Stress. Lots of stress. And also a bunch of random projects, including an Open Fortress server. Here’s a bunch of text talking about all of that!
Personal stuff
So uh, tiny little update: I had a job. Key word: had. I got one around the end of July, and kept trying to make it work through this semester. It wasn’t working. I could not maintain a good work/life balance at all what so ever. So after being told I couldn’t fix my schedule, I quit. It sucks because I actually really liked that job and the people who worked there. It just wasn’t flexible enough for my needs.
So now I’m hemmoraging money and quickly realizing that my semester is pretty much toast. Three months of work is going to end up resulting in an extra semester for me. It kinda lines up nicely with a move I’ve been thinking about making, but it still sucks.
Hopefully, I’ll take the lessons I learned from this semester and work towards bettering myself in the future. I’m starting to accept that there’s not much I can do for this semester except the best I can manage right now. If I fail some classes, it will be okay. I live and I learn. But now I know what not to do next time.
Like many people my age, I was never taught how to live on my own and handle adult reponsibilities. My childhood was a constant cycle of neglect and helicoptering, always on and always off, never allowed to breathe and learn things the hard way on my own because I was never allowed to have my own autonomy outside of cyberspace. I still feel somewhat more mature than a lot of my peers, but I also feel lost: the tools I was supposed to inherent were never given to me, and finding my own has been pushing me towards fits of suicidal thoughts and cripling anxiety.
But I’m still here. Somehow. and I guess that means I will continue to be here as long as I just keep moving forward.
BOOORN TO BE WIIIiiIIIiiiiLLLD
I have an Open Fortress server again! If you don’t know what Open Fortress is, it’s a mod for the Source engine that has taken up the mantle of Team Fortress Classic’s Deathmatch gamemode (which spun off as “Team Deathmatch Classic” at one point) and turned it into a stylized, streamlined arena shooter similar in vein to Quake 3: Arena or Quake Live.
I have been in and out of the Open Fortress community for multiple years now. In fact, I used to be a part of the dev team (for a single hot minute but still, the extra crouch sliding convars I added remain in the game to this day >:3). I’m building my community back up again as a way to build another queer-friendly space within the wider playerbase. And you can be a part of it too!
The server is currently live on this exact domain, eleboog.com:27015. You can also join the official Discord server guild to keep up with updates and chat with fellow gaymers. Finally, I have a website/MOTD up that should provide more information about the sever to you should you want it. It is currently a biiiig WIP tho.
The one thing I wanna do with this iteration of the server that I never really got to do with my earlier iterations is build a squite of open-source SourceMod plugins to enhance the server experience. I haven’t done it yet, but I will eventually have a repository on my personal Gitea instance containing the source code and compiled binaries of all of the plugins I develop for the server. My current plans for plugins include:
- WackyVote, a “variety server” voting plugin that allows players to change game rules and game modes on the fly without admin intervention.
Wanna turn on moon gravity? Allclass? Wanna switch from regular deathmatch to instagib? You will be able to do all of that! All you need to do is use the WackyVote menu to present a rule change to the entire server. If the rest of your peers vote for it, the server will automatically apply the changes! If a particular change requires a map restart to apply, you will be given the option of whether you want to restart now or keep playing the current match. - A mashup of randomcycle, rtv, and nomination-style map voting.
Essentially, upon the start of each map, the server automatically selects the next map based on a slightly-weighed randomization algorithm, taking into account previous maps played, the popularity of each map, and gamemodes (in the case of objective maps being allowed). However, players have two options to defy the will of the machine gods. The first option is to!nominatea map you want to play. When you do that, a map vote will be cast at the end of the match, allowing players to choose between the server-chosen next map and any maps nominated by other players. If players dislike the map they’re currently on, they can!rtvto “rock the vote”, forcing a map vote to pick another map to play on instead. I want to give players the opportunity to try out a variety of maps, thus the default to a randomized nextmap, however I also want to give players tools to play on specific maps they really enjoy.
One more thing: when players vote for a map or!rtva map, those actions will be recorded on a SQLite database along with periodic “map surveys” to track what players think of a map. This should help me determine what maps players like and what maps players don’t like, and thus help me shape the map pool to be full of bangers and devoid of stinkers. - A custom tournament and stat-tracking plugin utilizing modern database and front-end infrastructure (cya, HLStatsX!).
My goal is to implement “Sweaty Saturdays” where players can frag for bragging rights (in the form of ELO and “wackpoints”). Through the web portal, players will be able to view their own stats as well as their peers’, ranging from basic stuff like KD and wins to individual weapon and map stats as well as an official ranking system based on ELO (with dumb rank tier names like “plastic” and “uranium”, of course). To minimize how sweaty this makes players, ELO can only be earned during Sweaty Saturdays, and stat tracking is completely disabled on “Stupid Sundays” (where more experimental maps and game rules can be found).
Honestly, I feel really honored to have a community in Open Fortress again, no matter how small. Looking at the “Famous Last Words” on the server website, a lineage of community and random passers-by can be clearly seen. It almost makes me tear up a little. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things at all… but I have made an impact, no matter how small. I hope you will help me make an even bigger one.
A couple meta-updates
- My personal instance has been nuked into the shadow realm. Yes, including all of my followers. Calckey just was way too resource intensive for me. I’ll make a list of people to poke soon, but for now, if you were following me on fedi before, I’m back on plush.city, so go follow me again. I might make an Akkoma instance at some point, but next time it’s going on its own VPS lmao
- I have a cohost! Well, I technically have had a cohost for a while now, but with fedi enshittining a bit, I figured I’d try it out more. Follow me plox uwu
so yee that’s basically it, see you in 2027
