There's a video on Youtube that you might have already seen, showing what Quake (and there's another one for Doom) would be like if made today. While it's a caricature, it made me think about how first-person shooters - once a genre about flying around nonsensical architecture at the speed of light - have been supplanted with realistic war games, the pace of which have all but vanished.

Then I found where it had all gone - I've really got into Quake Live over the last week. It's a real sign of progress that I'm no longer all that surprised that it's possible to squeeze a free remake of Quake 3 into a browser, even when I realize that the game is now more than ten years old. The game looked noticeably slicker than the more moderately-paced Unreal Tournament from the same era, but its gameplay was simple, no-frills fun, with the focus just on dropping you into an arena with some other players and some weapons scattered around and having you fight it out in any way takes your fancy - explosives, lasers, the ID Software staple shotgun, and the quad damage which enhances all of these with the side effect of lighting you up like a Christmas tree with a sign on it saying "INSERT ROCKETS HERE". And on a good day you don't even notice any network latency at all - it's strange now to think back to when a ping of 400 was really good when madly rollerskating around the original game.


This is usually what it looks like
It's not without its problems, the most blatant of which is the skill matching system. Strangely there is no overall visible ladder, but they've made an attempt at sorting players into four tiers per game type - in theory, the games presented to you contain players of about the same skill, and you go up a tier when you're too good for the one you're currently in. However, in practice the system feels a bit... top-heavy, and the fourth tier contains players who range from "pretty good" (me) to "turbo nutter bastard nitrous" (the rest). Having been trained in the art of Quake 3 by the ancient masters (or at least one Linux geek in university), what usually happens is that I fight it out for the top of the lower section of the scoreboard while two or three mutant killer cyborgs from the future compete for actual first place.

Even when they're beating you to a pulp, some of the population are surprisingly polite, but there are also a fair number of people who remind me why I stopped playing the original Quake, spending less time playing than hurling whatever grunted insults they can manage to dribble out of their proto-human mouths or whining about people cheating by having moderately good aim. That's the risk you take when you're playing with unknown people over the Internet - so if anybody else I know wants to try this out, my account is DavidN. I'd be glad to meet up with you and/or blast you into oblivion on The Longest Yard.

I suppose that this is the next logical step up from the undead voodoo creatures in Bagpuss. After having grown up with British children's television, turning into a rabbit was the least of my problems later in life.

(Note that this video is unsafe. Not unsafe for work, exactly - just unsafe in general.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_HReR_McQ

It gets worse - the next night, they did it again and woke up to find they'd written Judas at the Opera.

For those who are interested in continuing my profoundly dull playthrough of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I've had this one sitting around on my hard drive for a couple of weeks but didn't get up the necessary interest to finish it off until tonight. In this episode, I wander around the laboratory without accomplishing much, and then fumble about the archives for a bit to find nothing much of consequence there either.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivo7ICjkaP0

One thing I should say, though - I didn't realize until watching the video that the piano started playing itself at 13 minutes! I was so used to games having incidental snippets of background music that I just tuned it out... now I'm wondering what I would have seen if I had gone back there. Possibly Cabadath.

dr_dos - where's that Town of ZZT video? It's far more entertaining than watching someone wandering around and throwing rolls of paper about.

I've been fooling around in Tracktion again, and this rather nice piano introduction came out of it. It's a bit of a genre change from what I normally write, but I ended up really liking it.

There's a song called "Elements" I'm writing just now that I sort of wanted to name "Elements Part One" as a reference to Stratovarius, but was hesitant because standing on its own, the title made no sense. Fortunately, as the introduction grew I realized that it would be better to separate it into its own section, and so this short piece got the title instead in a way that was actually justifiable.

Mapstalgia challenges you to think of a game that you think is seared into your brain forever, and to sit down and actually draw out a map of an area of it from memory - a feat that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. I got a submission to it put up today, and thought I'd repost it here because ironically it'll get more feedback on a personal Livejournal compared to a popular Tumblr.

Prince of Persia Level 1 (An Approximate Guide)

To repeat what I said in the comments... it wasn't long after I drew the introductory screens of the first level of Prince of Persia before I realized that I could not remember what the first level of Prince of Persia looked like.

The game has a secret little route that you can use near the start to climb over the first guard and exit the level without getting the sword first - once I discovered that, I never went the long way again, so most of this is from what I can scrape together of my memory when I played it in very early childhood. Even taking that into account, it’s full of alternative pathways and pointless rooms that you never visit once you know the route - there’s a whole floor down below the main level, which I’ve mostly had to leave out of this drawing.

It occurs to me that living in America is like being put into another dimension where human progress happened in a slightly different order. They can, for example, conjure those perfectly believable blue and orange lines on to the pitch out of nowhere during a televised game of what here got called 'football', but they still haven't quite let go of the Biblical creation myth or seen its irrelevance to politics. On a more mundane level, Crunchy Nut cereal has only just lost its "New!" banner on the top of the packet here, despite it having been invented quite some time ago in the time stream I used to inhabit.

I had a dream last night in which I was clearing out a pantry cupboard, and I found an old box of them at the back of a top shelf. I opened the packet and found that instead of the normal contents you would expect, the airtight bag instead contained five or six enormous sheets of completely flat cornflake material. In real life, the thought of it sounds quite uncanny and slightly revolting, but in the dream I started enthusing that this was a packet from the time before they were cut to the right shape for you, and you had to break off a large piece and then crumble it into cornflakes yourself.

I think that the dream came from a conversation that happened a few days ago, about why plain British crisps are still called "Ready Salted" flavour - because it's an archaic term that was once used to distinguish them from the crisps where the salt came in a little blue sachet, and you had to hunt through the bag for it, tear it open and then shake it into the crisps manually.

This was posted by e_to_the_ipi in a slightly tangential response to one of my earlier posts, but I think that it needs some more exposure. It must be said at this point that I'm not sure what I'm actually watching here, but I think that it does nonetheless.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkqLn_Aj9Rw

As far as I can tell, it's a summary of the news of the Scottish independence referendum as seen through the eyes of someone who's taken a vast quantity of acid, rendered in 3D to make David Cameron look even more like an android than he normally does. I don't think I've ever seen any examples of Taiwanese humour before, but I have to admire both the detail of David Cameron's Margaret Thatcher pin-up calendar, and the fact that Alex Salmond appears to be played here by Rab C Nesbitt... along with several other details that really have to be seen to be believed. I wouldn't have expected things like that to turn up even in most Western videographers' efforts.

I keep on thinking that I'm going to run out of interesting things to get from Russo's, but they seem to rearrange them all and invent a few more every time we have the chance to go there. This one looks like an unripe overinflated orange, or possibly some sort of alien breast depending on your frame of mind - to me it seems to have chameleon-like properties, as it's one of the range of colours between green and orange that are indefinable to me and it blends in perfectly with the floor in this photograph, but I don't think that this will be a problem for anybody else.

This one is a bit more normal than the ones on previous adventures - it was labelled "Pomello" in the basket, but is actually spelled as pomelo, as modelled by this cat here.

As you might guess from just looking at it, it's a very large citrus fruit. The flesh inside is dark pink like a grapefruit, though it's several sizes larger - though having said that, despite its large diameter, it has the skin of a rhinoceros and is considerably smaller on the inside. Its seeds are mostly concentrated right in the middle where the segments meet, so in theory you can scoop them all out at once and eat it in rings like a pineapple.

Its taste is probably most similar to a grapefruit as well, but it doesn't have the bitterness to it, which makes it feel a bit more like an orange instead. The slight extra sweetness is welcome, although its sheer size means that it's unsuitable to use as decoration for your girly drinks.

As usual I can't specify exactly what inspired me to undertake this project, but over the last couple of days I was suddenly driven to enhance the connection between my journal and my personal site (remember when people had those?) The journal has always been on the front page of it, but all that page did was to read the RSS feed and lay it out, so it could only ever display the latest few posts.

My aim was to make my site's impression of my journal much more full-featured, so that - ideally - Livejournal would be made a backend and you could explore the whole thing directly through the site. Livejournal's API doesn't really provide for this, seeming more geared towards clients that will actually draw out all the journal data and keep itself synchronized, so I wrote a parser to do it myself.

Actually, calling it a "parser" is extremely generous - it uses the normal LJ pages as web services, and these are full of Javascript and other extras that make them fairly unparseable, meaning that most of its job is to chew through the page until it finds something that it considers interesting. It does this by looking for pairs of delimiters to find the post title, content, date and so on - if it finds the start delimiter, it returns everything from that point on until it finds the appropriate end delimiter.

<title>davidn: The greatest bug report ever</title>An easy one - just get it out of the page's title tag, and it's always prefixed with "davidn: "

    <div class="b-singlepost-body">
        <div align="justify">Blah blah blah, I'm DavidN and I never shut up</div>
    </div>This one is a bit risky - further on than this, the tags change depending on whether the post has tags or comments or not, and I can't just check for a div closing tag because the entries themselves might use them. This only works because I don't tend to have four spaces followed by a div closing tag anywhere in my journal markup.

<span class="b-singlepost-author-date">
    <a href="http://davidn.livejournal.com/2010/">2010</a>
    -
    <a href="http://davidn.livejournal.com/2010/09/">09</a>
    -
    <a href="http://davidn.livejournal.com/2010/09/07/">07</a>
    15:04:00
</span>The general position of the date is easy to identify but is in an awkward tangle of links - this fragment gets XML parsed to get the numbers out.

Lists of posts from the months surrounding the current entry are provided through the calendar page (the HTML for which is actually much easier to parse), and navigation is also possible by grabbing the links from the forward and back arrows at the top of each post. Livejournal does this in a rather odd way, sending a "go=next/prev" parameter along with the original ID to redirect you to the new post instead of going to the 'view post' page with the new ID directly - but copying this behaviour worked without problems, as long as I remembered to get the post ID out of the HTML that came in, instead of relying on the ID passed to the page being the actual ID of the post.

Take, for example, this post I made about Red Alert two years ago - the navigation is quite basic and there are a couple of other things I want to do (like replacing all links to my own journal with links to this parsing page as it writes them out), but it gives you pretty much all you need to flick through the journal. It means I can now link people directly to my own site when I mention something I've written in an entry.

I could give out the source if anyone would be interested in doing this themselves, though be warned it looks fairly hideous. Though having said that, it's PHP - what do you expect?

I'm not sure how much longer I can cope with these constant reminders that I live in a country where it's generally accepted that people need to be told things at this sort of level.

There's quite a fascinating article that's been making the rounds recently, which was written by an American called John Elfreth Watkins (Junior) in 1900 and was published in the Ladies' Home Journal. In it, he makes predictions as to what the world would be like in a hundred years' time, leaving out only the possibility that people would have slightly shorter names - there's a complete scan of the original article here.

As is usual for things like these, a lot of his predictions turned out to be remarkably correct but in wrong ways in the details because he couldn't predict so far beyond the technology of the time - the concept of air conditioning is described installed as "hot and cold faucets". The way he talks about photographs being transmitted instantly across the world, video and sound being sent through a "giant telephone apparatus", and messages being delivered automatically to homes all came true in a single package that we know as the Internet - something which, in another uncanny indicator of being so far ahead of his time, he referred to as a series of tubes.

He got other things right through being just vague enough for them to match up perfectly with the way that they were actually done, describing what we know as X-rays as "rays of invisible light". Complex technologies like hydroponics are touched on with the mention of "vegetables grown by electricity", and he also predicted their distribution around the world in "fast-flying refrigerators", which makes it sound slightly like he envisioned loading up a Hotpoint, putting it into a trebuchet and flinging it in the direction of the nearest Tesco.

He couldn't get everything right - one of the more far-fetched predictions was that the letters C, X and Q would be discarded as no longer necessary. As we all know, the reality is that all words except "OMG", "LOL" and "WTF" have been discarded as unnecessary, with all instant communication expressed through these in various arrangements, repetition and intensity. He mentions the development of flight - which was still a decade away at the time the article was written - but he doesn't go far enough with it. He believed that it wouldn't catch on commercially, and that journeys between America and Britain would take a day and a half - an absolutely unheard-of feat in 1900, but which we would now think of as unacceptably slow. He also mentioned battle tanks that would travel as fast as trains - which is correct in a way, as British Rail's trains are well known for almost achieving the speed of tanks.

It's also interesting to read through the subtext of the predictions that any possibility of social change seemed to be ignored - he mentions that having one's own cook would be regarded as unusual, and while that's now true, it's not for the reasons that he predicted it would be. It also seems unusually short-sighted for him to predict all of these devices of convenience and then go on to say that exercise will be held as so highly important, with humans able to walk ten miles without difficulty. Ten feet through to the fridge to get one of his "ready-cooked meals" would now seem like a stretch sometimes.

After having been reminded of what the world of 1900 didn't have, it's rather fitting to think that this electronic copy of the article is now being transmitted all over the world through a technology that he tried to imagine. Although curiously, he didn't seem to apply his video predictions to, quite simply, books.

I've been experimenting with the marriage of Modplug and Tracktion again, hoping to produce the title track of Signal from the Sky by me, with guest guitars also by me. This is actually starting to sound like it's approaching half-decent!

http://albion.bandcamp.com/track/signal-from-the-sky-solo

Even though I thought my songwriting had been so slow recently, I'm coming to realize that I actually have about six pieces that are anything from halfway to nearly completed and needing some connecting up. So I might actually be able to release this lot this year - a two-year gap between releases isn't bad, is it?

I'd forgotten that I was going to talk about the film that we saw on Christmas day - it was the new Tintin, starring Billy Elliot and Gollum. As you might expect, several hundred instances of previous experience had made me feel more than wary about seeing a Spielberg update of something that I love, but in the end I really enjoyed it.

It did feel odd at first. The way that Tintin constantly talked to himself was distracting until I remembered that that was exactly how he talked in the comic, and when just attempting to describe it, the artwork style sounds very strange - the film takes the proportions of the characters as they were in the comic (which you may remember as very human, until you really think hard about them compared to what humans actually look like) and apply them to realistically-textured faces. But they've managed to defy the odds and make these half-human hybrids seem very natural and not at all like Pixeloo's rendition of Homer Simpson over on the left - you can recognize each character instantly without them breaking the look of the film world.

"The Adventures of Tintin" is an appropriate title, as it seems to be a collection of most of the books stuck together - primarily the Secret of the Unicorn series in its storyline, but there are references to the other books everywhere. They even managed to work in elements from the moon story, with whisky becoming weightless as a plane dives, and book titles are constantly alluded to (such as in a prominent statue of a crab with golden claws).

It must be said that the reviews I saw that complained that this film was "relentless" were certainly right - working with computer-generated graphics allows the film to set up absolutely massive set-pieces without much of a pause in between them, culminating in a sort of shipping crane conkers battle. The ludicrous level to which the action sequences escalate give it the impression of an Indiana Jones film as directed by Nick Park - when I saw Die Hard 4 with Timothy the Oliphaunt I mentioned that every action film had to top the last one, and that it was going to be difficult to beat driving an eighteen-wheel truck on nine wheels around a collapsing freeway ramp, while on fire, pursued by a Harrier jumpjet. This one has a go with the following:

• Racing down a mountain to catch a falcon
• Going straight through buildings as they rapidly crumble
• With a wall of water close behind after accidentally shooting a rocket launcher at the dam
• Pursued by a tank
• Which has driven through a hotel and is carrying the entire three-storey facade along with it as it advances
• Hurtling down a washing line
• While clinging to a rapidly disintegrating motorbike

But the silliness works in animation - the whole thing really works as an adaptation, and... I really don't say this often, so enjoy it while you can, but this felt like a great interpretation and a wonderful way to introduce this world to people who through no fault of their own grew up in the wrong place to experience it.

There's a video that someone called andylyth put together of the audio from the film trailer, set to clips from the 90s cartoon version - and I hadn't realized just how faithful they'd been to it until I saw that, with it almost being possible to make a shot-by-shot reconstruction. Now I really want to get the books out of the library again... and for them to do another film with Professor Calculus in it.

I keep on saying (now and then) that despite the impression that I may have given over the last few years, I'm not really a fan of horror games. Starting when I got my hands on Silent Hill some time around 1999, it's just been the case that I somehow get roped into playing them as people keep on giving me them to try. It must be said that I have a respect for things that scare me cleverly, though, and they have a great viral appeal in that you can pass them around either to spread the pain or just to see if people are as traumatized as you were.

I had told people... quite a lot that I definitely wasn't going to play Amnesia, then quadralien went and got it for my birthday, so I felt I should at least give it a try. And I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to share my reactions with the world - though it must be said that the game has started slowly compared to my expectations, with only a couple of involuntary noises from me. In fact, I think the party that ended up most distressed from the experience was the plant ten minutes in.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTsvrbo0tJw

I did about twenty minutes of it, then decided it would be better to upload it in multiple parts instead of one megavideo and edited what I had. Thanks to a Christmas present from Whitney's parents, I've now moved on from iMovie (which, to be fair to it, is pretty decent for a free program and can out-video Windows Movie Maker in virtually every respect) and am using PowerDirector, so having eliminated the need to work on two computers at the same time I can put these things together a lot more quickly.

This has to be the most interesting thing that Microsoft have done for a while. Everyone I know in our industry has been hoping for the worldwide use of Internet Explorer 6 (and more generally, Internet Explorer) to reduce to the point where nobody has to support it any more, but now Microsoft themselves seem to be heading a campaign to finally wipe the old version off the face of the earth.

It's been around since last year, but it's recently come up again because recently its usage dropped low enough for it to be officially declared dead in the Western world. Currently it's at 7.7% worldwide, with the page hopeful to get it down below 1% eventually. Only China now has a significant share of it, with several countries on the brink of passing the 1% mark - America managed it, so there's no reason we can't!

(A note, just in case, because one of the most frustrating things for anyone to say in these conversations is "Why should I change away from Internet Explorer? It works fine". Do you know why it works fine? Because people like me have spent days battering its demented interpretation of everything and anything into shape so that it will at least work somewhat like other browsers that actually make sense.)

And so we're now approaching the end of 2011, the year in which the most happened in the history of the world ever. Charlie Brooker - whose year review I've yet to watch - referred to it as an end-of-series special from the pen of a madman, with multiple story arcs unexpectedly coming to an end.

On a worldwide scale, there were earthquakes in Japan, Australia and New Zealand, hurricanes here and in Scotland, revolutions in Egypt, Libya, across the middle east and on a smaller scale in London and cities across England as well. Osama Bin Laden is dead, and so are Muammar Gaddafi, Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs (who really don't deserve to be placed alongside the other names on this list). And recently, Kim Jong Il's gone as well - reportedly of a heart attack, which seems a suspiciously human explanation for a nation which repeatedly made up stories about him in exactly the same way that mentally challenged people on the Internet might share facts about Chuck Norris.

On a more personal level, it's been no less hectic. I think the list of my friends who didn't change their jobs or entire careers this year was shorter than the list of people who did - I myself went through that process in April, having been wonderfully comfortable but then getting an offer out of nowhere just when it looked like I might suddenly need it. And now I'm being moved up to being apparently in charge of at least a couple of people. I learned to drive again, we bought our first car, I released a game that I'd been working on for four years, and we organized our first Christmas together. We went to two friends' weddings, another friend contracted cancer that he thought was backache and was then cleared of cancer a few months later, my parents' elderly next-door neighbour died, his wife moved into the flat previously owned by a family friend who also died, my brothers started new university courses, my sister got engaged, and so did another university friend (compressing these spectacular occurrences into one, as it was to each other).

We're going to go out for an early dinner and then spend a quiet few hours until midnight watching things that Britain saw five hours earlier, hoping for no more massive world events in the year's last few hours in the western timezones. I wish everyone a calmer new year than the last one - if there's anything I want to say to everybody, it's to thank them for their continuing companionship despite my rapid transformation into being such a miserable old git, accelerated all the more by my transition into my ancient late twenties. I hope to keep everyone who's close to me for many more decades.

Some of the comments gathered on my three-years-old upload of Chockablock, an oddly charming if slightly psychedelic 1980s pre-school programme.

Chockagirl can sit on my Chockacock - 1355steveo

I'd put it in her "block slot". - shapla1979

first time I have seen a woman reverse without crashing - Cancerape

She reminds me of a mentally retarded woman I once almost had sex with. - thechapaqua

hahaha maybe she thought it was a c...k - 2TEG

she can sit on somthing else too hehehe mmmmm - 2TEG

She can suck my chock-a-cock!!! - Jermyn78

THAT CAROL LEADER? SHE GIVES ME THE FUCKIN' 'ORN. - thechapaqua

i want her now please very much,thanks please very much if you can do this for me please - scootmahoney

I'd like to put my block in Chockagirl's blockslot. - ming64

(and I'd block her slot too) - markypearson01

Choc a girl ? Choc a truck ? CHOCAFUCK! - tomtomstuff

By the almighty power of Fred Harris - was I the only watcher of this programme who was raised with a shred of basic decency?

Our first Christmas alone was quieter than normal but we still had a great time - speaking to both our families over Skype, opening gifts from each side and then going out to see the Tintin film, which I'll write about later. As a sign of our age, our main gift from Whitney's family was a very sleek coffee/tea/hot cocoa brewing... system (is the only word for it), and taking advantage of the way that we haven't had any neighbours for the last year and a half, I gave Whitney the karaoke game for the PS3.

The thing I was most looking forward to was something a little smaller, in the form of Iron Savior's new album - I'd been doing my utmost to stop myself just listening to the whole thing on Youtube before Christmas came, but when ordering it, Whitney found out that the import version came out on the 27th, two days too late - so she found the album cover and back online and mocked up a fake CD case for me to open, with a disc-shaped note inside saying that the real thing was on its way. My waiting has been prolonged for a few more days, but I'm hoping that that will make it all the more worth it!

She also got me the original Etrian Odyssey, which is a difficult thing to find now - after a lot of searching, she managed to find it listed as new at a sane price. The trouble is, well... she found it on a site based in Thailand, and it has to be said that of the two items I just mentioned, the fake Iron Savior album is the more convincing one by some margin. The cover of the Etrian Odyssey box looks like it was done on a home bubblejet, the cartridge label is on card with glue that despite its best efforts doesn't quite stick, and when you turn on the DS with it in (which it must be said I only did rather warily), it boots up into an alternative OS with a file selector.

The site - which I don't want to link to, but it's called Games Stock - isn't actually the comically unconvincing mess that I had expected, but they showcase 160-game cartridges that obviously can't be official (or legal). They also have the cheek to say that the reason they don't provide the manual is to give their customers the best price possible - which at $35 must be a pretty bleeding enormous profit margin, seeing as all they do is download a ROM on to a writable cartridge. This thing has about as much sense of disguise as Robo-Ky does when attempting to masquerade as Ky Kiske. Actually, it's got the sense of disguise of Michael Kiske trying to pass himself off as "Ernie" in Avantasia. Commodore Norrington said that Jack Sparrow was the worst pirate he'd ever heard of - he obviously hadn't laid eyes on this lot, otherwise he'd have had Jack in ninth or tenth place at least. And so on.

However, I was sort of delighted when I looked up the strange "R4DS" bootup screen online, and found some detail of what it was - peeling back the "Do not open" label stuck unconvincingly across the top to reveal that what I had was a writable DS cartridge with a miniature Flash drive inside. I've spoken to ravenworks about it, and he gave me a several page long description of its memory management and how it has seven or eight different buckets that you have to slide around to write in in a system that can only have been designed by Professor Layton. I can't see myself seriously writing a game for it myself because the audience is quite small, but it might be something that I take the chance to play around with, having been given the unexpected opportunity.

I get the feeling I should probably report the sale of laughably fake cartridges, but I'm not sure where to.

It's December the 25th, the Pope has come out condemning the superficial glitter of Christmas while wearing a sparkly gold hat as big as our tree, and we have had our own more understated display:


To anticipate a question, the prettified oranges at the sides are christingles - in the church of Scotland, you make those by wrapping a red ribbon around an orange, carving a space for a candle, and sticking cocktail stick spikes with sweets into them and then hurling them at each other in ritual combat. They were lit using candles borrowed from the menorah... which felt, in a small way, like what interaction between religions should always be like.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, or have a good time no matter what you choose to celebrate or how you say it.