Monthly Archives: June 2009

Supposedly Famous People

3
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 30, 2009 – 1:31 PM
Filed under Other

The other day I found an interesting picture (provided by Raidenator) involving about 100 significant, historic people. Some of you may have already seen this as it is a few years old (give or take), but I thought I’d take a look at it anyway.

(Click for high res)

Anyway, it’s a cool picture albeit lacking some important people (Martin Luther King Jr., Clint Eastwood, George Washington). There are lists of answers floating around the web although I haven’t found any official one. Overall, seeing Stalin, DaVinci and Abraham Lincoln at the same table is pretty interesting.

The Talk on Titles. Again.

6
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 26, 2009 – 1:37 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod

This post is quite overdue as I found little time (or little motivation) in previous weeks to write it .

I decided to take a brief tour among GMod RP servers again, not expecting to find too much variety or improvements in classic criticisms. I did, however, expect to see something interesting as Reich RP had a server up. Before venturing any further, I’d like to note, and I’d like the reader to note, that the reason for my posting of this is based on the hopes I have that the community will improve their standards and their server. With that being said, I’ll talk about titles.

Now, what they’re doing wrong. The first player has their title set as, “Skinny, Funky looking man.” I’m not sure if they would’ve used the word funky had their character been white. Either way, the title is so clearly erroneous (with the exception of the word, “skinny”) as “funky” is an opinionated adjective. In other words, he might not appear funky to everyone. This is a confirmation that the player is falsely assuming that all the other players share his Out of Character opinions about his appearance.

Perhaps the second player is a disillusioned author trying to adapt his taste for noir stories to Garry’s Mod Roleplay or maybe he just doesn’t know how to set a good title (we’ll go with the latter). One character’s goals, plans, motives, opinions or thoughts are of no concern to anyone simply reading a title. If the player making Fred Mertz’s title wants to reveal his goals to the rest of the in-game world then he must find an in-character forum, aside from titles, to do so.

Now for something a little different.

First we saw hyphens, then we saw periods. But now, we see both in Civil Protection names.

I will admit, I am slightly guilty of this criticism myself. However, I believe it is made up for in the fact that all the people who played CPs on the OB server with such arrangements of punctuation did fair jobs. As for Reich RP, the Civil Protection performance was poor and lackluster. I’m not sure if they were trying to make up for it with their elaborate squad names and ranks. For example, they walked right by this guy without blinking an eye:

Finally, if you’re wondering why it’s called “Reich RP” yet there are no Nazis anywhere, you share my curiosity. I was slightly appalled when I joined their server to find not the Third Reich, but rather the cliched Civil Protection ruling over City 18 once again (the titles soon distracted me, however). Beta testing or not, the above criticisms remain in my mind. I hope Reich RP can improve its performance because they seem to have (or at least they did at the time) a decent playerbase. Perhaps they have improved already, perhaps not. But with the above in mind, I will leave you with one last title I saw. I don’t believe I need to make any commentary on it.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

4
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 25, 2009 – 2:47 PM
Filed under General

It’s been reported by TMZ that Michael Jackson has died at age 50, as a result of going into cardiac arrest.

Michael Jackson was, arguably, one of the best (if not the best) entertainers of our time. With such hits as Thriller, Billie Jean and Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough. Despite previous accusations afforded to him, Michael Jackson was one of the most talented musicians in our lifetime. As such, I honor him and note that he shall be missed among pop fans and musicians abroad.

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There IS a sign on my garage that says, “Dead Ringer Storage”

0
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 24, 2009 – 9:52 PM
Filed under Team Fortress 2

That’s right folks, the Team Fortress 2 server is up. It’s on a standard map rotation with default maps with vanilla settings so far. I plan to keep the server pretty standard as a lot of mods take up space and appeal to a smaller audience. As always, however, I’m open to suggestions. Without further ado:

Dead Ringer Storage

Dead Ringer Storage

If anyone wants admin they can contact me or TKFT. We’re pretty lax right now and don’t have some dubious admin application or donation process to go to. So if you like the server and frequent it feel free to ask. (As long as we need admins.)

For those of you unfamiliar…

To whom decency, originality and respect for one’s work may concern:

3
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 21, 2009 – 10:59 AM
Filed under General

I somehow find myself unsurprised at the fact that there has been some drama brought to our humble community, from the outside this time. It seems that even after we’ve stepped away from our Garry’s Mod server, there are still individuals who wish to to trouble us and make names for themselves, no matter how ignorant or arrogant those names may be.

Now, I’ll cut to the chase. The condensed version of today’s story is quite simply: some members over at the “HyperGamerNetwork” have attempted to plagiarize some work and writings of the OB development team. The aforementioned work refers to one of the prior blog posts titled, “Metaplot: Alpha Build.” It was posted in a thread that has now been closed and removed from the board it was originally posted in at the claim that it’s “still going ahead probably a bit more privatly”(longlostblake).

First, here’s the original post made by the vandal himself, longlostblake.

Now, regardless of how cliched anyone thinks the storyline is, regardless of how many times people have done Half Life 2 RP or variants of it, regardless of any RP archetypes in plots, longlostblake has made a poor rewrite of the prior blog post. In other words, aside from the storyline idea being claimed as his own, he’s assuming credit for the piece of writing as well. The major noticeable similarity is the almost parallel structures of the first two paragraphs in each work. It seems that longlostblake simply copied and pasted the blog post, rearranged a few sentences and went to dictionary.com to look for synonyms. Furthermore, he’s leeching off of the RP plot that OB had been pursuing for months before we switched to Space RP.

I began with a simple reply, subtly requesting an end to the nonsense. As displayed below, I was supported by one of HGN’s smarter members, HockeyMaster195.

I imagine this post would’ve sufficed in the days where most people were respectful, reasonable and revered decency. Much to my dismay, however, it was soon met with some amusing replies:

Creeding, the first to “reply”, seems to have a surly disposition towards me for some apparent reason. Perhaps it was my fault for assuming a calm, reasonable post would be met with a calm, reasonable response.

The second attempt at rebutting my post (and an additional supporting post by HockeyMaster) was made by the actual e-swindler himself, longlostblake. Longlostblake bases his arguments (and so do his e-buddies) on the premise that if he hasn’t heard of a community then they don’t deserve to be a community with their own material. This is confirmed by his cry of “who the fuck has EVER heard of ‘Our Benefactors’.” I find it highly offensive that, in his defensive reply, he trivializes the entirey of the OB community (even if it is smaller than HGN) with one statement. Longlostblake tries to consider himself the online authority figure by assuming he can simply throw us all aside without any response whatsoever.

Even more unsurprisingly, another high caliber individual makes a reply and a defense for longlostblake with the following post:

To begin, I can’t understand the majority of the post so I’ll do my best to interpret it. The first paragraph of KingArthur’s attempt at a reply consists of some jumbled, misspelled words thrown into attempted sentences. KingAthur’s second paragraph is an entirely irrelevant, ad hominem argument directed at me. Overall, it just adds onto the heaping pile of immaturity and stupidity displayed by the defenders of demi-God longlostblake.

I imagine that longlostblake must’ve feared further reply from me (good thing this blog is here) as he demanded the thread be locked and declared the RP valid and ongoing.

longlostblakes final reply

longlostblake's final reply

I will hand it to longlostblake, he did make a fairly smart decision. By removing the thread from the public eye he’s now able to craft it and gift wrap the idea so he can comfortably employ it via the purchase of a server by the time the opposition dies down. Before I conclude, I’d like to note a part of a conversation I had with Silverknight, the owner of HGN. I, along with HockeyMaster, spoke to Silverknight of the so blatantly obvious plagiarism going on and requested he put an end to it. His overall reply was simply:

|HyperGamer.Net|Silver Knight: Your story is still very different and you do not indicate half the things blake does

He went on to say about the uncredited storyline:

|HyperGamer.Net|Silver Knight: I considered it but if blake can actually fix the matieral he presented and actually give more reason to why and how it should be rped, i might take it on board

In conclusion, I find the HGN administration’s action (or lack of it thereof) (exluding HockeyMaster)  to be highly hypocritical and antithetical to their supposed ideology of striving towards originality. Although, I suppose it’s supported by their motto:

The Times Are a Changin’

2
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 9, 2009 – 5:18 PM
Filed under General

While milling around on my PC one day I was suddenly prompted with the idea of needing a calendar. I’m a cheap bastard and I hate buying things so I decided to make my own calendar. Albeit being a bit late in the year and a little past the game’s initial hype period, here it is:

Episode 2 Calendar

Episode 2 Calendar

The picture isn’t the best but it gets the job done.

my car

0
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 5, 2009 – 2:24 PM
Filed under Other

Is there a sign that says Dead Ringer storage on my garage?

1
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 4, 2009 – 9:46 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod, Team Fortress 2

Finally, as it has been spoken of for quite a while, Our Benefactors is getting a Team Fortress 2 server. The server will go up on or around June 20th and will have the same IP address as the Garry’s Mod server. As such, the Garry’s Mod server will be going down. This is largely due to the slowing playerbase, along with the fact that I’ve neither the mettle nor the determination to maintain it any longer. More on that later. Regarding the server, perhaps it will return some day, perhaps it won’t. The concept plot below will be addressed at a later time. Overall, everyone can look forward to enjoying the angst of the new weapon lottery system in Team Fortress 2 on an OB server.