04/12/2005 @22:18:34 ^23:06:37

This update is going to be rubbish but read it anyway. You haven't got anything else to do.

Write a parody of Spark's user profile. Then click this thing, there's a very good chance you'll see something hilarious (depending on your sense of humour)

I haven't played much Doom recently. The sheer quantity of stupid bugs in the development version of Prboom is depressing. However here are a couple of things which I can mention:

• Doom advent calendar, one map a day until Christmas. Shame today's doesn't work in Prboom in spite of being stated as "Boom compatible". Please test your maps in something other than ZDoom. ZDoom-compatible does not imply Boom-compatible.
• A beta version of a project called Congestion 1024 has been released. This is a set of 32 maps each with playing area not exceeding a 1024x1024 unit square. They're like normal maps but highly compressed. You get lots of very fine detail and teleporting monsters (as an appreciator of well-designed monster teleporters I can say some of these are incredibly well done) However they are cramped. Well, obviously! I need to able to move freely to really enjoy a map, so it's not really to my tastes. Doomworld threads: release notice, news post. I don't know what's happened to the conglomerate map 30.

Related: note to authors, just stop using zdbsp, it only works properly with zdoom and fucks up texture alignment in everything else. 1024.wad really suffers from this.

Changing the subject, Harry Potter films can't hold a candle to the books. The second one was on TV yesterday. The ending made me feel ill and if I hadn't read the books I wouldn't know what the fuck was going on at all.

Speaking of films - definitely "films", "movies" is American - The Two Towers was rubbish as well. I read the Lord of the Rings books when I was 12 and they bored the shit out of me, so when I saw Fellowship of the Ring earlier this year I was actually very surprised to find I liked it. But The Two Towers or Twin Towers or whatever the fuck it was called was just like I remember the book. That is, long, boring and incomprehensible.