Sporku

Hopefully finishing 1Monster: twitch.tv/capnclever

What's the deal with the reputation system, anyway?

Just over a year ago, I woke up at 6 on a dark winter morning. There was some slow atmospheric music playing on the radio, pretty awesome experience to start the day. I recall radio announcer said it was Pink Floyd, but I didn't catch the song title. It was surprising for me because I'm not really a massive fan of what I know of Pink Floyd's work.

I recently stumbled upon this (awesome) Stratovarius keyboard solo, which I think is quite similar. Same feel, same tempo, same chords at 3:27-3:31..
Any ideas? Also whatever I woke up to was near the end of the song.

I bought a new gaming rig

Z170-HD3p
Intel core 15 6600k
EVGA GTX 1070 SC

I'm kicking myself for not grabbing the i7 6700k when it was on sale
but for a 144hz gaming is the i7 a better choice as I still have a few days left to return the i5

I was a bit skeptical about using Spotify, because it turns out I'm a stupid bitch that even having my Iron Maiden, Metallica, Blitzkrieg, Beatles, Judas Priest CD's I still use(d) youtube to listen to them, knowing that the audio quality is worse, and without wi-fi I couldn't listen to them, refused to play on CD because... I dunno?
Until one crucial day I downloaded Spotify in both my laptop and iPhone...
Knowing that every Beatles album (even the anthology ones) were avaiable to listen, even the LOVE album is there, blew my mind.

The only thing that I disliked about Spotify Free is that you can only play songs randomly, this often sucks when you have 2 songs that blend together, for example: Sgt peppers lonely hearts club band - With a little help from my friends, or The Hellion - Electric eye.
Luckily there is a sale that gives Premium Spotify for 3 months charging you only like 500 CLP (less than a dollar). However, I don't have a credit card so it's game over for me ;( tehee.

oh, and The Beatles' "1" 2015 remaster album has an amazing sound quality my god.

Hi folks! This is honestly a pretty crummy subject to have to talk about in a big public forum post, but it's long overdue that I get this off my chest, so I'll make this quick and get it over with:

I'm a transgender woman and I'm in the process of undergoing HRT. This is a really exciting and important thing for me, and the past year and a half of my life has already been way better for it. It also isn't a decision that was made lightly -- on the contrary, it's been the scariest and most difficult thing I've ever had to do in my life.

Those of you who already know have been tremendously supportive beyond my wildest expectations, and I feel extremely fortunate to have made such amazing friends here. The Doom community is a pretty awesome place. With your help and reassurance, this post was way less stressful to make, so thank you!

To everyone else who's just hearing about this now, I'm not going to be a different person than you've known on the forums since forever. This is who I've always been, something I was internally grappling with even before I registered here on Doomworld a long as heck time ago. So my posting will still be as lousy as you've come to expect, etc, etc.

Given the problems that have been had with some other threads in recent memory, I'm just going to remind everyone that this is a personal blog thread and not a gender politics debate. With that said, I realize that this is a subject that's unfamiliar to a lot of people, so questions are welcome, just please be respectful. Thanks!

Sarah

Thoughts:

* The beginning of the game is better than I remembered, but the end of the game is worse. This is the opposite from when I played Doom 3 recently, where the beginning of the game was worse than I remembered but the end was better.

* The megatextures generally look TERRIBLE. I can see a lot of artistry went into the world but everything looks like a blurry low-resolution overcompressed JPEG. Carmack's reach clearly exceeded his grasp with it. Too bad we'll never get a "high resolution pack" - even a texture pack that just made all the textures less compressed, even without a resolution boost, would probably help a lot.

* The further you play, the more clear it is how desperate they were to reuse content. Basically every "side mission" in the game has you go back to an already-played level that has been repopulated with enemies and you play through it backwards. After a few instances, it gets real obvious what they were up to.

* The car combat stuff is so fucking tacked-on and pointless. I'm glad I could basically ignore it for the most part.

* Several levels are almost exclusively populated with "mutants" which are melee-only and go down with one shotgun blast. Playing through those levels is the worst sort of generic shooting-gallery garbage.

* That said, the actual physical level design is probably the best aspect of the game. It's all 100% linear but it's done very tightly and organically with lots of looping around and seeing areas behind / ahead of you as you go.

* I saved up a bunch of money and bought the materials to craft literally 500 pop rockets, which are explosive grenade rounds for your shotgun that kill every normal endgame enemy in one direct hit, which made the last level hilariously trivial. In general, the ability to purchase 999 rounds for a weapon makes the weapons super unbalanced and many of them largely pointless. Why use weapon XYZ when I have effectively unlimited sniper rifle rounds and can just creep through a level killing everything from a distance?

* The BFG SUCKS.

* I had forgotten just how hilariously sudden the ending of the game is. It's super clear that the game must have originally had a three-act structure, where Wellspring was Act 1, Subway Town was Act 2, and then... something else... was Act 3. But then they realized they were running low on time / resources and so they decided to cut all of Act 3 and just sort of graft the final level onto the Subway Town world map. It's like if you were playing Half-Life 2, and at the end of Nova Prospekt where you and Alyx go through a teleporter, that was just the ending.

That's right, a whole thread about the deadly stache.

The other day I was among a group of coworkers who are all into rock music and not a single one of them knew anything about Zappa, not even a single song he had written. Not one. This kind of baffled me, but at the same time, he's pretty obscure these days and was always considered pretty far out even when he was alive. I figured I'd dump a bunch of great Zappa tunes in one easy spot.

Zappa wrote some of my all-time favorite pieces. There's a big chunk of his material that simply isn't for me as it's too unconventional/'out there', but it's really quite astonishing that one dude could write in such a myriad of styles and genres. Given his enthusiasm for finding new sounds and pushing the boundaries, I suppose it shouldn't be all that surprising.

Below is a condensed list of Zappa songs I really like. The first few are my absolute favorites, and everything that follows is just a mix of stuff I can put on at any time and love listening to.

Keep in mind, humor was always one of Zappa's focal points when writing music, not just in terms of lyrics, but in terms of instrumental sounds as well. The sounds can range anywhere from rock to jazz to classical to just goofy as hell, but I love them all. At the end of the day, humor really is just one small aspect of it all. Listen to a few for yourself and see what you think:

Uncle Remus
Apostrophe'
Transylvania Boogie
Watermelon in Easter Hay
I Am The Slime
50/50
Road Ladies
G-Spot Tornado
We Are Not Alone
Dumb All Over
Heavenly Bank Account
Dirty Love
Muffin Man
Your Mouth
Bobby Brown Goes Down
Joe's Garage
Keep It Greasey
Why Does it Hurt When I Pee?
A Token of My Extreme
Harder Than Your Husband
The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
Stick Together
Camarillo Brillo
Beauty Knows No Pain
We're Turning Again
Night School
Promiscuous
Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk
Dancin' Fool
Don't Eat The Yellow Snow
Tinsel Town Rebellion
Be In My Video
I'm So Happy I Could Cry
I'm Not Satisfied
Why Don'tcha Do Me Right?
Would You Go All The Way?
Eat That Question
Bolero (Cover)
Whippin' Post (Cover)


I could listen to a playlist of those songs almost endlessly. Of course, if you don't want my hand-picked favorites and just want to dive into some Zappa albums, I would recommend Joe's Garage, Overnite Sensation, Chunga's Revenge, Apostrophe', Freak Out!, Broadway the Hard Way, Does Humor Belong in Music?, and Sheik Yerbouti. When listened to in one sitting, Zappa's albums tend to tell a really funny, interesting or even sad story, so if that sounds appealing, maybe one of these will be up your alley.

Aside from his music, Zappa was a guy who I really respect. He valued the constitution and actively fought to defend freedom of speech, the kind of guy who would defend your right to say what you want even if he wholeheartedly disagreed with you. His albums and songs were regularly restricted from radio play and many record stores refused to stock his albums, back when they were new releases. He received constant backlash for the content of his albums, and it's extra hilarious given how tame it all is by modern standards.

Anyway, that's the end of my rant, I hope some of you get some entertainment out of it.

Thank you alcohol, for the years of false chemical happiness. You are the only thing good in life. You are like the friend I never had. I now no longer need people, because I have alcohol. You have completed my life.

Just post what you're listening to:
Biosphere - Bose-Einstein condensation

Just post what you're listening to:
Biosphere - Bose-Einstein condensation

Just post what you're listening to:
Biosphere - Bose-Einstein condensation

Just post what you're listening to:
Biosphere - Bose-Einstein condensation

I think I'd truly regret calling this an announcement of my official retirement from Doom mapping, but I think I may be coming to the conclusion that it's time to quit kidding myself.

With certain circumstances in my life sucking up my time and negating my ability to pursue Doom mapping as a legitimate hobby, I've been balancing a weight on my shoulders with rather small unfinished projects that I'm struggling to bring to completion. Things are moving at a glacial pace and my future only looks to incorporate more extra-curricular activities in my daily routine, making my absolute favorite pastime look more and more like something that's only fit to be put in the attic and left alone as a distant memory.

A few years ago, mapping seemed to flow naturally out of me, which is where the majority of my body of work came from. I began to concentrate on more complex design strategies in order to construct more unique looking and replayable doom levels. Unfortunately this started shortly before I bought a house and got married and such. If the kind of levels I really want to make were a piece of jewelry at the bottom of the swimming pool, my responsibilities are the air-inflated floaties pulling me up to the surface. My wife would be offended if she saw me describing things that way but it's about time to admit that Doom mapping wasn't much more than a timesink to get myself to the point in life that I am at now. Now that I'm living it, there isn't much room to squeeze it back in. There really hasn't been much room this whole time and anything I've released since shows it.

While reverting to my older mapping style would probably be much more productive, I'd still have the reminder that "I can do better than this" lingering over me as I play through them. I think there are enough mappers here who can create similar enough maps. I'm not really interested in being a part of that category of mappers.

But anyway, it hurts my ego every time I come back to mapping after a long unavoidable hiatus with an intention to create a design that I feel has finally manifested in my mind after many weeks. The lack of regular practice with Doombuilder 2 is clear in my attempt to rectify it when the design comes out sloppy and inconsistent. I begrudgingly close the laptop lid and go do something else. If I find myself a career path that pays much better and has an unusual amount of downtime and low-stress, I may be able to get back into the groove and nullify everything this blog stands to declare. Until then, I feel as though the only other appropriate time to get back into mapping is when I retire and wait to pass away.

What does this mean for UAC Ultra 2? Not sure. For a long time I've been epitomizing UU2 as a way to "go out with a bang" and encapsulate as many of my ideas as humanly possible into a single megawad and live the rest of my life comfortably with the satisfaction that I've exhausted as much of my potential as I could into a final product. Then I'd leave everyone in the community with a sick megawad to play in many different styles with hundreds of hours of gameplay depending on how one chooses to play it. I'd also hope it would stand as a model for what I'd like to see more mappers do with their maps. I can't say I'm pulling the plug on it, but the rate of its progress is mirrored by my motivation to complete it without an optimistic partner or small team to share it with. I hope I can garner enough strength to make my ideas come to fruition, but until then, I've put a pin in it until things change.

In the meantime, I have no trouble checking on Doomworld and posting every now and again. I still have an insatiable urge to kill monsters and fortunately, playing the game and all the new wads that come out for it is significantly less taxing than editing it is. At best, I think tabling my mapping career may be excusable in exchange for offering myself as a mentor for any interested mappers (PM me!) or volunteering myself for a rather minor role in a major project. It breaks my heart to tell myself that it's time to call it quits, and I'll fight with every fiber in my body to keep the candle lit, but I just wanted you guys to know where I'm at.

So, it's a mobile game on top of the charts, an endless runner in which you tap to fly a bird through pipes. It's all the rage right now, as every journalist tries to jump on the clickbait train making their own articles about it.

Everyone seems to be wondering what makes it a success, whether the popularity is organic or engineered. Journalists, as they are prone to do in their attempts to one-up each other, go on grand theories about game design and business, about the addictiveness, player masochism and social media or praising the simplicity. Commenters, as usual trying to act like sophisticated intellectuals above the unwashed masses, spew their bile on the graphics ripped off other games and the state of the industry in general.

Gave it a go two days ago... and I found it enjoyable, which is not something I can say about a lot of mobile games I've tried. The interesting thing being, I can see the reasons I like this game are also some of the reasons I like Doom, and nobody seems to bring up these reasons in this great public quest for answers.

There's no downtime. You don't wait for endless loading screens, you don't wait while a cinematic plays, you don't wait following a NPC, you don't wait buying upgrades in a store. You just play. Once you die you can restart instantly.

It's reactive. There's no frame drops. You tap the screen or press a key and your character moves accordingly. It looks clean. There's no GFX soup getting between you and the information you need to have.

It presents me with a simple mechanical challenge that is satisfying in itself and rewarded statisfyingly. In Flappy Bird it's flying through pipes and getting an extra point + reward sound in that noiseless environment. In Doom it can be killing a monster, hearing his pain groan and seeing his death animation.

Of course there's much more to Doom than that. Flappy Bird has no depth, but nonetheless the above qualities are enough for me, for a mobile game. I pulled out my phone and had a 10-second game before writing the above paragraph. Literally, perhaps fifteen seconds including the time to pick up phone, press button, slide to app, open app, start playing and play. An unfortunately uncommon experience with mobile games. As a person who prizes reactiveness in all forms, I can't help but hope that particular aspect will be picked on eventually.

I'm talking about Yu Yu Hakusho, I used to watch this anime a lot when I was a kid, never understood too much, but it sure entertain me.

I found a web page to watch this again but with japanese original audio with subs, I readed what was this show about, so basically the protagonist died at 14 when a car hit him trying to save a litle kid that was playing football and etc.

I watched the first episode, but I didn't expect to cry, 'manly' tears started to fall when he was a ghost and he went to his own funeral, and his mother started crying, almost everybody was sad, even me, but I couldnt contain myself of crying when this little kid saved by him and his mother went to the funeral and he said thanks for saving him.


Sure, silly thing you can say, but it mean a lot, there aren't too much animes that made me cry, like... 3 or 4, and I watch anime from the 80's to now (last anime I saw, and still airing is nagi no asukara), and this is the first one that made me cry in it's very first episode.

I'm talking about Yu Yu Hakusho, I used to watch this anime a lot when I was a kid, never understood too much, but it sure entertain me.

I found a web page to watch this again but with japanese original audio with subs, I readed what was this show about, so basically the protagonist died at 14 when a car hit him trying to save a litle kid that was playing football and etc.

I watched the first episode, but I didn't expect to cry, 'manly' tears started to fall when he was a ghost and he went to his own funeral, and his mother started crying, almost everybody was sad, even me, but I couldnt contain myself of crying when this little kid saved by him and his mother went to the funeral and he said thanks for saving him.


Sure, silly thing you can say, but it mean a lot, there aren't too much animes that made me cry, like... 3 or 4, and I watch anime from the 80's to now (last anime I saw, and still airing is nagi no asukara), and this is the first one that made me cry in it's very first episode.

I'm talking about Yu Yu Hakusho, I used to watch this anime a lot when I was a kid, never understood too much, but it sure entertain me.

I found a web page to watch this again but with japanese original audio with subs, I readed what was this show about, so basically the protagonist died at 14 when a car hit him trying to save a litle kid that was playing football and etc.

I watched the first episode, but I didn't expect to cry, 'manly' tears started to fall when he was a ghost and he went to his own funeral, and his mother started crying, almost everybody was sad, even me, but I couldnt contain myself of crying when this little kid saved by him and his mother went to the funeral and he said thanks for saving him.


Sure, silly thing you can say, but it mean a lot, there aren't too much animes that made me cry, like... 3 or 4, and I watch anime from the 80's to now (last anime I saw, and still airing is nagi no asukara), and this is the first one that made me cry in it's very first episode.

I've just won one, after I entered a draw at my local university's open day last month. Going to collect it next week. I'm pretty chuffed, and kind of excited, because I haven't used any Apple products besides an iPod Nano, and briefly a Mac computer when I used the one in my school's studio (which did affirm my belief that I'll always prefer PCs :P).

However, while it opens up a bunch of possibilities in the form of thousands of iOS-exclusive apps I was never able to use before, I already do everything I need with my laptop, so I don't know how useful one would be to me.

...Aside from the possible uses listed here.

...Anyone use an iPad? At all? Maybe? xP

...well, it's not the exact same name, but I thought I'd mention it. U jelly? It's in Neumarkt. Yes, there were Nazis shooting at me. But I got all their stuff.

New build is as follows:

What I just bought:
i5 3570k
Biostar TZ77XE3
Geil EVO Veloce 16GB DDR3 (2 x 8GB)
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus

What I already have:
Fractal Design Define XL R2 - Titanium Grey Case
XFX Radeon HD6950 2GB
Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD, 6GB/S
Toshiba 2TB 7200 RPM
Caviar Green 750GB

Peripherals:
Acer P235H 23 inch monitor
2 Craigslist special IRC monitors, both 21 inch Dell, one that rotates
Topping TP-30 USB DAC/Chip Amp
Polk TSi100 Bookshelf Speakers
Filco Majestouch Ninja Mechanical Keyboard - MX Browns
Logitech G400

I'm upgrading from an early Phenom II black edition, a dual core miraculously unlocked quite stably to quad. On a sad little DDR2 Mobo. This setup should do me well for gaming for quite a while.

Just post what you're listening to:
Biosphere - Bose-Einstein condensation

So I just went swimming. It was kinda crowded and it's a small pool, only 5 lanes and 25 meter long. 2 lanes were used by some that were practicing some swimming stuff. 1 lane was for slow swimmers. 1 lane was for water-running.. and the remaining 1 lane was for regular/fast speed swimmers.

As I swim ok fast, I go the regular/fast lane. There were two others who swimmed about the same speed or a bit faster than me.. and one who was a complete moron who apparently could not read or realize how slowly she was swimming. She didn't even go to the slow lane when that lane had become completely empty. Earlier when I looked at the people in the slow lane.. even they swimmed faster than this dummy.

Then I constantly needed to stop at the ends of the pool and wait.. Finally I was totally cold and shivering.. and even the sauna felt cold after that, I had to throw one bucket of water into the kiuas to feel warm again.. and then another bucket to feel like I had been in a sauna.

Yea, next time I need to go earlier, so that the pool is more empty... uhh...

The ticket selling lady was nice.. and hot :D

In the last decade, Honda has been seemingly slipping, making questionable cars with questionable fuel economy compared to the golden era of Honda . They finally produce a car to make me fall in love with the company again but only release it in select cities and a limited number. It's just .. why....

In the last decade, Honda has been seemingly slipping, making questionable cars with questionable fuel economy compared to the golden era of Honda . They finally produce a car to make me fall in love with the company again but only release it in select cities and a limited number. It's just .. why....