03/02/2003 @15:25:14 ^19:46:53

I Told You, Don't View This Site With IE!

Its PNG support turns out to be, predictably enough, extremely retarded!

libpng.org's PNG support in browsers page

Despite Appearances, This Is Not A Rant!

Following the recent Field of Integers debacle, I have been accused of being a "blogger" suffering an "eternal struggle for actual content".

Yes, I'm fully aware it's a joke, but it again made me think about why I do this site at all. Like everything else I do, it's entirely selfish. (I write code, but never release it unless I have to in order for it to be useful. I make records, but I'll be damned if I ever try to give them to people again. Too many idiots complaining about sound quality or simply telling me "that's crap, Rob")

I do this site so that whenever I have something I want to go on about, I can. I can't talk to people I know about things I would like to talk about, we don't have those things in common. Rave records? "We don't want to know" Doom? "Don't make us laugh, it's shit" Computers? Most are like "shut up"; I know some who aren't, but they know so much more than me it's embarrassing...

It's for me. It's entirely selfish. I'm not going around whoring for hits by posting images of half naked celebrities or doing link exchanges with lots of other sites. I'm not running a community site. I don't have comments pages. (If I did, it would be because I built them myself as a coding experiment) I might well appear to be struggling for content, to anyone else who happens to read this. But I'm not posting for them to read, I'm posting when and only when there are things I want to say - good or bad - and I think I have noone to whom to say it.

So don't call me a "blogger"! I think I'm disqualified, thank gods. I hate that term.

To that end, I have something I want to be uncharacteristically pleased about, yet I wouldn't really be able to tell anyone because I couldn't see them understanding why this is fantastic (and rightly so)...

Doomworld's Custom Titles Contest

Yesterday evening, there was the Doomworld custom titles superfest contest. The idea was, twenty(ish) screenshots from from either Doom or Doom 2 were posted, one at a time (in many cases having been tampered with in evil ways!) Contestants had to give the game and the map number, and the first person to get it would win.

And I won! Twice!!

I can't believe I won, to be honest, I never win anything. But I guess this competition was made for me... I have (a) a fast internet connection (b) an excellent visual and symbolic memory and (c) a chronic malignant obsession with a nine year old computer game, heh.

I risked pissing off the forum moderators, and people running the contest, to win twice. Why? There's a few reasons.

• I missed out on the first screenshot posted by a few seconds. I won the third one. I realised I was pretty good at it, so I carried on. Ego trip? I guess so...
• A cheap way to increase my postcount; a good few of my posts are carefully-researched and formatted posts, often as not with citations from the source code. Not only do they take ages to type, there is little opportunity to post them. Hence my postcount before the contest was only 27, after some eight and a half months. This was annoying. The ease with which people seemed to post, and subsequently become friends. My general unwillingness to venture an opinion for fear of looking like a dumbass...
• The first one I won was originally mistakenly awarded to someone else. Instead of taking offence and leaving in a huff I uncharacteristically thought "I could make sure of this by winning another one"
• The person to whom my win was awarded was crowing about it on #zdoom, only to be hugely disappointed. Now I know that kind of disappointment, it's horrible, and I wasn't about to be the cause of it in someone else if I could possibly avoid it. I thought maybe I could win another one and donate it. It turned out I was right, and I was thanked for my efforts. How to win friends and influence people, yeah? I wish that thread had been posted sooner, like before I'd gone to bed last night... I had a few ideas...

Oh, the prize. Winners got the custom title of their choice. See under my name where it says "anARCHy"... When you get to 250 posts, you get to set your avatar (the little picture) to one of your own choice, as opposed to one of the default ones (and I stopped caring about avatars when I switched them off, along with images and sigs, to make the pages load faster) but titles are harder to get because they are only given by the forum admins as a reward (or a punishment for being a retard, heh) I know it doesn't seem like much, especially now one way or another there are so many people with custom titles, but, you know, it means something to me.

PS It's a huge coincidence: I was going to post here about the guy who beat me to the first screenshot anyway. I'd rather rashly decided to write a post about drum and bass, but... well, just read it and the ones after, yeah?...