NEWS:ARCHIVE


  Dezember 19th, 2002

"It's Been A Year Already...!"

Today Pablo and I updated Fehler 404 with two new posts. While I talk about 404's first birthday, which actually was a while ago, Pablo posted some funny newspaper ads that make you go 'huh'? Go check it out.

- TM™



  November 26th, 2002

"Brownouts. Build another power plant"

Eagerly awaiting.

- TM™



  November 18th, 2002

"All I Know..."

"...Time is a valuable thing,
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings,
Watch it count down to the end of the day,
The clock ticks life away."

(to join the popular "Quote Linkin Park" movement)

Looks like this is turning into an official personal exchange of statements, but I'll take it on.

I'm speaking of Karthik's latest update (link here), where he talks about the time-problem which I mentioned in my last post. Karthik's comment goes something like this:

"Of course, I had a smile on my face when I read that, but it also got me thinking. I often wish that I had more time to do the things I like to do (work on my site, make Doom levels, draw, watch movies, etc.). I often feel like I'm fighting to get some time to do all these things. After reading what Toby said, though, I realise that I should probably be more optimistic!"

Now I really don't want to whine here, hehe. It's just that I cannot think of building full Doom levels right now (although I fired up the editor every now and then in the past time). But I guess it could still be worse. I'm happy to hear though that my little speech got someone thinking. This really honours me in a disturbing way. I guess this was my first statement that was serious enough to get someone thinking.

In other news, if you looked closely, you might have noticed that the last post was (it's fixed now) a bit different in appearance. Namely the blue borders around the text box were darker. This was a little, unintended hint at the revamped design which I hope to be releasing soon. Accidentally I wrote the update in the new under-construction version of the site. When I noticed that, I copied the post into this page, forgetting to set the border colour to the blue that this page uses. Generally I will be adding more contrast to the site, the text will get darker as well as the borders. I like the new design and i hope that I can get the content pages finished soon (although there's lots of content to add).

Moo, that's it for today.

- TM™



  November 14th, 2002

Two In A Row

Karthik obviously has a lot of free time. I'm going to steal some from him, and leave some of my work for him. Hehe. Fact is, he just released yet another new level for Doom 2. It's the third map in his "Out Of Phase" series. A nice little map with nice, compact architecture and good skill settings. You should go and get it from his site at www.karthik82.com.

There are no major updates here right now, because I'm preparing an extended version of this page right now. All the content from my older pages will be present (including all game levels), nicely sorted into categories, along with a sub navigation menu on the left. This menu is still giving me a lot of problems though. Mainly it isn't really compatible with Netscape and stuff. I will fix this issure before going on and add the content.

I'll also re-check all my guitar tabs, because I found some errors in one of them when I played it a few days ago. )-:

Apart from that, I'm playing a lot of Creed stuff lately. I owned their first album for quite some time now, but never listened to it very much. Now I found some original tabs for some songs from this album on Creed's homepage and thus I gave it a close listen and played the songs. Creed has beautiful and complicated guitar work. The old album allows me to play along, because it's not as hard as the new stuff on the "Weathered" album.

Generally, I'm listening to a lot of different music lately. Just mentioning some: Orgy, Machine Head, Linkin Park, Björk, System Of A Down, plus various single songs of various bands, as well as some classical stuff in form of soundtrack songs, mostly from animes. All cool stuff.

- TM™



  October 20th, 2002

In the mooD

I noticed that when I draw shapes in Freehand, I draw them in clockwise order. A clear sign of too much Doom editing.

Doom is also today's main topic. Firstly, Karthik Abhiram released his latest Doom level a few days ago. It's called "Congestion Control" and it's a map for Doom 2. A nice, medium sized level that will keep you busy for a while, because of it's layout and the use of boss enemies. Don't be scared like I was at the beginning, though, for the design really makes for a fair fight, giving you places where you can hide and do attacks from behind the cover.

But I won't go into any more details here, since this isn't intended to be a review of the map. One more thing though: If there was a "most additional stuff in a level"-award, Karthik would have won it, because he's supplying lots of additional stuff within the zip-file, namely a scetch of the map from the planning phase, and a drawing of the Doom dude. The level itself features some new textures as well as a new title screen.

You can download the level from Karthik's site at www.karthik82.com.

Karthik told me that the red brick areas in the map were inspired by my level "Hot Blood". That makes Karthik the second person who got inspired by that level of mine. The other one was Pablo Dictter, who used that texture style for the secret map in his "Subversion" episode. Personally, I never liked "Hot Blood" that much, the gameplay wasn't that good imo, but the texture style was cool nevertheless.

I think I should upload my Doom levels again.

I actually did some Doom editing myself too. Firstly I worked a bit on my E4M2 for The 9th Gate. Since the level is too big for DEU, and crashes the editor constantly upon loading, I split it up and create the end part in a second, new map, and join them later in WadAuthor. I actually came across a very cool effect that I haven't known before. Won't tell you what it is right now, but it (finally) gave me inspiration for the end part of the level. It's surely no brand-new effect though, I bet it's been done numerous times before. But I didn't know about it.

More new about this and other game news might follow soon.

In other news, I noticed that there was a slight error in the embedding tag for the Flash menu. On my Mac at work the menu wouldn't be displayed. It turned out that I forgot to add the subdirectory name in one of the two Flash-embedding tags. Also, I forgot to add the button for the "About" page. But it seems that noone missed it. (-:

- TM™



  October 9th, 2002

Minority Report

Minority Report is the best science-fiction movie in years. In my opinion. The last movie that completely carried me away was probably The Fifth Element. I loved the movie back then because it was fast, colourful and funny. Of course, Minority Report is a different kind of movie, but it presents us a nicely detailed futuristic setting, an interesting story (based on a short story by famous sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick) that really requires you to think throughout the whole movie, great special effects and the overall coolness that is a key feature of every sci-fi movie.

The whole technology is nicely worked out and albeit fictional (of course), it's still believable to some extent. This means that the world is presented as if it was a real world. In contrast, the world of The Fifth Element was heavily exaggerated, which fit the movie and made for a lot of funny scenes, but never laid claim to be realistic.

I like the whole visual side of Minority Report very much. Most of the movie is kept in a cold blue tint. While the technology like cars etc is very advanced, the houses and interiors are very much like today and even a bit antique. A very interesting contrast. Interesting was also the use of classical music in scenes where the Pre-Crime cops were investigating the information that the Pre-Cogs produced. The computer technology was also funky, with data gloves and holographic displays. I hope that I'll live to work with such a computer. (-:

Here's a quick summary of the plot: In around 2050 a special police department called "Pre-Crime" is formed. These special forces prevent murders before they happen. This is possible by "Pre-Cognitives", which are people with the special ability to forsee murders that will be executed in the future. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the leader of this special department. Suddenly he find himself accused of murder himself, and he flees from his former colleagues to search the truth and prove his innocence.

Of course it's not that easy, and there are various plot twists until we see the end. I found it hard to follow the plot, as it stays unclear until the end. As I said before, this movie requires your constant attention in order to not miss an important detail.

So all in all, this is a very good, sophisticated and philosophical movie. If you're into this kind of films, don't miss it!

PS: The movie's website is awesome too! All Flash and lots of cool things. Seems like they wanted to recreate the feel of the computers in the movie. Go and check out what you can do, it's fun!

- TM™



  September 22nd, 2002

The Phoenix Revolt

Check out the new Flash menu above! It still looks the same, but it has some nifty animations, and it's only half as big in filesize as the GIF images were. Reduce loading times - do animation! (-:

If you're into heavy metal/industrial kind of music, check out Damian Lee's (member of the 9th Gate team) band "The Phoenix Revolt". They recently recorded their first songs and uploaded them to MP3.COM, and I have to say that those songs sound really good. These are some very talented guys! Check out their music at http://www.mp3.com/the_phoenix_revolt.

- TM™



  September 14th, 2002

Karthik.Abhiram.New.Site

You should all go and visit Karthik Abhiram's new website at http://www.karthik82.com. The site is fully done in PHP, which impressed me a lot. I'll probably have a look at PHP myself. There's some stuff that I'd like to do with my websites, and PHP seems to provide a way to do these things.

Anyway, Karthik's site is very interesting, of couse there are his Doom levels, but also lots of other stuff like movie reviews and his drawings. It's all good stuff and worth checking out!

- TM™



  September 13th, 2002

Land Of The Square Shaped Dots

Manga drawings are back.

Site is evolving.

- TM™



  September 8th, 2002

New design for photography page

Those of you who more or less regularly visited my photography page might have wondered why I never updated it during the past months. Well, I have to admit that there's no real reason for it, apart from the fact that I did not take many photos and thus I had no new material to put online.

Some days ago I finally went on a photo tour again, walking through the city, trying to find some nice scenes and subjects. I took some good photos, but technology is evil, and in the middle of my picture spree, my camera's batteries died on me. So I had to end my tour, leaving some good image ideas undone. Will have to repeat that later.

However, I wanted to add some of the photos to my page, plus some pictures from my recent holiday trip to Hungary, but when I opened the page I was horrified by it's appearance. It's been almost half a year ago that I designed the gallery page, and I noticed that it's not up to my skills anymore, so I decided to design a new one. After some trial and error, I finally came up with a great design imho. The layout is still the same, but all the graphics have been redone, and it looks much more professional now. Go and see for yourself at http://tobigallery.tripod.com.

As you can see, I changed some elements on this page as well, again. The menu background now has colour gradients to make it look more plastic, similar to the buttons row. The pages got a grid background now. But somehow, compared to the new gallery site, this design looks terrible...

Guess I'll have to keep on working.

- TM™



  August 29th, 2002

Under Construction

If you come back these days and wonder that the site has changed, that is because I am heavily working on the individual pages and the whole site in general, trying out various ideas, adding design elements here and there, and I'll be hopefully adding more content soon too. For now, the navigation bar on top has changed, it's got nifty new rollover buttons now, and the whole design of the menu has changed too. Also, the menu got it's own frame now.

I'm trying to make this page look neat and I will probably screw with the design until I am happy with it. If you want to give your comments on the new design, feel free to email me, I appreciate any feedback that I get.

- TM™



  August 26th, 2002

New site!

I wanted to redesign my homepage for quite some time now, but I always either lacked ideas or time, and often lazyness hit hard too... But today I quickly created this page in about an hour, and I must say that I kinda like the design. It's light, stylish, bright but not exaggerated. Simple, stylish stuff.

There's not much content in here right now, but I hope that I'll add the various sections later (talk about lazyness again...). The old page never got finished, back then I only converted the main sections like those for game levels and guitar tabs, but I never created a simple link page. Now, linkage is here, as is information about me (most important stuff first), but that's it already for now. More stuff is about to come.

On August 1st I started my apprenticeship in media design. So far it's doing well. Greetings go out to my colleagues @ S.O.S!

During the past time I'm less into games, but more into music. I've made some songs using the program Impulse Tracker. I worked with that program some years ago, but my songs were always rather simple. Now they're slowly starting to sound decent. (-: PabloD is heavily into music too, and we're thinking about starting a music project. More on that might follow soon.

For now, check out the pages that are available and come back soon for more goodness.

- TM™