-- (anonymous)
You reap what you sow
Put your face to the ground
Here come the marching men
Your colours wrapped around
N e w s o f t h e D a y
22 May 2000
Who says violence isn't the answer?
A near-perfect illustration of folly is unfolding before our eyes. Recording industry executives and artists might as well march through the streets wearing signs: rob and murder us.It seems the RIAA has finally decided to draw blood at the smallest levels of the net community. This post to the Counter-Strike off-topic board at the Counter-Strike homepage alleges that the RIAA has contacted the user with a court summons. Folks, I'd move some of those Metallica mp3s out of your sharing directories right about now if I were you.
This calls for a few brief illustrative quotations. Got all these from the links section at the Gnutella page.
"What we don't want is a society where people no longer respect the value of copyrighted material," said Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., one of many legislators examining the issue. "The Internet is great for the distribution of creative works. But it can kill the goose that laid the golden egg." ( Napster Wildfire: Hollywood Braces for Raid" - CNet, May 15, 2000)
It looks to me like the goose is well down the road to suicide, as it continues to destroy any remaining good will it may have, and thus continues to alienate her friends. It's only a matter of time before Napster is irrelevant and FreeNet, or something similar, becomes as common a desktop staple as the web browser, a centerless nightmare complete with IP masking and a constantly shifting corps of random anonymizers. By the time this happens, how many internet users will feel a moral obligation to purchase the CDs they enjoy, rather than thinking of their hard drive as their record collection?
How many of us will have friends who have suffered fines or jail time for the equivalent of sending mix tapes back and forth?
Personally, I had stopped buying CDs until piracy became an option for me. It seemed that the steam had been let out of many previously interesting musical scenes, and the entire form just looked tired to me. Now that I have ADSL and the equivalent of a listening station on my desk, I spend far too much money on CDs. This is the obvious consequence of someone who is willing to spend any money at all on music hearing more of it than they otherwise would.
But, like many of the users who helped the recording industry to increase its profits last year by hundreds of million dollars, I increasingly find that when I purchase music I feel I am committing an immoral act, sending my money to people who in the end would use violence--the implied threat of confrontation with police--to control the data we send to one another at our own computers and over our own phone lines. In essence, every time I do what in theory would be the right thing, I am helping to fund an evil act committed against people very much like myself. I am paying for the logging, resolving, and printing out of their IP information, and for the transport of those printouts between lawfirms and courthouses.
I wonder what it will take before one of these hundreds of thousands of people--most of them long time friends to and customers of the entertainment industry--whose lives the RIAA apparently wishes to ruin, musters the courage to respond to this harrassment with a horrific act of violence. I wonder how many of us will cheer when it happens, and how many more of us will feel a pang of guilt as we offer canned, reasonless condemnations of violence in general.
Or maybe things will go back to being just the way they were, per the recording industry's wet dream, and we'll all do exactly as we're told, so frightened will we be by the RIAA's invasions of privacy, so moved and swayed will we be by the hackneyed editorials which are now churned out on a weekly basis by mainstream internet portals. No, soon it will all be over, and mp3s will have gone the way of child pornography--back into unimaginably wide distribution through the underground, where it belongs.
Ah, but then there's FreeNet, isn't there. It seems a lot of industry people haven't been reading their Wired like good boys and girls for the past seven or eight years. To quote this New York Times article by John Markoff from May 10th:
And technologists like Mr. [Talal G.] Shamoon say systems like Freenet present a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. In addition to his industry role with the Secure Digital Music Initiative, Mr. Shamoon is senior vice president for media at the InterTrust Technologies Corporation, a Silicon Valley company that builds systems for protecting intellectual property.
He cites the possibility of the transmission of viruses and other harmful programs as being one of the obvious risks inherent in electronic communities where no basis for trust inherently exists.
"From a trust standpoint, the current generation of tools such as Gnutella and Freenet are a nightmare for the same reason that badly constructed social communities are a nightmare," Mr. Shamoon said.
Nice try.
Anyone out there thinking of buying stock in InterTrust Technologies Corporation? No?
"When large numbers of people decide that they don't have to abide by the law, chaos reigns and society falls apart. That's not necessarily a good thing." (Michael Goldberg, "Napster, Gnutella And The New Morality" - sonicnet.com, May 22, 2000).
Not for you and your ilk, mother fucker.
Gnutella's homepage is here.
The Free Network Project's homepage for FreeNet is here.
As far as I can tell, there are two types of goths: people that dress in black, wear white makeup and listen to strange-sounding music, and people that dress in black, wear white makeup, say they're the real goths and the other people are posers, and listen to different strange-sounding music. -- Skie
rain down
come on rain down on me
from a great height
N e w s o f t h e D a y
Sheepy Saturday
Be there or be sheared
At eight o'clock Pacific time this morning, I'm going out for a while. When I get back, probably a little after noon, I'm going into the SCF to run through some of the kick ass maps I've collected from new and prospective MMG members over the last couple of months. If you'd like to play in these and see what a real Subspace map looks like, come on down. That would be 3:00 in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. There is a slight chance we just might be testing out a certain set of very promising bots heretofore not mentioned, if the right discussions can take place in time. Probably not, but you never know.Map Vault updated
Amazing the number of people out there who aren't willing or able to pen a single map review. Oh well, guess I might go and do it myself if there is time. Anyway, I'm back to my old tricks again.I spoke too soon . . .
Someone found the Stinkymeat and threw it away, and now the project has ended. :( If one of you Subspacers is responsible for this, know that you have made me an unwilling catalyst to the destruction of one of web history's great works of art, and your days are numbered.Half-Life DM, Jedi Knight, Starcraft
Under my guiding hand the wretched Eblanaites have worked themselves into a gaming frenzy. Anyone out there wanting to play some JK or some obscure Half-Life maps, or have a long and grueling eightsome across the Plains of Snow, you know where to find us.Stream of the week
::: m e a n d e r i n g s :::This is an awesome stream and I don't understand why it doesn't have more listeners. It's electronic and triphop music somewhere along the lines of Afternoon Nap but somewhat more bleepy and experimental, and with a slightly better and more obscure playlist in my opinion.
Ack
Saw this yesterday and forgot to go look. What the hell is conspiracy theory doing hosted by 8025? I mean, nice page and all (nice links list especially, bastard!) but why you chose to be hosted by a less interesting site that does not cover Subspace and is not even located at its own domain, is well beyond my comprehension. Let's hope this one doesn't go the way of the Nontester's HQ and SS Accelerator, whose link I can now not even find. (Special thanks as always to the NMEbase for not archiving anything and for adding to the number of dead links in my own archives. Gah.)<QA_Man> and I DON'T have a crush on i88
That's when I know that I have to get out cause I have been there before
So I gave up my seat at the bar and I head for the door
N e w s o f t h e D a y
Black Friday
A dark day indeed
Today is the first day I have ever seen more people playing Infantry than are playing Subspace. It's not like I have any room to talk, because I've been playing Half-Life for the last few weeks, but I still don't like seeing 188 people playing Infantry while 137 people are playing Subspace. It's not so much that I would like to see Infantry, fail, but that I want to see the SS community succeed more, for many reasons--and I do not consider 188 players to be a healthy community anyway, even in the middle of the night.Maybe if I knew what was going on I wouldn't find all this that disturbing, but as near as I can tell nothing special is happening in Infantry at the moment, and there hasn't been a massive crash or exodus of Subspace servers. I see Trench Wars at 40 players and CZE at 7. God bless Death Star Battle, holding out at 70 players. It's frankly about time that this far more carefully designed zone lapped TW. On that day I shall open up a bottle of champagne.
Did everyone up and get bored with this game at around the same time I did, or am I witnessing a bizarre anomaly? Have I just never checked the player tallies this late at night? Sorry to be a downer; it's just that the end is nearly upon us and, like, stuff.
How bleeding stupid can you get?
Just saw this on Planet Half-Life, quoted from an interview - a short one for obvious reasons - with Gooseman conducted at BondeLAN. The question was, "Have you ever considered changing the engine from half life to a newer engine like quake3 or unreal tournament?" Yes, let's gut the most popular action game in the world, and while we're at it fuck over the coolest, most community-friendly developer in the world, which has bent over backwards to help us on more occasions than anyone can remember, so that we can use a more demanding, less stylish engine from a game that is 1/4 as popular. Sounds like a fine plan.Gross, but look anyway
It's disgusting, but not Stile Project disgusting so that you have it thrust in your face without warning. Stinkymeat chronicles, in vivid detail, 18 days (and counting) in the life of a plate of hamburger, steak, and hot dogs. Disgusting. The catch, of course, is the whole thing starts out as just a plate of harmless meat. One of these days when you are feeling particularly fat, have a look at this and see just how far in you can get.Also, I need not point out the obvious, but I will anyway since a few Infantry players still read this page. ;) I'm predicting Stinkymeat won't be around long. Either the dude is going to wind up in jail or his webhost's kids are going to find this stuff, but it's only a matter of time before it's gone and you will NEVER EVER know the secret of what happens to ground beef ten days after it is released into the wild.
You will be amazed.
More bad news
Radium finally closed after a couple of hiatuses which followed a long stint as the best and hardest Half-Life map reviews page around. It had kind of been dead since November, but it's officially kaput now. I will miss it awfully.Amazing music
The new Amon Tobin album is out, at least if I am to believe the release date I saw at Amazon. There is no mention of it at the Ninja Tune site. I Napstered the album for now, of course. Unbelievable record by the name of Supermodified. I'm not sure what to recommend off of this one so I'll say if you've never heard Mr. Tobin before do a search for Sultan Drops, People Like Frank, Sordid, or Bridge.Quite by accident I wound up with both the Ninja Tune page and the jaw dropping new Amon Tobin site, and found that the Flash music looping on the two pages mixes together perfectly. If you're patient and wait for all the Flash stuff to load, the second link will take you to a mixer that will let you make your own Amon Tobin songs and thus present a simplified introduction to what his music sounds like and how this sort of stuff is pieced together. One of the most fun web pages I have seen in a long time.
Guess what's out
The demo for Ground Control just came out, so I'm going to go give it a try. Saw that at GameSpy.<berrie> i can't hear song lyrics
<berrie> it jsut sounds like blahs to me
<berrie> i think i'm broken or something
come back to me
come back to me
there is no day
until you come
back to me
N e w s o f t h e D a y
18 May 2000
Alright already
It wasn't really all that long.I've been playing Counter-Strike. The dumb Eblanaites are playing it too so that is a bonus, but the main reason is that something has improved in the newest version that has made it playable again. I could not play it in version 6; it was just too hard on the old CPU. Not anymore, though. I don't know what they did, but they fixed something.
The newer generation of maps are intensely fun, especially de_fang and de_railroad. My god what an awesome map that is. Interconnected everywhere. So much cat and mouse going on, just so much to do. Scary standoffs in the dark, intense long range firefights, every little sound gravely important. The communication system for this game has finally outdone both Subspace and Tribes. You've got a radar screen watermarked into the corner with your teammates flashing when they call for help or declare an area secure. The symbol used to describe their location indicates their relative vertical position. It cannot get better than this, and it hasn't been this easy to run since November. I really don't know if I'm coming back this time.
I'm sort of in a mood to do something interesting in the Sheep Cloning Facility, and have been discussing some interesting new ideas with someone who wants to work with the zone, so hopefully something will come out of that. I stupidly forgot about the zone's second resurrection-birthday, so there will have to be some observance of that soon. It was the 9th of this month, by the way. In 1997.
Other than what might happen in Subspace, I have no clue as to what's going on. I check my ICQ at least once a day so if any of you punks ever need anything from me just give a holler.
Anna-Puma is doing something badass cool but I can't say what, I don't think. QA Man is idling in #eblana for some reason. I think he has a crush on i88gerbils or maybe Roseo.
Subspace HQ has two openings for news staff. Inside those openings are rats and the unembalmed rotting corpses of those who formerly held the positions. Why don't you apply at PCGaming instead?
I keep forgetting what I was going to say, so I'm just going to upload this. Will update Map Vault tomorrow. Still waiting for you people to send me those reviews. ;)
Ack
Perchance did anyone get a screenshot of my 75,000th hit?
<SoSD> Dolly's blessing was upon my plasma cannon.
It don't help to be one of the chosen,
one of the few to be sure,
when the wheels are spinning around
and the ground is frozen through...
N e w s o f t h e D a y
7 May 2000
Kewlies
My three year old squad just won its first league game. :D Long fight, too. This was only our fifth game, actually; I just find the fact ofit versus the age of the squad to be a bit funny. I don't really keep tabs on predictions but I had to check this time. This pretty much made my afternoon. Hindsight's 20/20 and all that, but I don't really think these predictions gave us a fair shake. We'd gone from 12-1 to 12-3 to 12-5 and then suffered a fourth loss which was a disaster that lased all of 6 minutes. Cut us a little slack here. :PGrats to SoSD on the MVP thing. Foxxy was the shadow MVP, by the way. Couldn't have done it without her IMHO and am damn glad to have her on the squad.
A little heart goes a long way, bastards!
Sorry
I rather like being back at the task of doing Map Vault so I'm going to head on over there and bumble around instead of doing much more of a real update. I still need some help. Map reviews for FPS and RTS games would be swell. An article or two would be helpful even. Speaking of which, my God, I had no idea people put so much work into writing about Starcraft matches. If you thought the blow by blow accounts of Infantry games we've seen for the last few months were excruciating, have a look here. I don't mean that as a put-down or anything. I actually really enjoy reading these, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to write them.My lovely wife's lovely radio show . . .
. . . has moved to 9:00am pacific time Monday mornings. It's webcast here if you're curious. KCSB is the best radio station in America and the only station ever to have been shut down by the FCC. (Reagan did it when he was Governor here; they had it coming, too.) The webcast will probably be broken, but that's what Quicktime webcasts are for, isn't it.Movie ramble
Did I not tell you Gladiator would rock? Did I not tell you Gladiator is friggin amazing? Well, maybe not here, and maybe not you, but I did tell a lot of people. Well, now you know. Gladiator is awesome. Fun and serious and exciting and serene, well balanced across several settings and situations so that the movie never dwells too much on one aspect. It's worth seeing for the opening sequence alone. Never have I seen or read or imagined ancient battle as being so explosive. Maybe it wasn't, but holy shit, this movie looks like Apocalypse Now sometimes. Amazing. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing. John Mathieson, the cinematographer, is a demigod, and it's just wonderful to see Ridley Scott finally hit the mark dead center and approach the household name status that has been his by right for twenty-one years now. All that, and he had the balls to go and make it a boring drama as well. Just fucking awesome.Saw at cigarettes & coffee, the best of the Paul Thomas Anderson pages, that Magnolia has finally gone into second-run release and is back in theaters just long enough for you to see it. If you're ever in the mood for a 3 hour and 10 minute epic about a dying cancer patient, an idealistic police officer, a sexist self-help guru, a drug addict, and a retiring game show host, go see this one. It will scare the living hell out of you. PT Anderson wrote and directed the bitchin intese Boogie Nights, if the name slipped your mind. Magnolia is better than Boogie Nights or Gladiator.
Girl, Interrupted might also still be in theaters, second-run style. I won't say much about this one except that it made Winona Ryder my new favorite actress and it might be my new favorite movie.
<berrie> if we had 16 fingers we'd fear the year 1024
<berrie> robots that take over the world in the year AE45F will freak when it turns FFFF
And I know life is getting shorter.
I can't bring myself to set the scene.
Even when it's approaching torture,
I've got my routine.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
6 May 2000
This is news?
AhmedF at Subspace Safe Zone updated his alleged news page (I'm not linking it; find it yourself) with an astute five word review of the new ASWZ map. Nice!I probably don't need to clarify the obvious for anyone with half a clue, but this sort of fluff is why good mappers hardly do anything for Subspace anymore. These pithy, bitching little opinions from people who don't know what the hell they are talking about have helped to grind this game's progress to a halt, to make it one of the least interesting online action games still active, and to fill half the zones in the game with badly tiled, shoddy looking, unoriginal maps that bring embarrassment to the game and cause new players to write it off.
Stuff I haven't had a chance to look at yet zerx has posted some new movies to his manual at The Subspace Manual. They have their own section now. The focus is largely on turret wars, but one file that caught my eye is what has to be the first ever recording of an event victory in Subspace, a short movie of Chemical winning tonight's Master of Chaos tournament (which I stupidly missed again - congratulations, Chemical). Have a look. Also, OneIfreak released his second shipset at his Graphic Replacement page. This comes little more than a month after the release of his first set, and includes full rolling for all the ships. I haven't actually played with these yet (sorry) but from the images on the page they look even cooler and more sophisticated than the original set, and still they keep to the basic traditional definitions of the VIE ships. I'll have to get in one of these and fly around soon. And hey look here, is this the beginning of a mapfolio? :)
This week in Subspace history
Please don't take this as a promise that I'll be running this section regularly again. I don't really know if I have the time or energy. Two years ago yesterday, BFrog made the last-ever official patch to the game, correcting the infamous bug which allowed players to simulate negative packetloss and thereby double their bomb fire. Also that day, it was announced that Chaos Nevada would be closing, to be replaced by a new Chaos West. And on the fourth of that fateful month, Tito's Burritos saved Chaos East from a 12-mine Leviathan by kicking my ass in a duel. Oh well, it was worth a try.One year ago this weekend, Infantry HQ erupted into flames after Suicide posted (with my consent) a chat between him and I in which we predicted that Infantry was headed pretty much for the place at which it has now arrived. Both of us were thrown out of the alpha test in a move by Trixter which publicly contradicted statements made by JeffP.
Suicide went on to lose his mind completely, insulting the Harmless team and shutting down Infantry HQ. He vanished in early July after his threats to publish sensitive banG information resulted in Pro League's withdrawal from his sog.java.net site.
Me, I spent the summer playing TeamFortress Classic, which was probably for the best. Here's a few pasted from last year's post. Arctos posts a proposal for a set of major changes for King of the Hill. For you nostalgists, I've still got the post in crude text form along with a draft of my response.
- (5.6.98) I send Blackie a big ol' manifesto on the promised "test zones" discussed briefly at Vangel meetings. Later it will become the itinerary for the early days of the new Sheep Cloning Facility.
- (5.6.98) Jolly Roger's remixed version of Rodvik's Chaos map wins the Chaos Nevada vote. Combined with votes for the original version, the level earns more votes than all other candidates combined. Amazingly, when it is finally uploaded the zone dies almost instantly.
- (5.1.98) This page moves from Maxgaming back to WestNet. Maxgaming continues to sink.
- (5.1.98) Doh, forgot this one. Happy year-and-a-half to this page. Special thanks as always to Cybrid.
- (12.1.97) Birthday coming up
On a related note, the reincarnated Sheep Cloning Facility turns two years old this Tuesday. I'll probably run something there that afternoon to commemorate that grand day on which Blackie finally took leave of his senses, altering the course of Subspace history forever. Btw, the part up there about this page turning a year and a half old on the 5th was wrong. That is June 6th. Map Vault I finally started back down the long road to regular updates of the Minefield's semi-sister page. Decided I kind of miss the old bastard and it's better to take it slow and do a decent job than to try and do great work on it every day and burn myself out. So if mediocrity is your cup of tea, head on over to Map Vault and uhh, read about maps or something.
I could use some reviewers, by the way.
You can't let Styx have that kind of power over you.- moon bee
Looks like from here on out
it's just me and you.
N e w s o f t h e D a y 4 May 2000
Well hello there
I've actually been back about a week. Played a little Subspace (not much), played some Counter-Strike and some Starcraft, saw a few movies.Guess I just have web dweeb block. Hopefully I get back in the saddle over the next few days. Lots of behind the scenes stuff going on with Subspace, most of it pointing off into the unknown.
There's a clue hidden in the Infantry NMEBase Com archives, you know.
If you look hard enough you might even catch Captain Harloch lying his ass off about it. I won't say nothing though. I'm as big a phony as he is. ;)
Anyway, just to let you folks know there's movement once again.
There's also some stirring up planned for ASWZ, I hear, so you bullet bouncing campers will have something to bitch and whine about again. Sorry, no flashing gumdrop bases this time. The MMG has two new members.
The immortal Anna-Puma, former selfless poet-laureate of Chaos East, joined a week ago, and ASWZ's resident paradigm shifter OneIFreak entered our ranks yesterday. I'll add something about them to the Minefield's local MMG mini-page tomorrow.
And last but certainly not really worth mentioning at all, sage386 wants an extra 15 minutes.
He'll have to settle for this news post, I'm afraid. Nice try, you sad little punk. I think I'll leave you with that and be off. Happy corner bursting. Back.
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