ArmouredBlood

When I post in the Doomworld Facebook group, I don't expect irrelevant shitposting in the topic. I'm not asking for one to be 100% in line but don't be posting irrelevant memes or Halo material in a Doom group for the sake of getting reactions of others. It looks immature and childish in my eyes.

Some joking/funny relevant material can be OK but don't unload crap onto my topic because a select handful (which got shitcanned from the group) did and thought they could get away with it.

That is what /b/ and other places is for, not the Doomworld FB group.






..Maybe I'm just getting too old (lol 33) for the immaturity I saw the other day.

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Thought I'd mess around, try and get some more newgothic out. And streaming it. I may or may not keep it up.

http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood

Gentlemen, I am going bald. I am not bald, but I will be bald. My hair is skinny, not fat. My entire family has skinny hair. My family does not ever go grey, we just go bald. Sadly they say you get your hair from your mother's side of the family and my mother's mother was balding at 50.

There are a few reasons someone can be bald. Genetics of course, but also inflammatory disease (ex: gingivitis and multiple sclerosis) can cause baldness. Basically, baldness is a side effect. Sweat can clog hair follicles and so on.

So after doing some research, I'm going the vitamin route to fix things. What causes hair growth? What does the body need to make it? What am I not getting enough of? Like if you want to build a red barn out of legos. If you have a lot of red legos, you can make a big barn, but if you only have a few, then your barn won't be big.

I've spent about $50 on vitamin A, B6, C, E, Iron, Biotine, Zinc and Omega 3 (for the why the hell not factor).

At this point, it is only a proclamation that I am going to down these vitamins and see what happens in the next 30+ days. While this might not be some miracle cure for hair loss, it will probably result in better overall health. I'll let you all know how it goes, but is there any one among you crazy enough to try this experiment with me?

Or is it 'degree mode on'? Either way, I graduated yesterday from university after 3.5 years, finished my BA degree with majors in Philosophy and Gender Studies. Enjoying my break so far before I get back into uni again next year, where I'll be doing a Bachelor of Philosophy/Master of Research post-grad course, and hope I do well enough to go for a PhD.

This is me caped in academic glory.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/1231219_10151877578276488_1573232125_n.jpg

On a side note, ever since I finished my degree in June and was left contending with truckloads of time, I've been working on a Doom 2 Boom project. Just to clarify, I said I'd 'retire' from mapping so I'd effectively discipline myself into focusing more on uni work, which worked quite well for me (and I'd look like a right idiot if I came back any sooner). But I figured I'd release a nice and proper project to make up for Surge, and instead of 'retiring', I'll just say it can't be guaranteed that I will or will not make another map. :P I'll probably officially announce the project in a month or so when I've done enough to show some progress. The project itself is a perfect example of why I suck at vanilla mapping. I hope to finish it before I start my postgrad course next year, which is looking doable at the time being.

I'm also looking for a known UV-Max Speedrunner to help me out with the gameplay balancing/advice. Let me know if you're keen!

*Behold, an original title!

My laptop of 6 years broke its video card on me a few weeks ago, so I'm stuck on the family computer for a while. Doom and doomworld have been low on the priority list because of that, and mapping is ... unlikely. My hard drive should be fine, so, just need to get an enclosure and try to get the data copied and then the few maps/scraps I got will be saved. Lots of time to read and hang out with people, but I've never been an out and about person. I have a job interview coming up Wednesday and with US football season starting soon (stupid fantasy football getting me interested) I'll have plenty to do until I save the money for a computer of my own again, and then save for graduate school.

Oh yeah, and student loans. They suck. Scared to hell of that 22k looming over me for the next 10 to 20 years. And that was for 3 years with community college. I'm in forebearance/application for deferment for a month or so more, so it's not immediate, but fuck that rolled over 550$ bill the second month and threats of default ... that's motivating me to get a job ASAP. I think with some organization and a decade more of students in huge loan debts, us USAers will finally get the gov to help pay the debt and get money to colleges to reduce tuition, but that's rather far off and no help now.

Between the intense boredom and ohshitshit'sgettingseriousnow, I've been caught heavily by the living card game Android:netrunner and own the core and all expansions except one, and love to play it however infrequently my friends who do play it can hang out. Also star wars: edge of empire is awesome, and my group had its second meeting Sunday in which we killed lots of thugs and our R2 unit doctor masqueraded as cousin it in wookie pelts for a bit. I got to fail at being a mystic Gand findsman too, although I got a few souvenirs for the people. My WoW raid group finally killed lei shen, and now we're hoping to gear everyone up a little better in the one week we have before 5.4 hits. Luckily the family computer is just different, and not worse than my laptop, so games go decently. Not fun occupying the computer 8-10 PM on thursday though.

And the last thing to talk about. One of our dogs, around 9-12 years old (I have no idea how old anymore really) had to be put down last week from having his second lung collapse. He hadn't been doing too great lately, and I'm worried our other dog will be following not too far off from losing him since they were siblings, but such is life. It didn't affect me quite as hard as losing the dog we had before them, but I was much younger. My sisters are more affected since they didn't really know our last dog that long. Well, just had to get that out there.

Anyway, I've been both good and bad, life going as it does. Better than the last school semester when I was just tutoring and doing fuck all else and bored out of my mind when not playing games. Thinking of taking some programming classes on coursera or something, learn python or java, so I can get closer to my interest in bioinformatics. And then one day, when genomes can be modified and sculpted into new species that are 95% of the time viable, I will create creatures that will offer more efficient, environmentally and ecologically safe and adjusted alternatives to current mechanical industries. Well, that's the dream. Maybe keep my offhand promise to my dad to brew a purple beer that tastes great until then. SO much that could be done in the future, if we don't fuck it up.

Reinstalled Windows 7 on my laptop for the umpteenth time this year, due to a recurring problem that shows up after some time of using my Wacom tablet / USB mouse / laptop touchpad:

1. Touchpad is barely responsive
2. Mouse has its red light, but flickers and shuts off every now and then.
3. When I go to use my tablet, even while holding the pen in place, the on-screen cursor goes on a shaking fit on the screen. Quite annoying when I'm going to draw straight lines. =/

I have a Dell Latitude D520 laptop at the moment, not exactly the best thing on Earth. But, since I don't have too much in funds coming in either way, I have to stick with it for now.

Has anyone else had this problem? I've tried looking it up, but most of the sites I go to provide me with stupid "Turn off / Turn back on" and "Unplug / plug back in" -esque answers.

I've been putting off buying a new desktop PC for years, and now I've finally decided I'd rather have a laptop anyway, which should get me out of my basement and into my kitchen.

I'm thinking 15.6" screen, big enough to see and small enough to carry. 1366x768 max resolution is fine. Aside from that it just needs to be reasonably good at playing things and doing stuff by modern standards. A friend is already telling me to get the Lenovo IdeaPad Y510p on sale for $850 on this page. If anyone wants to show me some better performance:price ratios or warn me about important things I haven't thought about then that's what this thread is fuckin' for.

I've been putting off buying a new desktop PC for years, and now I've finally decided I'd rather have a laptop anyway, which should get me out of my basement and into my kitchen.

I'm thinking 15.6" screen, big enough to see and small enough to carry. 1366x768 max resolution is fine. Aside from that it just needs to be reasonably good at playing things and doing stuff by modern standards. A friend is already telling me to get the Lenovo IdeaPad Y510p on sale for $850 on this page. If anyone wants to show me some better performance:price ratios or warn me about important things I haven't thought about then that's what this thread is fuckin' for.

Obligatory tl;dr warning.

Family drama just seems to be mounting over here as of late, and I'm just wanting desperately to get away from it all.

Right now, my mum is the only person I can stand. She has seemingly no unlikeable qualities whatsoever and is an absolute saint to all of us. I love her dearly.

My dad, meanwhile, has recently become a ticking time-bomb of rage. If someone dares to speak while he's on a train of thought (ie. all the time because actually he never seems to stop talking) then he'll either passive-aggressively shut up, and just stew in raging silence for the rest of the day... or take out all his frustration on all of us, to the point where he thinks we all hate him and are bored by his very existence. He has some serious demons that none of us can reasonably deal with, because he lets them develop into hideous cancerous thoughts about the world around him that can't be shifted. This came to be obvious to me some time last year when, after I'd become rather frustrated with his constant negative outlook on things, he stayed up all night typing a 2,500 word "letter" detailing how I was an ungrateful little shit who didn't appreciate any of the hard work he'd ever done for me. I don't have said letter any more, but it was the most upsetting thing in the world to read. His thoughts started out fairly honest and reasonable and I initially agreed with how I may have said some wrong things to him, but those thoughts rapidly degenerated into utter madness. I could tell he'd just thought, "James is a bit of a bastard sometimes", when he'd started, but he'd just allowed increasingly fetid and horrible untruths about me and the argument we'd had to spiral out of control from that one thought, and he condensed all of that vitriol into 2,500 terrible words. I spent the whole day feeling wrecked, staying in my room away from him, and seeing no alternative but to write a rebuttal, which amounted to 4,000 words and I had to show him the following day because I spent so long on it.

I realize this all sounds incredibly pathetic. And that things could be much worse, like he could threaten me/the rest of us with actual violence, but the fact remains that it's not normal for my dad to be able to harbor such horrible thoughts so easily, and the way he deals with those thoughts is always so incredibly detached from reality. Could he not just, like, get into an actual argument with me? That honestly would've been preferable.

Meanwhile, my brother seems to be getting increasingly bipolar. Most of the time he's just astoundingly silly and loud, and can be heard at almost any time of the day loudly regurgitating quotes from YouTube videos, or yelling at his TF2 teammates. He also animates with Flash occasionally (which he's still learning), and does voice-overs for other people on a voice-acting board. But even though he has all these things he loves doing, and does them, every week or so we see him drag himself out of bed utterly depressed and then require a lecture on self-improvement from my dad, which won't really reach a conclusion, but will definitely bring up how he's "afraid of success" and all sorts of other stupid bollocks. Neither me or my brother currently go to school or have jobs, so we have all the free time necessary to make whatever we want of ourselves. I'm doing what I love (making music and moving towards finishing our EP) but it's as if he doesn't like doing what he loves, as weird as that sounds. I think he sees it all as work, so he procrastinates chronically. He'll also get upset at the smallest things (like people not putting the biscuit packets back in the cupboard properly - seriously) and make a massive deal out of them. And most alarmingly, today at the dinner table he revealed that he'd been dealing with homicidal thoughts that occurred because people (i.e. us) had the gall to be in his room and he wanted to be alone. But those thoughts were gone now and it was over and not worth worrying about (bizarrely, my dad concurred with this). I'm like, "no, that's actually quite disturbing" - I seriously worry about his mental well-being, sometimes, and this just compounded my concern.

Both these things collided a couple of nights ago when my brother, outraged at how a pack of biscuits hadn't been put back properly, interrupted my dad. At that point I had a bit of an "oh, fuck" moment, because my dad got this look that I can't really describe. After my brother had made a royal song-and-dance about the biscuits, my mum tried to steer the subject back to my dad had been talking about (something actually important, related to our financial position) but he took this as another interruption in the flow of the conversation, and just exploded. He was swearing and throwing insults and making up stuff about what we thought of him, like how he was incompetent and forgetful (he made this shit up on the spot but he believed it!). He has since apologized for the outburst and tried to make amends, but parts of his tirade still hang in my mind, namely how he was so convinced that we all thought he was worthless and boring and stupid, and how when he gets into these moods he can't be reasoned with.

[Rough translation of how it went:]
"You all think I'm boring and worthless."
"No, we don't."
"See? And now you think I'm wrong and a liar."
"No, stop being childish."
"FUCK OFF AND LET ME SPEAK. [insert uninterrupted 4000-word argument here]"

At the end of all this we were all (him included) emotionally drained and thoroughly upset, most of all him because he managed to divert the subject by saying (through tears at this point) that he wanted me and my brother to be successful and not have to work in a boring office job, which is his absolute worst nightmare ever. (This relates back to how he was talking about money before my brother brought up the fucking biscuits.) You may remember that I actually wanted to get a boring 9-to-5 job of that sort at some point because I just wanted to motivate myself to do better and also get some independent financial reward... but that still hasn't happened. And now it looks like if it does, my dad will see himself as a failure of a father.

For some reason my dad's currently talking with his mum on Skype about what happened two nights ago. Which means he's going to dredge up all the emotional turmoil from what happened and get his mum to give her input, which I can't see panning out well because she's likely just going to get him all riled up again. I really hope she doesn't, because for the most part she's really nice, but does have a bit of a habit of unwittingly stirring up a good deal of family drama.

The truth of the matter is, my dad has been on a bazillion self-improvement seminars, during which he's tried to find happiness through all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming, and even religion. But he's still the same person underneath, just unable to really emote like a normal human being. I think he's beyond therapy of any sort and it'll just be another waste of expenses. I doubt that my brother would fare any better, because they just have those kinds of brains that don't take kindly to change of routine of any sort, and just gradually reform back to their original twisted ways again. I really feel like it's autism... because honestly my brother and I had to have inherited our Asperger's Syndrome-esque tendencies from somewhere. (My brother seems to still be affected by it, but I think I've "grown past" my "borderline-AS" diagnosis now.)

Honestly, because I want to help, but feel powerless to, it's getting to the point where I just want to be away from this family. Move. Run away. It's looking increasingly like a preferable option. I don't want to have to deal with people who are so detached from reality they see goddamn biscuits as being the worst thing in the world. It's just driving me mad, and compounding the fact that I don't feel like I live like a healthy human being in a healthy family environment.

I'm sorry for the long post you probably don't care about. I just had to get this bile out somewhere.

I don't know.

I had this crazy dream, where I was in a kingdom and threatened with banishment unless I could slay the beast in the moat surrounding the castle. ONWARD I GO!

I can remember diving out of bed like it was important, and taking to the floor. I was not, however, on the floor. I had dived out of the castle and into a small wooden dinghy, and was circling the castle as it towered over me. I gazed at the surrounding forest and took in the chill of the twilight air, hoping to prove my worth. I looked back at the castle and felt crestfallen; I was really enjoying that sleep.

That sleep? Ah, yes! In a sudden, the castle morphed into the bed, and the forest became the various furniture littered around the room. I was not in a dinghy, I was lay on the floor; half-asleep in the cold.

I got back into bed, a bit embarrassed. This has never happened before. I'm not sure it was sleep-walking per se, but it was weird. I don't even.

Heh. Isn't there a gif of an Imp popping out a cake around here somewhere? Anyways, I got some headphones, a DVD, chocolate and a book so far. Anyone else wishing to contribute? ;-)

Obligatory tl;dr warning.

Family drama just seems to be mounting over here as of late, and I'm just wanting desperately to get away from it all.

Right now, my mum is the only person I can stand. She has seemingly no unlikeable qualities whatsoever and is an absolute saint to all of us. I love her dearly.

My dad, meanwhile, has recently become a ticking time-bomb of rage. If someone dares to speak while he's on a train of thought (ie. all the time because actually he never seems to stop talking) then he'll either passive-aggressively shut up, and just stew in raging silence for the rest of the day... or take out all his frustration on all of us, to the point where he thinks we all hate him and are bored by his very existence. He has some serious demons that none of us can reasonably deal with, because he lets them develop into hideous cancerous thoughts about the world around him that can't be shifted. This came to be obvious to me some time last year when, after I'd become rather frustrated with his constant negative outlook on things, he stayed up all night typing a 2,500 word "letter" detailing how I was an ungrateful little shit who didn't appreciate any of the hard work he'd ever done for me. I don't have said letter any more, but it was the most upsetting thing in the world to read. His thoughts started out fairly honest and reasonable and I initially agreed with how I may have said some wrong things to him, but those thoughts rapidly degenerated into utter madness. I could tell he'd just thought, "James is a bit of a bastard sometimes", when he'd started, but he'd just allowed increasingly fetid and horrible untruths about me and the argument we'd had to spiral out of control from that one thought, and he condensed all of that vitriol into 2,500 terrible words. I spent the whole day feeling wrecked, staying in my room away from him, and seeing no alternative but to write a rebuttal, which amounted to 4,000 words and I had to show him the following day because I spent so long on it.

I realize this all sounds incredibly pathetic. And that things could be much worse, like he could threaten me/the rest of us with actual violence, but the fact remains that it's not normal for my dad to be able to harbor such horrible thoughts so easily, and the way he deals with those thoughts is always so incredibly detached from reality. Could he not just, like, get into an actual argument with me? That honestly would've been preferable.

Meanwhile, my brother seems to be getting increasingly bipolar. Most of the time he's just astoundingly silly and loud, and can be heard at almost any time of the day loudly regurgitating quotes from YouTube videos, or yelling at his TF2 teammates. He also animates with Flash occasionally (which he's still learning), and does voice-overs for other people on a voice-acting board. But even though he has all these things he loves doing, and does them, every week or so we see him drag himself out of bed utterly depressed and then require a lecture on self-improvement from my dad, which won't really reach a conclusion, but will definitely bring up how he's "afraid of success" and all sorts of other stupid bollocks. Neither me or my brother currently go to school or have jobs, so we have all the free time necessary to make whatever we want of ourselves. I'm doing what I love (making music and moving towards finishing our EP) but it's as if he doesn't like doing what he loves, as weird as that sounds. I think he sees it all as work, so he procrastinates chronically. He'll also get upset at the smallest things (like people not putting the biscuit packets back in the cupboard properly - seriously) and make a massive deal out of them. And most alarmingly, today at the dinner table he revealed that he'd been dealing with homicidal thoughts that occurred because people (i.e. us) had the gall to be in his room and he wanted to be alone. But those thoughts were gone now and it was over and not worth worrying about (bizarrely, my dad concurred with this). I'm like, "no, that's actually quite disturbing" - I seriously worry about his mental well-being, sometimes, and this just compounded my concern.

Both these things collided a couple of nights ago when my brother, outraged at how a pack of biscuits hadn't been put back properly, interrupted my dad. At that point I had a bit of an "oh, fuck" moment, because my dad got this look that I can't really describe. After my brother had made a royal song-and-dance about the biscuits, my mum tried to steer the subject back to my dad had been talking about (something actually important, related to our financial position) but he took this as another interruption in the flow of the conversation, and just exploded. He was swearing and throwing insults and making up stuff about what we thought of him, like how he was incompetent and forgetful (he made this shit up on the spot but he believed it!). He has since apologized for the outburst and tried to make amends, but parts of his tirade still hang in my mind, namely how he was so convinced that we all thought he was worthless and boring and stupid, and how when he gets into these moods he can't be reasoned with.

[Rough translation of how it went:]
"You all think I'm boring and worthless."
"No, we don't."
"See? And now you think I'm wrong and a liar."
"No, stop being childish."
"FUCK OFF AND LET ME SPEAK. [insert uninterrupted 4000-word argument here]"

At the end of all this we were all (him included) emotionally drained and thoroughly upset, most of all him because he managed to divert the subject by saying (through tears at this point) that he wanted me and my brother to be successful and not have to work in a boring office job, which is his absolute worst nightmare ever. (This relates back to how he was talking about money before my brother brought up the fucking biscuits.) You may remember that I actually wanted to get a boring 9-to-5 job of that sort at some point because I just wanted to motivate myself to do better and also get some independent financial reward... but that still hasn't happened. And now it looks like if it does, my dad will see himself as a failure of a father.

For some reason my dad's currently talking with his mum on Skype about what happened two nights ago. Which means he's going to dredge up all the emotional turmoil from what happened and get his mum to give her input, which I can't see panning out well because she's likely just going to get him all riled up again. I really hope she doesn't, because for the most part she's really nice, but does have a bit of a habit of unwittingly stirring up a good deal of family drama.

The truth of the matter is, my dad has been on a bazillion self-improvement seminars, during which he's tried to find happiness through all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming, and even religion. But he's still the same person underneath, just unable to really emote like a normal human being. I think he's beyond therapy of any sort and it'll just be another waste of expenses. I doubt that my brother would fare any better, because they just have those kinds of brains that don't take kindly to change of routine of any sort, and just gradually reform back to their original twisted ways again. I really feel like it's autism... because honestly my brother and I had to have inherited our Asperger's Syndrome-esque tendencies from somewhere. (My brother seems to still be affected by it, but I think I've "grown past" my "borderline-AS" diagnosis now.)

Honestly, because I want to help, but feel powerless to, it's getting to the point where I just want to be away from this family. Move. Run away. It's looking increasingly like a preferable option. I don't want to have to deal with people who are so detached from reality they see goddamn biscuits as being the worst thing in the world. It's just driving me mad, and compounding the fact that I don't feel like I live like a healthy human being in a healthy family environment.

I'm sorry for the long post you probably don't care about. I just had to get this bile out somewhere.

Seriously, I don't want to sound in a bad mood, but from the reviews I've seen of the Doomworld Megaproject 2012, I have to ask: why is everyone so flip' freakin' negative? I thought some of the maps we're absolutely awesome!

So many of the maps I thought were really cool, everyone else seems to call crap. Some examples:

Space Base: It's reminiscent of many of the silly sci-fi movies I watched as a kid. Yeah, it's ugly in places, and bizarre beyond all reason, but why is that bad? I myself don't get all of the humor the level goes for, but it still has a distinct feel and tone that really sets it apart.

Big Cybie's House (I believe that's what it's called): Probably one of the most creative set of uses for old Doom textures and sprites I've ever seen.

Even "Something I made While High on Mountain Dew" (again, I think that is what it is called) is neat. Though obviously, it's more an aesthetically bizarre and otherworldly experiment than it is an actual level, but you get the point.

That doesn't mean you have to like any of them. I hold everyone's opinions as equally valid. However, to me, it feels like the many of the opinion's I've heard from the Doom community, not just on these levels, but on the megaproject as a whole, are too harsh.

Oh no, the map designer used a mid texture as a wall! Surely the world will end! But wait, what about the gameplay? Is the level design itself bad? Are there interesting features being implemented?

Seriously, I'm not saying every map of this project was a masterpiece. In fact, the majority looked from meh, to good, to horrible, and so forth.

Everyone has the right to their opinions. I just hope, beyond all reason, that there will be another Megaproject coming up. Because, as a new mapper, being part of a community project that involves so many mappers at one time would truly be the biggest thing in the world to me. I just hope people would enjoy it, rather than despise it, which is what seems most everyone has done (admittedly there is a share of real clunkers, but there was also some really neat stuff, too.)

I want to preface this blog by saying that this isn't a means of responding to everyone's reactions to it, and I'm not posting this for more detailed feedback. At this risk of sounding like a cry for attention, I'm hoping this is interpretted the way I intended it and less like "PLEASE LIKE MY MAPS!!" I'm just laying out my thoughts on how the first episode panned out and how the results were different than what I expected. This is helpful for me as a mapper, to spell this out for me to review during times of need, instead of letting it dwell in my mind, abstaining me from moving forward.

I believe I was successful in creating what many of my listeners said were overly ambitious. I created levels that could be played in single player, cooperative and deathmatch. I designed the maps to play quite differently in all skill levels, with each skill level optimized to a different style of gameplay per player. All done, without reducing the volume of monsters that appear in each map. I designed the levels with a high volume of large secrets to heavily expand the gameplay if the player so chooses. I also designed the levels with many different possible routes to the exit, so that coop players could spread out and attack the same monsters from different angles, and in Nightmare, respawning hordes of monsters wouldn't crowd up hallways, blocking the only paths the player can take. This was also exciting to me as the designer, as with almost every demo I watched, the players each had a different approach to each map, none of which matching my usual runs. It seemed almost every player had a different experience, even though most of them conceded on it being rather boring.

Watching the demos of my players in my maps was infuriating at times. The way many of the players skulked around corners, picked off monsters from a safe distance, and played highly defensively was absurd to me. It appeared as though they were expecting any step to activate the trap that jumps out and slits their throat. Like the use of light monsters was supposed to lead up to something deadly. When truthfully, I wanted my players to play highly aggressively, utilize all their weapons, ration out their ammo, and crash through this thing. Instead, players weren't very observant of the ammo items, were hesitant to press onward, and resorted to infighting to conserve ammunition. With six levels with the same style of gameplay, where players were quite obviously missing the point, I couldn't help but scream "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" while watching some of the demos people made for me, as they simply wandered around crowds of monsters, even while carrying powerful weapons and tons of ammo, and unintentionally ignoring the hitscanners that devastated them. Apparently distracted by the array of directions to choose from, which was the type of gameplay I designed the easier skill levels for. I was expecting people to approach these levels with the same aggressive enthusiasm as they would Knee-Deep in the Dead, or Hell Revealed 2. From my observations it looks as though the foreboding atmosphere and lack of highly threatening monsters implied a different method of gameplay, and the players obliged.

I was beginning to be concerned that with a game as black and white as Doom, that people seem to have a need to be told what to do, and that even with an increasing demand for non-linearity in the Doom community, it's the levels that pit the player in situations where "the only way out is through" are the most successful. It became increasingly depressing as I wondered how the creator of Garry's Mod might feel, after creating a mod designed for infinite possibilities, the majority of it's player base uses it to show off Gman making silly faces.

It was comforting when I retreated to my playtesters to ask where I went wrong, and they responded that I have successfully created levels that were perfect for the type of player that I am, and that what is perfect to me may sound good on paper, but in practice, it is so specific to my own taste that it's discouraging when another player, even one who does like the same gameplay as I do, has a mild disagreement with it, especially with a brand name that people will play with specific expectations. Just give it time.

I hope time is all that it is, but it feels as though my time is up now that UAC Ultra 2 is residing in post hell. I still have hopes that after UAC Ultra 2 is completed, that players may recognize its beauty and how careful I was at designing it after playing and replaying it a few times. That is, if they can reserve the strength to give it a second chance even after it left them with a sour taste in their mouth the first time around. Who knows how long that will take. It may take decades to even consider playing UAC Ultra 2 in Nightmare coop or in Deathmatch. And I could simply be completely full of myself to be expecting that, especially when a quick sadistic zinger at the end of my opening post is all it takes put its credibility in ruins for most people. But I certainly hope not.

I'm hesitant to move right on to making the rest of UAC Ultra 2. Even though I have set high standards for myself, along with any doom level designer, I'm in full confidence that I can create the amazing Doom experiences that I can envision in my head. I'm just concerned whether I can successfully design something that will appeal to the types of people that enjoyed Speed of Doom, Alien Vendetta, Scythe 2, and the Memento Mori's without compromising the goals I set for myself in the first place, especially because many of the scenarios that appear in these wads cannot be recreated without a UV-only like design. It will take a lot of careful planning to make them work in the many game modes I wish to appeal to, and simultaneously create a unique and fun experience for the people that won't play in anything other than UV. I'm taking my time with it, but I refuse to ship out a rushed product, and can assure that every map that appears in the completed megawad will have to endure a cruel and severe level of quality control monitored by myself.

Obligatory tl;dr warning.

Family drama just seems to be mounting over here as of late, and I'm just wanting desperately to get away from it all.

Right now, my mum is the only person I can stand. She has seemingly no unlikeable qualities whatsoever and is an absolute saint to all of us. I love her dearly.

My dad, meanwhile, has recently become a ticking time-bomb of rage. If someone dares to speak while he's on a train of thought (ie. all the time because actually he never seems to stop talking) then he'll either passive-aggressively shut up, and just stew in raging silence for the rest of the day... or take out all his frustration on all of us, to the point where he thinks we all hate him and are bored by his very existence. He has some serious demons that none of us can reasonably deal with, because he lets them develop into hideous cancerous thoughts about the world around him that can't be shifted. This came to be obvious to me some time last year when, after I'd become rather frustrated with his constant negative outlook on things, he stayed up all night typing a 2,500 word "letter" detailing how I was an ungrateful little shit who didn't appreciate any of the hard work he'd ever done for me. I don't have said letter any more, but it was the most upsetting thing in the world to read. His thoughts started out fairly honest and reasonable and I initially agreed with how I may have said some wrong things to him, but those thoughts rapidly degenerated into utter madness. I could tell he'd just thought, "James is a bit of a bastard sometimes", when he'd started, but he'd just allowed increasingly fetid and horrible untruths about me and the argument we'd had to spiral out of control from that one thought, and he condensed all of that vitriol into 2,500 terrible words. I spent the whole day feeling wrecked, staying in my room away from him, and seeing no alternative but to write a rebuttal, which amounted to 4,000 words and I had to show him the following day because I spent so long on it.

I realize this all sounds incredibly pathetic. And that things could be much worse, like he could threaten me/the rest of us with actual violence, but the fact remains that it's not normal for my dad to be able to harbor such horrible thoughts so easily, and the way he deals with those thoughts is always so incredibly detached from reality. Could he not just, like, get into an actual argument with me? That honestly would've been preferable.

Meanwhile, my brother seems to be getting increasingly bipolar. Most of the time he's just astoundingly silly and loud, and can be heard at almost any time of the day loudly regurgitating quotes from YouTube videos, or yelling at his TF2 teammates. He also animates with Flash occasionally (which he's still learning), and does voice-overs for other people on a voice-acting board. But even though he has all these things he loves doing, and does them, every week or so we see him drag himself out of bed utterly depressed and then require a lecture on self-improvement from my dad, which won't really reach a conclusion, but will definitely bring up how he's "afraid of success" and all sorts of other stupid bollocks. Neither me or my brother currently go to school or have jobs, so we have all the free time necessary to make whatever we want of ourselves. I'm doing what I love (making music and moving towards finishing our EP) but it's as if he doesn't like doing what he loves, as weird as that sounds. I think he sees it all as work, so he procrastinates chronically. He'll also get upset at the smallest things (like people not putting the biscuit packets back in the cupboard properly - seriously) and make a massive deal out of them. And most alarmingly, today at the dinner table he revealed that he'd been dealing with homicidal thoughts that occurred because people (i.e. us) had the gall to be in his room and he wanted to be alone. But those thoughts were gone now and it was over and not worth worrying about (bizarrely, my dad concurred with this). I'm like, "no, that's actually quite disturbing" - I seriously worry about his mental well-being, sometimes, and this just compounded my concern.

Both these things collided a couple of nights ago when my brother, outraged at how a pack of biscuits hadn't been put back properly, interrupted my dad. At that point I had a bit of an "oh, fuck" moment, because my dad got this look that I can't really describe. After my brother had made a royal song-and-dance about the biscuits, my mum tried to steer the subject back to my dad had been talking about (something actually important, related to our financial position) but he took this as another interruption in the flow of the conversation, and just exploded. He was swearing and throwing insults and making up stuff about what we thought of him, like how he was incompetent and forgetful (he made this shit up on the spot but he believed it!). He has since apologized for the outburst and tried to make amends, but parts of his tirade still hang in my mind, namely how he was so convinced that we all thought he was worthless and boring and stupid, and how when he gets into these moods he can't be reasoned with.

[Rough translation of how it went:]
"You all think I'm boring and worthless."
"No, we don't."
"See? And now you think I'm wrong and a liar."
"No, stop being childish."
"FUCK OFF AND LET ME SPEAK. [insert uninterrupted 4000-word argument here]"

At the end of all this we were all (him included) emotionally drained and thoroughly upset, most of all him because he managed to divert the subject by saying (through tears at this point) that he wanted me and my brother to be successful and not have to work in a boring office job, which is his absolute worst nightmare ever. (This relates back to how he was talking about money before my brother brought up the fucking biscuits.) You may remember that I actually wanted to get a boring 9-to-5 job of that sort at some point because I just wanted to motivate myself to do better and also get some independent financial reward... but that still hasn't happened. And now it looks like if it does, my dad will see himself as a failure of a father.

For some reason my dad's currently talking with his mum on Skype about what happened two nights ago. Which means he's going to dredge up all the emotional turmoil from what happened and get his mum to give her input, which I can't see panning out well because she's likely just going to get him all riled up again. I really hope she doesn't, because for the most part she's really nice, but does have a bit of a habit of unwittingly stirring up a good deal of family drama.

The truth of the matter is, my dad has been on a bazillion self-improvement seminars, during which he's tried to find happiness through all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming, and even religion. But he's still the same person underneath, just unable to really emote like a normal human being. I think he's beyond therapy of any sort and it'll just be another waste of expenses. I doubt that my brother would fare any better, because they just have those kinds of brains that don't take kindly to change of routine of any sort, and just gradually reform back to their original twisted ways again. I really feel like it's autism... because honestly my brother and I had to have inherited our Asperger's Syndrome-esque tendencies from somewhere. (My brother seems to still be affected by it, but I think I've "grown past" my "borderline-AS" diagnosis now.)

Honestly, because I want to help, but feel powerless to, it's getting to the point where I just want to be away from this family. Move. Run away. It's looking increasingly like a preferable option. I don't want to have to deal with people who are so detached from reality they see goddamn biscuits as being the worst thing in the world. It's just driving me mad, and compounding the fact that I don't feel like I live like a healthy human being in a healthy family environment.

I'm sorry for the long post you probably don't care about. I just had to get this bile out somewhere.

2013 has been an odd year for me. I've barely touched Doom at all (2012 wasn't dissimilar on that front, to be honest), but far more importantly I've been made redundant and found a new job. I've not had an official contract saying a definite start date just yet, but it's looking to be Monday 13th. I'll be working for Yodel up in Liverpool doing loads of stuff with OBIEE and their legacy systems. It's about 5 grand more than the previous job earned me and, thanks to how my redundancy pay worked out, I've basically earned an extra month's salary this year overall, with an extra 1.5 months of holiday too. Not a bad deal, all told :P


As for the stuff you are presumably more interested in... I don't think I have the drive for Doom mapping any more. I've got loads of WIP maps in various states of completion, for ZDoom and limit-removing projets (mostly my own, but a few community efforts too) with a lot of cancellations over the last year or two, but essentially no enthusiasm for any of them. Just now I opened a map to do a proof-of-concept for my MAYhem 2013 idea and almost instantly realised that I knew it would work and can't be bothered to see it through.

The idea was that, now my life is seeing some stability and certainty once more I'd be able to pick up some hobbies again. You know, play games more (which I've certainly been doing), read some books, keep up with some of my favourite shows, get back to the gym (I'll want to move to Liverpool first for this one) and find a creative outlet. It appears Doom is unlikely to be that creative outlet.

I think I need a new challenge. Turns out that, after 80 maps or so over 10 years, it just doesn't seem to be as exciting as it was, even with all of the stuff ZDoom has to offer or the limitations to push in Boom, limit-removing or vanilla projects.

Maybe I've got some more maps in me, maybe not. I'm just really not feeling it and figured you guys might be the ones to discuss with.

I beat the first mission in story on very hard in Fzero GX. That was the only one I hadn't done, and I beat it by .005 seconds. It took 2 or 3 hours of hand pain (I don't play consoles much anymore) and heavy concentration. It has been at least 8 years since the game came out, and I just got the last thing I wanted to do in it. Yay.

In other news, I have had a few ideas for maps but nothing really motivating. I think it's from a lack of musical interest - that usually gets me going. Should find some new midi artists to keep up on.

I have a job (!) tutoring that is 4 hours a week and 15$ an hour ... yay end of college where I want to work but can't do what I want around my class schedule. How annoying. I will be done with requirements by January so things should go somewhere then.

Waiting for the last Wheel of time book to come out, I think it's soon? January 8th apparently. Found a few good books lately but I want to go the library again tomorrow. I need to find the rest of the laundry series by stross, and wondering when SM Stirling will put something out again. Don't have the budget to buy much so it's all on the library.

Joined a fantasy football league this September and been doing horrible in it due to some bad drafting, meh trading, and starting reggie bush for the last 5 weeks. Ugh. Newbie tip, never look for the most hilarious names to draft. Also know when division games are. And poor michael vick can't seem to catch a break. If you want some mind-numbing "why is this on the internet" look up manningface.

I think League of Legends will not stop making champions and the winners will all be people who know their matchups. I don't know, I haven't played more than 10 games against AI though.

Age of Mythology is awesome, but the hard difficulty makes things a bit annoying - I hate restarting something, even if it's only 5 minutes. Wasn't too bad when doing the Fzero run but it seriously stopped me from playing Kotor 1 all the way and is probably what stopped me from finishing ME2 and Dead space 2.

Anyway, that's me for the last month or 3.

I think I don't like laptops very much. I bought a laptop a year ago, and now it's already a bit faulty. Some of it could be just dust inside, but if I open it, even just to see what's inside, the warranty goes off and I probably have some 10 months left of it.

I think the GPU is overheating after playing some more modern games than Doom, or if I play Doom with a more modern port with models on. Usually when I've encountered any overheating problems with my computers, I have opened them and cleaned the dust and the overheating problems have gone away.

Then there's also another problem, that I might be able to fix but I have no idea until I have looked inside the case. The blu-ray drive is no longer reading discs, it fails like +90% of the time, so very rarely it manages to load a disc, which then works as long as the computer is on, or until I eject the disc.

The blu-ray drive problem could be more dust, or some cable a bit loose. I could probably fix this kind of issues myself.

Then there's also USB 3 port that doesn't work as USB 3. Initially USB 3 devices didn't work in it at all. Later with some driver update, they worked, but they seemed to work in USB 2 mode.

I don't really like my external HDD (the USB 3 device) either, when it's not used for a while, it goes to power save mode, and wakes up when I use a program, and delays the program start until it has woken up, even if the program doesn't use anything in the external HDD.

I don't really like the 16:9 display on the laptop. I liked my old 16:10 display, had a little bit more vertical space, even though it's old and doesn't have as high resolution as the 16:9 display.

Oh and I also really don't like that I need to press the "fn" key to press Insert. There is even good amount of space for a separate Insert key in the keyboard area.. why didn't they have it there!?

Also I hate that I don't have proper numpad.. they're just duplicates of the other number keys. This could be solved with BIOS update, but they would lock the numlock into one state, which would be used with any external keyboards too...

--

Today I started my old desktop computer to see if I had some old version of some program there, and to see what was in some of my dvds. I got kinda excited about using it, because I had selected the components for it, I had put it all together, I could open it any time without breaking some warranty (not that they're valid anymore), and it still works as good as ever! Bought it 2008.02.22 (just found the receipt for it today, I wonder where I have the receipt for my laptop...). So, almost 5 years old.

I had hoped the laptop would have lasted more than a year before any issues appear. I kinda would like to buy a new desktop computer, so that I would have a more up to date computer that I can customize if necessary, replace broken parts easily, etc. But I also don't feel like buying a new computer just yet...

Should I send this laptop to maintenace just because there's dust inside, because there might be a cable loose? Then wait for its return for weeks or how long? Maybe as a bonus they format the HDD?

I was thinking I'd send it to maintenace if the keyboard keys suddenly popped off and didn't want to reattach, or the display melted, or something else more serious than dust or loose cables.

I want to look inside! Should I?