The Mind Of OverlordTomala

Contemplating a revival of Comedy Night

Once upon a time in the Myst/Uru community my group The Guild Of Slackers had a community thing called Comedy Night. In those days The Guild Of Comedy would dress up as the comedians and perform on a stage in the Guild Of Comedy Neighborhood (or The Blue Neighborhood if the act was rated 18+) and the person presenting the comedy audio would dress as the comedian. It stopped gaining interest during the first run of Myst Online. I’ve been stewing on this for well over a month now. I want to revive it, but not in MOULa.

Why? I’ve been in there a few times, and between the forums and the people who play in game themselves I doubt there would be much interest. That and quite a few people these days including myself are annoyed with the ancient voice chat system. We could stream it on a shoutcast server but it wouldn’t be as immersive, plus there would be those old sticks in the mud who refuse to listen to streams because you know… An audio feature from the early turn of the century is sooooo much more immersive than Speex or Opus codecs that are used in modern voice chat programs like Mumble, Vent, etc.

So where would I want to hold this? In the Garry’s Mod cinema gamemode.

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I’ve been watching my server for awhile now, and people have been gathering in there to watch all sorts of things. Sometimes it’s some pretty stupid stuff, but I’ve seen some people come in and have anime marathons (the latest one was a Deadman Wonderland), dance parties and one of my regulars held a movie night! So why not have a comedy night? There are lots of full comedy videos on YouTube, and YouTube is supported in the gamemode.

Of course you would have to own a copy of gmod to get on the server, but the map that we use doesn’t require any assets from other source games. At the very least they would need to have the cinema map and gamemode, and optionally download any playermodels they would want from our workshop collection. Then bam. Comedy Night in a nutshell. I don’t expect people to buy the game JUST to join in on this. But for now this seems like the best way to hold an event.

Due to my work schedule it won’t always be on the same day and might not even happen every week. But once I can get people to agree on one solid day and time we can have a few laughs.

Yes I still exist.

It has been brought to my attention that I haven’t written anything in a few days. TBH I haven’t been feeling very well, plus I’ve been busy. Oh, also I haven’t had much to write about. Other than this because someone HAD to bring it up…

Thanks for reading enough to bring it to my attention. :v

Post Valentines Day Open Thread

I didn’t really celebrate Valentines Day this year, much like the other years. I spent it with friends and family which is always nice. I was monitoring my server traffic and noticed that we hit a new record of 31 people across all servers! I even had to up my cinema server slots from 12 to 24 and add in reserved admin slots. We’ve been getting more popular lately. In fact we’ve been looking into a more powerful dedicated server box to relocate everything to.

Although in the meantime the hardware should do well enough to hold us over. Just can’t put up anymore servers in the meantime… and I have quite a few server projects that need to be carried out once the new server is acquired (as soon as they come down in price). Plans for a Starbound Server, a goof off Mann vs Machine and an experimental Shoutcast server are on the fabled to do list.

More new toys

I finally got my hands on a wireless keyboard so that I can type from within bed. This makes it a bit more seamless when moving from the desktop to the living room/bed/wherever I want to go… maybe the bathroom? 😛

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My choice is the Logitech K830. It has a built in trackpad and illuminated keys. It lacks a numpad but that’s not really necessary to me. I just want something to control things from afar because, you know… I’m an Overlord? I have to have full control from everywhere…

It also has some built in hotkeys so that you can change your multi-monitor setup, do a file search, play, start and stop music, and more. All of this works out of the box without any additional software, although you can install Logitech’s Options Software so you can personalize it (which I haven’t yet).

So far it’s been working quite nicely. I curled up with it and my wireless controller and tackled a game I haven’t played yet called Freedom Planet. Which I’ll go into further detail in another future post.

So now my nerd setup is finally complete! Well… Until I decide otherwise.

Please tell me this is a joke

I stumbled upon this video from another blog I frequent. It’s about how GameStop employees can better understand the mysterious species that is the female shopper. O_o

This HAS to be some form of satire. The videos they make us watch at work have a hell of a lot of cheese factor in them, but nowhere near the amount presented in this disasterpiece of a video.

A new generation of Open Source graphics?

So it’s been announced that OpenGL has a successor called glNext. Details about it will be revealed on March 5th at the Developers Conference in San Fransisco. It will be presented in a panel called “glNext: The Future of High Performance Graphics (Presented by Valve)”. It will feature developers from other companies as well, like Epic Games, EA etc.

It’ll be interesting to see what unfolds. Ever since gaming under Linux has taken off I’ve been wanting to see an overhaul of OpenGL take place. It’s nice with some games, but really shows it’s age in newer ones. For example: I prefer playing Borderlands 2 under Windows because it keeps a better framerate, while under Linux it’s not as optimized even when you lower the settings. And that’s coming from someone who owns an R9 290. There should be no excuse for that kind of performance on a GPU that has an actual 4 GB of GDDR5.

What is a roku?

Roku

I’ve been getting asked this a bit lately by a some people who read here. Basically it’s a small streaming device that you can plug into your TV so you can watch channels and shows via the web without a computer. It’s like Apple TV but Linux based instead. They can be small like a thumb drive or big like a hockey puck. They’re even making Roku Smart TV’s now. O_o

You can also watch movies on it as well as play small games. My version comes with a free version of Angry Birds, so I’m cursed now…

It’s all assembled

Got the HDTV setup with my computer and roku. So far everything seems to be working accordingly. It’s kind of trippy having all these windows surrounding me. But so far it has proven useful for monitoring statistics and recording. Also did some gaming on it earlier with a controller using Big Picture. This should do nicely. 🙂

Got the speakers setup too. I now have a true 5.1 surround sound setup. I still need to EQ them, but otherwise they’re in working condition.