Sporku

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

Time to spend the next 10 years of my life re-learning how to Doomworld.

Sup. Okay, so it's not exactly a new car, so much as it is new to me... but hell, the damn thing is far newer than I would have previously seen myself owning.

It's a 2008 Nissan Altima SE (3.5L V6), and if you ask me it's absolutely gorgeous. This is the first automobile I've ever purchased and owned on my own. My previous vehicle (A 1999 Pontiac Grand Am SE) had essentially been disowned by my dad and, while functional, had fallen into disrepair and is physically not in very good shape. So yeah, I'd say this is a pretty big step up.



I'm pretty stoked about it.

Yeah, so I guess I'm one year older today than I was same time last year. A lot has changed since then.. still kinda weird to think about, seeing as the last couple of years prior have been pretty stagnant in comparison. I'm still undecided as to whether or not it's all been for the better, but at least I'm moving forward.

In the last year, I've...

• Bettered myself physically, creatively, and socially
  
• Broken ties with important people in my life, and made many new ones
  
• Got a drum kit and have been loving the hell out of it
  
• Done something I feel goes against everything I stand for as a person
  
• Had fun doing it
  
• Started drinking, something I've always had a vendetta against in the past
  
• Done a ton of other shit that I probably wouldn't have normally done before
  

Yeah my computer got totally fried somehow, so I've decided to just say fuck it and build a new one (assuming I can get the funds together). So... here's what I had in mind:

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Yeah, so my girlfriend of 2 years broke up with me on Sunday night, and I feel like total shit because I really was starting to feel like our relationship could have been going somewhere further.

I've been given a lot of reasons as to why she broke up with me, chief among them being that I have on many occasions had a negative attitude, almost bordering on cynical. I feel like if she had communicated her problems to me, we could have worked all of that out. Still, she doesn't want to try and work things out and after giving me a bunch of bullshit excuses (in my opinion), she finally reveals to me that she likes somebody else. Honestly, I'm insulted. She'd much rather try and hook up with somebody she's only known for 3 months and doesn't even know at all than try and work things out with the person she knows loves her for exactly who she is and would do just about anything for.

So in a lot of regards, I'm extremely conflicted as to what I should do. I feel like she's my best friend, and she's the only one who truly understands me for who I am. I still want her in my life, and she still wants to be close friends, but I feel like if that's how things are going to be, I'm just going to be sitting and watching as she goes off with some other guy and it's going to slowly kill me inside. What's worse is that I feel like I had finally managed to bond with her family and feel like a part of someone else's family a few weeks ago and now I'm essentially being excommunicated.

I really don't know what to do. The chief advice people have been giving me is to just let it go and start introducing myself to other people, but at this point I don't know if I can bring myself to do that. I don't think people really understand how much our relationship meant to me, and expecting me to just "let it go" over a short period of time is absurd if you ask me. I don't think I could bring myself to try and be in another relationship for quite some time.

Sorry for the emo rant, and I know Doomworld isn't exactly the best place for this kind of shit, but... whatever.

So I decided maybe it'd be a good time to invest in a decent acoustic drum kit. I had previously been playing on a cheap-o electronic drum kit from Alesis, which has been a less than stellar experience for me... the pads had very lousy rebound which only got worse as time wore on, the cymbals that came with it were either not sensitive enough or too sensitive in that one cymbal would only recognize really hard hits while the other would trigger multiple times from one hit, the bass drum pedal started to stick after a while, and the list goes on. But I guess I got what I paid for, and it made due for a good while.

Anyway, rather than shell out a shit ton of cash for a decent electronic kit, I decided to finally get a good acoustic kit to bang on, for a couple of obvious reasons. First and foremost, I really don't dig the sound of even the highest end electronic kits... sounds much too robotic, even with 500 different drum instruments programmed into them. Also, a good acoustic kit cost me a lot less than it would have cost me to get an okay electronic kit. Soooo, what I got was a TAMA 6-piece kit (1 bass drum, 1 snare, 2 rack toms, and 2 floor toms) and a basic cymbal set (hi-hat, crash, ride, and an extra splash). I'd say that just about does the job quite nicely, especially compared to the junkheap I was playing before.

*Ahem* So I just finished putting everything together and getting all the drums tuned (which I previously had no experience doing as you obviously don't need to tune an electric drum, so that was a fun learning experience). All that really needs to be done now is to move a couple of things around and do some final adjustments on everything. But other than that, it's awesome. Here's a couple pics I just snapped on my shitty camera phone:





I am quite happy with my purchase.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm on a pointless journey here. I've been searching for years for a decent gamepad to use on my PC, and with every single option I've tried so far I've been met with nothing but annoyances. Is it really so much to ask for a good wireless controller that doesn't feel like it's made of cheap plastic and have a fully functioning d-pad and analog sticks?

So here's what I've tried so far:

• Built for PC gamepads. I've tried several gamepads made specifically for PC over the years, and all of them have suffered from at least one crippling issue. The most common being a badly constructed d-pad that doesn't function properly (you wanna go right, huh? well, good luck doing that without also going diagonally too!) If the d-pad is tolerable, it's the analog sticks that are a problem. For the love of god, who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to build round analog sticks into a SQUARE hole? Not to mention that in comparison with most first party console controllers, PC gamepads almost always feel like they're made of cheap plastic.
  
  
• Playstation 2 to USB Adapters. Theoretically a fantastic idea. Sony's Playstation controllers are probably the most well designed and functional controllers I've ever used. Unfortunately, I've tried a couple of different PS2-USB adapters and both of them were anything but useful. Both of the adapters I picked up had problems with the controller ports, where one of them would intermittently work, or if you decided you wanted to use two controllers at the same time one of the controller ports would decide to crap out on you, so you'd only be able to use one controller at a time.
  
  
• XBOX 360 Controller. This is what EVERYONE recommends I do. I've tried it, and I've gotta tell you it's great aside from one crippling flaw. The XBOX 360 controller has THE WORST d-pad ever to grace a 1st party game controller. What the fuck were they thinking? Sometimes I feel as though the d-pad in that controller has a mechanism inside of it that triggers random directions whenever you touch it, just to fuck with you. Now, there's several guides on the interwebs about how you can remedy this issue, but I don't think I want to risk wasting $50 tearing apart a controller and using some sandpaper on a d-pad only to end up breaking it in the process.
  
  
• Playstation 3 Dualshock Drivers. This is my most recent (and most successful endeavor). Being that Sony sucks all kind of ass with their proprietary hardware that only works with other Sony hardware, they couldn't be bothered to write a simple driver to use the Playstation 3 Dualshock controller in Windows. So of course that means that there's some shoddily developed drivers floating around the internet developed by a third party. I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get them to work, especially since I'm running Windows 7 x64, which doesn't play too nicely with unsigned drivers. I did eventually manage to get my PS3 controllers to work, but of course there's a couple of really annoying downsides. First and foremost, I couldn't get bluetooth connection to work so I had to go out and buy a 15-foot long USB male A to male mini-B cable. Beyond that, when I'm done using the controller and decide to unplug it, it'll turn my PS3 on and sync with that, which means that I'd either have to unplug my PS3 when I'm using the controller on my PC or get up and turn the damn thing off constantly.
  

There was a bit of a shooting incident at my school yesterday. No one was injured, but it's still pretty crazy to think about. The guy that got arrested looks like your typical angry nerd. I had left school a few minutes before the shooting occurred. Had I left any later I would have gotten stuck in a lockdown situation while the SWAT team sweeped the school. Lucky me, I guess?

Better article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120900172.html

Seriously, did everyone just randomly decide now was the perfect time to fuck with my head and change their usernames all at once, or what?

Click for bigger pictar. Here's the last cake she did, in case you missed it.

So I've been doing quite a bit of work on my site as of late. I spent a great deal of time refining what I already had in place and making tons of little improvements here and there. I'm pretty satisfied with how it's turned out, aside from the lack of IE6 support (which I'm still working on). I've also been adding quite a bit of content as well, which is a plus.

So I figured I'd start writing up some map reviews like I used to however long ago. To start things off I did a (rather lengthy) review of NewDoom Community Project 2. I'm open to requests if anybody cares enough. Wheee.

Okay, so I've been tinkering around with building a new (old) computer using the desecrated remains of my recently deceased motherboard. In order to get the full picture, a short backstory is necessary. A couple of months ago, I got home from work to find my computer off. Upon turning it on, I was greeted by, well... nothing. Nothing really happened when I turned it back on. I started to panic, and ended up spending a good few hours tinkering with the computer trying to diagnose the problem (pretty much taking out/replacing as many vital components in the computer with backup parts as I had at my disposal). Having narrowed the problem down to either the CPU or the motherboard, I ended up replacing the motherboard and CPU. I figured since I'm gonna have to shell out a good bit of money to do that, I might as well just go for a substantial upgrade rather than just buying replacements of about the same power. I ended up with this motherboard and this CPU.

That's all fine and good, and hopefully this motherboard will last me a good 5 or more years, but that's not really the point of this post. Jumping ahead to... just a few days ago, a thought popped into my head that had not previously occurred to me for some idiotastic reason: I haven't bothered trying to pop out the CMOS battery on the old motherboard to see if that'll fix it. Lo and behold, it did. I did some tinkering with the motherboard out-of-case and managed to get it to boot up and function (as much as a motherboard with nothing but some RAM and a crappy PCI video card in it would function, anyway). I felt pretty stupid for a while, seeing as how I spent a good amount of money replacing the motherboard in the first place, but at least that gives me another decent computer to work with.

To start I bought a cheap case, a hard drive, and a cheap DVD burner and started my little experiment. It's all done and built, but there's still a couple of problems I've gotta get worked out. I ended up having to buy a bigger case fan for the case because the stock fan was two times smaller than any normal case fan should be, and put the stock fan on the side of the case to replace the plastic air duct that was there before. It runs pretty loud, and the computer still runs hotter than it did in its original case, so that's something I'm going to have to keep messing with.

Since I often have company over and play LAN games a lot, it's nice to actually have two decent computers for gaming handy. When it's not being used for gaming I'm sure I can think of something more useful and productive to use it for (a local web server maybe).

Main computer specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16Ghz Processor
GPU: GeForce 9600 GT
RAM: 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Beta 64-Bit

Secondary computer specs:
CPU: 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 Processor
GPU: GeForce 9600 GSO
RAM: 3GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Beta 32-Bit

On another note, I've actually gotten to like Windows 7 so much that I have it installed on both of my computers and my laptop, no dual boot. I'm gonna be sad when August rolls around and the beta stops functioning. :(