Doomkid

My proposal is to stick my thumb up my ass and sit here bitching about it while doing nothing to help.

iirc, some areas that were/are being affected by COVID didn't have to lock down quite such an extreme to still see a decline overall in cases. A full-blown pause of ALL economic and social activity would not have great long term effects of course, but I don't think many countries have had to resort to quite that extreme just to manage to get the spread under control and get the numbers on a decline. Following of the back of my statements about political divisions being so insanely high and yet so insanely arbitrary these days, there are some people who seem to think any sensible precautions like masks, washing hands, or generally trying to be a little more socially distant than we're used to amount to "full blown tyranny", even before it comes to any actual shutdowns of any sort. I'm hopeful that the number of people who think that way is smaller than it can sometimes appear while browsing the net. Of course, there are also people who think attempting to fully "pause" the economy and stay that way until COVID "goes away" is the right approach, but of course that's going too far in the other direction.. Haven't seen that talking point nearly as much, but it still gets floated often enough to bare mention. The overarching point is both extremes are just one more example of the seemingly irreparable political fracturing that's happening currently. Which sucks because it doesn't make for a path forward, it doesn't result in any sort of solutions. Inability to compromise is going to be the death of the US. (Especially when it's coupled with all the fucking "world war 3 gonna happen" talk I keep seeing everywhere. Some people even seem happy about the prospect, like they're just waiting with baited breath for an excuse to start firing on whatever they perceive to be the other side) What if another, even worse virus shows up? No vaccine found for years, say? What will we do then? It kinda seems like nothing has been learned here and all it's done is expose how fragile we really are. Of course researching a vaccine is "trying to find a solution" but beyond that very explicit pursuit, I feel like no one is saying "hmm, we need to do some serious restructuring to prevent this from fucking us all right up, even if something worse does come along", and the few who do say those sorts of things are called crazy. Oh well, whatchagonnado..

Well, the idea behind a properly executed lockdown is that it only has to happen for a few weeks at a time before things can reopen and get semi normal, at least for a while until when/if another outbreak occurs in that area. Putting that aside though, I agree largely that we simply can't carry on as we are now. I think this virus has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting some of the serious flaws with how we currently function and how unsustainable they actually are. Even aside from the virus, younger generations have repeatedly seen increases in cost of living without seeing proportional increases in average "unskilled" labor wages and the disparity becomes even worse when you adjust for inflation, not to mention an ever shrinking window of opportunity when it comes to university education. This whole pandemic has exasperated these issues in a big way, we're seeing the gutting of many essential workers (which, imo, most all of the ones you listed are essential) but really it's only the working class who are taking the hit - it's been a massive financial boon for some industries, particularly tech industries (and their CEOs who are essentially unmatched in terms of wealth, power and influence at this point) and ideally the fact that certain facets of the economy are actually benefiting from the outbreak would mean a focus on newer burgeoning fields - something that could result in many more jobs in industries where there was previously not much in the way of positions to fill. This focus would of course have to be balanced by a focus on collective bargaining rights for employees to prevent us from falling into another prolonged economic downfall for the majority of the working class. When the common people have a decent money to spend and they don't have to worry about their rights being violated to get that decent amount of money, the economy gets strong as hell. Spending goes up, production goes up, from an economic standpoint solely it's all around a great thing that benefits everyone. If the country wasn't so politically fractured, everyone could possibly see this as a route to positive long-term change, even despite the current shitty spot we find ourselves in. I blame it on this weird shift towards the very concept of solidarity being seen as treasonous. "If my side says X I literally HAVE to think Y, and I won't budge even a single inch, even if all the facts suggest I'm in the wrong, because I can just skew the facts to fit whatever narrative it is I want to believe" seems more like the modern guiding principle. Anyway, the tl;dr of it all is that I see many ways in which it's an ideal incentive for a sort of 'soft' economic and industrial revolution. Our current economic approach is clearly unsustainable on the whole and this is just bringing that fact to the surface in a very unfortunate way.. With how high political tensions are right now in the US though, I just can't imagine it happening. Really, it's hard to imagine cooperation working towards forward thinking solutions in the current era, as disheartening as it is to say and think. No one wants to argue in facts, and most talking heads are currently making their bread fear mongering about the implications of change - even though the implications of stagnation and downfall seem far more dire. One thing is certain, or at least seems like it shouldn't be too contentious to say - there are no easy solutions. EDIT: Jesus, reading j4rio's post also made me consider how desperately healthcare reform is needed. I mean, one of the first world countries struggling the most with COVID also happens to be one of the only ones where healthcare is a "welp, hope you can afford it because if not fuck you" situation. It's like a cruel joke!

The quicker you go into at least some form of lockdown, the quicker you can come back out of lockdown. Pretending it doesn’t exist and carrying on as usual leads to a bunch of pointless death and doesn’t even keep the economy afloat realistically, so I don’t see why not. It’s been demonstrated to be an effective approach multiple times in multiple countries since the epidemic began, surprised its even being debated still.

That’s just an attachment limit, I think every user is allotted a total of 30 meg or something, but you can delete old ones if you don’t need them anymore or use imgur

Wanted to be 100% sure it was a parody account and quickly ended up loling multiple times

Edit: Tried to post the classic Doomguy face but it didn’t work!

Maximum Doom needs a dedicated video on YT explaining it's historic significance similarly to how you've done here. Those D!Zone posers can eat a bag of dicks! (rofl)

Officially landed at the Doomshack! Beautiful issue as always. My pedantic ass noticed one thing - CSDoom was erroneously stated to have been developed in December of 2001, when really it was released in Dec 2000 and in development for months prior. Not a big deal by any means, I'm guessing the 2001 rather than 2000 was a simple slip of the finger. I can't believe how professional these look now!

Really nice looking architecture in those shots

While the average quality is higher than of shovelware discs, this pack has all kinds of zaney 90’s modding goodness:

I really like those screenshots, looks right up my alley. Gonna give this a whirl when I’m at the PC for sure.

I think it’s a general parody, iirc there have been at decent handful of “give me your wads”/“I’ll play and record your wads” type threads

lol, I know this is running pretty far afield of the original discussion, but someone needs to make some meme comparing how different products appeal to different age demographics, but Doom is literally the only one that has max appeal from age 7 to age 70. Based on what I've seen over the years, it genuinely seems accurate.. and the returns don't diminish at all imo. I've been wondering for 20 years now when I'd get sick of this game and the next hot game would come along and dethrone it. Still yet to happen. (Though of course my love of Doom coexists with love for many other games, old and new)

This is a funny one because I was talking about it just the other day with some other Doomers. I knew the cheat codes for shareware Doom from the moment I got into the game as a bebe, I think they actually came in a text document on the floppy we had. IDSPISPOPD helped me learn the keyboard layout at a formative age.. Once my brother pirated Doom 2 for me a couple years later, I noticed all the codes worked except IDSPISPOPD. My kid brain just thought this was a design choice - as if the developers thought IDKFA and IDDQD were “good enough” and the other code was a little too OP. So, with iddqd on, I played through the whole of Doom 2 the “proper” way, by which I mean I navigated the whole game without being able to skip whole chunks. I was probably like 6 at the time, but I’ll never forget the rush when I discovered the Wolf3D secret (Wolf3D being one of my favourite games), when I first saw the epic Cyber VS Mastermind fight on Gotcha!, and when I first figured out rockets were the way to kill the Icon of Sin. Even with IDDQD I felt like I had truly kicked the game’s ass seeing that texture explode at the end of it all. I know many of you remember how incredible this game looked relative to other games at the time, so for me it was just love the whole way through. I spent at least 2 weeks on it from Entryway to IoS, or at least it felt that long. Anyway, point of this ramble is, YES, I’m glad I didn’t know the no clipping code as a kid because being “forced” to navigate those maps just made me love them twice as much. I always loved Doom 1 too of course, but making my way through Doom 2 just felt so epic since it wasn’t just handed to me for free, unlike all of E1 had been. I didn’t explicitly realise it at the time, but it was an early lesson about how something always feels better when it’s earned. As a side note, beating Doom 2 is what directly led me (with help from my dad) to hunting around for levels on the internet. A pastime I still enjoy just as much today as ever! Of course, looking online very quickly led to me discovering IDCLIP, and I remember being so annoyed that I didn’t know it when beating Doom 2, but in hindsight I’m so glad because I developed such a deep appreciation for Doom 2’s levels, as well as the general notion of cheating actually making something less fun. A baffling concept to a kid!

How the hell? Just from sitting near a cigarette smoker for ages? I wouldn’t be surprised, I’ve seen house interiors stained horribly by it. Still, it’s crazy to think of a monitor being caked with the stuff.

Holy crap, that is foul. The closest thing I’ve ever encountered to that was a Sega Genesis a friend of a friend gave me for free that was all sticky and when I took it apart I found a bunch of roaches inside (as in the bugs). I was about 14 when this happened so like an idiot I just said “fuck that” and threw it away. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would have worked after some TLC, and I wouldn’t so lazily/thoughtlessly bin a device like that these days.. but it was just so nasty that my instinct to toss it overrode all else.. So I can definitely empathise with not wanting to handle a rat-shit-filled rig!

I made a mod just like this years ago for memey DMs my friends and I used to have, it makes the RL practically worthless against the CG, but it was funny to see in action

Will do, and thanks very much for the suggestions, all very helpful.

Attempting to make new textures that try to emulate the style of the vanilla textures would be a fun thing to work on here and there. I think CC4tex, which I've never used for mapping but I'm sure has been used in loads of wads I've played, is choc full of slightly recolored or restyled versions of the vanilla textures, maybe it could serve as a decent extension to use while mapping. I don't think it overrides any existing textures.

I think SGMv2.01 does really well as a metal soundfont: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v78I8Kdx_xs7o6wOsAXcn2iaPA28CNXE/view?usp=sharing Layering any of these 3 drum soundfonts (RealAcousticDrums5, MelottiDrums, or TamaRockSTAR) overtop makes it much better: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rk3PZ79-wyuGCcfTB01L0D-CUnADmmnc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LKqE-VaeNbcmq3TpTe9Gl92BmiNVmEdz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pC4Hu5CvF9y8AOhN9eLSenUfPZ8phS-y/view?usp=sharing The best metal guitar soundfonts I've found are LP.sf2 (Les Paul soundfont) and Heavy_Guitar_Collection.sf2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1buyj-eNd25dTQLJ39wjNIyj_0e46NMyZ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I6dTKGRFtpoOom7X6kORdnOizWLRMC-V/view?usp=sharing I have a huge soundfont comparison video here, so you can compare various soundfonts, including the drum-only and guitar-only soundfonts that are great for layering over existing soundfonts: (Guitar and drum soundfonts start at 1:27:50) If you want listen to/download/muck with as many soundfonts as possible, you can find tons of them here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TbLOvr6GwqrxteWH8RD7Z7Q7t8q-vsIe https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EI2R4QMsJI5Vzemps8wz3rq97YKxja5l https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1492myFXb_4aG1HsQ4aNA4DcL2SUNVvYL https://musical-artifacts.com/

I absolutely love shitty 90's shovelware box art. MegaDoom II has a screenshot from LEDGES.wad, a famous old DM map (the wooden one with the arch vile). The screenshot above that shows what is distinctly the blaster from Dark Forces, or actually I think the sprite itself was made even earlier for Star Wars Doom.. It's weird though because it shows an unchanged Hell Knight in a wooden room.. What's the blaster doing there? That sprite did make it's way into numerous old releases, but it's a hint at least. All the maps on the early D!ZONE covers are at least on the disc, that much I can say. I recognize all of the scenes, especially the big SHAWN2 room with computer panels, boxes of rockets and a tech pillar in the middle, as well as the plain, boring, square map with green marble tile floors all the red and green pedestals everywhere. Screw looking through all that junk just to find specific junk, but they're not lost at least. On the back of the DOOM Gurus book, I can see a winter themed wad that IIRC had 2 maps and was a Christmas village of some sort made by ByteBrothers. idgames isn't working right now (getting a 502) so it makes it a bit hard to search for the exact wad in question, but I'd put money on it. The screenshot with the "Donuts" sprite is also definitely from Simpsons Doom, on the box with the orange colored back. The "Death Match" box has the aforementioned Christmas wad, plus seemingly other Christmas wads, as well as what looks like a screenshot from either MrDoom30.wad or Dwango2.wad, or at the very least has the exact same sky texture (blue sky with tall light brown mountains). I also see that one wad which would be well known to shovelware diggers that has the Geiger textures everywhere in what is otherwise a flat boring map. Actually maybe it's the one kmxexii mentioned, although I'm sure there's a wad that starts you smack dab in the Geiger. I also see a distinct old anime themed wad with an orange-haired protagonist who uses bright blue weapons.. It was a show that's unfamiliar to me so I can't recall it.. but I know for a fact it's on idgames. There's also see what is clearly a Dead Simple remake with that one semi-common starry sky with nebulas and whatnot visible which is also ringing some bells.

Okay, so I haven't got it booted back up yet, but I'm 99% sure I found the problem: A giant wad of cat fur somehow wriggled it's way to the heatsink.. I'm stunned since I took the PC apart just a few months ago for a clean and it was spotless, the PC is a very tightly packed/compact model without a lot of room for movement unlike old big spacious towers, and my cat hardly spends any time in this room.. This fur wad was determined. My old graphics card died about a year ago, so I've been using an ancient Nvidia Quadro from freaking 2007 in a 2016 PC, basically just as a "spare tire" that I was too lazy to consider replacing til right now since I don't really need high-end graphics performance most of the time anyway. Naturally I thought that ancient card had just bitten the dust considering it's age, but I'm not so sure now. I'm gonna buy a new one even if it wasn't the faulty bit though since running on a spare part so old and weak is obviously no long-term solution. (If anyone has any suggestions for a half decent card that would fit in an Alienware X51 R1, please fire away!) The heatsink is all nice and shiny now and I've used some fresh thermal gel. Hopefully the processor wasn't damaged after running for potentially over a month without proper cooling.. Random edit: Good lord, I wasn't expecting the results for Googling "dust in heatsink" to be fucking nauseating, but they are..

Thank you all for the advice - I'm going to try some of the solutions outlined here, I'll report back with the results (and actually useful information about my system) after a while. I appreciate all the suggestions and info!

So many good moments in this run. A treat to watch!