After venturing around for DOOM Halloween mods the other night I wanted to see what the Quake Community had to offer. I found the Quake Halloween Jam from 2018, which sports a total of nine spooky maps to play. So far I’m two levels through it, each level presenting a challenge even on Normal difficulty.
It’s like a world you can actually jump into.
When you load the Halloween Jam you start off underground in a coffin, but eventually make your way to a haunted house containing large portraits on the walls that you can leap into. I played Pumpkin Grind, which lives up to its name of having lots of pumpkins and being a grind (a FUN grind!).
Mood lighting at its finest.
Then I ventured through The Four Incantations, where you have to fight off four wizards to open a seal to leave. That one also did a good job of throwing monsters at me. It gave me an excuse to download the latest vkQuake to check out. It was pretty easy to get up and running. I never really did much in the way of modding the old Quake. It was always DOOM and Quake III Arena that got my most modding attention as a kid. Better late than never I guess.
There was once a cat that lived in our neighborhood. She belonged to a redneck who believed his pets were feedable yard decorations. Besides the cat, he owned a dog. We thought was named “Shut up” because of how many times he yelled Shut up at the poor thing, who we found out later on was named Diesel. Eventually he ended up moving away and returning some property value to the rest of our neighborhood when he drove his fat ass freight truck away never to return.Before leaving he let us know that his cat went missing, but never bothered to stay and look for her. Eventually she found a home with two kids that loved her… or so we thought.
Fast forward four years later and she mysteriously reappears outside in our neighborhood, mainly coming around at night. She looked malnourished, like many of the other cats that are either left outside or abandoned in our neighborhood (we have shitty neighbors). We offered her the garage in the evenings for shelter, and started calling her Kiki, and later Kikyo. By morning she would leave. Eventually Kikyo would start hanging around during the day, and we began to notice she was getting more and more plump. At first we thought it was from feeding her, then eventually it became more obvious that the poor thing was pregnant. Last week her water broke, but there was no kitten activity. After waiting 32 hours like the Vet recommended we took her in for a checkup, and next thing we knew…
Kikyo with her babies: Scooter and Squeaky.
TWO PREMATURE KITTENS!!! Kikyo had two pregnancies going on, a pregnancy of four and a pregnancy of two. The four didn’t make it, and the two were difficult to wake up… but they made it.
Mewing Intensifies
We’ve been doing what we can to feed and care for them since their arrival. Each day we weigh them, and they get a little more and more heavier. Their Mom has been doing an excellent job taking care of them!
Scooter and Squeaky.
As crazy as it is, we’re probably going to keep them. If Kikyo had given birth to a regular litter of kittens we would have given them away without any issue. But helping save this bonded pair has made this situation completely different. Of course, this means we have six cats now. But we’ll make it work. We won’t be adopting anymore cats, for awhile anyway. We’re happy to welcome Scooter (left) and Squeaky (right) into the world, and into our family. 🙂
I thought about tearing back into DOOM last night, this time GZDoom! I wanted to download some Halloween themed DOOM wads. Tonight I tried Trick and Tear – a Halloween themed megawad for DOOM 2. So far I’m three levels in playing on “Hurt Me Plenty”, or as they call it in the wad “I Play With The Lights Off”. Trick and Tear features a total of nine levels by numerous authors, so far I’ve only survived through three of them.
I’m about half way through Map 3 (Rigor). Surprisingly the Revenants in the image don’t attack you! (not yet anyway). Made it to just outside where I keep getting pounded by rockets from fully functioning Revenants. I won’t lie… I’m kinda wishing I went at least one difficulty back. Some of the areas feel almost impossible to trudge through when you’re locked in an area with a sudden demon moshpit, and no wiggle room to effectively take them out. But I didn’t give up! Just took breaks whenever I got irritated enough. Think I’ve had my fill for the evening. It gave me an excuse to check out wads… it has been a good number of years since I last looked. You know a game is really good when you have people who are playing AND making mods for it decades later.
I won’t have much in the way of YouTube content this month. Instead I’m siphoning my creative time towards some spooky scenes for a projector we’ll have outside. It’ll only be a couple minutes on loop of some spooky scenery, but far better than your trad Halloween projector. I’ll have it all compiled before the end of the month.
It’s been awhile since making an Open Thread, but I don’t have much time to sit and clippity-clap at my keyboard. So for now please enjoy these two precious baby kittens!
There’s a whole story to them, but that will have to wait for another evening where I can properly tell it. This is definitely not a story that I would want to rush.
After cycling through my library to see what my brain would fancy I stopped on Infinity Runner. One of the many games in my library that went unplayed… until tonight.
The Infinity.
You awaken aboard a spaceship that you’ll later on learn is called The Infinity, and your job is to go streaking throughout the spaceship without dying in an attempt to escape. The only time you’re able to control your character is when you need to jump, slide or press left and right to get over certain obstacles or pick up data packets. So far I’ve only played it with a keyboard and mouse, next time I’ll see how a controller performs.
Once you have a basic rundown of how the controls work, you’ll start to learn that you’re actually a werewolf. Anytime you come in contact with a syringe gun you’ll automatically transform. This doesn’t really mean much though, other than you no longer have to press buttons during cutscenes, at least until you revert back to your human form.
Overall the story is pretty basic, but has a certain charm about it. Every time I’ve glanced at the store page on Steam it always has a status of mixed reviews. I bought it during a sale for about how much it goes now, so I can’t really complain about what I’ve experienced so far. One of the commonly reoccurring complaints I’ve noticed is how short the game is. We’ll see how long I can drag this one out!
It’s Oct 1st, and you know what that means? IT’S SPOOKTOBER!!! The month where I knock the cobwebs off of the spookier titles in my library in an attempt to finish them., or at the very least put a dent in some progression. I spent the final hour of my evening immersing myself in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where I’ve managed to successfully outrun the invisible Water Creature and arrive in some unexplored territory.
Found multiple journal entries and notes, helping to further along the story. I’m currently trying to get some sort of elevator working, just found a key to the machinery room before calling it a night. I found a few cogs, but there are a few other parts of the machine that will require another evening of proper investigation. There’s a reality awaiting me in the morning that I must return to, the Derp Descent awaits.
If earning enough watermelon seeds to unlock a fruit cat skin in My Suika – Watermelon game is a sign that I’m addicted, then at least I’m willing to grind away at it instead of spending real world dollars on it. 😛 We had another random scorcher day where one minute we were in the 17C range, and then within an hour we were getting close to 30C. This weather becomes more and more unusual all the time. It did at least give me an excuse to play more on my Steam Deck today at least. Before vacation the poor thing was lucky to get used on the weekends. My lunches at work have either been too short or non-existent, leaving me with no time to even get a survival match in Serious Sam down.
It’s looking like we might have a repeat of the same weather tomorrow. Already charging up my Steam Deck in anticipation!
We had another nice summer like day. I got through some footage, played a bit of Castlevania in between renders thanks to my trusty Steam Deck, and partied it up in Resonite when the evening hit. I still have a couple more days of freedom before I return to the hell hole, but I’m enjoying all the free time I can get, and it’s looking like there will be more of it in the future. Already scheduled a couple weeks off at the end of October, so the pain won’t be too intense when I head back to work… hopefully.
My search for the perfect template marches forward. I spent most of today venturing through WordPress.org and the four corners of the internet to find a template that doesn’t completely piss me off. When searching I get bombarded with e-commerce, portfolio, business, and anything NOT A BLOG. The current one would be fine if I could get the YouTube links to display properly on smaller devices, but no matter what settings I play with it’s never the proper aspect ratio. Of course, most of the templates I’ve been looking at don’t display YouTube videos on the front page. Why not? Another irritating trend I’m seeing is AI being built into some of the themes… Jesus Butt Fucking Christ, I don’t want AI in my theme suggesting to me how to write a post!
There are still multiple search terms I haven’t tried yet, but I’m getting tired of just searching for “Blog Theme” and having it also pull up business templates. It would be ideal if they added an option to uncheck options like e-commerce and the others just so I can find something that doesn’t make me look like a business corporation. This is a personal blog that shares videos… how is that so hard to accommodate for?
