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Thanks to "Passionate Admirer" for letting me know my Sentry Heatmaps were fucked. Long story short, I changed some code that I shouldn't have! I have manually re-ran them and they are working properly again, and they should work during their next daily run.

I also want to take this time to say that you, dear readers, should expect to see some weirdness around here in the next few days or so. I am in the process of finishing up a migration of my websites and I have saved the best for last. I may throw up my trusty "LOL GTFO" page if things get too crazy but hopefully the transition will be relatively smooth and painless.

But none of the go inbetweens.

(So if you do not give a fuck about any non-work, non-project related things you can just go ahead and stop reading this one.)

I still feel lost. I don't know where I went wrong, I don't know what I did that I drove my life off of a cliff and just prayed that I would grow wings. I am afraid of success. I am happy in the process, and I am even okay with failure, but the thought that I do something right is terrifying to me. When I do things right, I have nothing left to gain, nothing left to learn and grow from. And so I do whatever it takes to ruin everything for myself, to keep me happy in this perpetual cycle of losing and trying again. I thought about naming this "I Have Come Curiously Close To The End", but since there is no real end to a cycle it doesn't fit. Maybe I'll save that for when I am at the end of something.

Cycles don't end, but they do break. I am so sick of the stagnation in my life that has permeated every single crevice of my life. It seems like every single day, some small part of me is just turning into some hard, stale shell of what it was. The things I like and the things I want are becoming brittle and just doing nothing but weighing me down. Even the city that I love seems to be dragging me. Sometimes I wish I had the guts to just pick up everything that I have, or at least everything I care about, and just go. I have enough friends in enough places that I could manage it, and maybe even be happy with it. Columbus, Ohio. Seattle, Washington. Phoenix, Arizona. Denver, Colorado. I wish I was brave enough to truly give up everything I know and am familiar with, to lose everything so that I can re-learn anything. The worst of it, the stale that has taken over my life, has been my creativity, the thing about me that is so dear and so important and so defining as my ability to make. I have lost my ability to create.

I have tried so hard to surround myself with creative things, the things I love and the things I want and enjoy. I have tried so hard to find my muse and find something to create, but I don't know what I have been doing wrong until very recently. I don't know when I lost it, I don't know where or why. Speaking to someone recently, they suggested that it might be me losing the person that was most important in my life that might have caused it, and as much as it pains me to think about, I think they might be right. I feel like it isn't until I have learned from a mistake I have made, rather than simply having made the mistake, that I truly learn from it and can move on. Someone once told me that, in her five marriages throughout her life, the one consistent thing she had learned about people is that nobody really changes who they are. I had always believed in that since she told it to me, but it wasn't until I was in that position that I learned for myself how unwilling the people around you are to change for the better unless they really want to. Very rarely does anyone want to change.

I have accomplished so much for myself in the past 11 months, all of it in spite of my fear of success. I have changed my life in the most drastic way that I think anyone can and I did it without flinching. But as powerful as this accomplishment is, I can't shake the feeling that for every mile I have come, ten more still remain. I still feel like I am lieing to my friends every day, and that I am clutching onto a vestigial part of my life only for the comfort of familiarity. I rarely set deadlines for myself and the last time that I did was earlier in the year. Maybe it was shortly before it. But the important thing is that I stuck to it and set about these changes which mean so much to me now.

So now I have set another deadline for myself and I feel even more strongly about this than the last. In two months it's make or break. I am retaking everything that I once felt I needed, my creativity and my happiness and, most of all, my life. If I can change who I am, then changing everything else should be easy.

I think.

I know that I have posted about this before, but I wanted to go ahead and bump this for anyone new and to provide some more info.

As you may already know, I have written a script that generates heatmaps based off of data collected about Sentries in TF2. You can read more about them specifically and view the heatmaps at that link. The reason I am bumping this is because I am opening up this to other communities. I think that the most effective way of generating data would be by using more than one data source. While we are kind of a big deal over at F7Lans, more data is always better.

If you are the community leader for a TF2 community, and you are currently running SourceMod, please contact me and let me know you are interested in participating.

It's been a while since I was actually apart of something that saw public release. Just a few days ago, the HLstatsX: Community Edition version 1.6.0 was released on Aug 12, and included my heatmap code. I'm really pleased to see something like this that I wrote added to such a large project. Congrats to psychonic and the HLX:CE team for the big release. Obviously they had to adapt my rather primitive code to suit their needs which I was glad to help with and transition into their great project.

Aside from that though, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing anymore. I haven't felt inspired in so long, I forget what it's like to just have an idea come to me and be unable to do anything except put it down on 3 polygonal planes. I'm tapped out, I'm dry, and it really sucks. I really need to get away for a while, just lose everyone and everything around me and figure out something I want to do again.

Hey and we're back. I redesigned things, have you noticed? This is the... third? time I have redesigned my site. This go around I am just streamlining some things up front to look a lot nicer, I had kind of started to not care about the browser inconsistencies and other little minor problems with my preveious look. That and I learned a while ago that using text-in-images only is a pretty terrible idea, so I'm going for a much more web-friendly version. Look at the text!

I also spent a long time fixing up my back-end stuff. Have I ever said that I wrote my own CMS to manage my site? It's true. I don't like shit like php Nuke and whatever other options there might be out there, so when I opened my site like 4 years ago I had a very basic CMS backend. It has grown as I have grown both in terms of needs and knowledge, and now I'm on like v3.0 or something. I don't keep track, it's not like anybody is ever going to see it and/or care.

Well, a lot of things happened during my little down time.

I'll just go ahead and say it; 3D Realms. What the fuck. I watched things pretty close to the ground and I was all up in the 3DR boards and the community that shifted over to Duke4.net, and I read all about the lawsuit between Take Two and 3DR and blah blah blah. I don't really know what to say or think. What it looks like to me is that Take Two decided to let 3DR sink down where they would no longer be able to stay a float, and then try to sue the rights to DNF and/or the Duke IP entirely. 3DR publicly said that DNF was not canceled and that production has merely halted for the time being. Who knows what is going to happen I guess. Time will tell!

About a week ago, I just about literally shit my pants when I saw the Natural Selection 2 teaser. I have never enjoyed playing a single game as much as I enjoyed playing NS; it is the one and only game I ever have or ever would play competitively and I really enjoyed when I did playing with TheVille right around the time of release. I (of course) enjoyed playing Commander and I think that I was pretty adept at it. After my blood pressure went down some, I ragepurchased a private Natural Selection 1 server for use by me, my friends, and the web communities that I belong to.

Then someone told Penny Arcade, and some people on the forums there started using it. I have never posted over there before, I am very very vaugely familiar with it all, but after playing with a few dozen members I have to admit that, at least the ones I have played with, are pretty cool dudes. For anyone who cares and is reading this far still, here's the server information:

IP: 63.211.110.63:27015
Pass: msleeperdotcom

I'd also like to point out that my TF2 Sentry Heatmaps are getting pretty popular! Almost 1,000 hits at the time of writing this, that's not bad considering I haven't told too many people about it. I have been helping the HLStatsX: Community Edition team port over my code for use in their popular stat ranking system. I've given my code to them since I'm such a nice guy, and they were looking for some Heatmap code anyway. I'll post more when they release their stuff, they said it will be a while before it gets integrated.