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NEWS:ARCHIVE
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"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
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"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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Land Of The Square Shaped Dots
Manga drawings are back.
Site is evolving.
- TM
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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
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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
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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
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