I have decided against posting the long thing I wrote last night. My aim, to avoid the morons that make me mad, is not achieved writing posts about them. Instead it either encourages more contact, or deliberate ignorance on their part, making me wonder why the hell I'm not getting a response. This is unacceptable.
Anyway here are some humourous parodies and pranks based on goatse.cx
- throatse - safe for work unless your boss gets the reference. And if it's up, it seems to refuse connections a lot. The ring on the finger makes it so much better, even if it is the wrong finger.
- Project to write the url on banknotes.
I was trying to work out why I think goatse is so funny. It's not the picture, which is just like yeah whatever seen it a million times before. No, it's the association. The history. The reaction you get when some people see it (Bex said she said she hadn't seen it, which I thought was bullcrap because it had been posted on .misc years ago, but anyway she went there and after a silence of a couple of minutes she was all like "URGH URGH URGH URGH MING MING MING", it was hysterical) The pranks, parodies, spoofs and other crap people have done with it since (imagine using logging into a computer called goatse. Imagine your network's firewall/router is called goatse. If you don't think this is hilarious we have incompatible senses of humour)
It's really a running gag, plain and simple, an internet in-joke, which at least for me hasn't yet gotten old and completely run into the ground. I guess it'll go stale eventually but as long as there are people making original works based around it and more importantly as long as there are people disgusted by it I think it will continue.
Time to congratulate Felix again
You know you're not too busy when you submit stories to Slashdot:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/29/189220&tid=155&tid=99
while ($hands->action eq 'applause') { $lllama->nerd++; }
I know this is pretty early, I haven't been to bed yet. Yesterday was one of those "can't lie down, must occupy mind for fear of what it will do" days. I wrote an update last night but I don't know if I should post it. Some of it is fine but other parts are all "omg drama oh snap attention whore lol" not to mention the whole thing was way too long to read. Well with any luck I'll just pass out soon and it won't matter at least for a few hours
FATHER TIME WAITS FOR NOBODY'S FOOL
It's always really hard to know where to start when you haven't updated for ages.
I was playing with perl and bash script one-liners again in order to discover that the longest time I've ever left this thing before making another update. The answer is apparently a shade over fifteen days. This gap, of roughly fourteen and three-quarters days, will be the fourth longest. It would have been the third if I had waited about three more hours. BoringStats++;
Anyway so a couple of days ago I received the following information
I've decided to stop updating my website (well actually I decided ages ago), so maybe you should take it off snafu.
but I decided to leave it there for a few days, so people would see the announcement so can I have your xdev account plz its not like you need all that bandwidth for a site that never updates kthxlololol
Actually I'm beginning to wonder if any of the sites currently languishing at the foot of snafu are actually going to update again. Yes, Frisky, I'm looking at you. I dislike how you randomly made a site, badgered me on IRC to get snafu to track it, then disappeared. At least your host does last-modified times so snafu doesn't have to download the whole page to discover you still haven't updated. Oh well.
So about a week and a half ago Simon reinstalled the server. This actually broke the site for a while, which I thought was funny, but it's all fixed now. One positive side effect was the creation of four and a half days worth of readable web server logs. The reason that I'm always going on about reading the logs is that I know snafu gets quite a lot of hits and I wanted to know exactly how many. This period gave me an estimate of 64 hits per day. This was around what I'd been expecting, so whatever.
For ages I've been using rsync with "-e ssh". Fair enough, but I discovered quite by accident yesterday that in Debian rsh is symlinked to ssh via the /etc/alternatives mechanism. I don't know why I've never noticed this before. This means of course that where I've been going "rsync -Pavze ssh" all I need is "rsync -Pavz". Might help somebody to read this, I guess
Also yesterday my mum came home from work having borrowed the fourth Harry Potter book. Like the previous three I swiped it to read. I couldn't help laughing at how, at 640 pages, it is fully twice the size of the third one. I also had to go back to the library. They wanted me to renew my ticket, which would have been all very well except for when I went to the desk to do it, there was this kid there who must have been like 7. He'd clearly only just learned to write, and took ages. I mean I know the little idiots have to learn sometime but can't they just practise at home?
In Doom, Classic 11 came out rather sooner than I was expecting it to. While it's a very good map I don't think it's up to the standard of the previous ones. Other than that I've mostly ran around large overcrowded difficult maps in god mode or with the super weapons patch. These are maps, like those from the Hell Revealed 2 beta, that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. I also discovered that nuts3 does run with PRBoom, contrary to what I said before. You just have to do prboom nuts3.wad -warp 1 as it doesn't like non-320x200 TITLEPICs. nuts2 had the same incompatibility, I just forgot about it(!) Anyway, nuts3, with over 12000 monsters, still runs incredibly slowly on my system but it's worth a look because, as the author demonstrated several times in Equinox, he has a great flair for impressive architectural setpieces. There is a fantastic reference to Equinox in nuts3 as well, if you find it.
In fact, I've just had a intriguing thought: while nuts2 is nuts with a few extra bits added, nuts3 clearly has more in common with Equinox. Now I posted on Doomworld, when nuts2 came out, that since Equinox was released a couple of weeks after nuts, that now nuts2 had come out maybe we were about to see Equinox 2. Given the references it's just occurred to me that nuts3 is Equinox 2, since in the same thread the author registered and posted that he was unlikely to be making another Equinox because it would take too long. Could my and others' comments in that thread have inspired this? I would like to think so, but, yeah, who cares...
Oh Snap! Another Past-1AM Update
Punisher. This is an old release (1995) by one of the people who helped make the second Final Doom mission WAD, The Plutonia Experiment. Like Plutonia map32 (and Spark's map01) it's a modification of Doom II map01. It is jam-packed to the rafters with monsters of all sizes (over 600, which in 1995 was ridiculous) Personally I can't finish it without god mode but people with more ability than me can beat it. Its extra constructions and retexturing are quite messy compared to the work done with Plutonia 32, which I prefer (but also cannot beat, at least, I haven't done so yet) Still, Punisher has the advantage of being free to download.
Following a review of a map like Punisher it's interesting to consider the progression of difficulty of maps since the game was made. The typical population of a map from one of Doom's original three episodes is fewer than 50. By the time Doom 2 came out it had broken 100 and when the majority of maps were made in 1995/1996 monster counts ranged mainly from 50 (small) to 400 (very large) Furthermore, the area of a high population map would be correspondingly large, so the density would still be similar. Difficulty is really more about population density than population size.
Of course there were oddities, like Punisher, with its 600 monsters in an area of "Doom 2 map01 plus a couple of large side areas". Now in 1997, Hell Revealed was released. Supposedly a megawad for players of all skill levels, it was mainly noted for its incredible difficulty, and monster density, especially in later levels, many of which exceeded the extremes of Punisher.
After Hell Revealed came the release of the game source code and the removal of certain game engine limits; furthermore, computers were getting faster and more powerful and larger and larger maps could be made. A sequel to Hell Revealed was begun. This project has not yet been completed but a beta version was released, containing some of the most extreme maps ever made. Its map32 was the worst, having something over 1600 monsters in an area not much greater than Doom 2 map 01.
Hell Revealed 2, along with other projects such as Alien Vendetta, and coupled with the power of contemporary hardware, has resulted in the acceptance of obscenely overpopulated maps. Indeed many megawad releases, especially those made by the most skilled players, will now feature one or more extreme maps. The Community Chest Project map29 has over 1300 monsters and the final third of Scythe is almost all extreme in one way or another. The current state of play is that maps with monster count up to 1000 just don't cause that much of a stir any more.
So what does cause a stir? Well, the Nuts series did. Arguably, a lot of the stuff on the idgames archive shouldn't ever have been released, being things like half a dozen square rooms each each containing 40 cyberdemons. Released in late 2000, the original Nuts.wad would have been such a release, but that it pushed the boundary so far that it rapidly became one of the most downloaded maps ever and a useful benchmarking test for source port authors; it had over 10000 monsters, a whole order of magnitude greater than anything seen previously. Recently, we've seen Nuts2, which was a modified Nuts with fewer monsters and more comedy textures and sprite replacements; and just this week we have Nuts3, which... well, to tell you the truth it caused PRBoom to segfault on my system, and apparently only works in the latest ZDoom betas, but I heard it has over 12000 monsters... Oh snap, indeed.
PS Having said all that, I was playing with sandbox this afternoon and made a map with over 24000 monsters with it. PRBoom managed to run it on my system, but the frame rate slowed down so much it wasn't funny. It will be interesting to see when the first playable map with 100000 monsters on it will be released, and whether or not being able to run such a thing will be a sufficient condition to indicate your system can run Doom 3...
Today's map review was going to be a 20-level set called Real World but as Doomworld's idgames frontend still hasn't updated, I can't make a nice link to it. Apparently, the database update scripts are not crontabbed and need to be run manually, so it could be a day or two yet. However to save time I will say now that it's an update to 8pack, which was reviewed in this week's newstuff. Bizarrely, its author chose to release 8 maps in plenty of time for newstuff, then, scant hours after newstuff was published, rerelease with 12 more.
According to Felix that AOL CD could have been worth something. Oh well.
It's 10 years since an unpleasant event which came to be known as Phone Day. The short version is that, at the end of term, the girl on whom I had a huge crush had dared me to call her, not expecting that I'd actually do it. It was pretty awkward, since she really didn't like me at all by that stage. The resulting negativity cascade in my brain made the summer that much more unbearable, especially since much of the time I had nothing to do other than sit and think. I don't think this incident was the cause of my loathing of telephones, but it certainly nixed any chance of recovery any time soon afterwards.
Since, uh, "taking a holiday from" IRC I've spent a gratuitous amount of time on the SA forums. I managed to identify an old drum and bass record (Terrorist by Ray Keith) simply from alright now i'm listening to jungle and boom tss KA tika BOODAKA tikka tikka PSSH kerk ka BOONTS BOONTS. This cheered me up no end. Here is the thread, though since it's in FYAD linking to it from here is pretty much useless. I'm only really posting about it because I am horribly insecure (well Spark says so and he's right about everything!) and desperately crave your approval.
I am of course reminded of the time when I was walking home from school with a couple of acquaintances and a car drove past with bass booming out of it; they were suitably unimpressed but I was all like "Hey, that's Alex Reese's Pulp Fiction!" I'm sure I'd get on with people I know better if I were like this with all that guitary shite they seem to like, but there you go. Also I know I've told this story about a million times before, but apparently not on here.
I could leave it without updating, or I could do what I did yesterday...
biblio1.wad or The Library. This is a single map for Doom 2 (from this week's newstuff again) There's a background story in the text file which gives it a little extra spice: it seems you're the caretaker in a downtown library and you've locked yourself in with a bunch of "satanist skinheads"! Anyway, the first part, the part that actually looks like a library, is well made. However, towards the end, and for no good reason, there is a maze (ugh) textured entirely in scrolling tormented faces (urgh) and lit by a strobe (oh man) This is clearly not good level design (and thankfully is rarely seen in new levels these days) Gameplay is mostly pretty easy. The monsters are few, and are mostly zombies, but there's very little health so you have to be careful. The keys are hard to find, indeed I needed the map editor to work out how to get the yellow one. In summary this started off a fairly decent map with a quirky and intriguing story line, but I didn't like the yellow key puzzle. And that maze really sucked. I don't like mazes at the best of times, and thankfully this one was pretty simple, but still.
In other news
- More boxes and stuff were thrown away. This included, rather sadly, the Risc PC box. From 1996. No, I don't know why we still had it either. Other than perhaps that it was totally forgotten, languishing in the bottom of the cupboard.
- Also unearthed: An AOL CD. In German. Oh, the humanity. I couldn't throw it out fast enough
- We took it all to the recycling bins which allowed me to discover the CD player in my mum's car can play CD-Rs as well, though it too initially skipped quite a lot. No wonder, I guess, as it doesn't get used very much.
- Reading the Linux Network Administrators Guide, which is interesting but I bet I will fail to take it all in, and glancing at keirsey.com. Despite my inability to believe that this temperament classification thing is not all rubbish, I still go and find stuff about it to read.
I like writing reviews of Doom maps. This site, in its original incarnation (that is, when I made the graphics and so on in mid 2000) was going to feature a lot of reviews, in fact a review of every map I had ever played.
Unfortunately, back then "review" seemed to take on the meaning "detailed walkthrough and commentary" and the whole thing became hugely bloated and overambitious. The most extreme case would be the review I wrote of TeamTNT's Icarus, the file for which was some 70k long and took about two weeks to finish writing. Now who would read something that long, about a wad that was, at the time, already four years old? It was insane. I should put it up sometime for comedy value.
That doesn't mean I don't want to write map reviews, I just have to be a lot less verbose about it. Doom Underground is a good review site, though the reviews are longer than the sort of thing I want to be writing. Doomworld's newstuff chronicles, now that's about the size for which we want to aim. Having said that, both these examples and indeed all the major review sites provide screenshots which I very much doubt I would ever do.
Anyway here's some more stuff I've played recently.
- robv.wad. The construction sucks. The architecture is pretty much randomly laid out with little rooms off hallways. The texturing theme is all over the place, green marble, blue tech, stone, whatever. But it's quite old, so it's only to be expected. What was that huge empty computer room for? The gameplay is quite fun. If you find the computer map or are able to get the secrets, it's easy, and there are a lot of monsters to kill and lots of weapons and ammunition to do it with, just the way I like it. I don't understand why half the monsters are stuck in walls or to each other though. There are a couple of large barrel collections, set up to kill all the monsters in the room for free. In summary I guess it's okay, ugly as anything, but playable once.
- pisa2.wad. I downloaded this before its appearance in this week's newstuff because it's in Italian, which caught my attention. Contrary to what newstuff says, it's two maps. The first is a large open space containing, of all things, the leaning tower of Pisa. Of course it doesn't really lean because plain old Doom doesn't do slopes. I enjoyed jumping off the top. There's a bunch of other buildings around it, apparently realistically laid out. They are textured well, though the rest of the texturing is just Doom stuff. It's really easy. You start with the rocket launcher and other weapons are immediately available, with plentiful ammunition. Facing you, a meagre twenty monsters. Seems it's more for looking around than playing. The exit, which is damn near impossible to find, leads to.. "Aces, another author's house map!" It's not too bad as they go but suffers the same problems all attempted real-world constructions face, namely that even if you do work around putting a real 3d structure into an effectively 2d game it still doesn't play very well. Lots of small rooms and tiny cramped corners is not much fun. Having said that this one wasn't the worst I've seen and didn't have a stupidly high monster density.
I know that writing Doom reviews on this site is completely pointless because nobody I know who reads it plays the game. But then I don't share many interests with people I know and even with the ones who do I don't like talking to them about stuff they already know about because I always end up feeling more stupid. Talk to any of the technically-oriented #warwick regulars and you'll realise how little you know about computers, for example.
But hey. On the other hand one day I hope that I might write something about Doom that makes someone go "I wish I knew what he was on about" and bother to play one of the things I mention. Then maybe I could actually have a conversation about it with someone who doesn't fill me with fear because they're a stranger! Oh my, wouldn't that be sweet. I know it's about as likely as a chocolate teapot but still. Like I said, I like writing Doom map reviews.
Analysis of bisc's last-seen database
I asked Peter to send me the contents of bisc's seen database so that I could poke at it, and today he did.
The main reason for this was to determine how much of an increase in size various people's apparently never-ending stream of nick changes was causing. I think all the nick changes are pretty stupid but since it's not really doing that much damage I'm going to stop caring. Apart from the first time I used IRC I have only used about half a dozen nicks.
Indeed, I could use the database to discover that initial collection of nicks, before I knew about bisc, before I knew that talking using an ever-increasing number of nicks was wasting resources. These were BobDeath, MrPriapic, HornyGuy, VHornyGuy, MrErect, LargeTits, BallsHurt, Huge_Cock, Porn_King, and DrLurve. This was the 20th of July, 2001; still back in the days when my "lewd, suggestive and disgusting" gimmick still worked. It's a well-publicised fact that I've largely had to give this up since FDave came along and basically did it better. I have yet to find a new gimmick, and until I do, I have no mental script to follow in social situations, so I am quiet and boring and for me socialising becomes unpleasant. Now, as I spend more time on SA, I pick up more of its catchphrases, so I find it very natural to use them in a new social gimmick; however, it fails badly, as I know only one other person who can reasonably be expected to get the references (Nelis) Anyway I seem to have totally digressed, so before I start explaining other reasons why I'm no longer doing the social thing or indeed talking at all to quite a few people I had better move on.
I was able to discover the date when the format of the database changed from nick->time\message to nick->time\channel\message. This change makes the output of the function break for nicks that haven't been seen for a very long time; I'd always wondered when the cutoff point was. Turns out it was sometime in the first week of July, 2001, around the time #warwick moved onto Astrolink. Makes sense I guess, upgrades performed, etc. I think the code probably should expire nicks that haven't been seen for over a year or two, but I doubt I'll be arsed to write it and so why should anyone else?
I made a couple of text files showing the contents of the database sorted into various orderings, and put the urls in the channel, but from the lack of change to the last-access time of each of the files other than those which I know I've caused myself, it seems no-one else is interested. Nevertheless I'll leave them there for a couple of days.
I guess the fact that I haven't published any solid results here makes this entire update completely pointless, but really I'm only writing it because I'm streaming audio to disc, and can't do the other stuff I was doing before Dreem Teem Presents finishes (I was fooling around ripping audio CDs, oh no RIAA don't arrest me please! Hey that rhymes, maybe I should be a rapper...)
Well I was going to upload another mp3 today but I never got round to it
However I converted 7 of them into audio files and wrote them onto a CD-RW disc. I was rather put out to discover that only the two CD drives in this computer would touch it; my stereo, the CDROM drive in the Risc PC and the CD player in my mum's car all spat it out in disgust.
So I tried making a CD-R disc with the same tracks. I was very happy, not to mention quite relieved, to find that it played back in my stereo.
It did jump a lot, but then my stereo's CD drives jump a lot these days anyway. I hardly use them, it's more convenient to use the computer's CD drives, and let the sound card mix it with whatever else the computer's doing - playing Doom without sound is a terrible handicap, heh.
Anyway I guess I'll send the CD-R to Elliot as I promised him ages ago I'd make him some CDs. His stereo's about two years newer than mine so it should be able to play it. This week it will have been a year since he sent me a tape, the second side of which I still haven't played.
Final note: I need to find out why my CD writer wouldn't write a CD-R faster than 12x speed... Some stupid reason, I don't know...
Hey guys what's going on in this weblog?
- I got "not selected" for that job on the unitemps website but there was another one (html/css for ITS E-lab) so I applied for that. For some reason I'm not so bothered, I guess I must be getting more accustomed to being rejected (either that or my brain is currently so unhappy this failed to make any new impact on it)
- Recorded a 10'05" UV max run of blastem2 (133 monsters maximum possible out of 139, like I said before there are 6 that can't escape from a nonfunctional teleporter trap off the side of the map) I used the same route adjustment I did with the UV speed run. Inspired by taking 23 seconds off the previous record, I carried on, but didn't quite manage to better it; I recorded a second 10'05" and a 10'08". I'm quite pleased as you might expect and now totally convinced my goal of breaking 10 minutes is possible.
I tried four times to write a third item for that list, none of the attempts worked out at all, so I'm giving up. There is really nothing to say. There's nothing going on in my life worth talking about. Look. Look at this.
- I spend lots of time reading the SA forums, hardly any time reading Doomworld (I don't know why I don't go there so much, it's weird) and being too scared to post anything anywhere. Ditto for the doom irc channels I'm idling in. To complete the circle I should idle in the SA irc channels and be too scared to type in there too.
- I have some books to read mainly from Coventry central library. Also my mum's been borrowing the Harry Potter books off someone she works with. I am reading them (currently somewhere in the third one) and enjoying them rather more than I would have expected to.
- I'm sitting on a bunch of tracks, I can't decide which one to upload next or even if I should leave it and let people carry on listening to the current ones. I am vaguely amusing myself playing them through the various effects you can put on them using sox. For example I sat here listening to all 29 minutes and 32 seconds of aBoUt tImE! played at quarter speed.
- Comedy "I went to Tesco and bought some bread" option
The last thing is not true - like I have any reason to leave the house - but is a pisstake of a pisstake.
jobs
I've applied for a couple of things Unitemps have sent me recently. I was rejected for the first one within an hour and a half of applying for it; it was one of the urgent ones, and I can only hope I was rejected simply because I wasn't fast enough.
So far I haven't heard back from the other one, for which I applied today. Though I doubt I'll get it (because it's a longer term thing) I want to remain hopeful, since it's about programming for a website. PHP and Perl were mentioned, however along with a few things with which I'm not so familiar, like Dreamweaver. Despite this, I didn't hesitate too much in sending off the application - I dare say I could pick it up pretty quickly, I got the hang of SPSS easily enough - but since I didn't hear back immediately it's probably gone to someone else.
snafu
snafu welcomes Frisky's Song Diary. Don't ask me who is really behind this site as my silence was requested!
CDave is the new Felix; he's taken something I've written, and copied it, making an arguably better version. Complete with a tortuous name chosen for the comedy acronym, Alert Notification Updated Sites is in the final stages of beta testing (hence the filename, which it strikes me will change, and break this link... oh well, not like I care that much about broken links in really old updates)
It adds the feature of being configurable. A few people have asked me for this, but since the infamous p3find security hole incident I've avoided writing interactive web pages where possible. Furthermore, to be honest, I find the interface to be somewhat cumbersome; however I doubt this could have been avoided, HTML forms are by their nature going to be unpleasant, as the tags were tacked on to the standard as it evolved over the end of the previous decade.
(Oh and he appears to have acquired an account at triv.org.uk but has yet to log into it...)
doom
Here's what I've done recently in the beautiful game. You can all stop reading now, I know you don't care about this.
- blastem2: I risked a minor route change for speedruns. It relies more on luck than I would like, but... I broke three minutes, recording a 2'55"! So that was pretty cheering. Watching the demo play back there are about half a dozen places where I could save a second or two, so it could go even lower. But that's one objective achieved, the other of course being to get the max kills run under 10 minutes, at which point I will consider sending the demos to the SDA and/or putting them up here.
- number 10 in the Classic series has been released. Four or five of the original nine were released as individual maps, with the episode of all nine being released at the end of 2000. It was rereleased with minor modifications in 2001, arguably unnecessarily. Anyway it's again very playable and I've made several runs of it, the best time being around eight and three quarter minutes. Some think the cyberdemon is out of place but I'm not one of them; it had exactly the intended shock effect on me when I first encountered it, yet you are able to get more than enough equipment to deal with it easily. Fantastic.
- Congestion Control. This is quite nasty, there's not much ammunition to play with and the monster density is high. Watch for the teleporting spiderdemon, even though I was expecting it to appear at some point it still made me jump when it did.
- Congestion Control 2, arguably easier and more fun than its predecessor (there's a lot more ammunition and weapons available from the start, and more stuff to shoot. This makes it more fun in my mind)
- Metamorphism, which felt like a cross between Congestion Control 2 and Alien Vendetta maps 12-14; no great surprise, given that it's a co-production of the authors of those maps. Its layout is a tad confusing, unsurprisingly given the authors passing it back and forth. It's still good though, I wouldn't be mentioning it if I didn't like it, heh
- Murderous Intent, very well made but very difficult on UV. Its author likes archviles... I remember trying it around last November but never getting further than map 3, this time I am a bit further.
- The Community Chest Megawad. It's not every day that you get a new 32 level megawad. This one's really good, I've watched it be developed inside Doomworld's forums over the past year or so. It was eagerly anticipated and worth the wait.
- And, oh, yeah, following on from spark's map01 modification: apparently he made another map called CASTLE3.WAD which I managed to speedrun in 16 seconds. It's not the sort of map on which you can do a max kills run, and it didn't catch me like the other one did so I haven't done any demos. Oh well.
I still really want to do some things with the PRBoom source, or work on my own maps some more, but as usual I can't seem to get started. I've gone back into the Doom IRC channels on freenode, but of course I'm far too shy to say anything much. Never mind the fact that the channels themselves are in a kind of flux at the moment, indeed in some danger of being thrown off the network following an incident or two with the staff last week, heh.
