About me
A brief introduction
I'm from London, England, born in 1982. I graduated from Royal Holloway in 2003 with First Class Honours in joint Computer Science and Physics.
I'm very much a geek, having attained full geekdom recently during my first play of Dungeons and Dragons.
My interests
Programming
I've always loved programming since I got my first computer, an Amiga, in the early nineties. Programmers are gods of their own universes. No, really.
My favourite language is Python, which displaced Java from that spot easily. The language I use most is PHP, since I'm a web developer.
Game modding
I very much enjoy making mods (well, mutators, which are mini-mods) for the first-person shooter games Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004. It can be quite challenging, not just getting to grips with a scripting language and an existing engine, but also other considerations like making it work over a network, and game balance. You can see some of my UT mutators here.
Cellular automata
A cellular automaton (CA) is a virtual structure of 'cells' which change according to a table of rules. For example, a simple CA might have all active cells replicate themselves to their surroundings, in which case you'd expect to end up with a huge blob after a while. It turns out that some CAs, even simple ones, are VERY interesting, producing odd structures which pulsate, grow, or even crawl across their virtual space. The most famous CA is the Game of Life, which you can find applets for all over the web.
Science-fiction
I don't think this needs much explanation. I used to be a huge Star Trek fan, but nowadays it seems rather tame, except for some of Deep Space Nine. Voyager basically sucked everything that was great out of the franchise and turned it into a random plot generation device.
My favourite sci-fi show is Stargate: Atlantis, with Stargate SG:1 coming a close second.
My favourite science fiction novel is... well, I'd have to pick the whole Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, since they were never really novels to begin with.
Starships
I am a starship geek - that is, I will happily point at and drool over cool fictional spacecraft, search the web for pictures of them, and fill a page with doodles of potentially funky vessels. I have no plans ever to build model starships as a hobby, but I will point/drool at them if I see them. My favourite Star Trek ship is the Nova-class USS Equinox, because it's small and looks nifty.
Nature
You know, that thing with all those animals and plants and stuff. I love birds. They're just beautiful and fantastically cool and they have feathers and they can fly. I like most animals, actually. In the mammalian world, rabbits hold an appeal for some reason. I don't mean fat, fluffy, floppy-eared domestic bunnies - I'm talking wild rabbits. They have a certain grace of form that I admire, and they sometimes live underground which - and your guess why is as good as mine - has always intrigued me. And also - they're almost always the, er, underdog, and therefore I identify with them a bit more easily.
Furry
I'm a Furry. That means I think anthropomorphic animals are awesome, and I'm part of the fandom which agrees. I go to the London Furmeets every three weeks, which are awesomely fun. My furry persona (the animal that represents me) is a wild rabbit.
Furry fiction
Basically 'any books which appeal to furries', which for the most part is stuff like Watership Down (which is my favourite book of all). Other well-known examples are the Duncton Chronicles by William Horwood; Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; and the Redwall series by Brian Jacques.
Retrogaming
I tend to be incredibly slow at adopting new technologies... the bleeding edge always seems to be a very expensive and fleeting one. Instead, I often turn backward to older games. Firstly, there's a wealth of interesting history to be found that way, and secondly, a lot of older games are GOOD. (Well, okay, an even larger number of older games are abysmal, but you know what I mean.) I use a variety of emulators to play games from the past 30 years which seems fair since I didn't have a computer (an Amiga 500+) until I was 9 years old.
Shoot 'em ups
A shoot 'em up (informally known as a shooter, or a shmup, but shooter is easier to say and doesn't sound stupid) is a genre of computer game in which you shoot things. Up. I like them. I'm not sure why; it might be because my favourite game is a shoot 'em up, but I believe it's because shoot 'em ups create instantly interesting action. You start the game and immediately you're flying and blasting. Add to this interesting mechanics, like R-Type's Force, and it makes for a fun experience that you can dive into straight away.
A typical shoot 'em up is sprite-based, with scrolling levels, and invariably pits the player against hordes of armed-but-dumb enemies, and huge end-of-level bosses.
My favourite shooter is Apidya (see my fansite on it here), and I'm also fond of the R-Type series.
Roguelikes
Roguelikes are a genre of computer game, and I adore them. 'Roguelike' literally means 'Rogue-like' - as in, 'like the game Rogue'.
So what is Rogue? It was a game made in the early 80s, and it was about exploring a dungeon. But not just any dungeon - a RANDOM dungeon. The computer would generate a random dungeon with randomly placed monsters and items, for you to explore, and off you went.
It didn't bother with proper graphics - instead, it represented the entire game as text characters. But don't think it was like a story adventure, oh no. Rogue was far cleverer than that. Instead of using actual graphics to represent the game world, it used the many different text characters to represent elements of it. Walls are lines of |s and -s. Corridors are winding sequences of #s. And you, the player, are represented by @, while the monsters were assigned different letters of the alphabet depending on what they were.
And this was ingenious. The game world was generated randomly entirely from algorithms, but any game world could be represented as long as it fit the confines of characters on a UNIX terminal. Roguelikes truly are the most free expression of gaming that exist. You can make a fully interactive, fully deformable, fully changeable world, as long as you don't mind it being represented by characters. In fact, nowadays most of the popular roguelikes have the option for graphical tiles as well, but I prefer text characters - firstly, because they're easier to read, and secondly, because it makes me feel like I'm in that free world of infinite possibility. Roguelikes can make you tremble in terror when you see the letter L. (It's a lich.)
Now you might think that not a lot can be done with mere text characters, but roguelikes are more than just moving about on a map. Roguelikes are about, and forgive the confusing terms here, your character. And by that, I mean the being whom you control, the one represented by the @ symbol. (Rogue was the first to use @ to represent the player, and pretty much every roguelike since then has done the same, so it's kind of the 'symbol' of roguelikes.) Whatever the goal of the game is, your character is the one who will have to accomplish it, and he/she will invariably have the following things:
You're probably thinking at this point: 'Hang on. Isn't that Dungeons and Dragons?' And the answer is... no, but almost. D&D is an attempt to simulate a fantasy adventure in a dungeon, and roguelikes are pretty much the same thing, so they do borrow mechanics from D&D. But roguelikes have the advantage of being computerised, AND single-player. (Multiplayer roguelikes are rare, since they are notoriously difficult to co-ordinate.) This means that gameplay is fast and fluid (if you want it to be). You, the player, know what you want to do, and it is up to you how you achieve it. You rely on no-one, on nothing but your wits and strategy, and on the items you find or acquire.
Since the 1980s, several families of roguelike have emerged, and nowadays we have the 'Big Four' - the four most influential roguelike lines. There are dozens of other roguelikes, but these are the ones which are most popular:
If you are interested in playing a roguelike, I recommend NetHack for beginners, since it is a very exciting game for first-time players. Dungeon Crawl, Stone Soup edition, is a good choice for people who like tactical play. Angband and its later offspring ZAngband are recommended for players who enjoy the task of boosting their stats as high as possible - they are very 'grindy' games, where fighting lots of monsters to gain experience is considered normal. Finally, ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) is recommended for players with experience in roguelikes already, since it has a very large command set and a difficult learning curve.
One final warning about roguelikes: they have one feature that makes them both very rewarding and very frustrating to play at the same time - perma-death. This means, when your character dies, he/she is dead, and nothing will bring him/her back*. You cannot continue. You have lost the game and must start again, no matter how far you got. This is an accepted hazard of roguelikes, since it gives the player a real sense of danger and risk - most players do not want to lose their character, and will do what it takes to stay alive. Despite this, dying happens a LOT in roguelikes (which is to be expected, since the only other ways to end the game are to quit or to win, and the latter is something some people never manage despite years of trying). NetHack boasts some of the silliest ways to die, the best one probably being to fall down some stairs while carrying too much weight and holding the corpse of a cockatrice; this causes you to land on the cockatrice corpse and turn to stone instantly.
*Actually, some roguelikes have a very neat feature - you can sometimes run into the ghosts of your former characters from past games. In NetHack, this is normally a very good thing, because you can loot your own grave and pick up all the items your previous incarnation had. In Dungeon Crawl, ghosts are bad news indeed, and some of the toughest opponents you'll have to face.
