Journals

WAVE #3

Its a very strange sensation knowing that this time tomorrow the last 5 dreadful years working in a supermarket will be behind me. Yes, tomorrow at 4pm I hang up my green body warmer for the last time and head off into my career.

Overall emotion at the moment? Overwhelmingly Nervous.

I guess driving 10 minutes to my old hometown to print price labels for 9 hours a day got far too routine and in the end I just did it without thinking. The next couple of months are going to be a nightmare.

First off, my new job is in Shrewsbury which is an hours drive from my house. Fuel and keeping my 14 year old car roadworthy will definatly run my bank account into the ground faster than I would like.

Secondly, I'm no longer working with my finacee. We see each other most of the day and complain about the assholes we work with when we get home. Its nice. Now when I leave the house she'll either have left already or be in bed still depending on her shift. In the evening when I get home I'll only have a few hours before I'll need to sleep in preparation for the travel the next day.

The good points? Well, its the start of a career in Web Design for one of the UK's busiest e-commerce website providers. It's more money and goes up even more after a couple of months. Also, as luck would have it, the very same company hired 3 of my friends from college recently.

Anyways, I've been moaning for long enough and I suppose nobody really cares about this stuff. I just felt like typing out my thoughts...meh

Best get some sleep. Last shift starts in 7 hours...

tl:dr? New job causes conflict of emotions.

Good Day to you all.

[i]MEET ARCHIE...[/i]Now with waving action!

Yeah, so after the tragedy with Mizzi, my fiancee and I decided the house was too empty without him. It order to fill the hole that he left, we aquired a 5 week old kitten (he hits 6 weeks today)

He so cute but is a lot to handle at the moment with litter training and getting him used to the house. He's been here for a week and so far has explored 2 of our 4 rooms. He is currently adventuring on and around the sofa and is very affectionate to people. More soon.

I'm a little depressed at the moment. See below

Goodnight Mizzi

MEET MIZZI

He's adjusted very quickly to the smells and sounds of the English countryside and is proving to be quite the comedian. Overall, its nice to know that I'll have some company whenever I'm off work and the fiancee is out. :3Generally, since settling in, Mizzi has done what cats do best:

Good evening TWHL.

So, today is my Caturday. Got me a new cat today

His name is Mizzi (short for 'Mischief') and he's 1 year old. My plan was to take a few photo's of him today and upload them in this journal post but there have been a few complications.

Mizzi is a house cat and is used to living on a quiet street in the middle of town. However his owner is moving into a new apartment where pets aren't allowed. He is now living with me and my fiance out in the country on a main road so everything from the sounds to the smells is totally new to him. As such he has spent most of his day hiding under our sofa.

I'll upload photo's as soon as Mizzi is feeling a little more settled and looking more photogenic.

In other news I popped into work today to find out what hours I'm working when my holiday finishes. Unfortunatly it I go back a day earlier than I realised. I start at 7am tomorrow morning.

Looks like my next MOTM review and starting work on my Left4Dead map will have to wait.

So, with Left4Dead's Survival mode now up and running I've suddenly gained a lot of interest in mapping for it. Arena's are a lot easier to make in terms of reference and time but at the same time can still look good.

I intend to recreate one of the main streets of my home town, with the Buttercross (the town's main landmark and market area) as the central staging area.In this satalite pic you can see all the alleys and side roads leading into the street so the area should be perfect for the infected to swarm over.Zones:
RED: Buttercross staging area: Ammo and Health here.
GREEN: Play Zone: Players and Infected can maneuver in these areas
YELLOW: Infected Zones: Infected spawn in these areas. Players cannot enter.

I hope to start working on this map this week while I'm on holiday. More info soon. I will be asking for help and testing soon as well so stay frosty. <3

WAVE #2

I recently worked out why I prefer playing RPGs (Preferably FPS RPGs)

In most titles such as Half-Life or Far Cry or Crysis, you are perscribed a character, with a backstory and a motive and a set fate. This always kills immersion for me, even in Far Cry 2 when you have a selection of characters the overall game is the same regardless.

Fallout 3 is currently my top game and with good reason. After your characters birth you make your own story starting with your name and how you look. From then on things can change dramatically. I am currently playing 2 games in Fallout.

In one, I have created myself, as closely as possible appearance wise, but mostly in the choices I have made so far. As a baby I became intelligent, observative and agile but not overly strong. On my 10th birthday I annoyed Butch (the bully character) and used my wit to get out of a fight. I also thanked everyone for their gifts regardless of how crap they all were. When the shit hit the fan in the vault I helped out everyone I could and used my agility to sneak around or run from the guards so that I didn't have to kill anyone. Since leaving the vault I have been friendly with everyone, even lying occasionally to make them feel better (or for my own benefit. Hey, thats just how I am)

In my other game, I am playing as Crystal, who is pretty much my opposite. Female, attractive and a complete and utter bitch queen. As a baby I trashed my room, throwing toys all over, and made myself very strong, very charismatic and quite stupid. On my 10th birthday I told everyone how crappy their gifts were and got in a fight for calling Butch's mum a drunk. I even got told off for being ungrateful. I then shot my dad in the eye with a BB gun he gave me. When things went loopy I took a bat and smacked the living shit out of everyone, including those asking for help. I would often loot their bodies as well. I got some nice stuff out of it. I also locked a Butch's mom in a room with some radroaches (big fucking cockroaches) who ate her alive whilst I snagged all her booze and killed her son with a security baton. (I wanted his jacket.) Since leaving the Vault I have become addicted to Whiskey. At one point I broke into a woman's house and beat her to death with my fists so that I could get my fix.

Thats what makes Fallout such an immersive game. Imagine how crazy Half-Life would have been if Gordon was a medkit junkie and needed a fix in the middle of a shootout. The tension would have been double what it was. Or if you could make deals with the militia in Far Cry 2 so that they could give you supplies or be called on to help with missions.

Role-Playing is often shunned because of its slow combat mechanics and levelling systems but in my opinion its the best type of game for interativity and a truely immersive experience.

Oh, I also drank from a toilet in a dank and rusty saloon. Got quite sick.

tl;dr? RPG's are the best source of immersive and interactive worlds.

Wave 1

YouTube and Warner Music Group have really rubbed me the wrong way as of late. Muting an entire video because it contains 10 seconds of music is the most fucking ridiculous thing I have ever heard. OK, so an entire song I can understand even though my crappy GMOD music videos are still up. However my Santa's Revenge Review for Mod of the Month contained no more than 20 seconds of the track "12 Pains of Christmas," a god awful song by some god awful artist nobody had ever heard of yet WMG saw fit to mute it for this very reason. Never mind the fact that the rest of the video took a week or so to prepare and put together and that the artists were all credited accordingly.

If they had sent a message and told me, then I would have gladly downloaded the movie, altered the 20 seconds of footage and then uploaded it with a different track. But no, the vid was muted without my knowing and I no longer have the files to fix the issue. So, my Santa's revenge review is silent, making it overall pointless.

Warner Music can choke on a cock.

Well, I should be able to run off another Map of the Month review this week. Been lagging behind after the whole "REINSTALL FUCKING EVERYTHING" virus fix. I also seem to be suffering a pretty serious case of the "can't-be-arsed" fever.

Anywho, with any luck completing this video will inspire me to run off the other few maps I've been assigned too. Here's to hoping.

It's a good thing Fallout 3 is an awesome game. In my haste to wipe my system clean of all the nasty viruses that had swallowed my Windows folder, I seem to have cleansed myself of the the progress I had made out in the wasteland.

There were a few other titles I have inadvertently erased but Fallout 3 was the biggest one in terms of hours played.

I'll have to reinstall it at some point and get started again. I also decided to give Far Cry 2 another try, see if I can actually finish it this time. I've put 9 hours in so far. Man its fucking boring. Even the multiplayer. Thats a bad sign right there.

I miss GoldSource mapping

I really want to work on Complex Opinions so that I have media to revive the MODDB Page with. It was the one project I've worked on alone that I was genuinly happy with. Some areas need reworking and tweaking but I just can't cope with altering graphics settings each time I switch between Hammer and Half-Life.

Such a pain in the ass.

What is with the sudden overabundance of horror mods these days?

It seems for every decent Source/GoldSrc mod that is currently in development there are 3 or 4 more horror mods with development teams who believe that to induce fear you need darkness. These so called &#8216;teams&#8217; are usually made up of a single kid producing content, sometimes even less than that (hurray for stealing other peoples work!)

Here are the basic essentials to producing a horror mod these days:

• 1 Blocky map with no lights 100 zombies and 1 or 2 corpses.
• 1 custom zombie model / skin.
• A few custom zombie sounds.
• 1 crappy ass title (Fear: Source / Dark Black / Zombie Manor)

Compile and release and a throng of equally talentless teens will no doubt praise it as the work of a god, inspiring them to release mods of their own.

What a load of bollocks.

How hard is it for people to say "Thank You" these days?

I put in 10 hours work yesterday. I was running the department while my manager was away. Therefore I had to work 10 hours from 9am to 7pm with 1 hours break for lunch. From 9am to 4pm I had to cover the office doing several managerial jobs. From 4pm on a Sunday I have to put out advertising and do legal price checks for Monday morning's trade. If it's not done, the company is then displaying false advertising, which by-the-by is considered illegal by trading standards.

I usually work 12pm to 9pm on a Sunday which essentially gives me from 4pm to 9pm to do advertising. So last night I was 2 hours short not to mention suffering from a major stress induced migraine. I was sick when I got home. My shift for today was supposed to be 7am to 3pm, however with 2 hours lost last night and the doors opening to customers at 8am I was an hour short to get everything done. So I started an hour early, wandered in through the doors and then I get a load of other work dumped on me. I worked my ass off from 6am to 12:30 without a break. I had 30mins and was told I could leave at 1pm for not taking my lunch hour.

Finally 1pm rolls around and I leave passing the Store manager on my way out. He turns to me and says:

"What time are you in tomorrow mate?"
"I'm not" says I
"Oh God." He calls back "Pain in the ass."
...
RAGE!

Remember that little journal entry rant I made a few weeks back? Well...

My new Homepage / Portfolio is online!

http://www.urbanebula.co.uk/

It now includes a link to a wordpress blog which is where my new "Talking to myself" entries will be posted. Feel free to drop in and comment if you like.

Talking to Myself: Part.1 of God only knows how many...

I don't expect anyone to read this and even those who do will find the content somewhat lacking in entertainment value. I really have nothing of any interest to talk about.

I am sitting at my desk on a forum I used to visit at least once a day and now only find time for twice a week or so. So why the HELL would I keep a record of my thoughts here? I have no idea. Maybe its just a way for me to vent my various frustrations and other feelings to an audience that might...just might...be as fucked up as I am. Jesus, I sound like a little emo bitch.

Yet here I sit, the last few hours of my week long holiday slipping away, typing every thought that comes into my head, the backspace key still present but unused. Why type out something only to dwell on it before backtracking and sugar coating it for the benefit of the audience, so as not to offend? These are MY thoughts. Why should I allow my own portrayal of cencorship to gag my own opinion? Why should YOU?

I guess what I'm trying to say is do not be afraid to speak your mind, maybe others will speak theirs in return. Don't hide being a facade of numbers or ratings or 1337 sp33k because nobody will take you seriously.

I'm aware that this kind of nonsensical rambling holds no place in an internet forum designated to creative design and production which is exactly the reason I posted it in my journal. I am also painfully aware that this journal entry will have a comment section, which will most likely be filled with flaming and dismissive statements. But if you felt at least a spark of realisation in reading this then stand out from the masses and say something.