Kishore sent me these photos of our classmates today. I'm going to have to make a separate page for it, but until I get around to that, here are the photos -
With all the excitement of getting my Doom site hosted at NewDoom.com I forgot to mention that I saw Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on STAR Movies on Friday. Really nice to see this again. This Friday (May 4) they're showing Mickey Blue Eyes, which seems like a good movie.
I am still waiting for the holidays to start (May 5!!). But I won't be going to college on May 2 and 3 because I have to prepare for my NIIT Sem B. Module Test I. This is on Linux, C++ and CGI.
The weather - current max. temperature today - 41.5 °C which is about 107 ºF! It is very hot in the afternoons.
I added a spoof of Kaun Banega Crorepati on my Doom site. What happens when a cacodemon takes part in the show? See this page!
Yesterday I watched Event Horizon on HBO (9:30 PM). Seeing a nice print of this movie made a lot of difference - I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. It's directed by Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat), and written by Philip Eisner. Starring Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne, it's a horror-science fiction-thriller about a rescue ship boarding the derelict Event Horizon (a ship that disappeared beyond Neptune in 2040 - and mysteriously reappeared there 7 years later). Once on the ship, weird scary things start happening - and it is soon apparent that the Event Horizon had gone to another dimension - and came back "alive" with a very evil force inhabiting it. Lots of fun. End credits music by Prodigy, the score is by Michael Kamen.
I'm very happy about my Doom site being hosted at NewDoom.com! I was up till about 3:30 AM this morning uploading the files there and making some changes to the site. From now onwards, all the Doom stuff is at that site. Here I will write about all the non-Doom material, and that site is totally dedicated to Doom.
My new address there is http://www.newdoom.com/karthik and I also have a new email address you can use to contact me - karthik@newdoom.com.
Varun's site is now called The Sanctum, and it has been totally redesigned, with a new look and lots more content. The new site came online today. The address of course is still the same, http://varun87.tripod.com. Go to the site and sign his guestbook.
I was very, very happy today because I got a mail from Newdoom.com's News Manager Jason "FACE.UK" Sloan, offering to host my Doom site at Newdoom.com! I mailed back saying that I was definitely interested in their hosting plan, and I am now waiting for them to send me the details. I really appreciate their agreeing to host me. I've already made several changes to the site, so that I can be ready to upload it there. I told them that I wanted the name http://www.newdoom.com/karthik.
This is good news - Srikanth and Ganeshan presented their Technical Paper on Quantum Computers for the second time, this time in a contest at Vignan Jyothi College. Srikanth called me today and told me that they won the first prize! Congratulations to them both.
Yesterday I was at NIIT from 9:30 AM - 3:30 PM attending a Personality Effectiveness Session, which is why I didn't come to college. That was a good thing too, because a certain "situation" arose at college that I didn't want to be involved in. Anyway, I went to the gym in the evening, which was nice except that I caught a calf muscle.
I also played some maps from 10secto2.wad, which were mostly bad - no comparison at all to the superb original 10 Sector Maps. I also downloaded another version of Eminem's My Name Is, and pulled out d_worm.mid from Cyb's Adventures of Massmouth.
News related to Doom -
- Downloaded quite a number of WADs yesterday, Tomi Rajala's Painful Evil, Cyb's terrific The Adventures of Massmouth, Tobias Forsberg's great Ropy2, and a few others.
- Got Opulent's 10.97 second UV Max demo of Mockery.
- Started work on my new Ultimate Doom level! Initially I wanted to do a totally E1-style map, but now its taking on a different look. I'll just continue it this way. So far it's been about 3 hours in development, and I'll tell you two things about it - one, I'm going to use a MIDI of Wamdue Project's King Of My Castle as background music (I tweaked the file to loop properly, and modified some of the instruments used to suit the level), and two, in one of the areas I'm going to try to recreate our college's computer lab!
- See Doomworld's Apr. 22 /newstuff Chronicles for a write-up on my map Chaos Punch.
These MP3s and MIDIs are what are on my playlist currently, and I have Winamp playing these almost all the time - whether I'm playing Doom, mapping, or working on my site.
- Darude - Sandstorm
- Wamdue Project - King Of My Castle
- Toy-Box - Tarzan and Jane
- Diana King - Shy Guy
- Lou Bega - I Got A Girl
- Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee), Move Your Body
- Eminem - The Real Slim Shady, Role Model, My Name Is, The Way I Am
- David 'Tolwyn' Shaw/Mark Klem - Anchor, The Hell "Prince" Medley, Skulltag
- Rimco - Doomed
- Bart Klepka - Running From Hell (God Mode Mix)
- Whigfield - Sexy Eyes
- Modern Talking - Brother Louie
- Snow - Informer
Today's Operating Systems test was postponed to 25th because of the AICTE committee coming to our college for an inspection. From what I'm told, they were very impressed with our college. The postponement is a good thing too, because I am not coming to college tomorrow. My batch at NIIT has a 9:30 AM - 5 PM session of Personality Effectiveness (PEM). Well, so that also means I won't be attending the IEEE session at college. Anyway, I hope I'll have fun at PEM tomorrow. It's also been a while since I attended a class with my batch B013 friends (they have a different schedule - 11 AM to 1 PM everyday - since I can't come at that time I've been going for special classes), so it will be nice to see them again.
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Yesterday on STAR Movies they premiered The Blair Witch Project, written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. This was an unusual movie that I've been wanting to watch for quite some time, but after I watched it yesterday I was disappointed. I wrote a review for the movie, which you can read here.
At the doom.wrong.button.com site there are some terrific images in the /doompics directory. After reading about this at Newdoom.com I went there immediately and downloaded them all. There are JPG scans of four Doom novel covers, and a huge 1 MB-plus JPEG of the Ultimate Doom Poster. The size of this is 2711x4093 pixels, and when I saved it as a bitmap it came to 31.7 MB. These pictures are from Peter Heinemann, and can be found at the following address - ftp://doom:doom@24.72.20.212/doom pics (from Peter Heinemann)/.
From a post on Newdoom.com I also went to Pablo Dictter's site and got a WAD of his called The Missing Scene. This was really a nice WAD with 4 levels, and I should write a review for this soon.
At college our holidays were supposed to start on April 27. And I was really waiting for them to start. Then there was a rumour a few days ago that classes were going to be extended for one more week - something which I was hoping was only a rumour. Unfortunately holidays have been postponed, now they will start only on May 6! This is obviously something I wasn't too happy about, because I have my Sem B Module Test I (Linux/C++/CGI) at NIIT on May 3. I also have lots of reviews to write (both movie reviews and WAD reviews). And I was also waiting to get started on my new Doom I level, which will be done in Knee-Deep in the Dead style. Plus I've got many screenplays to read. Now I can't wait for May 6 to get here!
Varun got his results of the 9th class exams today - he has come FIRST in his class with a total of 611/700, which is 87.3%. Congratulations, Varun!
Varun made a great Doom Wallpaper today - it is called Doom Battleground and it has monsters and marines fighting it out! It's a high quality 1024 x 768 image that looks great on your desktop. You can get it from the Wallpapers Page.
As you can see I have changed the look of http://karthik82.tripod.com completely. This time I have made the page even simpler, so it should load faster. I spent a lot of time yesterday doing all this, because today was an unexpected holiday from college. Email me at karthik_abhiram@yahoo.com and tell me what you think.
Thanks to Opulent for sending me a demo of Chaos Punch yesterday. He did this one in Tyson (using only the berserk fist even to kill the Barons of Hell at the end), completing the level in 4:18. See my Doom Pages to get the level and to download the demo.
I also got a mail from Brad Spencer about my review of his Atomic Tomb. I liked that level a lot, which is why I gave it a 10/10 rating. I played it again yesterday after coming home from the gym.
I've got some happy news - STAR World is going to start showing new episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer soon! Not only that, according to advertisements on 15th, they are even going to start the Angel series. They haven't announced the exact date yet. So you will soon see another section on this site which will feature Buffy/Angel.
15 April's episode of ST: TNG on STAR World was a very good one. It starts off with the Enterprise investigating a worm hole near a planet that could possibly support life. Before they can get a safe distance away from the energy disturbance, they are sucked in, and they are all rendered unconscious. When they come to, they are informed by Cmdr. Data that they were out for 30 seconds, which is what their computers tell them.
But strange little clues (like some of Dr. Crusher's plants showing a day's growth, and evidence that the computers were tampered with) point to the fact that they were unconscious for far longer than 30 seconds, and that something must have happened during that time.
At the end of the episode, we see that the planet was the home of an extremely xenophobic race - the Paxans. They wanted to destroy the Enterprise, but Picard had come to an agreement with them. They would erase the short-term memory of everyone on the Enterprise, and Picard's crew would do their best to cover up the incident. That was what happened the previous time, but little "clues" were left behind. Picard promises the Paxans that they would do it right this time, and his plan succeeds.
A very entertaining episode. Story by Bruce D. Arthurs, Teleplay by Bruce D. Arthurs and Joe Menosky. Directed by Les Landau.
At my WAD Review pages I added a review for Atomic Tomb by Brad Spencer. This is one of the best maps I've ever downloaded, with great lighting and so much attention to detail. Read the review at my Doom Pages.
I finally finished my level Chaos Punch for Doom E2M1 and you can download it from my WADs Page. I spent about 15 hours totally on it, spread over a period of 10 days. Like my earlier one this is a Doom I - style level. Get it from my Doom Pages.
I spotted an update on Ganeshan's site last night. I knew he was going to update it sometime yesterday, but I didn't get any mail from him so I didn't check in the afternoon. Anyway, this time he has added all the new programs he has written (that Browser-Eater, and others I was talking about earlier). There's also a new Space Quiz, and the Science Chronicles (where you can write to him about your experiences with science). All that is at his site - http://ximor_iksivich.tripod.com, and the science chronicles page is here.
On 11 April, I got another demo of Ick, this time from Albert Valls, which he did for the Doomed Speed Demos Archive. This is a really terrific demo played in 3:38 with -fast monsters. There's a great part in the demo featuring a Cacodemon/Baron of Hell fight!
The Anomaly: Part II by Varun is a two-level set for Ultimate Doom, which he has been working on for quite some time. Now that his exams have finished, he has been doing a lot of work on it in the past few days, and it is possible that he might release it in a little over a week from now.
The long time this is taking is because Varun spends a lot of time in building the area and choosing textures, and planning on the monster/ammo placement (something he is very good at). He spends hours on just one room, making sure everything is right and that the enemies behave exactly the way he wants them to. So today I got to see some new areas he made for level 2. All the work he has been doing on these levels is simply excellent. And it keeps getting better and better. The levels start out with a tech style, then turn demonic in E2 style, gradually blending into an E4-type look (the new areas). I'm just waiting for him to finish his levels. They will be great fun to play and to look at.
This April 13th happened to be a Friday, so HBO showed Sean Cunningham's 1980 horror classic (some people might consider that term debatable!) Friday the 13th at 11:30 PM. I had seen Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday back in 1996 I think, but now was the first time I saw the original movie.
Friday the 13th is a slasher film written by Victor Miller that I found a little slow in it's first quarter - but once the scares start, they keep coming, and the movie gets more tense and frightening as it goes on. The story goes like this - in Camp Crystal Lake in 1958, two young campers are murdered - and then in the early 60s a boy drowns - because of which the camp is closed down. And of course it has earned a very bad reputation - people call it "Camp Blood" and consider it cursed. When the camp is reopened, the first few camp counsellors arrive there to get the place ready. It's Friday, it's the 13th, there's a storm, it's raining heavily at night - which is when the fun starts. There's some strong violence, and plenty of scares. The makeup effects were created by Tom Savini.
The website for the Friday the 13th movies is http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com where you can find a lot of stuff related to the series - including info on Jason X (part 10!!).
I downloaded Mockery (a Doom II map created by Scott Cover a.k.a. Covaro) on 12th. Yesterday Varun and me did demos of this map, and we've sent these along to Opulent for the Doomed Speed Demos Archive. My demos of course can be also downloaded from my Doom Pages, and Varun will post his on his site soon. I also wrote a review for Mockery - you can read it on my WAD Review Pages.
They've been showing Jan DeBont's excellent 1994 action thriller Speed on STAR Movies quite often in the last few days. Yesterday after coming home from college, just before I left for the gym, I saw about an hour of it. I have of course watched this so many times I know most of the dialogue by heart, but anyway it was nice to see it again.
I am waiting to watch The Blair Witch Project on Friday, 20 April at 10 PM, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on April 27. I still don't know the exact date when Event Horizon is scheduled on HBO, but I will watch that too.
Ganeshan played ICK yesterday, and he says he liked my level. I really should ask him to write some sort of comment on it so that I can put it on the site. And coming to the progress on Chaos Punch - it's nearing completion. I've already finished building the main areas, and for those, the monster/ammo/thing placement and difficulty settings are also done. Now all I have to do is to come up with an interesting end to the level, and then I can release it. I'll have holidays on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so let's see if I can finish it by then.
Our new IEEE chapter at college has it's first session tomorrow, and there I will be presenting my paper on 3D Games: Doom - A Case Study for the second time! I enjoyed presenting it last time at the ISTE Paper Presentation Contest (March 28), and I hope I will tomorrow as well. This time it will be longer, and more informal, so I suppose I can explain map editing in more detail :). This is something I enjoy doing (making maps I mean), and this time I'll get to mention my Doom site too, and talk about my level ICK. Rajeev and Kiran are also giving their Finger Scan and Hand Scan Technology talk again.
On 8 April I got a mail from Satya Srinivas, saying that he's launched his new site at this address: http://indianleaders.tripod.com, which, as the name says is a site on Indian Leaders. This site has been in development for about a year I think - because Srinivas has had this idea for a long time, and he's been working on this in his free time from college. Anyway, it's finally online, and I was really surprised at the extensive information that he has written. You could spend a lot of time here. And the site also has a nice clean design and layout. Srinivas also says this is just a part of a larger site which will come soon.
8 April - I probably should have been doing some college work - but I spent about two hours and finished 34 chapters of this wholly remarkable book by Douglas Adams. The exact time I finished the book was 12:51 AM on 9 April. The book was one of the most entertaining - and strangest - things I've read. The story goes something like this - one Thursday morning on Earth, Arthur Dent's house is demolished. The poor man is just getting over this when an alien race - the Vogons - arrive with some large ships and actually demolish the earth itself to make way for an intergalactic bypass. Arthur and his alien friend, Ford Prefect, manage to hitch a ride on the Vogon ship, but after they're thrown out they happen to come aboard the Heart of Gold - a ship powered by an Improbability Drive, stolen by Ford's relative Zaphod Beeblebrox. A lot of strange things happen after that, and it's this weirdness that keeps the book so absorbing.
"There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge a formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your own lookout.
Energise the demolition beams."
Yesterday after coming home from college I did some more work on Chaos Punch, and then I went to the gym. After coming home I watched Air Force One on STAR Movies. This movie stars Harrison Ford as James Marshall - the President of the United States. The US and Russian military forces capture a terrorist, General Radek (a small role for Jurgen Prochnow), and the US President makes an emotional speech at Russia saying that terrorism will not be tolerated. As he is on his way home on his plane, Air Force One, it is hijacked by a fanatical Russian terrorist, Korshunov (Gary Oldman, who's terrific), who will do anything in his power to see that Radek is released. But this President decides he won't allow this sort of thing to happen - and in true Die Hard style, takes on the terrorists. Glenn Close plays the Vice President, who along with the other staff members try to deal with the situation on the ground. Director Wolfgang Petersen provides plenty of action, and the acting is good. But all said and done, this still remains a "good" movie, not an exceptional one. Screenplay is by Andrew W. Marlowe.
Today, with Speed on STAR Movies at 9:30 PM, and I Know What You Did Last Summer on HBO at the same time, I had to make a choice on which to see. Since I've seen Speed so many times (must be easily more than 20 times, including once in Hindi), I saw IKWYDLS (which I saw once - in July 1998). This is a pretty good slasher movie in which four young people, just at the start of their careers, are involved in an unfortunate accident - they're speeding on a deserted road near the beach, and they happen to hit someone on that road - and kill him. They decide then to dump the body in the river, and keep the secret to themselves. One year later, they start getting threats (and later, gruesome things start happening) from someone who knows what they did last summer! Nice movie, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze, Jr., directed by Jim Gillespie, with a screenplay by Scream writer Kevin Williamson, based on a novel by Lois Duncan.
Coming soon on STAR Movies - The Blair Witch Project, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Apr. 27) and on HBO, we have Event Horizon this month.
05/04 - In the morning I went to the gym, I've got used to it by now and it's fun. In the evening I went to NIIT. I spent 4 hours in the afternoon and another three at night working on my new Doom level, Chaos Punch. It's called that because in it you will mostly have to use the berserk fist. Initially I wanted it to be a small level just to improve my berserk skills, but it's become more than that now. I will try to finish it within the next few days and then release it. I also got another mail from Opulent of the Doomed Speed Demos Archive, this time he sent me a Nightmare run of my level Ick in just 2 mins. 30 secs.
I am now officially an IEEE student member, because I got my membership card and other documents yesterday. Today I was also elected a member of our student chapter's Executive Committee. And our class is planning to organise seminars every Monday and Friday (we have two free periods those days), in which I will give talks on HTML/Web stuff. (Should be really fun and interesting for me).
I also started going to the gym on 2 April, and it was my third day today. My arms, shoulders and neck ache, and I can barely lift my hands now! But I suppose that will stop in another few days, as Rajeev tells me from experience.
Ganeshan gave me the March CD of Electronics For You, which had some nice themes - Gladiator, Jurassic Park III, and a great one of Sarah Michelle Gellar, which is on my desktop at present.
Tomorrow I resume NIIT classes, and we'll pick up with Inheritance in C++. Nice thing, because that's what we're doing at college too.
Die Hard is going to start on STAR Movies in a few minutes from now, so I'll update later on.
Yesterday Opulent (of the Doom Speed Demos Archive at http://www.doomworld.com/sda/doom_sda.htm) sent me a pretty perfect demo of ICK (100% kills/secrets/items) on Ultraviolence, in just 2 mins. 57 secs. You can download this from my Doom WADs Page. Thanks to Opulent for taking the time to do the demos.
I also fixed a faulty link on my LMPs page, now that demo of Malcolm Sailor's Quick is Good is linked properly.
I didn't know that Hissy had been freed some days ago (it seems Linguica gave it to Carnevil), so I guess putting the icon on my site is out. But there will be a Free Hissy Foundation, sometime soon, and it's for a good cause, so I should support it :).
I was really happy about Opulent doing the demos since ICK is my first released WAD. Doomworld also mentioned my site on their news, and I think I got about 40 hits that day to the site. Well, that was why I didn't write the Round Robin program for OS lab today, although I did come up with some sort of algorithm that makes some sense (but doesn't work properly). I also uploaded ICK to CDROM.COM, and I found out that you're actually supposed to upload to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/incoming after which it will be transferred by Ty Halderman (the maintainer) to /newstuff.
I haven't seen the movie Pitch Black, but I got it's screenplay by David Twohy many days ago. I read about half of it yesterday, and finished it just now. It's a terrific story, which goes something like this - a spacecraft carrying a varied group of people crashes on a planet that is almost perpetually in sunlight (owing to the fact that it's got three suns). Night on the planet happens only once in 60 years - when a neighbouring planet eclipses the suns. And it is at night that the nocturnal creatures inhabiting the planet come out. The creatures are predators, and threaten to wipe out the band of survivors who happen to have landed there when it's about to go Pitch Black. (Can't think of a better example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time than this!) The people who must find a way off the planet before the creatures kill them include the courageous captain Carolyn Fry, the mercenary Johns, and the convicted murderer Riddick. Pitch Black is not just a horror movie - rather, it's writer chooses to use this atmosphere as a background for showing us how people change under circumstances (foe example, how even a murderer can become the group's biggest ally).
I really liked the script. I must watch this movie sometime.
I've been putting this off for a while now... Finally I got around to adding a list of the subjects we have in the Second Semester at College on the About Me Page.
My Doom Pages have been updated with some new stuff. There is now a Links Page, and pages about Doom in general, and where to get Doom. I've listed the names of some shops that sell Doom here. Besides that I am now planning to join the Free Hissy Campaign, so I will add that button to the site in a short while.
1 April's episode of Star Trek: TNG was a good one as always. The Federation and the Cardasians have been at peace for some time now - but that peace is threatened when a Cardasian ship fires at the Enterprise. Capt. Picard is understandably perturbed by this, and he contacts the aliens. They tell him that a Federation Ship, the Phoenix, under the command of it's Captain Benjamin Maxwell, fired at and destroyed a Cardasian supply ship. Picard is asked by his superiors to see to it that peace is maintained under any circumstances - so the crew of the Enterprise and some Cardasians follow the Phoenix and try to find out why Capt. Maxwell did such a thing.
Maxwell (Bob Gunton) explains his point of view to Picard when he later comes on board the Enterprise - he says the Cardasians are in fact preparing to arm themselves for war. Picard preserves the peace by convincing Maxwell to stop taking matters into his own hands, but it is an uneasy truce because Picard realises that what Maxwell said was right.
31 March's episode of First Wave on STAR World was Rubicon - an episode which begins with Cade Foster (series star Sebastian Spence) nearly being killed because of a car that was rigged to explode. He later wakes up in what seems to be a secure government installation. He is told that he has been cleared of all the crimes he was thought to be guilty of, and that he has actually won in his fight against the aliens. But Cade doesn't let his guard down at all. Is Cade being paranoid, or are his supsicions justified (is the place really an alien facility)?
The end of this episode reveals that the place was indeed an alien research facility. It seems they want to test Subject 117 (Cade) - will he let his guard down in an atmosphere of security and comfort? Or will he keep on fighting? The invasion could be stopped by the humans if one in every 117 has a will like Cade's.
It has been a long time since I watched First Wave, and I must say I liked this episode. The music, as always is great.
I just watched Terminal Velocity now on STAR Movies. This movie was written by David Twohy and directed by Deran Sarafian. It stars Charlie Sheen as Ditch Brodie, a skydiving instructor. Chris Morrow (Nastassja Kinski) comes to him one day for a diving lesson - something which takes a nasty turn when she falls to her death. Now the authorities are after Ditch - and he might even be brought up on manslaughter charges because everyone thinks he's responsible for her death. Soon, Ditch realises that she's very much alive - and that she's actually a KGB agent trying to prevent some mean Russian gangsters from moving a huge sum of money in gold - and the two become involved in some crazy plot to save Russia. The plot as far as it goes, doesn't make much sense at all, so instead of bothering about it, enjoy the terrific action sequences, especially the one where Sheen rescues Kinski from a freefalling car!
Two great action favourites (both of mine and STAR Movies) are going to be shown this week - on Wednesday we have the Bruce Willis action classic Die Hard, followed by Speed on Saturday. On HBO, at 3:15 PM this Wednesday, they're showing Dark City too.
At my Doom Pages I've added two WAD reviews. The first one is of a 1996 level by Mike Reed called The Villa of Pain, which was the first add-on level I ever played. Another level which I wrote about is a Doom map called Marble Maze, by Scott Earnest. I also got Entryway 1.2 and I will be writing a review for that soon.
I got a mail from Karandeep yesterday informing me about his site which is now completely up at the following addresses - http://www.geocities.com/karandeep_bobby or http://gkaran.cjb.net. There's nice stuff to read at his page, and photos too. If you haven't visited it yet, go there and give him your comments in his guestbook.