also all the other free licences seem to be too long and complicated for me to be able to understand. Look at this:
/usr/share/common-licenses$ ls -lhSL Artistic BSD GPL LGPL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 26k Aug 21 2001 LGPL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18k Sep 16 1999 GPL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.0k Dec 16 1996 Artistic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.5k Aug 26 1999 BSD
So from now on if I do any more coding for which I release the source, it'll probably be under this licence. Freedoom recently started doing proper releases so they felt they needed a proper licence so there you go it's good enough for stuff I respect too.
Damn being shy
I was screwing with my irssi configuration again. In particular it can remember a list of channels you frequent. For me, that list numbers precisely one, #warwick. There used to be #zdoom but I couldn't fit in, I could never say anything then I started getting whaled on about something I wrote on here once that was misinterpreted.
But I'm too shy. I can't say stuff to people I don't know. I've been sitting in the rogue #warwick on Quakenet for some time and witnessed at least one conversation to which I could have contributed but I was too afraid to say anything. How do people overcome this sort of thing? There hundreds of IRC networks and thousands and thousands of channels, if I can't do it online, what chance do I have in real life? Bah.
There are exceptions, I mean it's easier when you're pissed (but obvious to others that you are) or if someone talks to you first (like at the ice rink) or, like I found myself explaining the other day, if there's someone else I know with me, I can talk because then I'm not trying to start conversations with strangers, I'm trying to entertain my friend, the audience. I need a sidekick. Does anyone want to be my sidekick?
Second update today and if anything it's dodgier than the last one. I wrote the following two pieces of text for testing purposes when I was rebuilding my site and the database thing a few months ago. Also, I was very depressed and upset and stuff. I apologise for their content but people were asking to see them.
14/1/2003 20:00 - omg
I fell asleep and dreamed about having broken a vase before waking up and trying to clear it up while being shouted at by an unknown authority figure and I've cut myself and my hand is full of glass and I can't see what I'm doing because I can't hold my eyes open because I'm still asleep but the anonymous figure doesn't care and just wants it cleared up and there's shouting so much shouting then I'm at school and for some reason everyone having been swimming and still very wet has to take a box full of horrible insects home and my box comes open and I'm trying to get these insects back in the box but they're all over me and I'm being shouted at again and no-one's helping me everyone's either just left or is laughing at me and I'm crying "why is this happening to me what have I done"... and then I wake up and Ros is standing in my room and it's 5:30pm and I've been having this nightmare like all afternoon and I'm so upset I can't eat anything for hours or sleep at all again until tomorrow morning and I have dreams like this every time I take a nap or anything I can't stay asleep for long and all I can conclude is that my subconscious is torturing me because it really, really hates me I think I'm in hell I hate my life and also all my friends and I wish they'd go away and leave me alone because pretending to care does not help at all because whether or not you do I can't believe that you do because I mean why would you I am a horrible person and I don't care about you and so I think you're lying just for comedy value or whatever and it makes me angry so leave me alone leave me alone why won't you all go away and stop caring about me just leave me alone I hate you go away leave me alone
15/1/2003 08:00 - don't read this
I have stayed up all night because I was too wide awake to even bother trying to go to sleep and anyway I was almost afraid to I hate my dreams even though it's unlikely something like that will happen again for at least three days also I got into doing this CSS shit even though getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is harder than getting a woman to do exactly what you want her to do for example let you sleep with her and then actually act like something other than a recently deceased corpse while you're doing it because how else are you supposed to know if you're doing it right especially when later you find out she's done it six times with some guy in a week when you know the length of time it took you to do it six times with her was four damn months it doesn't say much about your sexual prowess and doesn't that guy like to tell you so and she was saying for ages how I should trust her and then when she didn't want to do it any more she said it was because it was causing lots of trouble with her friends and it wasn't anything to do with you and then this happens and you feel angry that you ever let yourself trust someone and how whenever humanity throws you a bone you find out too late that it is poisoned and then when she phones you up wondering why you pulled that little running away stunt and why you were so angry you can tell her to stop acting like she cares and go away and leave you alone because you've decided you don't want anything to do with any of your friends any more and she wonders why well there you go that is why
Talk about angsty e/n bullcrap, oh well. All I can say to explain this is that sometimes the part of my brain that hates me gets something that it can use against me and which is too powerful for me to defend myself against. Furthermore, it was written having had no sleep and it was pretty, you know, automatic, I was just typing and not really thinking about it. Imagine.
Oh by the way before anyone starts emailing me about this, it was three months ago and I feel better now, okay? The important bits were talked out and now it's all good. I think. Just like I say, some people wanted to see part of it and I published the whole thing and it was really therapeutic.
OMG YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO GOOD
I've got my decent chair back. My mum's managed to have a new covering put on the seat, one that's supposedly more hard-wearing and so hopefully won't get a hole in it. Perhaps unfortunately the seat is now a kind of greyish blue colour which doesn't match the light grey of the back. However, I don't care. It's functional. I prefer that to looks (which is why I like my desk, a long piece of wood placed on a cupboard and a couple of tables) Also the seat matches the carpet in my room, vaguely.
ALL BETS ARE OFF
So yesterday I went and bought some Easter eggs for Amy in another blatant attempt to score. Vulture points. Score vulture points, sorry. Some catching up was necessary following Spark's decision to host her website. I am sure you'll instantly realise that that means her weblog is back with a vengeance! You may well have already noticed its return to snafu. Hooray!
OMFG LINX0R (some not work-safe)
- The SA Forums are still (partially) open at time of writing. Lots of extra comedy.
- fist.tk (NOT SAFE): From the SA forums I found another in a long line of domains pointing to pages containing nothing but an image not safe for work, or indeed anywhere. Goatse, tubgirl... now there's fist.tk, a delicious montage of scat and anal fisting. It cries out to be used in maliciously misdirecting links on guestbooks, comments threads and web forums everywhere.
yes I did use the word "delicious" deliberately, may I have my balls removed with an industrial milking machine
- This (ALSO NOT SAFE) is every bit as amusing as the last was disgusting. I want to see a "less than three" version, heh.
HAPPY EASTER, EVERYONE
Yeah, you know that. Screw Christianity - why is Easter located on the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox? Does that sound like something out of the Bible? I don't know, but it sounds more like a pagan thing, about the beginning of spring and new life, to me. I should research my posts more, really.
After dinner I shall try to get myself invited over to Kimber & Kirk's Freehouse in order to get the girl to share those eggs with me. She said she would, but since it was also about not being alone and bored in an empty house, and Matt (who hates people inviting themselves round, heh) has returned the idea might crash. I'll try not to be too bothered though because I've got enough of my own eggs here (my mum said she wasn't going to bother but... heh)
And of course there's always Doom:) This week's newstuff is concerned entirely with the sort of old style maps that I like, so I shall play some of them and even maybe post reviews in the comments thread...
UPDATE
Somewhat predictably there was no answer and there's no way I'm ringing the house phone because like I say Matt hates it. So, to use a terrible and totally unoriginal pun, I'm doomed :D LOL :D
I should have had the foresight to "accidentally" leave my hat behind, so I'd have an excuse to go back to fetch it, or something lololololol
Well it seems the server move went well enough, I didn't notice much downtime at all but then I wasn't really looking. Also let me link to The Something Awful Forums, they've been partially opened to the public again for a short time. Enjoy it while you can - or buy an account:) (I would but I have no money:\ )
It was a beautiful day both yesterday and today but of course I didn't take advantage of that at all. In fact I mostly had the curtains drawn, because I can't see the screen properly when playing Doom otherwise.
The usual Easter fair has appeared in my part of the world. I saw an advertising board that announced it would be operating from today, the seventeenth, up to and including the twenty-sixth. Not only is there a small rollercoaster but also this huge thing that looks like a cross between a crane and a propellor. I want to know what it does...
Last night I wanted to be able to write an update that contained something like this
...Amy's gone home, so we can all relax, put our feet up, crack open a cold one, and take a week off from being vultures. Heh...
primarily because I thought it was hilarious. But it turned out not to be the case. Mind you, you can hardly blame anyone who puts off a five hour train journey that involves the polluted dark tunnels and the mechanical snakes of human pâté that comprise the London Underground.
Promised Downtime and other Miscellany
Apparently the server is going to be moved tomorrow night so this site, SNAFU, webnewsstats and all the other crap on here will disappear, let's hope it doesn't last for long, heh.
Bex reckons that in the last update I should have written "Fewer than three" and "Fewer than eleven"! Very humourous, but artistic license allows me to bend the rules!
I was invited to go to Amy's house to play cards with some of the other vult-- uh, some of the scifi lot, but I dislike competition with other people and tend to capitulate instantly so I figured it wasn't worth it. Playing games against other people is just not my thing, I mean I hate drinking games and everything... Never mind the barely-concealed animosity we all have for each other-- THAT WAS A JOKE ASSHATS! Heh it's all good you know...
Right, the rest of this update is about Doom and idiot programmers putting really dumb mistakes into their code. So you can stop reading if you want, heh:)
Blastem2 Speedruns
I think it's finally happened, I've got sick of Blastem2. Before that, however, I switched categories: in order to give myself some variation I tried getting the fastest exit on the map possible without killing all the monsters.
I recorded a 3'21" (twenty something percent kills) but when I watched again and it looked really slow and retarded. I've also recorded a 3'20" which is much the same. Oh well. But I think I've played this map enough for now:)
I'm playing it on Ultra-Violence skill. What I've been doing up until now, that is killing as many monsters as is possible, is termed "UV Max". If you don't kill all the monsters it's called "UV Speed". There are other standard categories in which people record demos for Doom; the definitive list is probably to be found at Compet-n, on the FAQ and Rules pages. (Yeah I'd have typed my own list out but it's not really worth it)
Scythe
Been playing the recently released Scythe megawad instead. So far I've done the first 21 maps and I agree with the general opinion on Doomworld that it's really good. The first 20 were pretty easy; indeed their small size, relative ease and fun gameplay factor combined to remind me of TVR!, which is itself an amazing piece of work.
Having said that, however, Scythe is known to get really hard towards the end, so I might not be able to finish it... Apparently map 26 has 300 revenants. I hate revenants and their damn homing missiles...
One piece of weirdness was right at the end of the super secret level. There is a megasphere behind the exit line, so in order to make sure I picked it up as I exited the level I straferan at it. PRBoom instantly segfaulted. Fortunately I had a savegame so I reloaded, tried again, same thing happened. However it turned out that I was able to pick up the megasphere without needing to bump it using straferunning, so I carried on. Nevertheless it is weird, PRBoom is usually pretty stable and quite hard to crash under normal circumstances.
Stupid bugs
Here is an opportunity to laugh at my retarded programming ability. I have my script that manages my IRC logs. What it's supposed to do is rotate the logs so they don't get too big, and delete the ones that are too small or too old. Rotation means renaming (say) #foo.log to #foo.log.0, having first renamed #foo.log.0 to #foo.log.1, having first renamed #foo.log.1 to #foo.log.2... you get the idea. The actual rotation is done by a program called savelog which is a standard part of Debian. My script just uses it for convenience.
Now the current incarnation of the program reads the names of all the files in the log file directory, classifying them as "old" or "new". Old files are ones that have already been rotated at least once (so their name ends with a dot and an number) and new ones haven't, so their name ends in ".log". It looks at the "new" list, deleting or rotating files as it sees fit, then looks at the "old" list, deleting the expired files and so forth. (there's a bit more to it than that, involving channel logs and client privmsg logs, but for the purposes of this article it doesn't need to be explained)
Anyway have you spotted the flaw? It's the wrong way round! It reads and caches the names, then performs rotations (possibly changing the names) then tries to delete old files, the names for which might have been changed in the last step!
Whoops. It took me quite a while to realise why it wasn't working properly...
Much of this update was written a few hours ago, but at the time triv was down. We thought this was because Simon was moving house and in particular his servers, but as it turned out:
Apologies for the disappearance from the Internet of triv.org.uk today. This was due to someone unplugging my gateway box, which resulted in a necessary manual hard disk check.
Less than three
Remember last year when I decided that I had to make a track called technical difficulties? Well, this year, for vaguely similar reasons I have to make a track called less than three.
I've tried starting it a few times but failed miserably, up until this afternoon, when I managed to fling down three and a quarter minutes of drum and bass. I've made some silly vocal samples but I'm on the lookout for someone to make me some more! (yeah Amy you said you'd do some samples for me, come on, cough up)
Less than eleven
I managed to break eleven minutes on Blastem2!! Oh man! Times I've recorded today, in order of their being recorded, are:
11'34", 10'41", 12'05", 10'56", 12'11"
Two under eleven minutes. However, quite frankly a lot of it's about luck.
- How the monsters distribute themselves around the map
- In particular, how easy they are to find. Sometimes they get lost in small corridors and you lost precious seconds looking for them
- How much ammunition you end up using removing them. For example the barons on the towers round the edge can be extremely intractable and difficult to shoot.
- etc.
Thus I'm still not sure about this "under 10 minutes" thing; it's going to require lots of luck and damn near flawless play. I might just get annoyed and give up; that last 12'11" was irritating to say the least. I ran out of rockets and had to shoot the tower barons with my ssg! No wonder it took so long:/
Anyway. Instead of the usual link to the wad on Doomworld's idgames archive interface have a link to the map author's site on which there is a page (well, a frame) of maps including Blastem2.
Heh. I might be obsessed with a map and a slave to a game nearly ten years old but at least I'm not this guy.
Ancient popcorn
So I went downstairs to make lunch, and found there was no bread currently available. But all was not lost, I managed to cook a panful of noodles, and it was good! Inspired, I went and found the ancient bag of pan popcorn I've had forever. It was best before July 1996 or something(!)
Screw it though, I cooked it and it was really nice. Honestly there was so much salt in the butter... I managed to overcook it a little, and there are some black marks in the pan that just wouldn't come off even after ten minutes hard scrubbing with various cleaning fluids. Oh well. It's not a pan that gets used for anything else much. I guess I can count this experiment as a success.
This is becoming far too regular a feature, heh. Anyway I've achieved:
- A run under 8 minutes, though that was just fooling around in a lower skill level and I didn't record it.
- The first real attempt yielded a recording in 12'29", which a few days ago would have been wonderful but now is pretty shite:)
- Then I recorded a new best time of 11'21".
I know some time could be shaved off from that but enough to take it below eleven minutes? I'm not sure...
Sitewatch
Firstly I noticed Bex's site had updated but snafu hadn't noticed. It turns out in order to implement her domain name there is a tiny site at www.debecca.com that puts her real site www.debecca.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk in a frame. Snafu was looking at this tiny redirection site, rather than the real one. Fortunately I'd coded it so that it could check a different URL from the one to which it links, so the problem was easily fixed.
On a sadder note snafu noticed something wrong with Amy's site. It turns out they're spring cleaning in the computer science department and they decided to purge old accounts. I guess it was always going to happen, but there is nonetheless much consternation all round.
Sadly my browser is not set up to cache stuff to disk so I cannot help with any of the missing web log entries.
Milk Bottle Day
It's ten years since the day, 10th April 1993. I was covering for my friend's paper round (he was on a family holiday or something) at some enormous and foreboding house, fighting with the huge lump of Saturday papers and trying to get them through the excruciatingly tiny letter box. Disaster occurred, I accidentally knocked over one of their milk bottles and it shattered... Scared out of my wits by fear of recrimination and not knowing any other way to deal with the situation I simply ran for dear life. It was with a hunted, paranoid, constantly ready to take flight attitude that I endured the remainder of my time covering the round, and the day itself gained its name forever...
Fast forward ten years and it's like yet more of the reason that I'm still stuck in my house instead of being out there in the world enjoying the supposed prime of my life. And I heard that my site has apparently been sounding a lot more sane recently, instead of "the gradual decline of a man", as well. Right, okay. Anyway screw this, let's talk about something enjoyable.
Recordings for Blastem2 continue to be made. This afternoon I could only manage a 12'37" which made me think maybe my 12'08" from a couple of days ago was a fluke. However at about half past six I gave it another go and got an 11'56"! But it gets better...
22:33 <RjY> OMFG YES
22:34 <RjY> 11'28"
Yeah I broke not only twelve minutes, but eleven and a half minutes too! I'm now thinking under eleven minutes is possible, but my eventual goal of "less than ten minutes" still seems quite a way off.
A few additions to SNAFU:
- About a week ago I noticed it was having some problems with web caches; specifically, the transparent cache between its server and the rest of the internet wasn't letting it see updates to other (non-local) sites. I made it make HTTP requests that are supposed to tell caches not to use cached data; I can only hope they take notice...
- I was about to remove Felix when his site came back up again, heh:) Instead I added Bex's new weblog and CrazyDave's Link of the Day page. There are actually a pretty decent number of sites being monitored now, yay...
...some time later...
Blast it. I've had this thing open for ages and I'm sure there was something else I was going to go on about but I forgot it. Damn IRC, oh well. I have to remember to fix a link in yesterday's update now having inadvertently brought a bug in Matt's site scripts to his attention:)
A Week Is A Long Time In Vulturing!
Good evening. I've recently returned to my house following a disastrous trip to the Coventry Skydome irc... Godsdamnit, what a typo, I am such a nerd, please kill me... Indeed this very afternoon, I also read the word "wallop", as in "smack bang wallop", as "wallop", as in "write a message to all on-line operators"... Damnit. I think I'd better start again...
Good evening. Again. I've recently returned to my house following a fairly disastrous trip to the Coventry Skydome ice rink. More on this later, I've a lot to write and it ain't gonna be pretty...
Bipolarity
One of my many personality disorders is, I believe, a mild case of bipolarity, or manic depression. That is, extremes of mood, either good or bad. It's not the case all the time, but quite often you'll find me either unable to stop laughing at everything, or dreadfully and inconsolably upset about some tiny little thing that, quite often, my brain has blown entirely out of proportion. It usually wears off after a while, but it's still not a good thing (and, I realised, probably the reason why the gradient of a bird function on the point of a collapse is almost infinitely steep... no, you don't want to know what I'm on about, trust me)
Now there was an, uh... "incident" on Friday. I have my little vision of how stuff in my life supposed to go, and if my subconscious deems it sufficiently important, then either it's running, I'm running it, and I couldn't be happier, or it's all gone incontravertably wrong, the whole thing's crashed, and I might as well give up and indeed be dead.
Acute sudden unhappiness is a bizarre feeling, like having a layer of molten lava and pin-sized pneumatic drills grinding away, just below the skin, all over your body, in particular concentrated around the skull. I distinctly remember the rational part of my mind going "it might not be as bad as you think, you depressive idiot" - and indeed it eventually turned out to be correct - but I had to shut my brain up instantly (and even so, it was two days before the lava layer faded and I felt relatively normal again...) Here's some of the stuff I did to avoid thinking:
- Marsquake. It's a Bomberman clone for RISC OS I downloaded a couple of years ago, and I hadn't played it for ages so I went through all four sets of eight maps. The final set took about as long as the first three sets combined, they are hard. This is probably due to the monsters. There's these two types of tank thing that eat the bombs you've planted; the green ones may be incredibly annoying, but they're harmless, but the red ones, which only appear on the fourth set, are deadly to the touch and so their fast, random movement causes you to run out of lives quickly. And don't talk to me about bomb diarrhoea...
- Curses. A relatively modern piece of interactive fiction, that is, a text adventure, but considered to be a classic. Admittedly the first time I finished it I had had to use a solution for the final half of the game because it's far too hard for me. However, now I can complete it from memory and indeed every year I play it through again because I like the story and how some of the puzzles work (although some others still irritate me, why can't you lagach yourself back to Zeus's temple? Stupid! You end up having to visit Alexandria twice and it's really easy to put the game into an unwinnable state...)
- I wrote a couple of level reviews in various threads on Doomworld. Yeah, I posted something that wasn't completely factual and about which I wasn't completely sure of its correctness... I actually wrote an opinion! Someone check the temperature in Hell...
- Doom. And lots of it. It deserves its own heading.
Doom (I said, it deserves its own heading)
Like I said a while ago, a new version of DIY was released to the public last month. Now something else wrong on Friday was that my internet connection dropped out. Thanks NTL! Anyway I thought I could try installing it, but I found that the disk I'd put it on to transfer it to the Risc PC was corrupted. Bugger. Oh well, screw it. When the connection came back, I downloaded it again and tried to begin the process of merging the new version with my modified sources, but, well, various factors put me off. I suppose I'll do it eventually though.
I played a huge number of old maps, particularly of the Sunday afternoon drive variety. This is a term I coined to mean large, easy maps, full of monsters, but also full of health and ammunition, so you can basically run around like a basket case and just have fun, not worrying too much about wastage. The definitive example of such a map is UAC Experiment, a map in the classic Episode 1 "Knee Deep In The Dead" style and, for that style, enormous. It has a heavy total of 350 monsters but almost all of them are zombies, imps and demons, and provided you do the first few areas in the right order (so you have a decent number of different weapons, near to 200% health and armour, and bogloads of ammunition) you can go nuts for the rest of it. Others I enjoyed were metro13, Slugfest 9, av46sp01 (The Baron's Domain)... And Blastem2.
Blastem2. Had to say it again. I love this map, it is so replayable. Many maps these days I can barely be bothered to play once; this one, I can happily play it a dozen times in the same day and repeat this the day after and the day after that. It's a wide open plain, surrounded by a fence and some towers, and containing a central complex and inner courtyard. For some unfathomable but beautiful reason, the way it plays is so amazingly fun that I find I can repeat it over and over again. If you have Doom installed and want to try one of the maps I've mentioned, get this one.
Anyway I noticed the time it was taking to finish the map, having killed as many monsters as possible (there are 139, but six of them are unremovable due to a broken teleporter trap) was slowly decreasing. I got a time just over 20 minutes, then a 16'45" I thought "I wonder if I could get it under 15 minutes?" and managed a 14'42"! That was Saturday. On Sunday, among many attempts I got a 13'59"!
Because I had switched to PRBoom again I decided to try recording demos, and the first one I managed to record was a 14'05"... But it gets better, I was really lucky with the way the monsters teleported into the arena, and totally surprised myself by recording... get this... a 12'08". That was Monday night. I'm still working on it, I'd like to get it under 10 minutes, but I don't know if that's possible, you'd have to be really exact with the route you take and be extremely lucky with finding all the monsters as they teleport in (they have a nasty habit of getting into really awkward places and you can't find them in the clearup operation at the end)
Vulturing on ice
Details of what can only be described as a delicate and volatile situation are gradually leaking onto the internet. That sentence could also read "Details of what can only be described as a godsawful farce are gradually leaking onto the internet"; the basic premise was posted on Matt's site the other day - oh, what the hell, let's try his permanent linking system (UPDATE Link fixed, heh) - also people are even making logos, and for a final piece of retardation there's a rumour going around that some idiot's written a scathing comparison of the "contestants" and their "chances of success" in the "competition". No-one'll tell me who's supposed to have done this, but I guess we'll soon find out - if it is indeed more than a rumour and ever sees the light of day - by looking at who's presented most favourably. Then I'll damn well smack him with a rolling pin or possibly a Cthulhu stick (if I could possibly borrow one of them). It's just not funny! Do you hear me, mofo? Gonna bust a cap in yo' ass!
Anyway I digress. Talking about vulturing leads nicely into earlier this evening, and a ringing telephone. It's the girl going "so are you going ice skating", I'm like "well, I woke up with an evil migraine and am full of painkillers... but what the hell, I'll just have some more!" I finished eating, got ready and walked to the rink... first mistake was to tell the truth and say I was no longer a student; it turned out that everyone else had lied and got free drinks tokens.
Second mistake was to bother going along and trying at all. I've been there once before, nearly three years ago. On that occasion it took me about an hour and a half of the time there to get the hang of skating sufficiently well to be able to let go of the wall for any significant period of time. On the other hand, on that occasion I fell awkwardly on my left elbow and was unable to move my left arm properly for nearly a fortnight afterwards, so I hope you can understand my being overly cautious. But although I didn't fall over at all during the entire evening, the policy backfired...
It's like this: all your companions are at least an order of magnitude more skilled and experienced than you. So when you see them, they're all going round with ease and showing off, and when they talk to you they're trying to get you to do stuff you're just not comfortable with (like going more than arm's length away from the relative safety of the wall) That's like 5% of the time, the other 95% you are out there, totally, totally alone, your tiny amount of confidence draining out of you faster than urine from an incontinent old man's trousers. You suck.
Okay I'm probably overreacting again so in the interests of balance here are a couple of positives:
- Firstly, right before kickout time I was like "screw it", I left the wall and managed to go right across the middle of the rink. Okay, I might have headbutted the wall on the other side twice and probably have concussed myself, but hey, I'm hepped up and roaring on extra-strength painkillers, so whatever.
- Secondly, I made friends with this woman, who, initially at least, was holding on to the wall for dear life as tightly as I was. We had a number of humourous conversations along the lines of, well, being crap when your friends aren't, why you shouldn't let people skate over your fingers if you fall over, and why there were so many godsdamn screaming 13 year olds there (I said "they can't get served in pubs, so they're here instead". She laughed. Whatever.) But she left with her friends and then there was no-one left to talk to other than Torville, Dean, Dean, Dean, and Dean.
Anyway so eventually they kicked everyone out so we left. Everyone else decided to go to the pub, but feeling fed up, not to mention being whacked out on brain-numbing pills, I decided it was better to go home. Knowing my luck I will have missed something hilarious. On the way home I resolved to write an extremely long article on here, so there you go.
PS
- Something I noticed today on Matt's site was the phrase "if you stay long enough in Amy's house maybe she'll go out with you". I know what it is a reference to so I laughed a lot... but then I saw the irony and laughed even more. I mean, given he's the one who lives with the girl I think that's one pointed remark that's backfired...;) Sorry man but it had to be said... unless this double meaning was intentional! Oooh!
- Soon afterwards the girl's site itself updated with no other addition than a sentence about me "inviting myself over to her house" last week. I am hoping she started updating her site, then was interrupted or something, because the other possibility (that she put in a nasty remark to annoy me) would probably set off my lava skin again...:/
- Kimber & Kirk's. Sounds like the name of a pub, doesn't it? So it's no wonder there's always people going round there even if there were no contest on! Well I thought it was funny when I came up with it the other night, shut up.
- On a completely unrelated note (seriously!) look at this, Bex has actually done something with her domain name at last. I should ask her if I can put her on snafu - yeah, who didn't see another snafu link comin'...
Locktacular!
About a week ago Amy (you said you wanted more links, didn't you..?) was talking on her site about how she'd managed to get her window to open by scraping away the paint (damnit, the mental image of her leaning out, making faces at passing traffic, is making me laugh too much again...)
Well anyway the other day I was outside and I found a nail on the floor. It was a good nail, shiny and new, so I kept it ("See a pin, pick it up, all day long, you'll have good luck" - and what is a nail, if not a really big, fat pin, heh...)
Now my bedroom door has a lock on it. Not a proper one with a key, it's really just a bolt in the door handle. But it too was painted into immobility and I'd wondered for years if it could be made once again useful... On a whim, vaguely inspired by Amy's experiences, I fetched the hammer from the back room and set about the paint using the nail as a chisel.
Many loud thumps and bangs, and much flying paint chips later, the lock moved for the first time in at least six and a half years and probably more. Success, but only in so far as you still needed the hammer to move the lock because it was that stiff...Fortunately, I am the proud owner of my very own can of WD-40. So with a liberal quantity applied, the lock now moves stiffly but fairly easily in its housing.
Admittedly there was no point to this wanton destruction of ancient paint, for under normal circumstances I have no need to lock myself in my room. However I was curious, and I don't like to see things that could be functional not being able to be so, especially when the idea enters my mind that they could easily be fixed.
What a coincidence
This evening my mum brought home the car my dad acquired yesterday. Sadly not an Orion LX, in fact it turned out to be a dark red Vauxhall Corsa. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Simon have one just like that.?!
It's April Fool's day. I did have an evil little thing planned. However I decided it might be a bad idea and chickened out... I dare say enough comedy value will be generated sooner or later anyway, so never mind.
That's not to say there weren't enough April Fool gags flying around. For example Something Awful did another fake front page and Doomworld put up a story about how all the staff had quit and the site was basically dead. According to the comments thread a few people even fell for it, heh.
My dad's apparently found a replacement, well, at least a temporary replacement, for his car. According to my mum he wants a decent one that'll last for years but he needed one pretty quickly so he didn't have to keep stealing hers. So he's gone and got one that was a lot cheaper than he was expecting to pay but is really good value or something. Don't ask me why it would be good value, but I guess it's good news.
Finally for posterity I'd like to post this.
19/03 23:59 <RjY> honestly it's like vultures round a corpse or something :\
