17/07/2005 @19:11:38 ^23:47:22

stuck in a wooden house in the middle of a forest fire

the only source of water a dozen miles of blazing bracken away

I have nothing much to write about

In the previous update I neglected to mention the player death sound replacement in heroes.wad. This was an oversight as it is very funny if you first loaded the wad at the about the same time you saw Star Wars Episode 3.

Since then I've been half-heartedly doing ancient maps off that D1000 CD from last year. Most of them are either unplayable due to being bug-ridden or deathmatch maps or too trivial to even warrant a mention, although I've found a few nice ones.

Sometime during doing map 5 of my megawad project I found myself completely stuck, not due to lack of ideas but simply from running out of patience implementing them. The testing cycle when you're putting the monsters into a map is the worst. You have to play the damn thing over and over again until it even the mildest of annoyances causes rage. Since it's a fifth map in an episode it has to be significantly harder than the first, which means that to test the end half of the map you have to get past the first half. Over and over again. And carelessness through rushing to get to the bit I'm meant to be testing I get killed in the bit that's done already and have to restart. But you can't use god mode or whatever because that will ruin the balance. Eventually you just can't face even looking at your map editor.

The father has acquired a garden table and associated paraphernalia from another relative. At least it's made of wood, not plastic. There are, for some reason, two parasols, one of which is small and pitiful and the other is absolutely, almost comically, enormous. To top this off the mother did not like the chairs so the parents went to some charity thing and bought four old fashioned wooden kitchen chairs. I really don't understand why my mother wants all this stuff. Our garden here is way too small. It'd be good to sit there with a laptop and a wireless connection but they had garden furniture back in the day we all lived in the same house, and it was rarely, if ever, used... In fact it was almost always covered in rain. This spell of hot weather isn't going to last forever

I went for a walk round the common and took a ball to chuck around. I managed to get it stuck in a tree but somehow avoided panicing, instead I looked for a stick to poke it out. I found a large lump of rock, which I lobbed at the ball in the tree. It struck cleanly and knocked the ball back into my hand. Sadly I lost sight of the rock

In conclusion here are some fake spoilers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince