25/04/2004 @17:30:20 ^19:58:17

morning has broken

I'll break your fucking face

WAIT ALL WEEK FOR NOTHING BUT MORE SHIT ABOUT DOOM

Real World was a 20 level map set that came out last summer; a few weeks ago Real World 2, the sequel, was released. It's the same thing, small sized levels which are to a greater or lesser extent remixes of Doom and Doom2 original IWAD maps.

This one is at least initially more about Doom episode 1 than anything else. For example mazes in dark strobelit computer cores were abound, and it seemed like every level had a place with an armour vest on top of a computer panel. Compare the one visible in the distnance from your start position in the original E1M2. Being a Doom2 PWAD some licence with the texturing in these E1 parts had to be taken. Later on it improves though as E2M2, E4M7, and MAP09 all feature textures that can be found in the regular Doom2 IWAD...

As for gameplay, well, it's pretty trivial. I managed to play all 10 levels through to the end without dying at all, though I was saving the game at the start of each map so I had the psychological advantage of knowing I wouldn't have to restart the whole thing if I fucked up. Then I managed to do every map from a pistol start. The only ones that were even remotely difficult were the first one, where you have to actually shoot some monsters before you get a shotgun and the last one, which has some large monsters to contend with.

In summary it's a decent set of 10 levels but probably not as good as the original, which of course had 20. I recommend both the original and its sequel but I think the author would do well to get all 30 levels done so far, along with a couple of others, and release a full 32-level set.

how much time can be wasted

Hearing about the plans to upload the summer exam timetable as, of all things, an Excel spreadsheet, and put a link to it on the academic office website, I decided to press my luck and see if I could get them to let me make an HTML version. I did this in the belief that it would get used, but then I discovered they'd published the Excel spreadsheet anyway and indeed you can go into insite and get a personalised timetable. So what it amounted to was that I wasted an entire day writing stupid perl scripts.

However it makes me look like more of a rebel if I say, yeah, I did it deliberately, fuck the man, I'm getting paid for doing nothing, I rule the world, baby, when they said, what are you rebelling against, I said, what do you have, and then it was 4:20 on 4/20 so I smoked a blunt.

In truth I feel really guilty when I have nothing to do.

Anyway here are the two test cards I prepared. I had in mind that they could be pasted into a SiteBuilder page or something, but whatever. Don't link to them because they probably won't stay there forever. Also I hope your browser can decompress gzipped html on the fly (most can, I believe)

In other news I finally managed to get my account renewed; I'd been getting messages from ITS for the past month about it, and I'd told people but nothing had happened. Eventually I plucked up the courage to email the guy in charge of such matters and say "this is the last working day before all my files disappear" which seemed to do more than the trick, as the expiry date is now hilariously far into the future.

However on Wednesday about forty boxes of records and files came back from the scanners. It's pretty much my job to check them, so all this timewasting and doing things that are remotely interesting will have to stop.

It would be nice if I had access to them though