i contacted sujoy about buying the site, telling some of my friends it kind of feels like a mid-life crisis motorcycle purchase. sujoy offered a very fair exchange of allowing me the site identity, code, data, etc., in exchange for maintaining this site in appreciation of the community. we were both on the same page in that regard.

this site played a large role in my intellectual development. i was challenged, through arguments with smart and dumb people around the world, to prove myself argumentatively. i threw my personal identity and home addresses out like candy, brazenly daring the internet to find and kill me (please). i absorbed lessons about the nature of power and how human beings handle it that i would later read about by authors such as jouvenal, aristotle, skinner, etc. i watched charged personalities accelerated into the wall of community disdain, to explode into particles whose energies altered the direction of interactions for days, weeks, and months.

i've also been strongly negatively impacted by this site. i've been banned for exposing hidden corruption, i've been chastised for calling out well-loved users who used their power to secretly alter other users' content with no accountability, i've been hated for being a blatant asshole with no consideration for people i made no effort to understand or empathize with, and i've been criticized by others just as strongly for the audacity i've shown in making attempts at creative expression.

there's so much more than that, but i'll avoid getting too distracted from the general point i want to make.

i have some short-term quality of life and general improvement goals for esreality.com as a site, and some long-term goals for Excess Reality LLC as a company.

the short-term goals:
1. fix and improve the twitch stream sidebox - i'd like to first assess the state (what's working, what isn't), research and estimate the work required to update the codebase, then decide whether to update the existing code or perhaps roll out something new as a base for number 2.
2. allow users to manage their own lists of twitch streamers, rather than relying on an admin to manage a universal list for all users. this is a very low priority, as twitch provides mechanisms for notification of stream activity, but it is useful for users who don't have twitch accounts or maybe find having a less ostentatious source for updates is easier to handle.
3. update the user interface to be a bit more mobile friendly. nothing crazy, just enough to make browsing on a phone less tedious.
4. update the navigation & some of the content link boxes. articles haven't been posted in years, and are a somewhat antiquated format. esreality isn't currently a content creator, it's a bit of a community aggregator, and so i'd like to lean into that strength a bit by giving the community content better visibility, and de-emphasizing some of the stagnant feature content.
5. privacy updates - gdpr and ccpa, as much as i disagree with the rigorous structure of them, have become pretty big deals. they're a threat to people who just want to run web sites like esreality.com easily. however, giving a shit about user privacy and user preference toward how data they create is treated is morally correct. my goal here is to give users tools to mask their identities & content, to request data related to their accounts, to delete their accounts, and to never have to worry about their data or any behaviors being tracked, monitored, or distributed for any reason other than furthering the security of the site. this is a big task, and requires thorough review of esreality.com legal language, and european & californian statutes and codes.

these are general quality of life changes that can improve the site experience a lot, without changing things too radically.

the long-term goals:

excess reality llc owns the digital properties & assets of the site. my ultimate goal is to build a new platform that takes the core identity of esreality.com (gaming, life, community participation, discussion, passion, etc.) and frames it in modern technologies with some modern web app conventions, as well as a few ideas i believe are innovative and solve a lot of problems with how people holding disparate and antagonistic ideas can live and function in the same universe without constantly driving each other crazy.

i think there could be some opportunity for monetization, but it's not a focus for me. if anything, that could look like dumb ads sold to companies through classic human conversational business, rather than targeted ads employed via algorithm. i have pretty strong opinions on the impact that ads and things have on user experiences, and on the general moral basis for their presentation. like i said, it's not a goal or focus, just a potential. another avenue for monetization could be game server hosting, but that's a huge undertaking and definitely not one i'm interested in pursuing in my current state.

assuming this project becomes a reality, and is publicly released, i will archive esreality.com in a read-only state & preserve it for as long as i am financially, mentally, physically, and spiritually capable, as a tribute to what sujoy built.

all i have left to say is that i hope i do it well.

ESReality is performing some domain maintenance. This maintenance may result in some temporary downtime within the next week as a domain transfer takes place. Keep your hands and feet inside the ride and please do not panic.

Update
Everything seems to be functional after the domain transfer. Reverting this news to minor. Thank you for all of your continued support.

and i think about how brilliant i was (i'm even smarter now). people talk about cringing when they look back on their internet history. there's a lot to cringe about, but that cringe was a necessary sacrifice for certain forms of expression that just weren't possible without it. the arrogance to selflessly sacrifice all dignity in pursuit of some desire, regardless of the scope of that desire (e.g. becoming the greatest football player of a generation or having an especially loud fart within the span of recent memory) is a requisite component of certain forms of achievement; of certain forms of personal progression.

these achievements require a suspension of belief or some other distraction from limiting concepts that work against the realization of achievable goals, whatever they may be. i don't regret being an ass, then or now, because it's fun, and it's an important part of developing the fearlessness of consequences necessary to transgress and extend boundaries.

i think (fondly) about guys like jamerio sometimes. i think about being a bluff in the face of a relentless storm. it's a bit of an inspiration. one fascinating difference i've noticed between jamerio and people who are emotionally charged to bring him down is that jamerio doesn't typically revel in victory with people who act in somewhat good faith or good sport with him. he's arrogant and confident and likes to banter and spar, but he's mostly amicable and fun to argue with.

the people who tend to be negatively emotionally compelled have bully-like qualities. they want to rub jamerio's nose in some imaginary mess they suppose he's left around, and he deserves it. it's a pretty sinister difference. where jamerio or people acting in good faith with jamerio are content to play at barbery, these others bite too hard, and through doing so show their fears; their emotional investment in a subject being challenged in such a way as to make them uncomfortable enough to forget their manners.

i wasn't able to appreciate this quality very much a few years ago. i liked jamerio, he was entertaining, and i respected his intellect and wit, but i didn't quite have the sophistication of mind to appreciate the subtle sort of compelling force he expresses.

i'd take one jamerio for 50 son1dows. he'd dig a ditch faster, and he'd give better advice. the only reason i'd ever take 50 son1dows over 1 jamerio is if i knew somebody was going to shoot 50 bullets at me from head on. i'd take the 50 sond1dows and line them up directly in front of me.

unless somehow jamerio could plead his case, and expressed a preference to live, if even a moment more, to die via his own will. if jamerio asked that of me, in that moment, then i would grant that and give the eulogy for a man too good for this world. but if he didn't want that, i'd empathize, because that's a truly heroic request. i wouldn't hold him to that ideal, but i would definitely be inspired by it were it to occur.

anyway, if that wasn't the case, then i'd opt for the son1dows.

This is a very sex man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdgEcCKaLmE

many thakns for demiurgeto upload the video :^)

Some reports of antagonistic Discord server behavior have been submitted to ESReality's Fast Acting Resolution Team. Upon discovery of this issue, FART mobilized to troubleshoot the cause. Quick and attentive care was exercised by Demiurge and Brandan to isolate the problem to improper invite configuration resulting in users being automatically removed from the server soon after using the invite to join.

There is no record of the automatic user removal in the server audit log, and existing ESReality admins, having exhausted all of their cumulative mental resources struggling to understand this problem, had resigned themselves to the incapacity of affecting positive change by developing a desirable resolution.

Due to this discovery, Demiurge has admirably executed his duties duties by utilizing his administrative privileges to generate a new invite, which is now available above the ESR Navigatory Side Bar. Users who have been ejected from the Discord server in the past, please forgive ESReality for this egregious misapplication of administrative configuration. You were not intentionally removed from the server. Please feel free and invited to rejoin with the fullest confidence that your stay with be both welcome and long.

Quake Live rode the crest of games as a service. Built initially as a web experience, id Software stood at the boundaries of asynchronous social development. Though the implementation was not ideal for many, the initial technical achievements were real. As senior developers departed id in pursuit more fruitful (not solely monetary) opportunities, the deflated Quake Live development team lost direction. The technical achievement of the beta release was the third-to-final clearly defined goal for the project.

The easy availability of the Quake 3 gameplay experience on then-modern platforms shocked an aging community into activity, spurring a series of tournaments that, while epic to players and fans of the game, are slowly fading into irrelevancy as the weighty crush of the pestle of a bountiful and massively productive gaming ecosystem grinds their ever-weakening memory into the dusty mortar of history. In many ways, the achievements of Quake Live, both technical and social, blatantly surpassed those of Quake 3, though Quake Live lacked the inherent impact afforded to Quake 3 by virtue of the context of its release in the much sparser and much less perceptibly technical gaming ecosystem of the late 90s and early 00s.

Quake communities, like most--if not all--internet communities, were rife with contention incited by strongly-held opinions expressed in absolutes. Where some would argue that rifts between players resulting from differences of opinion about the merits of various aspects of Quake Live--to name only a handful, gametypes, playstyles, maps, netcode implementation, and refugee crises--inhibited participation, my position has been, through many years, that these clashes of perspective helped energize and divide the community into distinct subcultures that passionately advocated for their ideal qualities of the game. This tension between subcultures generated dynamic competitions that both stoked fires of life into the community and satisfied a classically masculine desire to establish the superiority of the positions adhered to. Without such oscillation of collective energies, players who aren't satisfied with merely excelling at the game became disinterested and wandered to more socially engaging or less socially conflictory communities.

As the years passed, a vocal minority community manager-approved player opinion panel pushed for whimsical changes sourced from their personal experiences and desires, resulting in a schizophrenic pattern of development that drove much of the less-vocal majority of dedicated players to other communities and games. The quality of development declined rapidly, resulting, at one point, in broken netcode that fundamentally altered the online experience in many negative ways, such as broken rocket jump consistency. As a service, id Software provided servers for users, and the quality of those servers also declined notably as the game aged, with many users getting drastically different representations of the game state at any given moment, resulting in an unsatisfactory feeling of inconsistency that subverted the mechanical and strategical facets of Quake Live gameplay that were, and are, so alluring as to be almost universally appreciated by players who otherwise reserved no respect for the opinions of others with regard to particulars of the game layered, in Quake Live's case, haphazardly atop of the pure foundation of interaction with a competitive system in an arena of well-defined boundaries for skillful development and growth.

The second-to-final clear goal for Quake Live was to modify it in service to the development of a beta for the ideas that would ultimately culminate in the production of Quake Champions. Features such as loadouts--the selection of default weapons that players started the game with--were forcibly inserted into previously cherished gametypes with, seemingly, no regard for or analysis of the motivations players held for enjoying them. The sycophantic vocal minority steadily voiced complaints over the inability for new players to gain a foothold in the sheer cliff faces of distinct plateaus of skill, and posited a variety of solutions that omitted variables that, if considered, nullified their conclusions and invalidated their solutions. Quake Live, in a convergence of technical stagnation, problematic implementation, and misguided development, shed its players with offensive disregard for player satisfaction, and soon the rabble had driven away the undesirable masses who so restricted their personal enjoyment of the game, and would have found, had they possessed the self-awareness to do so, that in their pursuit of the promise of progress, they'd only hastened the collapse of a once vibrant ecosystem. As the player base shrunk, the distinctions between skill tiers came into sharp focus, and new players attracted by the mechanics were confronted with less dynamic, less favorable, and less manageable experiences. In the pursuit of modifying the game to appeal more to new players, the sycophants had actually driven a greater wedge between the new players and their ability to enjoy the game.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Plasto, ca. 5 BC

The final goal of Quake Live was a tragically late love letter to a doomed community more than decimated by alienating changes and counterproductive decisions. Classic features of Quake games, such as dedicated servers and modding, albeit severely limited, were implemented, allowing for some extension of (greatly waned) vitality to the remaining player base. Steam integration allowed for smoother socialization and organization, and the Steam workshop integration promoted and normalized creative development that is readily available to all players, eliminating much of the hassle of obtaining requisite content that previous Quake titles suffered from. I can only wonder at the impact of such features had they been implemented at the onset of the release of Quake Live. Artificial limitations to end of match map selection were lifted, loadouts were ousted, and the restrictions to players experiencing the game as they desired were lessened, allowing for the remaining players to cultivate experiences and subcommunities that continue to drive community activity. Server quality increased, netcode was much more consistent, and players finally had a game they could exercise control in. The server supply was no longer artificially rationed by developers to funnel players into new undesired gametypes, and instead rose to meet the demands of the community.

For me, Quake 3 was hours of RA3 on the same map, liberally seasoned with a dynamic variety of rewarding, fun, frustrating, and infuriating social experiences that acted as hooks sinking in to drag interest out of what is, otherwise, a very sterile system of competitive mechanics of play. Though Quake Live's final--what I call--apology release provided some appreciated relief to the decimated player base, it had also shattered that endearing and engaging social experience through the implementation of modern pacing introduced by console games, such as greatly shortened map cycle times. Where in something like RA3 players of any skill could join servers and run around the same map for hours, developing familiarity and comfort with new environs and sharpening their mechanical skills, in Quake Live players are ushered quickly through a variety of maps, any potential flow they may have developed eliminated with each transition. Where in something like RA3 the vanity of winning the game came third or lower to socialization and the enjoyment of combat, in Quake Live the pursuit of winning on a given map takes priority, as the definite end of the match creates a pressing need to perform, resulting in differences of skill becoming frustrating and distracting from the enjoyment of diverse situations, and an overhead of stress that obfuscates playful engagement. Gameplay patterns developed in the restrictive temporal boundaries, causing further unfulfilling frustrations to players who held and continue to hold inflexible expectations for the perpetuation of such patterns.

Quake Live, now, is as it should have been 10 years ago, and Quake Champions, regretfully, carries the torch of schizophrenic direction that served as the catalyst for the demise of Quake Live. From my perspective, it appears as though Tim Willits drove Quake Live in a direction that allowed him to trade the contracts of Saber Interactive's involvement in the development of Quake Champions for a lucrative executive position with Saber once the wilted teat of development ceased its secretion of nourishing productivity, unfairly placing id Software in an untenable position with no recourse to salvage any potential Quake Champions's appeal to a greater audience.

@zhu what's going on big guy?

https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/matt...3ef806bdff

War Dogs Sound Off! WOOF WOOF



Results:
1. chalq
2. kwong
3. santile

Welcome to the War Dogs War Zone, where immortal champions battle for control of the Eternal Arena. The War Dogs are proud to present Chalq's Dog Pound Monthly, sponsored, created, directed, and maintained by Chalq. Featuring the largest North American prize pool in the history of 2020 North American CPM tournaments, Chalq has kindly donated FIVE HUNDRED heckin' dollarinos to the top 3 finishers, with 5 $10 Steam gift cards provided for randomly selected failcringe losers. Join the Dogs of War in the Battle Arena on May 16 for the first EVER CPM Dog Pound Monthly.

About the War Dogs
The War Dogs is a hierarchyless digital anarchogamer egregore that is + friendly and celebrates Inclusivity and Diversity. What is + friendly? Each and every War Dog leads a Unique and Meaningful life, and constraining such individuality to limited acronyms such as LGBT is inherently exclusive to the plethora of paths we take on our personal journies. Throw your paw in with the War Dogs to fight Bigotry in Gaming (and Nazis)!


Links: Discord Brackets VOD

in a friendly community, members allow for deviation from social norms in order to promote comfort and comradery. in an unfriendly community, members police each other for deviation as an appeal for social credit that can be exchanged on an unspoken secret market for future allowance of deviation that is, itself, kept secret between conspiring members.



at one time i was considered a toxic member of esreality, though my contributions provoked innumerable comments and threads, challenged the status quo, entertained a multitude of members, and promoted progress and change, both for the site and for myself as a person. over the years i became a head admin with full developer and database administration access, and was celebrated and denigrated alike by many esreality members. ultimately, i abandoned these privileges, which i held the utmost respect for, due to a lack of motivation to interact with moronic toy tyrants possessing a seemingly infinite pool of psychically obstructive energy who, when given access to an insignificant amount of power in a playful community, exercised that power to its fullest extent in order to impede the joy of others' participation, even if that participation benefited the ecosystem and development of the community.



some people do not understand ironical banter. when faced with challenging and controversial dialog as a stimulus, their behavioral response is to squawk like hall monitor parrots in an attempt to win first place in the tattle tell rat race of legislative-gotcha-relevancy. the cpm community has been infested by the podium finishers of years of such races, and has suffered population stagnation and erosion of playfulness as a result. for these people, 'rules for thee and not for me' is an unspoken motto, and the letter of the law is a critical standard when applied to those ignoble members who haven't aspired to attain naive aristocratic status within their particular niche gaming ghetto.



chalq is a hard working person with a natural mindset that reflects ddk's concept of the champion. he seeks to focus and improve at those things he desires to master, and has demonstrated such will to mastery through his numerous defeats of noted european cpm giants, such as gaiia, hal9000, vdmk, memphis, and more. notice that i did not include terrified terifire in that list of giants; the explanation is simple: terrified terifire is the quivering lapdog of cpm, whose incessant high-pitched yipping is more of an appeal for crumbs from the community than a pronouncement of intent and capacity to deal anything bordering on a significant strike against anybody who is capable of maintaining a defense against the artificial power he has been granted through passive aggressive social affirmation afforded by the collective insecurities of a small and irrelevant group of mentally impotent pseudo-fascists.



though chalq's personality may not have been casted from the theoretically ideal mold held dear by the hypocrite pharisees and scribes of cpmrael, his heart is filled with goodness and there is an underlying kindness to his behaviors that is missed by people who lack the introspective capacity for reflection upon their inability to apply their publicly expressed standards of judgment to themselves, and who are not sensitive to the subtleties of social expression that allow for the manifestation of ironical banter with an essence of kind-hearted relatability and comradery that personalities such as chalq have developed. such recognition requires a propensity for emotional and intellectual intelligence that cpm aristocrats have no desire to practice and develop, and the time has come for the community to express its disdain.



shame the comfortable bourgeoisie that has implemented a rigid system of self-serving hypocritical social corruption that lacks tolerance, playfulness, goodness, kindness, and understanding. gamers...RISE UP!



please donate just a moment of your time to anonymously express your outrage in the following strawpoll. remember, your vote cannot be viewed by the ruling elite, and so you will not suffer any social consequences for promoting the truth.

https://www.strawpoll.me/18365737

War Dogs Sound Off! WOOF WOOF

Professional gamer association War Dogs announces the War Dogs Warsow Division War of Attrition, sponsored by the War Dogs Gamer Committee. This is your opportunity to Seize the Cheese, $100 to be divided among players from the winning team. The never-before-seen Polar Twin Qualifier Format will determine teams of two players each for the final single elimination bracket. Players will compete in the Polar Twin Qualifier and will be paired according to their performance, such that the highest ranked player will be coupled with the lowest rank, second highest with the second lowest, etc. Results for each team's final single elimination bracket performances will be combined to determine overall standings. The games will be played exclusively on WDM2, and both qualifier and tournament will be Swiss format.

About the War Dogs
The War Dogs is a hierarchyless digital anarchogamer egregore that is + friendly and celebrates Inclusivity and Diversity. What is + friendly? Each and every War Dog leads a Unique and Meaningful life, and constraining such individuality to limited acronyms such as LGBT is inherently exclusive to the plethora of paths we take on our personal journies. Throw your paw in with the War Dogs to fight Bigotry in Gaming (and Nazis)!


About Warsow
In Warsow, you will join the fight as futuristic cyber-pigs vying for control of the eternal arena. Warsow features cutting edge cel-shaded graphics and professional arena gaming technology, with NEGATIVE input latency and POSITIVE attitudes. Practice the Art of Respect by disciplining and schooling your body to obtain the title of uncontested War Dogs World Power Pig.

Seize the Cheese!

Download warsow

Signup within the discord

Tournament Dates
Qualifier: May 4, 2019 - 8 PM EST
Tournament: May 11, 2019 - 8 PM EST
Prize Pool:$100

Sign up on Challonge

Stream
War Dogs Discord - Lo's Warsow Discord

so with xou moving on as an admin, esr would benefit from having some user or users who are interested in contributing content such as fixtures, events, etc. are there any amongst you who has the integrity to keep up with community activity such as this and would be interested in contributing to esr?

I have been driven over the last 15 to dig through and update the ESR code to create a prototype of what I believe is the beginning of a more aesthetically pleasant and friendly user interface. In this process I have also implemented some modern CSS & HTML standards as replacements for long obsolete methods.

I have not implemented the change without consulting the community, because custom CSS files that many use will need to be updated to work with new markup & styles. Any user with knowledge of CSS & basic web development can create a custom stylesheet, which can be stored on the server for access by all users of level 'regular' and above.


So I give it to the community to decide: should I implement changes and continue to direct this development of ESR? The test site can be reached by the following URL:

http://test.esreality.net/

post & comment forms should all now feature a collection of text formatting buttons. other text formatting buttons will become available as i uncover them (such as 'hide'). this feature will be polished over time.

a couple of other small changes have been implemented that may not be covered by custom stylesheets. this is the cost of progress.

i will update post file management as time permits. i realize it is a pain in the penis to manage images after they've been uploaded. this will take some time.

in which i describe training_aim_csgo and discuss some of the mechanical aspects of aiming that i have been thinking about

for those who don't want to sit through the video: this map allows you to practice aim with most weapons in the game. there are targets of configurable sizes that pop into and out of existence that can be set to move with different behaviors, and a scoreboard over the target field shows your accuracy for easy reference. the accuracy is reset each time the targets reset.

i'm wondering: is this possible for ql? this would be a great training feature for players of any skill level, and imo a very high quality addition to ql resources. my map making experience is very basic, though, so i'm not sure what radiant can do.

i would love to see something like this implemented in ql. scoreboards would actually make it a great 'single player' addition to the game.

i guess the best way to find out is to download qeradiant and try...but there are a few guys who are a lot better qualified to do something like this, and in a much better position to actually get the map into ql.

one of the features most obviously missing after announcing adl was a registration form, so that players don't have to use email or esr to sign up. in the process of creating the registration form, i was confronted by the question of map selection, as players will be choosing a home map when they register for the league.

so, i can think of some pretty usual duel maps:

almostlost
aerowalk
battleforged
blood run
campgrounds
cure
delirium
dismemberment
furiousheights
hektik
houseofdecay
lostworld
phrantic
sinister
thunderstruck
toxicity
verticalvengeance

are there some other maps that i should consider adding to the selection of home maps?

American Duel League is an in-development competitive platform for North American Quake players. It was started from the desire to build a league capable of providing sponsorship and compensation for all players involved. To reach that goal, however, will require spectatorship and participation.

In an attempt to determine whether such requirements can be met, and to test site and format functionality during development, ADL is holding a test season for North American players. Players of any skill level are invited to apply, but only the 5 players with the highest peak Elo for each region will be selected. Players will specify the server to which they receive the lowest ping, select a home map, and play each other player from their region twice, once on each player's home map. Regional standings are determined by wins/losses.

A selection of games will be streamed each night of play, and demos & screenshots will be provided by all players for each match. If initial response is positive, and player numbers are decent, prizes will definitely be considered.


Sign-ups are open immediately, and will close Sunday, the 24th of January. Games will begin February 2nd. Please visit the ADL registration page to submit your registration.

Update: ADL registration submission is now live on the ADL site. Please use this link to submit your registration.

The registration response so far is very promising. Remember to share this information with anybody you know who will be interested.

Links: ADL Official Web Site - ADL BitBucket Issue Tracker

2014 was unproductive from the perspective of expecting quantity, but the quality of production of my music was decenter.

here is the first thing from this year:

https://soundcloud.com/uepuejq/an-enormous-prepend

for the past few weeks i have been putting some active effort into improving my abilities in cs:go. in my teens i played quite a bit of 1.3 to 1.6. i wasn't really much of a quake player, though i was familiar with the game and had played netquake casually in our school computer lab in high school, and had played a good amount of ra3 for about 6 months. cs had lower system requirements than q3, and even with 30fps on de_aztec, it will still possible to be competitive. i didn't get a computer suitable for 125fps in q3 until around 2009 or 2010, and from 2000 to roughly 2011 i didn't play much of anything on the pc.

i have been able to put quite a few of the things i've learned to work for improving at competitive games, and when things click it is very satisfying. a couple of concepts and applications clicked for me today in cs go, and rather than allow myself to experience that pleasure and quickly forget about it, i chose to spend some time analyzing the game from my perspective and experience, and to take a look at a recent demo to sort of walk myself through my experiences, and make some attempt at verbalizing what is happening so as to better commit these concepts to memory.

http://www.twitch.tv/b/b/607186433

there's the video. i have been playing de_inferno mostly exclusively for the past 3 weeks, and this video sort of caps that exclusive focus. for the next few weeks i am going to be focusing on de_nuke.

also, sorry my voice is a bit nasally. my nose and throat are a bit inflamed or something.

can somebody point me in the right direction for learning how to read and interpret ql demos? is it possible to determine accuracies, scores, item pickups, distances traveled, and other stats from reading demos?

is it possible to compare the distance traveled of the mouse sensor vs. the distance traveled of the in-game cursor to determine discrepancies?

gather vital information from gaming sessions, use it to???? thoughts?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20618081...ame-better

wallhack - allows powered up player to see enemy locations through walls for some time
aimbot - pickup adds x lockons
silencer - player & player weapons are totally silenced for some time
noclip - player can fly & walk through walls for some time
pentagram - it should come back, ql can become a summation of the history of quake
scan - show enemy health & armor, weapons & ammo for some time
shield - shots ricochet off player for some time
star - increased speed, invulnerability, and damage touched players, but can't fire weapon
nodecay - health & armor gathered over 100 does not decay, reset upon death
timer - sets alarm for 5 seconds before each next major powerup spawn


some achievements:
speed limit awards, such as reaching 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000 ups
frag run awards, such as reaching 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, etc. without a death

allow players to reset their own stats

so i feel an urge to play quake live, but every time i decide i'd like to play, i remember that i no longer seem to be able to successfully rocket jump. this happened roughly around the time i switched to g100s. i have tried staring at the ground to rocket jump, and before i didn't have problems with my rj. is it possible that the g100s latency is lower than keyboard, so my timing is off? i don't know what to do to fix this. :\ it destroys any joy i get from quake games.

this is the story of a man, who, having been exposed to daily beatings (quite early in the development of his childhood), beat the world around him into shape; a man who beat himself into a shape others could not recognize as meaning well, for all his efforts to do well were, unfortunately, dragged doggedly along the battered frameworks of his twisted form.

as in hell we are subjected to our greatest pains until we assume a love for their presence--for it absolves, however momentarily, us of, at the least, our loneliness--and then, when hope, and even the desire for the possibility of hope, is gone, and all that remains is a love for the companionship of pain, then the presence of that pain is denied us, so that we are left broken and alone and with no hope for hope, and at last without even the only torturous love left to us, so are the man's deeds, which, for all the pain experienced in their execution, he comes to love.

he grew. abandoned to the wilderness beyond the frontiers of his inherited nature, without even the memory of a brief glimpse of the trail maps from his father's years spent pioneering the land before parsing it out. in the years of his uninformed movements he frequently found himself entangled, and, having no map by which to select a destination, endlessly lost. he spoke in a language heard only by himself, and, between fits of primal emotion crudely rendered through vocalization, he heard the sound of the wind above and between the trees, and of the rustling leaves and falling seeds, and he saw that his breath was as a drop of rain is to the river's rush, and from that vision came to understand that to be silent and nourished by the wind is sometimes preferable to speaking and being lost within it.

i'm going to bed. goodnight.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2mjfi...in_9_hour/

r u an esr noob - demiurge, 2014

i left off around enter: general manager. i'm gonna get a little bit informal now, because.

i'm lazy.

but, i'm a hard worker. hard workers have to be hard workers, because they have trouble keeping up with the people who are good at what they do. this is an adaptation required for the slow thinking incompetent. though we'll fail repeatedly, and though we'll spend hours to the competents' seconds understanding a problem, and then hours more devising a solution, those around us will see a dedication and commitment to solving a problem that is, at the very least, and much like watching the friend-zoned and neck-bearded loveless loser struggle to maintain asexual relations with his best friend slash high school love interest, a dedication and commitment to solving a problem that is admirable for its self-sacrifice and expression of loyalty to achievement in the face of insurmountable odds. it is a somewhat tragic irony, watching the loser aspire to achievement, as watching a fingerless amputee in a back brace attempt to bend down to tie his shoes.

there's a hope, in my approach to work, that others can see my desire to achieve something good, but in my years of striving for achievement i have also begun to understood the eventual necessity of mumbling 'fuck it', and then closing whatever deal it is i've struck, be it an issue in an issue tracker that may not meet my personal expectations for quality, or a car sale in which i'm sure there are better terms and agreements that can be made.

it's trite and common, and perhaps years ago i would reject it for being so, and then perhaps spend hours or days or weeks working against it, like stacking perfectly spherical and frictionless marbles. only now can i see that, without boundaries, the marbles simply spread. the achievement of perfection requires boundaries that, unfortunately, in social circumstances, are determined by an assortment of personalities, and only become exposed through experimental communications, as the circling and seeking tendrils of a vine slowly spinning until finding a limb or trunk upon which to attach itself, so we thrust our desires through the shared airs of collaboration, a mechanical process of establishing structure for the development of social conceptual frameworks.

it's trite and common, but if it were art, i could establish my own boundaries, or lack thereof, and allow whatever number of marbles my mind can produce to spread upon my imagination's endless tabletop, the inept and stubby fingers of my self-efficacy picking and dropping and flicking them against and away from each other, the calloused blade of its palm sweeping them together into crashing and clinking glass waves, to mingle and separate in forms both expressing meaning through their intended positions, and celebrating meaninglessness in their circumstantial necessity, in the unwieldiness of their natures.

it isn't art, though, and through years of striking my head and will against the boundaries of others in an attempt to expose those around me to the beauty and joy of unencumbered creativity, of the sandbox playfulness, of the carnal pleasure in the flinging of what to stick wherever what may, and the further entertainment of interpreting what where stuck as whatever what's where may be, and how where what went defines what what was and will be, and so on, through years of striking my head and will against the boundaries of others i have come to understand that achievement requires hard work and boundaries, and social achievement requires accepting that the boundaries of others are sometimes insurmountably grand and well-fortified. sometimes it requires less energy to realize the achievement of an undesirable goal and move on to a new opportunity. it's just the way things are. not every pitch is going to be a home run, not every pitch should be swung at, sometimes it's necessary to bunt.

so, i've been a car salesman (i styled myself as a 'purchasing advisor', a bit of fluffy bullshit to invent a concept of trustworthiness in the minds of customers whose conception of sales, and very rightly, was defensive and paranoid) working within the accepted boundaries defined by those who, in their grey-haired experience and their social naivety, understand the subtleties of sales boundaries required for success that they've accumulated over years of successes and failures, but expect those without their experiences to immediately or intuitively grasp what they've had the unappreciated resource of time to develop a sense for.

this is a common problem, and we learn to deal with and accept it as a rite of passage in the ceremonial hazing we call 'life'. the big boys torment the little boys, and the little boys cry until they learn that crying only encourages the torment, and they grow to torment those younger than them, to play with and push the buttons that expose them to the beautiful world of social manipulation, until either their curiosities are sated or priorities shift or they're isolated from society due to their lack of tact.

in this process, we can learn and refine our senses of empathy, our ability apply our understanding of the requirements for successful realization of our desires and the experiences over time necessary to develop such self-efficacy toward an understanding of how others must labor for their own positions. through this empathy we establish a telescope through which we gaze at the stars of the lives of others, we develop a capacity for spectral analysis that gives us the building blocks of their successes and failures, we invent a science of personal progress through social perception.

some will never develop the microscope, the telescope, the spectroscope, or whatever other tools may exist. they will be satisfied by the self-centric social universe in which all others orbit the anchor of their personal development. these people cannot be reasoned with, and any attempt to illustrate the true relative nature of their positions will result in a persecution matching that of the religiously fervorous catholics patiently demonstrating their cases to the roman inquisition.

general manager, he was a socially unempathetic heliocentricist, and through my naively ignorant and obtusely unawares expressions of social relativity i had, most unfortunately, become a target for his ire. i had cast my carefully crafted probes into the space around the earth of his life's experiences, and as my rovers descended upon its rocky surface he launched his barbaric military defenses to chip away at delicate sensors with blunt rock hammers and sling-shotted pebbles.

what would you do, confronted by such a violent response to attempts at establishing lines of mutually beneficial communciation?

capcom did it with marvel vs. capcom. some options include:

quake vs unreal tournament
quake vs half-life
quake vs doom

etc.

players can select from a couple or more different characters from each series. the maps are populated with weapons relative to each player's deathmatch universe. i don't really know anything about any other deathmatch games, but i guess shotgun from quake and shotgun from doom would spawn in the same spot, then rail from quake and shock gun thing from ut spawn in same spot.

movement system is determined by character selection. quake has strafe jumping, ut has dodge stuff, etc.

this will give a larger audience of deathmatch games a good reason to pick one game to play.

Ask people if they'd consider a job in car sales, and most people would respond "no, I just don't have the right personality for it." That's the wrong answer, obviously, because in their negative affirmation they've actually just considered a job in car sales, then dismissed it, but I'm avoiding the point: most people don't see themselves as salespeople. I was, and still am, one such person.

Initially, I felt as though I wouldn't ever want to be such a pushy and persistent sort of person. Salesmen all seem gimmicky and shady, and even those who are likeable have a necessary bias to convince you to give them money. The fragility of relationships established between buyer and seller is never far from mind, like two vagrants, one possessing firewood and a lit fire and the other the fresh carcass of a day's hunt, calling out to each other from across a river, the surface recently frozen, neither willing to cross for fear of drowning, but both desiring to establish the trust necessary to generate a mutually beneficial transaction of the resources necessary to sustain their lives.

However, even with my preformed reluctance to participating in such transactions, I pushed myself into the cold wild, dedicating myself to the potential of a career in car sales. I watched videos, listened to audio books, and read books about the business. I cast aside my ego to venture forth naked of all but my curiosity and desire to achieve.

The weekend of my engulfment into car sales was highly unusual. The company owned three car lots, and had gathered each lot's used cars onto one lot, touting itself as the biggest used car sale in the area, or what I referred to as the largest used car sale in the history of the universe. There were roughly six sales representatives from each dealership present at all times, resulting in around 18 people standing, sitting, and walking around in anticipation of the daily catch, and that is really the analogy that best describes car sales: fishing.

Car dealerships are like bodies of water, each body possessing certain types of fish susceptible to specific baits and tackle. Modern dealerships straddle the line between stocked pond, in which the fishing experience is engineered so as to eliminate the unpredictability of a wild environment, while still offering food and access to wild fish through the tributary rivulets contributing to its water levels. The sales representative must possess the standardized tools that serve consistently for the generic fish, and a hodgepodge of collected that experience dictates will serve well in specific situations.

That weekend, the best bait to use was dynamite. I pushed myself in front of the other salesmen, addressed as many customers as I could see, regardless of appearance, smell, attractiveness, height, skin color, and otherwise, and without any previous experience and training, in two days' time sold two vehicles, all while earning the ire of 15 other salespeople who, apparently, believed that it to be the responsibility of the fish to jump into the, and here I cannot even say outstretched net, but I suppose to jump onto the shore of the lake, flop around down the road to a hardware store, sneak in through the back after an employee walks back in from a smoke break, wait for a clumsy customer to knock a hammer to the floor, swallow the entire hammer, flop back out through the back door at closing time after the employees leave, travel back down the road to the shore lined with fishermen, cough up the hammer into the air so that it falls back onto the fish's skull, and await the fisherman who, after chatting with the other fisherman about last night's adventures, happens to notice, while scanning the ground for cigarettes with a hint of remnant tobacco, the dried, suffering body of their day's catch lying unconscious on the sand.

It was a good start to my future career in car sales. Following the weekend sale, I sold a new car to a woman who I'd somehow established such a bond of trust that she felt comfortable telling me stories of her fake breasts, and how showing them to police officers had saved her from more than one ticket. I closed out that month by earning enough money from commission to have beat my projected earnings.

After the sale, the monotony of day to day car salesman life made itself apparent. In between the intensity of hooking a catch were periods of waiting, a mixture of both patience and anticipation, requiring the maintenance of a subtle level of stress, just enough to trigger an excited response at the potential of a bite.

In the second and final month of my employment, I managed to keep myself, with an infinitely less developed customer base, right on the heels of the veterans. Where the other new guy hadn't sold a single car, I'd sold 3.5, and the veterans ranged from 2 to 5. I was enjoying myself, the unique situations with each new customer were like private screenings of never-before-seen movies, each with a script composed by life itself, limited in my experience only by my own desire and ability to focus on the details.

Enter: General Manager. To a point, I had been working directly with a sales manager and other sales representatives. In each of these people was a level of empathy that allowed for a mutually supportive relationship. None of us wanted, or seemed to want, the others to fail, and we all shared with each other the thoughts necessary to contribute to our successes. However, every employee, no matter their diligence and dedication, must some day be away from work.

For those unfamiliar with U.S. car dealerships, sales people are encouraged, and often required, to turn over unsold customers to management as a last effort to convert a customer into a sale. Also a common practice is for sales people to 'touch the desk', or report to a manager with details about a deal being worked on, which allows the manager to, ideally, impart wisdom or advice that will contribute to the realization of a positive final transaction.

While dealing with

ah, fuck it. i don't want to write anymore, but it seems a waste to just throw this away.

i've been waiting for a good new coheed and cambria album since good apollo iv volume 1, and now i've found it.

https://mandroidechostar.bandcamp.com/album/citadels

it's more technicaller and intricater than coheed, but still has the same tone, attitude, and mood. this has filled a void in my life that, with each new coheed release, grew more and more distinctly and bleakly apparent. the only downside is that i can never speak their awful band name aloud.

also, demiurge turned me on to obscura:

i've been streaming a lot lately, but every fucking time i do it, when a new map is loaded, my stream video is stuck at the ql map loading screen. the audio is fine, but the video stalls. i have to vid_restart. i used to have up to TWO viewers at a time, but because of this awful turn of events i am down to ??, which i assume means SOMEWHERE LESS THAN TWO.

i am going to try reinstalling open broadcaster, but has anybody experienced and fixed this before? any tips?

had a couple close games with sleepii tonight, but this one was really fun. best game i can remember from the recent past.

http://www.twitch.tv/b/c/5100659

was watching agdq mega man x speed run when i caught this. second guy from the left:

i've played ql for a couple years now. i think i picked it up after the beta period, and have played somewhat regularly for a few month chunks, with 3-6 month quitting breaks in between (netcode annoyances, cheater-population-density-paranoia annoyances, etc.) this summer, i quit my dead-end-full-time-desk-job at an engineering firm and started a part-time job at a hotel to give myself some time to figure out some different options. one of the things i wanted to focus on over the summer was really dedicating myself to practicing ql. i wanted to see how far i could push myself with some dedicated practice and effort.

one of my first achievements this summer was to finish lane 6 in raztrainql_beta3. i was really concerned about my movement speed and circle jumping in ql, and though it still isn't as consistent as it could be, the experience of finishing lane 7 exposed me to how much my gameplay was suffering due to some very basic movement ignorance and inability. after beating lane 7, i pretty much gave up on the raztrainql_beta3 training, as halfbeat strafing doesn't really make itself too necessary in duel. however, i'm setting aside some time to spend practicing on raztrain with the speedometer up, just so i have that connection between mouse angle and speed reinforced sometimes.

my second achievement was legitimately beating tyryl, even though he was fucked up on drugs, and his play is extremely inconsistent when he's like that. i consider tyryl to be very close to top tier when he's focused and sober, putting him slightly below zero4 and dkt. however, when he's fucked up, he's probably around an 1800 elo player, so it still doesn't top the players on my 'top 5 defeated' list on qlranks. even so, i think this achievement served as battering ram against the well-fortified gates protecting a part of my brain that tells me that i'm not good enough to really do well in this game.

unfortunately, i played a few guys (xdbs and taskmaster [who explained that the reason he's so great is because he's 'boots', whatever that's supposed to mean] come to mind), who have pretty young accounts, and as i watched them accelerate to the upper-middle-class of the north american scene, my desire wilted, and with that wilting came about the somewhat persistent negative outlook i am susceptible to. i started recognizing all the times i was shot behind walls, all the times the lg damage output from my opponent was too high to make sense, all the times my shots missed, all the games that my experience just seemed off and sluggish, and i convinced myself that i didn't want to play anymore.

i had managed to peak at 1560 elo, 40 shy of my goal to break 1600 by the end of june.

so i picked up cs:go, and i've been thoroughly enjoying it, since because cs:s was so terrible i thought i'd never get to experience cs again without playing 1.6 (which looks and feels awful anymore).

but quakecon rolled around, and i started to feel a bit of inspiration. zero4's point about not quitting a hobby was rattling in my head, but i kept fighting it by pretending that cs:go would fill the void i felt by not playing ql. i tried to play q3, but there is nobody to play against. i have no desire to play cpm. i weaseled my way back into ql, bound "cvaradd net_port 1; net_restart" to n, and started playing again. i've lost a lot of games, some frustrating to lose, noticing that sluggish feeling, the delayed lg hitbeeps, the missing rails, the bursts of insane lg damage, etc., and i've decided that i'll just let it go and deal with the losses.

right now i'm sitting at 1640 elo. i was even streaming the games i played when i did it. i know i'll drop again, i understand the wild peaks and valleys that come from being an inconsistent amateur, but i reached that point by playing against decent players, not through 600 +1 elo duels against new 1200 elo accounts.

i've been an esr user for a fucking long time. i've been active for about half that time. i haven't really played many pc games over all the time, maybe about 6 or 7 months of warsow before the past couple years of ql, and before that, about 13 years ago, i played ra3/cpma for about 6 months, messed around with random vq3 duels with tyryl and some friends from irc, but mostly played cs1.6 for about 2 years. i couldn't even get 125fps in q3 back in the day.

i'm 30 years old, and i'm posting a public journal about beating some kids at a video game. meh, whatever. who else am i gonna share it with? nobody else in the world plays this shit. my wife could only possibly patronize me in response to my expression of elation at my video game skill.

i'm done with ql. it's the second time i've 'quit,' and for the same reason. since it's pointless to run a q3 server with ql gameplay, i'm going back to my roots to play cs. GO physics feel infinitely better than CSS physics, and i'm slowly getting used to the weapon dynamics.

does anybody know of some good demos/videos from different maps, showing a single player's perspective? maybe some vods with commentary about decision making and team strategies?

do people still play mill/fire?

the new versions of the old maps are nice. they address a lot of the problems with the old maps (except cbble, i think they kind of made that map worse).

what do you listen to? i really enjoy the final fantasy 4, 6, 7, 8, and 10 piano soundtracks for doing this sort of work. also, loscil has recently been a good source. the beethoven piano sonatas work really well, too.

i remember listening to a lot of ryuichi sakamoto and alva noto type stuff (idm), but the glitchy/poppy has become distracting for me.

ec2 evo died after 1.5 years of use. ~6 months of very light use in an office environment, and ~1 year at home to play quake for ~5-10 hours per week. it was well cared for.

zowie fk black finish is flaking away 4 months after purchase. it has been well cared for.

i want to recommend zowie. i used to recommend them before the ec2 evo died, and even after that i chose to buy another zowie mouse, because sometimes unfortunate things happen that cannot be controlled or anticipated, and continued to recommend with my ec2 experience as caveat.

according to many reviews of the fk, this finish flaking is a common problem. being skeptical of how consumers care for the products they buy, i chose to purchase the mouse, regardless of the trends in reviews, hoping that delicate use would prohibit the review issues. these reviews, according to my experience and understanding of my own care for my hardware, were correct.

this is 2 of 2 zowie mice that have not met my expectations to, with proper care, perform for years without any degradation. to recommend zowie now, based on my experiences using their mice, would be irrational and possibly counterproductive.

can somebody recommend a non-toxic way to coat this mouse?

i'm running a q3 server that i'd like to alter the weapon knockback, damage, projectile speed, and rate of fire on, to be similar to quake live. is this possible? can somebody point me in the right direction for doing this? are there any other critical settings to implement?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/16/un...interview/

i didn't read it, but it looks long, so it's probably great.

http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/25ph6h/shoutout_to_sujoy/

this is okay to post. i hope nobody feels like abusing their admin privileges.

i'm trying to research replacements. this mouse lasted roughly 1.5 years, 6 months of very light use at work, then another 6 months of little to no use, and 6 months or so of moderate gaming use. it was really well cared for, so i was surprised when the cable began to malfunction.

other than the surprise about the cable, it is the best mouse i've owned. i also liked the salmosa i had, but the build quality differences between ec2 evo and salmosa are too large. salmosa & wmo feel like toys compared to ec2 evo.

the issue i see now is that people seem to be complaining about the surface finish of new zowie mice cracking and peeling, and i'm disappointed that the cable had problems after having treated it fairly delicately for the duration of ownership.

i'd like to replace with either an fk or another ec2 evo. are there other options of similar quality and price?

what did rapha title his powerpoint study of embarrassing life saving techniques applied to firstborn male children?

shame graph of heimlich sons

thanks

no aspect of this news post was meant to reference the death of fraggle. the title of the post is coincidental similarity due to the subject matter.

death is a subject, whether or not it is taken seriously depends on the personalities of those considering the subject. because some people find death to be a serious taboo, does not mean that those who do not find it to be a serious taboo cannot use the subject as a basis for humor or informal commentary. alternatively, those who are capable of conveying and finding humor in the subject do not invalidate the positions of people who hold the subject in serious reverence.

some people called the humor bad, base, in poor taste, etc. i disagree, and i'm happy to discuss why it may or may not be humorous or funny to anybody who is interested in a real discussion. i am confident that the style and language are good, and that the subtle humor and mood below the basic shock value of death greatly counters the accusations. it is my opinion that people focused on the subject rather than the substance have blinded themselves to the quality of the writing, demonstrating more about their ignorance than my own.

it is common in the history of creative expression to provoke emotion and conflict, whether external or internal. death is a subject of drama, comedy, and tragedy. the post was carefully crafted to present such a level of absurdity on such an obvious day for foolishness that to consider it seriously would be difficult and ridiculous. such lines as:

His room had this strange smell of expired milk, but I guess that's no more.

He gripped the teat as a lover, like he was giving CPR to an injured baby bird, and he'd hum while stroking the milk free, strangest method I ever saw.

run blatantly and specifically contrary to the typical gravity awarded posthumous reflections, though admittedly even obituaries do not always follow the formats that are concerned more for the bear-trap sensibilities of the self-offending self-righteous than the emotional makeup of the deceased.

to those who used their assumption of the relationship between the death of fraggle and the death of zhu to justify their misdirected anger: you are wrong. you are wrong to assume the post had anything to do with fraggle, and you are wrong to have directed your abusive and rude comments toward me. i hope that some among you will have the integrity to apologize, but i am an empathetic man, and understand that emotionally charged outbursts later shown to be inappropriate are often embarrassing, and sometimes silent acceptance and forgiveness is socially beneficial. to those who are frightened of accepting responsibility for their rude behaviors, please be assured that i forgive you.

Pontus "Zhu" Aberg, polarizing Quake Live player and ESReality community member, passed away late in the evening, Monday, March 31, 2014, at the tender age of 22. He was discovered alone in his room, a report on the cause of death has not been publicized by his family. His roommate, Milo Loden, commented on discovering his friend's body:

We weren't really friends, he didn't really get along with anybody in the house. He would stay up late hours yelling "come at me, brah" and "it's fucking zhu", among others, while we would try sleeping for work. When we would try to confront him politely, he would just ask us why his life should suffer just because we hadn't been milkringers in our youth. He was unusually quiet for two nights, and I was torn between being grateful and hopeful that he had matured, and worrying that something may be wrong. There's a period of indecision when you share a house with somebody, that you should check on them. With Pontus, that period was very large, because we tried to avoid his room. He would try to capture us on his webcam, which had tape over the recording light. My girlfriend once told me he asked her to feel how comfortable his bed was, and when she was laying down he started chatting on his webcam about her being his girlfriend. She was so embarrassed that she couldn't move. His room had this strange smell of expired milk, but I guess that's no more. He was truly an odd man, but it's sad to see death in any capacity.

Zhu, condemned by the vocal loathing of stringent anti-cheat advocates, though once a promising rising star in the Swedish Quake scene, fell deep into disgrace after a painfully long and winding path toward redemption, ultimately sacrificing his hard work with attempts at threatening and cajoling id Software staff members into permitting the reinstatement of the legitimacy of his account.

He grew up in rural Sweden, showing early signs of masterful hand eye coordination when, as nothing more than a precocious and well-spoken toddler, he would milk cows blindfolded in underground Swedish milk ring circuits. Albert Dahlgren, a retired milkringer, sung Zhu's praises:

I remember the boy (chuckles). Never seen a milk bucket so clean for my life. He gripped the teat as a lover, like he was giving CPR to an injured baby bird, and he'd hum while stroking the milk free, strangest method I ever saw. I won't lie, I sat up many nights frustrating myself to no end trying to figure it out. Never did, and maybe I'm better off not knowing. He was a good kid, we'll miss him.

Zhu's father, Gebert, raised his son to seek mastery of every task. When asked if he had ever been aware of his son's reputation in Quake communities, he responded:

He has ever been a fierce competitor, this is true. I remember the milkringing days, we cleaned up the 1997 tour. The first time I saw him perform, I was stunned and feeling a pride that only a father can feel for his first born son, but at the same time some awkward disappointment over his gentle treatment of the teat. It was then that I realized he possessed something that I lacked, some sturdiness of spirit that would allow him to succeed in the face of negativity from the crowd. Even in my shame my young son proved me his value. I love you, Pontus. I am so lost, son, why did you leave me? Who am I without you? How could I have failed you? (Wails of despair)

The post will be updated when a PayPal account for collections and donations for services is established. Civil comments will be a great benefit to his family during this difficult period.

Scheduled: 23:00 GMT, 15 March 2014 to 02:00 GMT, 16 March 2014
Schedule: Passed

Ready Up Gaming is happy to announce that the Groupstage A Games start today


Links: #ReadyUpCup, Cup Site, Groupstage A

i've been putting in a small amount of work toward getting better at ql. i spent some time practicing against bots to build up some habits for item timing, and this still needs a lot of work, but i've noticed some progress. i also developed an item timing trainer that i've used for a bit when work is slow or i don't have a way to actually play ql. that helped a lot with strengthening some timing concepts. one other approach i've taken is to watch a demo and physically note every mistake or issue from a game, and this really made me aware of some fundamental flaws in how i play ql (i drop & chase too much in the wrong moments, i run into walls a lot, i'm impatient and give up my position, i rush into areas without thinking or paying attention, and i lose awareness of enemy position at crucial points [besides all my timing flaws]).

so, all that in mind, i've played some matches recently, and even seeing some progress, i'm still just stagnating. i played a game against a ~1500 elo guy last night, and it felt like a great match, but it was still a struggle. if anybody could watch this demo and contribute some thoughts, however minor or insulting, i can offer gratitude in exchange. i have to put a lot of time into practicing, and that's fine. i'm sure i'll understand the game at a deeper level the more i work at it, but i'm curious if somebody more knowledgeable about the game will notice things that i haven't noticed, or can give better direction than my uninformed self-analysis.

link to demo

i'd like to create a utility to clean up and organize submitted configs for readability, but i'm not sure what people are looking for in these configs.

which pieces of the ql config do people look for from others? which mouse cvars? which graphics? which controls?

i found this tool, which is nice, and will be a great help when i have time to dig through everything, but what i'd like to create is something which outputs text to be copied and pasted as necessary into a personal config, or elsewhere, so i think it will still be good to create something new, and to maybe integrate this into esr somehow, so config sharing is a less tedious and confusing process.

any thoughts?

i'm talking to a guy who runs a small ql league for ready up gaming. they're also trying to do a somewhat regular funnish cup in n.a.

it's happening tonight. there will be lots of fascinating things to experience. it will be the most sensational media event within the next 3 hours. any n.a. players looking for something to do tonight should sign up. the map pool looks decent:

Blood Run, Sinister, Lost World, Aerowalk, Toxicity, Furious Heights, Cure

add ResilienT to your quake live friends and message him about it. he's figuring all this stuff out, so there will be plenty of opportunities to laugh at his expense.

also, resilient let me know that sulit will be streaming the cup. link to stream

checkins are at 9:30 eastern. matches start at 10 est.

check out #readyupcup on quakenet for more info

caught this on ql subreddit.

quakejs.com - a port of ioquake3 to javascript (really?!)

the author's blog describing the process and intent.

there's also #quakejs on quakenet, according to the site.

just loaded a cpma map (wicked) and have been jumping around a little bit. anybody else messed with this at all? the framerate of my game was kind of low, but i haven't yet checked to see if it's possible to run full screen, and if that will affect framerate at all. multiplayer support seems to be functional (there were 2 servers up when i looked).

ql timing trainer

this is a simple html/css/javascript project to simulate item timing in quake live. instructions are available in the html document.

todo:

- reset scroll bar position to top of log with each new entry (completed 2014-03-04)
- session personal high score (completed 2014-03-04)
- support times 0 < x < 1 (completed 2014-03-04)
- point values scale with timer multiplier (completed 2014-03-04)
- target should initially spawn in the top left corner of the window, and on start should respawn to random location (completed 2014-03-01)
- add instructions to log so players know what they're staring at (completed 2014-03-01)
- add randomized target and score functionality (completed 2014-02-28)

if something doesn't work properly, i'd like to make it work properly. if you want me to add something, i'm willing to consider it.

Which player will hold QLRanks #5 position for duel at 00:00 BST on February 20? Betting ends February 17th.

I'm thinking of a number between one and ten. Pick the correct number to win.

so i'll just do what i did last year, and reply here when i record new things:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/smth.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/notepad.mp3

here is last year's journal

one person is 'it'. players get to hide while 'it' player has no vision and counts to a number. when player reaches the number, he tries to find the hidden players. score is based on how many caught, time, whatever. it's great.

i do a lot of 3d modeling and technical documentation, so i'd really like to look into getting some decent quality peripherals for the office. at home i use the filco majestouch 2 and zowie ec2 evo on my main pc, with das keyboard and wmo on my other pc. i like mechanical keyboards, but my boss threatened to kill me if i ever use one in the office.

both my home pcs have some generic cloth pads that smelled like petroleum for a week or so after unboxing.

what do other people use at work? i'm tired of the cheap logitech mouse and dell keyboard.

Today's randomly selected ESR Spotlight Account is ja ja ve ve.

A user since March 2013, ja ja ve ve's hilarious antics cause no end of mirth for ESReality users. Thanks for being a member, ja ja ve ve, and please do keep up the funny, lol!

In ESR Spotlight Account threads we celebrate the users that make ESReality what it is. What are your experiences with ja ja ve ve? How does ja ja ve ve help to shape your ESReality?

player1 picks a weapon. player2 gets nothing. game starts, and for arbitrary amount of time, player1 tries to deal as much damage as possible to player2.

player1 score = shots hit
player2 score = shots missed

player2 gets same weapon as player1. player2 gets same amount of time to deal damage.

player2 score = shots hit
player1 score = shots missed

rinse & repeat.

has anybody talked about this at all? if i hit escape while connecting to a game, i disconnect from the server, but am not brought back to server browser, giving me this in-game chat & options menu. my screenshotjpeg bind didn't work, but i was able to type it in console (at which point console flipped out and the game became unresponsive).

i enjoy racing games, though i haven't really bothered to play them too enthusiastically. never really got into gran turismo, but spent around 40-80 hours on forza 2, quickly dropped forza 3 (more of the same), haven't bothered with 4, and watched 10 minutes or so of 5.

the dirt series, however, is really exciting to me. i love the concept of rally and gymkhana, and i love the physics of the dirt games. recently bought dirt 3 on steam and have been playing it more than anything (last few games i've spent any time on have been baldur's gate: enhanced, and not really much else, haven't touched ql in at least 2 weeks). i'm to the point where i've reduced my hud to speed, position, timer. the only assist i have is ABS. i'm using the 'complex' copilot/navigator info. it's a really fun way to get an experience of racing a car without all the time spent training to be trusted enough to drive an expensive rally vehicle down dangerous roads, and without the worry about dying for going balls out to see what is possible.

i'm curious, are there any games similar to dirt 3, but with a track editor, vehicle editor, gametype editor, etc.? sort of like a quake series for racing games? i would love dirt 3 to infinity if i could choose something like free drive on a track, or customize the number of AI opponents, or set my own time limits for drift courses.

also, are there any other modern games, or 'classic' games available on steam worth trying?

sort of tangent: back in the snes type days, unlocking characters was awesome and fun because it felt special. mortal kombat comes to mind as a major influence in the unlock direction, with easter eggs like toasty and reptile, and characters like smoke. anymore, 'unlocking' has just become a monotonous grind device to artificially inflate play times. to me, this is just a burden preventing me from doing what i want to do in the game.

demiurge posted a list of the most ignored users a year or two or three ago. the following is a follow-up following the elapse of this wonderful year. unless explicitly stated otherwise, these queries were hand picked so as to ensure that only users active in 2013 and only posts and comments from 2013 were selected.

user registration statistics (links to a comment in this thread)




happy new year. don't sign up for a gym membership. do quit smoking and lose weight. do spend more time with your families and friends, and be sure that they understand how important they are in your life (if they are. if not, construct a believably pseudopersonal lie).

edit:

so i've calculated the time spent commenting on esr with the following crtieria:

characters typed / 5 = number of words

the 5 comes from the wikipedia entry for wpm, which shows that the CPM measurement from a WPM test is equal to WPM * 5.

60WPM * 60 = 3600 words per hour


jamerio:        992175 characters / 5 = 198435 words    / 3600WPH = 55.12 hours
teen queen:     525758 characters / 5 = 105161.6 words  / 3600WPH = 29.21 hours
megaman3:       518634 characters / 5 = 103726.8 words  / 3600WPH = 28.81 hours
quake is potat: 486279 characters / 5 = 97255.8 words   / 3600WPH = 27.02 hours
hitsu:          372857 characters / 5 = 74571.4 words   / 3600WPH = 20.71 hours
voltaire:       296072 characters / 5 = 59214.4 words   / 3600WPH = 16.45 hours
Lethe:          285552 characters / 5 = 57110.4 words   / 3600WPH = 15.86 hours
Lam:            284284 characters / 5 = 56856.8 words   / 3600WPH = 15.79 hours
Lorfa:          270083 characters / 5 = 54016.6 words   / 3600WPH = 15.00 hours
brandan:        257128 characters / 5 = 51425.6 words   / 6000WPH = 8.57 hours


since i've measured my WPM, i adjusted my stats so: 120wpm - 20wpm = 100wpm * 60 = 6000wph. i subtracted 20wpm, because testing is a lot more intense and focused than casually typing on a web site.

how could we let this happen

http://www.esreality.com/post/335067/esreality-profiles/

was looking at this recently. i don't even remember some of these people. and i am thoroughly satisfied with how much of an ass i am!

we should do another.

when i found out about the new human concept art i experienced a desire to contribute. it's a box robot model. will accept access to current and future reflex builds as payment.

existence is a complex lottery, issuing tickets at some--what we conceive to be--rate over time. we are born into it scratching and stumbling and pissing all over ourselves, just to depend upon the scratchings and stumblings of those before us, they before those, them before they, so on and so forth, &c.; blank minds into a vividly vague infinity of impossibilities being realized unto eternity, or not.

the chipped and split fingernails of our consciousnesses rake away the flakey latex obfuscating our futures. must we always redeem our lottery tickets? if the analogy can be taken this far, is it reasonable to assume that some shin high trash can sporting a barnaclish collection of putrid grime congealed into waves and strings, slowly terraforming the plastic landscape into a firm bed upon which the roots of sickness can take hold, and with a bag sunken and sagging and spattered with sauces and straw wrappers, is it reasonable to assume that some trashcan of sickness exists into which can be deposited our less fortunate tickets, where they will be tossed away by some attendant, then driven to a landfill to fade and crumble under the attentive eyes of municipal waste managers?

hi. esreality is apparently teeming with the unfavorable behaviors of cyber bullying, which is the way by which internet hackers provoke disabled preteen girls into committing suicide. nobody is going to commit any suicides on my watch, so cease with the cyber bullying. cyber bullying is not cool!

Are YOU a victim of CYBER BULLYING? Have you recently had your feelings hurt, simply for being huuuuuman? Contact me, because I care.

this thread is about two sorts of handicaps:

1) the sort that plays ca and complains when their teammates don't go <here> at the beginning of round, callvote kicks people who don't play up to their personal standards, is brash and obnoxious, using sheer energy and repetition to bludgeon others into hopeless quietude, has tantrums and breakdowns two rounds into the game when shuffling hasn't resulted in a match that sees a draw every other round (and callvotes to shuffle 4 rounds in), and general drags the quality of the game experience down for everybody involved.

2) the handicap cvar. i've used this a few times against lower skilled players and found that we both enjoyed the game a lot more. what i've learned so far, though, is that unless you want people to get upset, you should set the value silently. one guy complained that his ping was too high to play me, so i offered to set handicap to even things out, to which he responded: i am not afraid of you!!! stop being condescending!!! then promptly disconnected.

i get the sense that a majority of players aren't just trying to win, they're vehemently against losing, and even avoid putting themselves into situations where the risk of losing increases beyond whatever intuited median they expect.

my experience using handicap against lower skilled players so far has forced me to slow my game down and exercise more thoughtful approaches and responses to their plays. against a higher skilled player, even when i'm timing (and remembering times decently), i feel as though i don't ever see the opportunities to get items, because i'm so pressured and harried by my opponent. i imagine it's the same for any of my opponents who are significantly less skilled than myself. handicap seems to actually balance things fairly well, and my personal experience is that the challenge of fighting with an inherently smaller health/armor ceiling is much more rewarding than the tendency to crush somebody who doesn't know how to respond to anything i do.

i think it's time to upgrade. current build (from 2010):

amd phenom ii x64 black edition
asus crosshair iii formula
radeon 5770
corsair tx psu

new build:

core i7-3770k
asus p8z77-v pro
asus gtx 770
corsair ddr3 1600 ram
corsair rm 550w psu

i'm guilty of some brand loyalty for this build, but the current pc i have has been great. the only change i'm making is from amd to intel, because i've never bought an intel cpu, and they seem to have pulled away from amd the past 3 years.

anybody care to tell me how stupid i am?

a month or two ago i decided to let my ql subscription expire. the decision was based on the painfully random-seeming game experience provided by the ql netcode. since then i've sworn an unrelated vow to refrain from playing video games until the year 2014, which due to some accident or catastrophe i may not even see.

i was wrong. the game isn't awful because of the netcode, it's just different. i grew up with games that required leading enemy positions with the crosshair, spending hours learning the rough precision necessary for a range of pings, from 200 on a good day to 350 on sometimes a better day but more distant server.

it is disappointing to me that the overall accuracy of the game is much fuzzier now, but the nature of creating a single state from two different states from two different places in two different times isn't a small task to tackle, and though i may have a preference for a certain approach to netcode, it doesn't mean that another approach is inherently worse because it doesn't meet my expectations or criteria for quality. am i too old to adapt?

i will be 30 years old on october 31, but i still have no idea who i am or what purpose something as comically inappropriate as my existence could serve. so far i've only been a tool in some others' kits, used in the construction of their secret dreams.

step 1: dream
step 2: work
step 3: ...
step 4: die

so yeah, i really wanna play quake.

From the internationally acclaimed innovator of the groundbreaking field of performance climate controlled personal computing peripherals, and world renowned inventor of the Skinner Pad, comes: Pro Chamber [patent pending].



Pro Chamber [patent pending] is a salt water filled tank precisely engineered to provide a low-gravity low-impact high-focus low-light high-light low-maintenance high-quality productivity experience. Whether your goal is to score the winning frag for your squad or craft the perfect spreadsheet for your regional management presentation, Pro Chamber [patent pending] will subtract outside forces from the equations to your success.

Four magnets work in tandem to create the Pro Chamber's [patent pending] signature NMXYAIDT [patent pending] (Non-Mechanical XY Adjustable Interface Device Tray [patent pending]). Drag the tray anywhere, but be mindful of the tension in your interface device cables! Durable telescopic tray arms ensure that your devices are always within your reach, unless you prefer otherwise.

Select from two geometrically pleasing and physically efficient orientations, such as:

Portrait

and

Landscape

Premium options include less obstructive mask and tubing, sealed and reinforced Oculus Rift head mount, interface device extensions and couplings, scaling ladder, water filter and bladed rotary flow generator, water heater with digital thermostat, web server providing administrative control on the local network.

so i'm posting this because i read recently that it's the last day for donations, and though they've exceeded their initial goal, i'm sure they can put extra to good use. it's great times for everybody on january 14, when the internet will erupt with the digital emissions of billions of small children and men who are also small like children but are not, in actuality, children at all.

so go check out the web site, it's where the donation information can be found, so that you can see how much money the community is capable of raising for a fun and entertaining event, and use that knowledge to form power, and from that formation of power to inform others of that knowledge through your own successful video game ventures!

http://www.quakesm.se

notable attendees?!

Fazz
Purri
Fox
Spartie
Deadlift
Z4muZ
UaLaskij
Tox
Zhu

can life as a quake video game spectator be any more thrilling and shocking and surprising and stuff???

also, lakerman donated. i'd like to see him play. ;d

As requested in the Zhu @ Dreamhack forum thread.

My initial intent with the Zhu @ Dreamhack thread was to express a desire to see Zhu playing QL in practiced form at Dreamhack, whether or not he could compete in any tournament. My argument was to show the QL team that it's a good opportunity to give him some time to practice before going.

I would really like to see him in the tournament, just based on the videos I've seen and the ambition he's expressed. Put him on parole.

Soundtrack for this column:



Imagine: You're in bed, your body is physically oriented therein. Perhaps, in this imagined instance of some compressed alternate reality, submerged within a greater reality, itself likely lesser than some even greater part of something greater still, perhaps the weather is...cold.

So the blankets are up to your neck, and the coarse patchwork of hair representing generations of damaged genetics covering what you sometimes recognize as something that used to be the face of somebody you might have known at some time other than some time before now and, to this date, thereafter (so far)..you're cold, despite the beard. That's what I'm trying to say.

Ding, ding.

You've got mail. E-mail, that is (electronic mail, it's made from science). This lucky e-mail is from Chevrolet. Your car successfully forwarded a full record of the day's vehicular activity. This is worth sharing with close friends, family, and anybody else you can manipulate into orbiting the virtual galaxy of your psychology.

Car successfully communicated with internet. I think i like this sort of thing.

Envision: Sunrise. pastel pink stained concrete driveway, desert landscaping, purple mountain silhouette backdrop. Car. This is the car that is talking to the internet.

The air rests as a mountain, rooted in your lungs; your relaxed exhalations eruptions silencing the silence. The dryness burns your nostrils as your body sucks in the gravity of the isolation of your existence as some configuration of chemicals on or near some other configuration of chemicals, and so on for a long time not really worth describing in this little paragraph..

The tiny lights in the sky begin to shine, first the planets, then the galaxies. Configurations of chemicals, you know.

So you're cold, your car is talking to you, and stars are configurations of chemicals. What does it matter? Maybe it's just natural for cars to talk to the internet. Maybe that's just how things worked out in the universe. Who are you to judge?

Everything is okay, you think to yourself. You have a diligent car, a beautiful sky, and some feelings by which to feel things.

Ding, diiing.

Look at your phone.

Look at it.

Don't read any further until you look at your phone. If you don't have a phone, go look at somebody else's phone.

Our minds reach out like inch worms at the tips of branches, as the fumbling tendrils of some migrant vine, tenderly groping around overhead, in the dark, wearing boxing gloves, a blindfold, and three white socks (use your imagination), seeking the faintest hint of even the tiniest bit of whatever it is that any of us might have ever had the slightest inclination to experience.

Ding, ding.

dearest syncerror,

i don't believe in second chances, so much as gradients and curves of ambitions and allowances. i made the decision to elevate zhu's user level on esr recently. there were two main factors that influenced this decision.

1. zhu is not an idiot. i have had conversations with the guy, and he understands the connection between behaviors and consequences. whether or not he chooses to behave some specific way is another question, which leads to the second factor.

2. the system in place on esr can easily address the potential risk of allowing a person to use the site freely. i can afford to test whether or not a user is prepared to behave in a manner that respects the system and its users by allowing probated users the freedom to disrespect them, knowing that if the freedom is abused the probation can be easily reinstated. xou made it very clear that he is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to OPPRESS and SUPPRESS zhu's freedoms, and so far zhu has maintained that freedom.

zhu has a good personality for this community, even though i think it's tough to fit in when you've cheated and there are lots of people ready to point that out mindlessly, like some spurned and bitter wife constantly reminding her husband of some fleeting infidelity from their past.

i won't pretend to know the ql team's motivations for handling these behaviors, i only wish to propose one small idea.

dreamhack is happening soon. zhu has made it clear that he is attending. i am a spectator of ql (since i have given up playing the game). i believe that zhu playing quake at dreamhack would be quite the spectacle.

i believe it is in the interests of the ql team to instate a moratorium on zhu's ban until dreamhack is concluded. knowing that:

1. the ban can be reinstated easily if zhu demonstrates any detrimental behaviors
2. zhu demonstrates an understanding of consequences for his choices, and regret for making those choices
3. zhu has regularly demonstrated a passion for the game and regret for engaging in behavior that resulted in his inability to play.

unbanning zhu will be entertaining, but more importantly it is an opportunity for a human being to redeem and prove himself both to himself and to his peers without any true risk to ql. it is a good opportunity, because giving him time to prepare for dreamhack means that he can demonstrate the validity of his skill and progress on lan. most importantly, it is a safe experiment for ql, and a great opportunity to increase the loyalty of at least one player who shows a great love for the game.

it isn't the ql team's responsibility to offer anybody redemption, but the chance is there, and all the team has to do is seize that chance and perhaps alter the ending to this tiny plot in ql history from the tragic irony of a talented player subjecting himself to the ridicule and scorn of an unforgiving community to the fallen player extended a hand by which he can climb up to overcome his mistakes and demonstrate the principal of human nature that is the growth and character that develops from making mistakes at all.

it's time to recognize that zhu is a member of this community, and that he has the mentality of a quake player. even lance armstrong took advantage of the system, a system he claimed to love, when nobody was looking. at least zhu has the dignity and poise to admit that it was wrong and to apologize for violating the trust necessary for the game to maintain its integrity.

in order from newest to oldest:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/...20song.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/something.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/...0trout.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/dogspeed.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/stuff.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/hello.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/some%20piano.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/Untitled.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/jesus%20speed.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52181616/colorblind.mp3

lots of speeds!!!111

just downloaded these two from bandcamp. so good i wanted to share:

oldest - oldest

indricothere - ii

Playing Shadowrun was a bit of a tease. I like where they were trying to go, but I don't think they knew how to get there. I'm now looking forward to other similar games.

Wasteland 2



Satellite Reign



Underrail



Chaos Chronicles



Frozen Synapse

i don't know if it's video games in general, or just ql, but i can't play ql online anymore. watching somebody lg me with 100% accuracy around a corner they couldn't have known i was waiting is absurd. the game is broken. i won't be paying for another subscription. it's too bad, too, because i think about ql the same way i think about golf. i just can't justify playing a game where the deciding factor in a majority of my matches is networking.

i won't claim to know anything about networking or how games handle it, but i can't remember experiencing anything this awful and unpredictable and lopsided in cs or q3 or cpm or osp.

The soundtrack for this journal entry:



Looked through similar artists to Alan Parsons Project, because I've listened to the album I Robot a bit over the past two months.

Shadowrun Returns is the video game equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, teasing a promise of problem solving that has so far been padded by what i judge to be limitations inherent to the interactive format of the game. With an open world, the magnitude of problem solving and consequence could be greatly increased, but it's possible that such functionality wasn't economically possible, given the $1.8 million earned as a Kickstarter project.

My choices in conversations with NPCs so far have been cautious and somewhat calculated, and I am wondering whether or not I'm overly concerned due to past experiences with similar games, or if the developers have given particular lines of conversations consequences.

In scenes I am presented with a few characters I can initiate into dialog. There have been, so far, at least two conversations of less than at most twenty, and that's a very high estimate, that have resulted in the conversation abruptly forced to end and no further interaction allowed with that particular NPC within the context of that particular scene. This indicates that my experiences in the game are limited by how conversations are pursued, and hints at the possibility of such pursuance of certain lines of conversation affecting development of the story. It's a refreshing sense of confrontational gravity of responsibility, considering the autonomic button mashing involved in many modern RPG dialogs.

I have so far recorded two pages of notes that I am hoping will come in useful when considering possible courses of action, a couple excerpts:

ORGANS HARVESTED
HEART
SPLEEN
LIVER - SAM

EVIDENCE FROM MURDER SITE
BIG TROLL IN GREEN HOSPITAL SCRUBS W/ CYBERWARE ON RIGHT HAND

The 30 minutes researching and investigating a missing bartender led to a warm buzz of satisfaction at having solved a few simple missing information puzzles, but when the puzzles were over and the information from the area all exposed, when I expected to have to act upon the information I had gleaned from the scene and then face the consequences of my decisions, I was instead forced to speak to a character to trigger permission to exit the building, and by speaking to the character was given no choice except to advance the story down a forced path.

In the hour playing I could have spent $16 on seats in a movie theater smelling vaguely of the musty remnants of a recently departed animal circus with an exceptionally large horse and elephant show on an exceptionally disruptive diet, only to have my ear drums excited to the point of cellular suicide as the bombardment of epileptic light seared the ghosts of 60ft. of probably passively digested entertainment into my eyes, and indeed, my brain, forever altering the physical structure of the collection of matter I sometimes pause to consider the meness thereof. Based on my experience of the cost of entertainment and the value of entertainment offered by various forms of costly entertainment, Shadowrun Returns can be considered a Relatively-Low-Cost-Moderately-Interactive-Entertainment-Experience(tm).

It is interesting to note that the soundtrack to this journal ended as I applied the finishing touches to a few phrases.

Esreality, meet Stinky. Stinky, ESR.

i move the mouse cursor to some random position on the desktop, lift the mouse from the desk, and click. 4/10 times the mouse cursor will move slightly, maybe 1-3 pixels. this is fucking up my work process, as my career requires precise mouse stuff, and now my boss and coworker are making fun of my palsy, which is really quite insensitive.

anybody have any idea what may be causing this?

windows 7
wmo is mouse
nvidia quadro 4000 graphics card

http://esreality.com/post/909349/n-a/

i've played this map twice now. it's the first new map that has really appealed to me. i like the feel of the map, with big open spaces that supports freedom of movement, but lots of connections and corridors. there are a few problems that keep it from being consistent:

rocket splash on floor tiles and the spots missing floor tiles is clipped. at the end of my second game i decided to not even think about rocket launcher. too bad my lg and rail are so weak.

the sound is confusing. the differences between levels was indiscernible, and disorienting. maybe this is where the name of the map comes from?

in the two games i played, trying to grab the 50 was pointless. i'd like to try the map with ra @ mh, mh @ 50, 50 @ ya below rl, and ya @ ra.



just ran through it in practice mode for a little while. i like some of the shortcuts that i missed when i was focusing on staying alive. this is a really cool map, but two major problems cripple its playability:

the rocket splash problem i mentioned previously, and something going on in the mh room causing the graphics rendering to stutter. this is abnormal for my computer, and can make the jump to rg a bigger pain than it already is.

also, i was playing with some bot settings and found this. not sure i want to...test it.

discuss.

these should be things.

it has been raining for two days. the climate is my area is very humid in the summer months, more so in the days during and following rain. the air outside is cool, so the windows in my home are open, but in a quick game of clan arena i noticed that my aim is sluggish, and i just cannot seem to look around quickly enough.

i realized that the humidity is causing variations in the material properties of my mousepad. with this in mind, i have designed the skinnerpad (patent pending), a climate controlled mousepad for achieving the perfect level of environmental sensitivity for every hardcore pro player.

[22:55] <brandan> music
[22:55] <brandan> is pretty strange
[22:56] <brandan> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNsVpL8TDLA
[22:56] <brandan> i mean
[22:56] <brandan> what the hell is this?
[22:56] <brandan> why do people feel a need to express these thoughts?
[22:56] <brandan> is it like a ping
[22:56] <brandan> to the universe
[22:56] <brandan> broadcasting some data
[22:56] <brandan> and whatever data is returned
[22:56] <brandan> in response to that broadcast
[22:57] <brandan> is uh
[22:57] <brandan> uhhh
[22:57] <brandan> contributes to
[22:57] <brandan> an updated rendering
[22:57] <brandan> of reality
[22:58] <brandan> 'reality' defined as uh
[22:58] <brandan> a concept that one is capable of recognizing as a concept
[22:58] <brandan> like
[22:58] <brandan> being able to say
[22:58] <brandan> this is a thought
[22:58] <brandan> is enough to define a concept OF reality
[22:58] <brandan> that is what concepts are born of, and what reality consists of
[22:58] <brandan> concepts
[22:58] <brandan> the concepts in our brains
[22:59] <brandan> are just isolations
[22:59] <brandan> of a magnitude
[22:59] <brandan> located somewhere
[22:59] <brandan> on a scale
[22:59] <brandan> between infinities
[22:59] <brandan> ..

i remember being accused in cs was considered an achievement. today i received my first ever accusation in ql. around :50 is where i assume he's in some hiding spot on the map.

anybody involved in anything? looking for help with anything?

hi. i haven't really ever watched demos. there are a lot of demos. if anybody could be so kind to contribute some suggestions, and maybe some links, here is what i'm looking for:

duel demos from any decent map (dm6, ztn, dm13, t7, tox, aero, etc.) that show perspectives of:

controlling the entire map for the entire game and winning
playing in control the entire game and losing
playing out of control for much of the game and staying alive/winning (cypher vs. rapha on dm13 from quakecon comes to mind)
playing out of control and then gaining and maintaining control

it'd be really cool, if anybody can suggest something, if you can describe why you're suggesting the demo.

now that this event is history, i am left wondering: is buzz lightyear...afraid to fly?

i thought it was really interesting to listen to.

i've had a few close games with players between 1700-2000 elo recently. the game i just finished, i came back from an 8 frag deficit to 4 in a span of 4-5 minutes. it's not much, but i had nearly total control that entire time, which tells me that at some point i started focusing on the right things. i played a winning 5 minutes. :D

need to remember to get to gl platform after mh pickups. this position seems to play a big role in how i score. from this position i can watch and hear every path through the map, which gives me a bit of initiative in determining how and where confrontations occur. even if i decide to run, i can fall back to 6 exits and two decent hiding spots.

when i'm playing 1300-1500 players, i have a bad habit of hunting and playing ca, rather than playing for the items. somehow i deal a lot of damage, but lose most of the fights that i stumble upon. this damage is pointless if my opponent can restack while i'm scavenging like a prawn.

seeing just how strategically deep this one map can be, one rason i can see for demanding that new maps be instated in tournaments is that the people who want new maps are incapable of conceiving of or ignorant of this depth of play. i can also see that people want new situations, as i'm sure the microscopic differences in the common confrontational patterns can grow monotonous for some.

i'd like to see blood run, aerowalk, toxicity, lost world, and furious heights as a standard map pool, with a wildcard pool that introduces one extra random map (t4 [whatever that one's name is], hektik, dismemberment, etc.). it seems to me that these 5 maps possess enough of the major geometrical configurations to suitably demonstrate players' skills and to generate a majority of the power struggles possible in quakelive.

my main argument for standard maps has typically been that other sports and games don't force players to learn new environments every six to twelve months, and i stand by this argument. however, i also believe that subtle changes to a map, such as adding or removing openings, or relocating items, could offer subtle variety in the pace of games.

another argument for standard maps is that i prefer to give the people who care to play the opportunity to really master a few arenas, so that the quality of games is as high as possible. imagine an away soccer team forced to play on some home team's circular pitch with a loop de loop in the middle. the game would certainly be interesting, and probably entertaining, but the quality of play would suffer, and the time, dedication, and love the players put into the game wouldn't apply so much.

a standard map pool's greatest benefit is giving players a few arenas in which to realistically logistically focus their time. time is the most valuable possession any person has. forcing a player with limited time to pick a few from many maps to practice is strategic only in the most banal sense, like having a fencing competition but allowing any type of sword. you're doomed from the beginning if you focus your time on a rapier when a 6'-4" tall mongoloid warrior has put all his time into a buster sword.

it's just my opinion, but quake should not be a game of catching an opponent out on a map he doesn't know or wasn't prescient enough to have practiced religiously. the argument is simple: give players a few areas in which to focus their skill development, and watch the skill grow. give them too many areas, and they will be forced to choose a few areas anyway, and the quality of games on the maps they do not choose to focus on will suffer. sports players have an arena, and within that arena strategies and tendencies develop and oscillate over time. players come and go, and they are tested against the standards set by the players before them.

journal yay!!

this works very nicely on a 27" monitor. my view is no longer obscured by hud elements. curious as to how it will affect my aim.

"Keep your eye on the ball and relax" - Gary

Watching a ball comes naturally to those of us who aren't blind and can exercise at least a modicum of self-control and focus, but what does it mean to relax? For a five year old holding up a red plastic baseball bat and anticipating the next underhanded pitch of an over-sized plastic baseball with faux stitching, it means to loosen your back, arm, hand, neck, and jaw muscles. To relax is to allow your body the freedom to execute a pattern of movements smoothly and with as little expenditure of energy as necessary. The baseball swing is a chain reaction, a process of bodily preparation ideally resulting in the concentration of a great amount of energy into a point of contact between bat and ball. Excess energy focused in the backswing requires greater energy to initiate the forward swing, which impacts timing, balance, and orientation. If the muscle groups active in the backswing are engaged too fully, unnecessary energy is spent to transfer that energy forward to make contact with the ball. The baseball swing requires a solid base to be provided by the lower body. If the base isn't firmly established, torque from the upper body will result in significantly inconsistent swing paths. The baseball swing, like other mechanics of athletic locomotion, is a product of rehearsal. To be successfully executed, the body and mind must be free of conflict, such as that resulting from a subtly inefficient torque plane and excessive tension in transferring energy from backward to forward momentum.

Like soccer, which is not baseball, Quake requires constant movement. There is no sitting in the dugout while waiting for a turn at bat, nor resetting at a scrimmage line after the handegg has been downed. Improperly dedicating energy to superfluous movement promotes fatigue. For a game such as Quake, which requires at least ten minutes of constant movement and concentration, such fatigue has profound consequences on performance. Successful athletes, whether casual, amateur, or professional, will all benefit from developing tendencies that focus on efficiently managing locomotive economy.

"Remember to breaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathe" - Dashboard Confessional (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9R9Bmn2gt8)

I regularly catch myself forgetting to breathe while dueling. The ramifications of oxygen deprivation are numerous. Lowered blood oxygen levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_oxygen_level) limit mental faculties, stunting the capacity for concentration and memory. Muscle responsiveness is reduced, requiring greater effort to execute controlled, precise movements. If breathing is not corrected, fatigue increases, efficiency decreases, oxygen levels decrease further, and these effects cascade, leading to ever-degraded performance consisting of a confused state of jerky, reactionary behavior. Will is lost and impulse takes control. Without a good foundation of skills, such impulsive play results in repetitive and predictable behavior.

Knowing these detriments, however, does nothing for preventing them. It only highlights the importance of developing adequate breathing tendencies. As of writing this column, my best solution is to create a say_team bind reminding me to relax and breathe. The hope is that such a bind leads to a Pavlovian response to the chat beep, wherein my diaphragm is reminded to do its job, ultimately resulting in training my body to behave more efficiently without prompt.

"Stretching improves balance, physical performance, and blood circulation." - Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretching)

According to my personal experience, stretching inhibits stress and helps to clear my mind and reset my focus. Any form of physical effort positively alters my mood and inflates my desire to do well. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_exercise), regular exercise:

increases the blood and oxygen flow to the brain
increases growth factors that help create new nerve cells and promote synaptic plasticity
increases chemicals in the brain that help cognition, such as dopamine, glutamate, norepinephrine, and serotonin

Simplified: regular exercise promotes learning and thinking. Applied to skill development, exercise promotes general well-being, creating an environment within the body in which learning and growth are nurtured rather than negated. My personal experience has been that, when sedentary, my will to skill has also been sedentary. Desire and ambition must be sought, and the pursuit becomes a trudge through the mires of pointlessness and apathy. After a simple mile hike I am breathing more fully and have somehow discovered ambition without having looked, my arms swing loosely at my sides, balancing my movements through unforced pendular action. There is a feeling underneath the skin after having been depressed and then exercising, as though there's a subtle itch scratching itself, the friction of that scratching generating warmth; it's something like the inflation of a hot air balloon, the fabric billowing against itself until filled.

Healthy exercise is not far detached from healthy diet. Articles abound supporting the claim that diet and exercise play overwhelmingly large roles in quality of life, helping to determine general feelings, energy levels, thinking patterns, awareness, will power, and so on. To once again cite my personal experience, the difference between a diet of nutritious food versus food devoid of nutrition (or even negatively nutritious) is like the difference between walking across a bed of hot coals wearing insulated fireproof boots and stripping off your clothes, scouring your entire body with a wire brush, dousing yourself with kerosene, then flopping down to make furious love with one particular hot coal that seems to be a little less self-absorbed than the rest.

For much of my life I would laugh at athletes interviewed after games. The typical basketball interview:

Commentator: Dante, you were down 6 four minutes into the fourth quarter, but you scrambled to get back into the game. Can you tell me how you did it?
Dante: Well, basically (sweat bursts from Dante's moustache with each word uttered upon his labored breath) we just executed. Before the fourth quarter, we weren't really executing, but in the fourth quarter we pulled everything together and were able to execute.
Commentator: Can you tell me a little bit about what when wrong for Opposing Team(tm)?
Dante: Well, basically, Opposing Team(tm) started the game with really good execution, but around the fourth quarter their execution was slipping.
Commentator: Any words for your fans?
Dante: I couldn't have done it without our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

But at some point my thinking changed. This is all that a professional athlete has to worry about: execution. The plays and movements and rules and such are so well drilled into their minds and bodies that their only concern once in game is to execute what they know to do. They're not idiots incapable of elegantly expressing elaborately plotted strategic maneuvering, but rather brilliant athletes demonstrating the brevity of thought necessary to be successful in a competitive sport.

"Perfect practice makes perfect" - Random Reddit User

Relaxation requires a clear mind, a capacity to focus on the key elements of a game that matter, rather than allowing the mind to be overwhelmed with noisy information that is not relevant to a given situation. That capacity for focus requires thoughtful preparation and practice. Being able to focus on what to do, rather than what not to do, eliminates conflictory thought in game. Spending some time rehearsing possible responses to difficult in-game situations, just as basketball players drill plays religiously, gives players tools to commit to courses of action without the wasteful effort of doubt and confusion. The course of action may or may not be appropriate, but it will be the result of a greater amount of thought and effort than the time spent in-game confusedly wondering which path to take to where.

There are a few elements of my approach to duel that I am currently focusing on improving, but relaxation has become the main. Tense muscles grinding the mouse into the desk and a rigid claw scraping the letters off the keyboard means LG battles thrown away and pixel rails missed. It means forgetting item times and enemy locations. It means running around the map like a harmless blue ghost, giving Pac-Man uncontested access to every big white ball he wants. It means rushing into the street like a starving dog to grab a half-decayed bird wing, looking up to see the fully loaded semi screaming forward to deliver you into oblivion.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52181616/sunday%20morning.mp3

Here's a collection of last year's work worth sharing:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/thing.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/this%20is%20a%20hole.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/My%20Song%204.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/cheater%20tech%20metal.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/icanplayguitar.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/some%20shit%20...20with.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/ode%20to%20a%20whore.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/whatthisis.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/hm.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/lock%20and%20dam.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/there%20may%20be%20peace.mp3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/580654/there%20may%20be%20hope.mp3

i am herr...lol old skewl gaming joking..anyeway stream ql for me to do? there is program yes? where file to me accepting? 10x 8DDDdd

I support the project the same way people vote for Barack Obama. It's a fantasy; escapism.

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This contract is between a user and quakelive.com, not between a non-user and quakelive.com.

I am unaware of any patent or protection id has against reverse engineering QL communications protocols and encryption methods other than the quakelive.com terms of use. If somebody has a real understanding of these points, elaboration would be beneficial to the community.

The internet has changed drastically in a very short time. Reckless disregard for caution, especially in the face of such a stern contract as required to use quakelive.com, can have seriously negative consequences.

That is all.