v-s.net v0.6

Monday, 2:43 pm in Archive

Well, yesterday I finally succumbed to curiosity and installed myself a private RO server running eAthena SQL; skRO (s’crow) has 100/100/100 rates (I think). It was pretty damn easy to set up once I realised it was probably better to run it under cygwin (Linux emulation under Windows) which I already have installed thanks to Graphics last semester (Windows is crap for compiling, but the uni machines were crap for OpenGL). I think it took maybe three hours at most to do, the majority of which was spent looking around for what would seem to be really basic things like “how do I make a GM account” and “how do I set up the client to connect to it”.

~Mat [h] set my router up so the server should be accessable to those of you On the Outside, however I’m only on a slow ADSL connection so it will probably lag like buggery and my IP is dynamic so it will change location every time I reboot. Nevertheless, if anyone is curious send me a login/password and I’ll set you up an account. (Or if anyone wants to donate a server I will admin it. Har har.) I also downloaded Athena CP, which is an interesting PHP interface to SQL distributions of Athena, however it’s a buggy piece of shit and I’ve had to rewrite it almost completley (who the fuck uses $GET_arrayname style variables).

Despite this, RO still has yet to regain any of its lustre. I’m using skRO as a build server, zipping through levels with GM @ commands and just testing final builds. So far I’ve come to the conclusion that Rogues are shit, and that not even having 99 in every stat and godly equipment can save them. Stalkers aren’t much better. This makes me sad; I wanted a Rogue for a while.

Acolytes are still the One True Jobclass.

In other news, I saw Hellboy and The Stepford Wives the other day. Stepford Wives was very good, I thought; sort of a black comedy in the vein of Brazil. It was a bit like Day After Tomorrow in that we were more ‘learned’ than most of the other people in the audience (which was filled with a bunch of noisy skanks; don’t know what they thought they were going to see) so more of the jokes were funnier. We didn’t just laugh at the Viggo shirt. Unfortunatley Stepford had a very Hollywood ending (kill the bad guy, save the day); I still think it should have ended when they descended into the glowing machine thing, or perhaps in the supermarkert scene afterwards. But anyway; funny movie, which was very much made by the performances of Midler (the squat Jewish author) and Some Guy Whose Name I Don’t Know (the gay ‘wife’). Kidman did well too, I thought, and I will always have big hearts for Walken. The wives were sutiably disturbing. The husband guy (Matthew someone; you know the guy) was kind of limp-wristed and aenemic, but I think he was sort of supposed to be, so. Meh.

Moving on, Hellboy was surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be. I’d hazard that it was better than Van Hellsing simply because it’s comic book one-liners were funnier. In a kind of predictable way (but, then again, I read a lot of comic books with ‘that’ kind of main character, if not Hellboy itself), but still amusing. Plus, horns are sexy (Illidan!). So is getting a backful of glass (er, that sounds a bit weird; it’s a cool visual in an “I’m glad it’s not happening to me or anyone I know or in fact anyone who’s not a hardcore superhero demon guy” kind of way). And everyone loves kittens (except ~braken [h] and ~Mat [h])! I’m tossing up whether I liked it or Leage better but, like League, I will now probably pick up the comic the  next time I see it (simply because it will invariably be better than the film and it’s always nice to do the creator some justice). Oh yeah, the opening ‘quote’ from De Vermis Mysteriis made me laugh.

For those of you not versed in Cthulhiana, DVM is one of those Lovecraftian books a la the Necronomicon. It originally comes from a short story by Robert Bloch called “The Shambler from the Stars”, and gets mentioned in two Lovecraft stories including “The Survivor” (with August Derleth, who was known as a bit of a revisionist) and “Haunter of the Dark”. Stephen King mentiones it in “Jerusalem’s Lot”. DVM itself was supposedly written circa 1542 (or possibly 1484) by a Ludwig Prinn just before he was killed by the Inquisition. There are several editions in various languages, many of dubious quality (supposedly the original Latin translation is the best). It may be influenced by Druidic rituals due to the contents of one copy supposedly being written largly in runes similar to those used by the Celts. It has 16 chapters, dealing with various familiar occult topics (divination, necromancy, familiars, vampires and so on). The most famous chapter deals with the ‘Saracenic Rituals’ (to do with Egyptian-style things). The books also contains the usual spells to call down generic horrors from the sky, tales about Byatis (a Great Old One know as the “Berkeley Toad” presemedly due to its resemblance to the lecturers there) and Irem (a lost Arabian city filled with pilliars and said in the Koran to have been destroyed Sodom-style), the true names of gods, the formula for Liao (a black-lotus drug), and a series of operations to turn someone into a deep one hybrid. Basically all the sort of stuff that’s in a book made up by half a dozen different authos who didn’t necessarily consult one another on the contents.

I love shit like that.

• Tags » geeking, h.p. lovecraft, hellboy, movies, ragnarok online, skro
• Comments By » ~braken [h], ~Random [h], ~Mat [h], ~gaps [h]
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