ITS HALLOWEEN
So here's a link to some scary disturbing shit, well, scary and disturbing if you're one of the little whiny shitburgers who live in the rogue channel. For decently jaded people who aren't driven screaming into the night by a rectangle of maroon, it's just a picture and today especially you should click on it. There's far worse. There's people stupid enough to commit criminal assault, take pictures and post the evidence on the internet! And they think I'm a moron. Oh well, I guess one man's moron is another man's misunderstood comedy genius.
I have for Halloween in previous years tried to invent all sorts of stupid rituals and shit to do, often involving concentrating on simple geometric shapes or somesuch. I wanted to be able to astrally project myself around without having to leave my bed. I wanted to try out the old superstition that if you go to a crossroads on Halloween and listen to the wind you will hear your future. I wanted to believe there's more to the universe and in particular mind and sentience than quantum particles wobbling at each other.
But there's the problem. I have no evidence that any of this shit works and being schooled as a scientist I am forced to conclude it's all hogwash. The nearest you can get to astral projection is that careful balance just on the edge of sleep where you have lucid dreams. I can never make this last for long, I never manage to do anything interesting, indeed I rarely realise I'm even doing it until I've woken up properly and can't remember what did happen. As for listening to the wind I suspect all I would learn about what the future holds is that it would feature a period of standing in the freezing rain looking like a moron with an ear cocked to the sky.
PS My job has pretty much finished but they want me to go back and do another one. More on this later if I decide it isn't too dull.
Here is a special report because I woke up way too early and have time to waste (you know the deal, it would have been right on time IF IT WERE STILL LAST WEEK BEFORE THE CLOCKS WENT BACK)
Anyway yesterday I heard, on uwarwick.announce of all places, about some scam whereby you get an email asking you to divulge account numbers and whatever so your funds might be spirited away to the land of Thugs, Bitches and Ice. It's well made and looks official, as does the the site to which it links. Compare that recent virus that replicated by fooling people into thinking it was from Microsoft Update.
Apart from noting my bank was one of the ones affecting and sniggering at morons who'd be taken in by what was to me "just a different sort of 419" I didn't take much notice. That is until I got home and found an email from my bank telling me exactly the same thing, ignore these official looking emails etcetc.
But for some reason it had taken over fourteen hours to be delivered. If my bank were Flash Gordon we'd all be dead by now! HAHAHA
I got a tattoo of the IP number of goatse.cx
but two weeks later they switched hosting company and it changed!
thousands and thousands and thousands of envelopes
Work last week can be neatly divided into two parts, with the division point being lunchtime on Thursday.
Before lunch on Thursday went like this: I'd get some little thing to do that'd take me a relatively short amount of time. Then I'd sit around until I felt guilty enough to go look for something else to do. This involved pestering people who clearly had gratuitous amounts of far more important work to do, and making them stop and find me something that would take them nearly as long to explain how to do it as it took for me to do. Thus the cycle repeated.
So we get to Thursday and I'm having lunch, thinking this has to be it. But no, the boss comes up to me and asks me to go back next week! Spraying crumbs everywhere I'm like "what! I've had hardly anything to do" but she's not having any of it.
Anyway after that the shit hits the fan as the direct debit letters have begun to be generated and need to go out by the end of the week. I got several huge boxes of envelopes, fresh from the envelope stuffing machine, which needed to be sorted by destination (UK, air mail, campus etc then the campus ones had to be further sorted into residences and blocks, because allegedly if you don't do the post room's job for them your shit won't get delivered for weeks) Due to the sheer quantity of envelopes this task was pretty fraught and in fact I ended up not getting a lunchbreak on Friday. Seeing as the other guy decided he'd have a lunchbreak three times as long as he should, I was quite annoyed!
Bleeding Tower of Pisa
Bleeding Tower of Pisa has one of the best map names I've ever heard but that's pretty much the best thing about it! With over 400 monsters, and an initial wide open area dominated by the blood-soaked construction that gives the map its name, it promised to be a classic. But the vast majority of the map is very cramped hallways and passages, and areas with a consistent theme but completely separate from and bearing no relation to each other. I guess it was made in a time when most people's computers would slow to a crawl when presented with a hundred-monster firefight in a huge outdoor space but nevertheless it was disappointing.
Plus, there are very few maps which have a whole lot of areas leading off from different sides and heights of a big lift and which aren't made really annoying waiting for the damn thing to reach the floor you want. I've just discovered that the same author made Metro13, so I know he's capable of better... Oh look, there even is a site with all his maps handily collected together.
It's type in listing time again everyone!
Ages and ages ago I made a fairly useless factorisation program and, 1980's computer magazine style, invited people to type it in. There was also radioshow which slightly more usefully will record audio going into your sound card and mp3 it as it goes along, for a given length of time.
Today following this thread on alt.games.doom.ii I was finally sufficiently motivated to make dumptriggers, a script that goes through a WAD file, and for each line in each map in the WAD that has a trigger and a tag number (that is, controls some remote action like a door opening or floor lowering) prints out the line number, the action number, and the sector numbers which the line affects. The idea is as follows: say I have a secret door for which I can't find the switch or tripwire. I can go into Yadex and get its sector number, then grep the output for that sector number. This gives me a line number that I can search for, back in Yadex.
dumptriggers [wadfile.wad] will give you a bunch of lines that look like this
mapname Llinedef Aaction Ssector Ssector Ssector...
some real examples from doom2.wad MAP01:
MAP01 L00126 A062 S021
MAP01 L00084 A102 S046 S047 S050 S051
The first says that line 126 being activated will cause action 62 to occur to sector 21. The second says that line 84 does action 102 on sectors 46, 47, 50 and 51. Because I knocked this thing up in an afternoon it doesn't do anything useful like tell you what actions 62 or 102 actually are, you'll have to look them up. (As it happens the first is the lift with the imp in the large brown room at the end, and the second is the switch that lowers the four floors in the green and blue room at the top of the map)
Finally before I leave you with the listing to cut and paste type in, a note relevant to the usenet thread mentioned above: The UDS, despite being one of the most beautiful and inspiring documents ever written, nonetheless contains an occasional error. In particular if you take it at face value and only search for the linedef action numbers which it refers to as crushing ceiling activators, you will miss some, including significantly the large one that gives Doom2 MAP06 its name.
dumptriggers is hereby placed into the public domain, "as is", without any guarantee of fitness for a particular purpose; and if something screws up it's your responsibility and not mine! There are a lot of error checks it should do, but doesn't, nevertheless it runs successfully on the latest versions of doom2.wad and doomu.wad. Enjoy!
#!/usr/bin/perl
# dumptriggers
# by RjY of anARCHy, 19:2/3/2003
# Placed into the public domain. Do what you like but don't bother me about it
use strict;
use warnings;
# takes optional wad file argument, else uses default filename as below
my $WAD = $ARGV[0] ? $ARGV[0] : "/usr/local/share/games/doom/doom2.wad";
open F, $WAD or die "$0: Cannot open $WAD: $!\n";
my ($BUF, $WAD_ID, $N, $dir, @start, @length, @name);
# read WAD file header
# see the UDS <http://www.gamers.org/dhs/helpdocs/dmsp1666.html> for WAD format
read F, $BUF, 12;
($WAD_ID, $N, $dir) = unpack("a4LL", $BUF);
die "$0: $WAD is not a WAD" unless ($WAD_ID =~ m/[IP]WAD/ && $N < 32000);
# read WAD file directory
seek F, $dir, 0;
for (my $i = 0; $i < $N; $i++) {
read F, $BUF, 16;
($start[$i], $length[$i], $name[$i]) = unpack("LLZ8", $BUF);
}
# main loop through possible map names
for (my $lev = 11; $lev < 83; $lev++) {
my $mapname;
# godsawful hack to work transparently with both types of map name
if ($lev < 51) {
$mapname = sprintf("E%1dM%1d", int $lev / 10, $lev % 10);
} else {
$mapname = sprintf("MAP%02d", $lev - 50);
}
my $i = 0;
$i++ until ($i >= $N || $name[$i] eq $mapname);
next if $i>=$N; # continue if this map name cannot be found
# load linedefs and sectors
my $j = $i; $j++ until $name[$j] eq 'LINEDEFS';
my $lines; seek F, $start[$j], 0; read F, $lines, $length[$j];
$j = $i; $j++ until $name[$j] eq 'SECTORS';
my $sectors; seek F, $start[$j], 0; read F, $sectors, $length[$j];
# construct hashes of line number to action, number to tag
my (%actions, %tags, %sectags);
for ($i = 0; 14*$i < length $lines; $i++) {
my ($action, $tag) = unpack("SS", substr($lines, 14*$i+6, 4));
if ($action && $tag) {
$actions{$i} = $action;
$tags{$i} = $tag;
}
}
# make a list of sectors with a given tag
for ($i = 0; 26*$i < length $sectors; $i++) {
my $sectag = unpack("S", substr($sectors, 26*$i+24, 2));
if ($sectag) {
push @{$sectags{$sectag}}, $i;
}
}
# loop through the actions found with list of associated sectors
for (keys %actions) {
printf("%s L%05d A%03d", $mapname, $_, $actions{$_});
printf(" S%03d", $_) for (@{$sectags{$tags{$_}}});
print "\n";
}
}
close F;
That's called sexual harrassment, my young feller-me-lad
The expression "feller-me-lad" actually means a small boy from whom you receive oral sex, see it is short for "fellate me, lad" in the same way that "crikey" is short for "Christ, kill me"
I should stop this my boss is over there <--
Following on from last week the good news is that as I suspected it is possible to automatically allocate payments! The bad news, however, is that in nearly all cases it doesn't fucking work properly and you have do it manually anyway. Fortunately practice has enabled me to do it slightly faster than continental drift.
The point is moot, anyway. I know how to allocate payments I've entered as I go along now. Furthermore firstly the five-inch pile of allocations to do was taken away from me, then a couple of days later the remainder of the supposedly more urgent ones went as well. I thought I was going to finish them that day and all, but nevertheless at the time I was like "SCORE!"
When I tried to allocate this one guy's fees payment to the relevant charge, an error box came up, and then his payment disappeared but the charge didn't. I was like "oh I've just cost some poor cockhat eight grand" but I made a note of the student ID number and I guess they'll sort it out somehow.
I spent the final two days sorting a box full of postgraduate direct debit forms into alphabetical order. Then I had to holepunch them and put them into lever arch files. The holepunch I was using was terrible. You pushed it down and it made the holes, fair enough, but then it wouldn't come back up again so you had to sort of wrench it open. It was pretty intractable and this one time I managed to take the skin off my knuckles.
The work that I have come to think of as "the usual" is drying up, so I was sure I wouldn't be asked to go back. However, I was. I had no idea why and rather cheekily said so. I also asked a few of the people from whom I usually get work. It would seem that the postgraduate office at least has something they will want me to do, but it seems that they work out what they want me to do as they go along.
Presenting the adventures of JUNGLE JIM!
Entanglement is up and down like the proverbial whore's drawers. On the other hand Frisky's home computer has suffered some form of catastrophe, and since the site is one of those that can only be updated if you're dialled up on the ISP's own lines, it has been pronounced dead. At the very least we have solid evidence that even one trained performing monkey on a typewriter can make a better designed website than a million Geocities retards!
I walked into town this morning mainly to visit the market and get some more aniseed balls, but I couldn't find the stall I used to get them from. I went in the various horrible mainstream record shops as well. All I can say is, damnit, why did Spinadisc have to go?
I found a new facet to goatse: if you say "goatse man" over and over again really quickly it sounds like "goat semen". More importantly I only have to say the word in the rogue channel and they're all falling over themselves going "urgh argh shutup". I really don't get this
Not Another E1 Wad is an E1M9 replacement, made because the author thinks the original is rubbish. Having said that there are areas which are obviously inspired by it. It's a decent map and worth the download, stylistically perhaps not as pure E1 as I'd like; but then you could argue the original isn't, either..
Finally, it seems some people "enjoyed" Shitty Contentless Updates Week but only because "any update means something to read".
please don't hate me it gnaws at my soul
ROGUE CHANNEL IRC DRAMA
Wages... Must remember I'm getting wages...
Apart from piles of cheques and printouts of transactions (I did three whole sheets of cheques in about twenty five minutes!) four new things emerged to do last week.
- I've put them through the credit card machine, I've checked them, but before this week I had never had to enter any credit card transactions. This was exactly the same as entering cheques only you get about a million bits of curled shiny paper to handle. It was annoying enough, then on Friday they decided to have a fire drill when I was right in the middle of doing a large set of them and I completely lost my place
- There were an enormous batch of PLU deposits to be returned to students who had completed their courses. You get their student ID and use it to get their address, write out an envelope, put in the letter with attached cheque, cover it in stamps and put it in the post. It was dull but easy except for writing out continental addresses. These are weird in both layout and spelling so I had to keep looking back up at the screen to check I was doing it right
- Student status letters. There was an overabundance of "to whom it may concern" letters to be done by the records people and with absences running high they roped me into it. You check the person is fully enrolled then the system generates a letter which you copy into Word, edit a bit so it looks nice, and print out six copies. It was annoying because it was a process that could clearly be far more automated than it was. However, the funniest part is that now there are a few poor fuckers going around trying to claim that they're students using letters signed by "Rob Young, Academic Office". I concluded that the academic office stamp you had to put on each letter was far more valuable than the name at the bottom.
- On Thursday I was given a pile of A4 paper fully five inches high. These were a list of students who had (possibly) paid their fees but the payments hadn't been allocated to the relevant charges. I had to go through them and allocate the payments. As you can imagine this was really repetitive, but also requires extensive use of the mouse which, on the computer they gave me, is rather like a brick with suction pads on the bottom. I'm pretty sure I've made at least one or two horrible mistakes while doing this; not only is it dull and repetitive but just like those student status letters common sense told me it's a job that should be able to be automated. Many of the payments I'm allocating are ones that I've entered in weeks past, and I'm pretty sure you can allocate them as you go along, but I was never told how to, or even that I should.
I guess that whatever gripes I might have, it's the life of a temp. You get told what to do and how to do it and then basically be a robot. In fact I'm surprised I haven't got into more trouble for thinking too much and making decisions (about the purpose of a given cheque, for example) that should probably be left to the more experienced staff. But they're all even busier than I am, so I prefer not to disturb them unless I absolutely have to.
It's got to be said that doing the payment allocations and finding those mistakes in stuff I did, and thought I was doing well, three weeks ago was very demoralising and I found myself really hoping they wouldn't ask me to go back, but they did. Fifth week...
Other shit that's not long enough to deserve its own heading
Poor Towel. Following an accident in which she "poured out her heart and soul" into an update only to have Mozilla eat it, she deleted her site. This made me sad because Entanglement was clearly a site into which a lot of work had gone. We can only wish the Darling of Compsoc well, and hope she puts up a new and improved site with even more gothic sketches and photos of crazily coloured hairstyles soon!
This week's newstuff, number 150, is one of the recent best. In particular there's Fear Complex. Episode 1 style and easy but really large and with over 300 monsters, it has the potential to be, like UAC Experiment, a superlative Sunday Afternoon Drive map. I will report back on it and the others that caught my eye in a later update.
I listened to the football, and was generally pleased with the result. I had been utterly convinced England would lose horribly, and never more so than after the penalty miss. I like how these so-called professionals can hold grudges and act on them even after a period of months; it's fair enough to expect things to get heated during the course of one game but I would have thought that going home and having a good night's sleep would give you a little perspective.
I managed to fix my Christmas lights; as it turned out it was only the fuse bulb that had failed. I replaced it, and also took the opportunity to replace the green one that had never worked in the time I've had the set. However, unfortunately with this and having given my only other fuse bulb away last year I don't have any spare so I'll have to find somewhere from which you can get them.
And finally, I think I made the entirety of the rogue #warwick hate me yesterday! As far as I can tell they take me seriously! Oh dear. People even tell me I shouldn't take it so seriously! I could say that they've missed the point, but I guess as usual I went too far. Sorry guys!
your eyes were bigger than your belly
An old saying whose meaning changes horribly when applied to anime
on the seventh day the experiment is complete
We have shown that
- it is possible to update every day of the week, but
- it is not possible to avoid the resulting entries being dreary wastes of server space
I suspect part of the problem is that I know talking about work is really fucking dull but there isn't much else that happens in a given weekday. The remainder is of course that like almost everyone else with a weblog I have nothing of interest to say to anyone.
:D lol :D I can type coherently ^_^; *bounce* :P
Whoever keeps posting "snafu person" on Towel's comments page are morons and should stop
~.:={RjY}=:.~
rock your soul and make the building shake
oooooh feel good ooooh yeah yeah oooooh fe feel good ooooh hooooo
feel good fe fe feel good feel good feel feel guh guh good
fuckwit convention caricatured
Finally after like five months the pictures from the rogue channel's visit to a public house have been scanned and uploaded
Followup to the third to last paragraph of this update. Coincidentally, the job mentioned in the final paragraph turned up on Unitemps the other day, which was kind of funny
? has requested we send you details of job
Okay somebody's being an idiot
Hi,
A friend of yours, ?, has requested we send you information on the following job:
B7388 - Digital Preservation Department - Unix Systems Administrator
Further information about this job is available on the Capita RAS website via the link below:
http://www.capitaras.co.uk/JobDetail/B/03/7388/000
Sender: ? a@a.a
Capita RAS Online Services
For fucks sake the closing date is tomorrow, it requires 2-3 years experience, and more importantly to leave home. Along with the dubious anonymity I can only conclude I'm being trolled
I AM NOT AN ATOMIC PLAYBOY
If you hadn't already realised this week is "write shitty contentless update every day" week
get yoh ass to mahs
So reality took one step closer to fiction today as Ahnold was elected governer of California. Before you know it Hugh Grant will become Mayor of London. Anyway what happened to Gary Coleman?
Furthermore I was annoyed by the Simpsons being delayed by two or three minutes for a "Party Conference Broadcast" which somehow managed to be less captivating than the title sequence of The Salon.
That's about as much politics as I can be bothered with. I had hoped that while I was in the shower I'd think up something to finish this post off with, but all I did was hum drumbeats which doesn't translate well into text.
YOU CAN'T HAVE TOO MANY ROCKETS
Remember that every time you find rockets in some map and don't know whether or not to pick them up
It's bloody dark in here
A couple of days ago, one of my sets of fairy lights (can't call them christmas lights because they're up all year round) decided to fail. None of the bulbs light which suggests that the fuse has gone. I can't replace the fuse bulb in case the replacement follows suit. I suppose I have to check each bulb, but if I have to replace the fuse to do that the whole thing's fucking screwed! Oh no what do I do
At last, the followup to Which of RjY's treasured possessions will break next
but at least the internet isn't quite as broken any more
*.com no longer resolves to an IP address. Apparently that was fixed a few days ago. I never even saw the thing to which it was supposed to resolve before because it was always down, heh
I went to watch the snooker but it had been rained off
It's been a while since I've had to go to sleep early on a Sunday and been out all day Monday, so that I have a new Dreem Teem Presents recording to listen to when I get home. Of course when I have no reason to maintain a sensible sleeping schedule and it ends up like I'm living somewhere in the vicinity of Hawaii I would just listen to the show live, but this is a pleasant reminder of the days when, in particular, I'd get home after a day featuring Writing Skills and really be in need of something to cheer me up.
Something Awful's new feature "The Weekend Web" is shaping up to be one of the site's funniest, if the first two are anything to go by. It may be about forums but it reminds me of that thing where you go to livejournal, deadjournal, blurty, or any other of these diary sites, and click the random button until you find one that's hilariously retarded. It's funny and passes the time.
Also on the subject of people who can't seem to bring themselves to type coherently on the internet, and also to answer whoever it was who left the comment "Uhm, 1) who the...? and 2) how'd you get on SNAFU?" I'd like to welcome Towel, one of the denizens of the rogue #warwick, to my somewhat neglected site portal. We do what we can to bring hits to people. Also I removed a couple of sites that have shut down, but none of the ones who haven't updated for ages but still potentially could.
carrots handbags cheese toilets russians planets hamsters weddings poets stalin KUALA LUMPUR pygmies budgies KUALA LUMPUR
Okay I admit it's growing on me.
Also to fuel OBNOXIOUS DRAMA I think there should be MORON CENTRAL EVICTION NIGHT! You should be able to vote! Oh man it's so funny I couldn't stop laughing all morning.
PRBoom crashed but now it doesn't
I tried doing a run of the whole of Doom Episode 3, but after the end of E3M3 it crashed with some error that I can't remember, something about drawing patches at illegal coordinates, or something. This happened twice but just now I ran through the level (19% kills, 59 seconds, of course the world record is only 24) but on exit it was fine! What the hell?
However I couldn't get Southern Cross Gold Edition to run. It says "Requirements: possibly ZDoom" in the text file, but so did the original and that didn't stop DIY from running it. I don't know. Every source port is different.
In today's newstuff I found Black Mountain. This is a large, easy map mostly set outdoors, then passing through a rather dull skin-textured maze, then back outdoors again for some impressive setpieces and large open areas. There's not much detail but there are several groups of small monsters in large numbers which coupled with an abundance of ammunition makes it fun. I liked the area with the huge dried up lava fall and the even greater sized final area surrounding the mountain or whatever the hells its supposed to be. It has a vague story and some extra graphics used at the very end for spice. Recommended if you've got nothing better to do; it remains to be seen if I can be bothered to play it again.
I'VE SEEN THINGS, I'VE SEEN THEM WITH MY EYES
scampi.swf is apparently the followup to badger.swf. I still think odd.swf is better than both of them but I haven't yet watched any of the others.
I'm just glad it wasn't raining
With one important exception week 3 of work in the academic office was much the same as week 2. Get pile of cheques, write them out onto payment sheets and enter them into the system. Check the stuff other people have put in is correct. Repeat.
The exception was Thursday afternoon. Due to the absence of another guy I was roped into delivering boxes of instructions for online module registration to departments all over main campus. Oh fun! Inaccessible buildings, heavy boxes and stone-faced deparmental secretaries galore!
- Having been a student doesn't necessarily mean you know campus well. I know the computer rooms, the library, and the locations of a number of lecture rooms. The undergraduate offices of nearly a dozen random departments were, as far as I was concerned, deep into "There be Dragons" territory.
- I'd go to three or four departments at a time, carting boxes on a two-wheeled L-shaped trolley. I gained a whole new appreciation for the difficulties faced by wheelchair users as it seemed every single route I took was blocked by steep stairs.
- I had to go into the physics department for the first time in over two years. I'd hoped never to have to go in there again but fortunately I didn't see anyone I knew, except possibly the people in their undergraduate office. I don't think they remembered me but certainly didn't look pleased to see me at all (but apparently physics hates the online registration scheme for some reason)
- When I finally found the correct office in the engineering department I explained what it was I was delivering and this guy says "why didn't they put the instructions online too?" I didn't have an answer, so all I did was laugh and say "good point". However later on after overhearing the amazingly pretentious conversation of some overdressed posers in the humanities department lift I realised that it was highly unlikely half the university would read any such instructions at all if all they were presented with was a URL.
- Finally it took me long enough to even find computer science as as it has moved since I last explored campus (the old building now occupied by a group I've heard described by staff as the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Yobs) When I finally did... oh man. It's like a fucking sewer round there. The only explanation I can think of that seems reasonable, given my experience of computer scientists, is that they all decided to shit themselves at once.
- Thanks to all the people who held doors open and whatnot for me though, even though they'll never read this
But I've been asked to go back for yet another week. Hopefully without the unexpected manual labour. Oh yeah, unless you absolutely have to I'd advise you to stay away from the office for a while because the queues outside are pretty long.
cousinishes
My cousin and her two sons came to my house last week. I haven't seen my cousinishes for a long time and how little we seem to have in common any more would sadden me if I didn't find horrible stereotypes so hilarious. The elder one is seventeen and a half and from his cap, tracksuit, signet rings and trainers (complete with those godsawful half-socks that end below the ankles) to his two-year smoking habit and mobile phone whose screen reads "Rach 4eva", he is about as townie as it is possible to be.
The younger one has just turned fourteen and is therefore even more mumblingly surly than he used to be and when he does open his mouth it's usually to insult you. It's a shame because I think he's pretty clever but suffers from the same low opinion of himself that's plagued me my whole life, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I'd like to tell him to fucking stop it lest he find himself up shit creek one day but I have no idea how.
They both have ridiculously thick Coventry accents, which raised a peculiar issue for me because all of a sudden I found myself using longer words than usual, and pronouncing everything as correctly as I could. This was in contrast to how dumb I found myself trying to sound and how much of an accent I was putting on when I was going around with those boxes. I don't know why my brain would act differently in this way, especially since usually I wish I had a thick midlands accent of my own and didn't sound so much like a fucking ponce. I hate my voice.
