The webmention system has remained hooked up here and still works. To my shame I forgot about it and stopped downloading new messages. I remembered a couple days ago, ran my download script, and there were mentions that'd been sitting in queue for years. So: sorry! Thank you to the two people who commented, I appreciate it. Those comments have been imported and I've left myself a note to remember to run the mention download script when I update this website in the future.

I'd still like to host my own receiver & mention-sending comment form (I'd be a lot happier without depending on third-party sites). Maybe it's time to look at the problem again.

Later Quake games allow the player to step up even if they're in the air. Some Quake 1 sourceports implement this feature as well, often disabled by default. The feature is called an "airstep" in these engines and is typically enabled by setting the pm_airstep cvar to 1. The Quakespasm lineage of Quake engines (notably: Ironwail) do not, from what I can tell, implement airsteps.

That's an issue for me because I'd like to play the new cool singleplayer Quake mods but I don't want to get stuck on stairs. Fortunately this is easy to fix. Ironwail is used for most of these new mods & it's just a couple lines of code. Here's a quick patch for Ironwail 0.8.1 that adds rudimentary good-enough airsteps:

ironwail-0.8.1-airsteps.patch

diff --exclude Makefile -Nru ironwail-0.8.1-orig/Quake/sv_phys.c ironwail-0.8.1-hacked/Quake/sv_phys.c
--- ironwail-0.8.1-orig/Quake/sv_phys.c 2026-01-01 13:04:04.000000000 -0800
+++ ironwail-0.8.1-hacked/Quake/sv_phys.c   2026-01-20 19:17:37.866332969 -0800
@@ -865,9 +865,6 @@
    if ( !(clip & 2) )
        return;     // move didn't block on a step

-   if (!oldonground && ent->v.waterlevel == 0)
-       return;     // don't stair up while jumping
-
    if (ent->v.movetype != MOVETYPE_WALK)
        return;     // gibbed by a trigger

@@ -888,7 +885,6 @@
    VectorCopy (vec3_origin, upmove);
    VectorCopy (vec3_origin, downmove);
    upmove[2] = STEPSIZE;
-   downmove[2] = -STEPSIZE + oldvel[2]*host_frametime;

 // move up
    SV_PushEntity (ent, upmove);    // FIXME: don't link?
@@ -914,16 +910,26 @@
    if ( clip & 2 )
        SV_WallFriction (ent, &steptrace);

+   downmove[2] -= ent->v.origin[2] - oldorg[2];
+
 // move down
    downtrace = SV_PushEntity (ent, downmove);  // FIXME: don't link?

-   if (downtrace.plane.normal[2] > 0.7)
+   if (downtrace.allsolid)
+   {
+       VectorCopy (nosteporg, ent->v.origin);
+       VectorCopy (nostepvel, ent->v.velocity);
+   }
+   else if (downtrace.plane.normal[2] > 0.7)
    {
        if (ent->v.solid == SOLID_BSP)
        {
            ent->v.flags =  (int)ent->v.flags | FL_ONGROUND;
            ent->v.groundentity = EDICT_TO_PROG(downtrace.ent);
        }
+
+       if (oldvel[2] > 0)
+           ent->v.velocity[2] = oldvel[2];
    }
    else
    {

After about 6 (!) months I recently finished a streamed playthrough of Morrowind. As finished as TES III can get anyway - the main quests of the base game and the two expansions complete. I played with around 85 mods, mostly sourced from the lists on Modding OpenMW.

After the cut you'll find a list of the mods I used with links back to nexusmods where they can be downloaded. Like the other modded game I played in 2025 I don't recommend this list. It's a better idea to pick one from modding-openmw.com and start from there.

I played the game on my Debian 12 (later Debian 13) personal computer using version 0.49 of the OpenMW engine reimplementation. The engine performed brilliantly & was a major upgrade over running the old engine in Wine (at least, my memory of running the old engine in Wine).

I pulled ideas from three different modlists to produce the list below, specifically I Heart Vanilla, I Heart Vanilla Director's Cut, and Expanded Vanilla, all from the aforementioned site modding-openmw.com. Past those curated mod sets I installed a maybe a few dozen mods that I personally like, some old, some new. It's a lot of mods - 86 - though less than what some folks run these days.

There were a number of mods that either conflicted with others or weren't working properly. The dungeon overhauls seemed to prevent the S3maphore mod from playing the correct music in certain dungeon interiors. I had some landmass or geography conflicts resulting in torn or disrupted ground (easily worked around). And, a big one, the Devilish Needs mod did not work well for me. I had to turn a few of its features off due to bugs or conflicts and could not use it to its fullest. If I were to start a new game today I'd give the mod Sun's Dusk a try to replace Devilish Needs.

Aside from that this all mostly worked as intended. The difficulty rebalancing mods did their job (and made many encounters much more challenging). NCGDMW-Lua worked well, although I made an error configuring it at the start, I should have set the skill growth speed to vanilla instead of the default "slow".

Not included in the list below (because I'm not sure when I installed them) are the OMWFX Shaders & MOMW Post Processing Pack shader packs. My shader chain (from the Post Processing section of settings.cfg) was: ssao_hq, quakeunderwater, clouds, godrays, bloomPS2, depth_of_field, reshade-colourfulness.

Anyway here's the modlist itself, copied from notes I took as I configured OpenMW. This should be all the major items; a dependency or something minor might have been missed.

For completeness here's the load order I used, copied from openmw.cfg:

I played a Sea Elf / Maormer NPC Priest class character (enabled by the All Races and Classes unlocked mod) and played through a good chunk of both the Vvardenfell and mainland Mages Guild and Imperial Cult questlines. I leaned into the blunt weapon, light armor, unarmored, mysticism, restoration, and conjuration skills. I used one-handed maces for damage and Tamriel Rebuilt's Staff of St. Ino as a walking stick (and as an excuse to repeatedly reference the works of Brian Eno). I finished the Bloodmoon expansion at around level 37. (A level I achieved by paying for training with gold I got from selling things to Creeper).

It was a good time! Morrowind is one of my favorite games and it was very fun to return to it after a ~5 year break. Tamriel Rebuilt is frankly incredible now, the new areas are built to a much higher quality than the parts of TR I played 15 years ago. I look forward to someday rolling another character so I can see more of TR (and SHotN and Project Cyrodiil).

I'm not completely done with this character, I think I'll return to it and do some post-game stuff (maybe complete the mages guild questline). But for now the game is going on break & priest Lyria gets to rest.

I recently finished a modded game of Fallout New Vegas that I streamed on twitch. It was a good time & I used a pretty fun selection of recent (2020? and later) mods that resulted in a mostly crash-free and fun experience.

After the cut you'll find a list of the mods I had installed, all ~130 of them, with links back to nexusmods where they can be downloaded. I don't recommend this list, you should use (or at least start from) Viva New Vegas instead, but I'll pass this list on anyway (for my own records and because people asked for it).

I started from the aforementioned stable base of the Viva New Vegas list and added various things that caught my attention - landscape overhauls, new dungeons, a body replacer, and other miscellaneous things.

I'll say now, before the list itself, that A World Of Less Pain definitely conflicted here and there with some of the landscape overhauls I was using (specifically Enhanced Landscapes / NV Suburban Overhaul / Simple Mojave Urbanization). The conflicts that I remember were only visual, however; the mods worked together fine but occasionally looked bad/goofy.

Additionally I think that there were mods editing items that were in conflict (and that I didn't notice until partway through the game). If I were to do this again I'd omit the Type4 body mod and its associated clothing mods to reduce the number of ESPs changing those records.

With that out of the way here's the list itself, organized into sections as suggested by the Viva New Vegas guide. (This roughly corresponds to the left pane in Mod Organizer 2). There may be a few dependencies not listed.

And for the sake of completeness here's the specific load order I used (corresponding to the right pane in Mod Organizer 2):

I played the game on my ordinary Linux desktop computer. I'm currently running Debian 12.10 & using the Wine version available in the standard apt repositories (Wine 8.0 according to apt search). I had some crashes around Helios One and an unusually high number of crashes in the Dead Money DLC but other than that the game performed well.

One thing I couldn't get working at all under Wine was xLODGen. I used the pre-generated Viva New Vegas LOD & so I had a lot of distance detail mismatch with the mods I was running. (A lot of "pop-in" I think it's called). I'll need to figure out how to get either xLODGen or FNVLODGen to work one of these days.

I built (and vaguely roleplayed) a character skilled at guns, medicine, and speech. I took a lot of of damage-increasing perks - Black Widow, Grunt, Bloody Mess, Living Anatomy, and eventually Thought You Died. I used a bunch of overpowered DLC weapons - .45 Auto pistols, the Survivalist's rifle, the Holorifle. I was a glass cannon for much of the early and middle game and ended up pretty overpowered at the end (completed at around level 40).

It was, as I said above, a good time. I look forward to playing Fallout 3 soon (though I think I'll play that one vanilla first as I have never played it before).

Another short video demonstration of a few different Quake 1 movement techniques. Various forms of air acceleration, climbing, crouching, doublejumps, et cetera. Player movement is again being handled by the mod I'm tinkering with.

This video is also available on youtube (in higher-but-still-garbage quality).

The map shown in the video above is pd_ladders.bsp (a test map from progs_dump 3) by dumptruck_ds. Player movement, both acceleration and the slidemove, is all done through custom QuakeC running on the FTEQW engine. Movement techniques shown include ladders (obv.), mantling, stairstepping (airsteps), Q1 air accel, Q3 air accel (strafejumping), CPM air control, and so on.

I wish I could've chosen to obsess over something other than a Quake mod. Having said that the movement feels pretty good now. It's getting there.

The program source code contained in that repo is available under the MIT License unless otherwise indicated. Text on this website (articles, wiki pages, etc.) and original graphics are now licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license unless otherwise indicated.

(Note that most of the graphics aren't my original work - they're photos of cover art, screengrabs from film and TV, preview images sourced from the web, etc. .)

If you think you can use something then go for it. Just, y'know, please credit me when you do.

Electro in the 130s today featuring a few nice old Dominance Electricity tunes plus one relatively recent breakbeat track by Paradox.

Right-click save-as here or on the spectrogram above to download this mix.

Track #7 Breakbeater by Paradox is the latest track in this selection, the most recent release. It's from a two-tracker on Sneaker Social Club; I played the B side Detronic back in MTT 317. Breakbeater is a spare and heavy drum workout, a style Paradox excels at, really awesome tune. I have it pitched down quite a lot in this mix so I suggest you check out the original at the link above.

Track #13 On The Run (Sbassship Encryption) and #14 Dominant Race by Dagobert and Gab.Gato respectively are both from the German label Dominance Electricity. I set out to play DE this week and these two are what made the cut, what felt right. Most of the Dominance Electricity I have sounds like warm weather music to me so I try to hold on to them for the summer months. The latter of those two (the one with the, ah, challenging track name) is from the Global Surveyor Phase 2 compilation. I've played a lot of pieces from that comp for this mix series over the years & I think it's a good place to start with DE's catalog if you're unfamiliar.

This is kind of a loose one. I nailed a few of the hard parts & then wiffed some of the easy ones. Apologies for the slop. As always the links above will take you to where you can purchase these releases (all but two are available digitally this time). I'll be back with another set soon, hopefully before next Thursday. More electro, maybe some '80s tunes for a change.

Working through an odd mismatched selection this week. Electro and IDM then into four-on-the-floor house, techno, '90s bits, etc. . Nothing new I'm afraid but some nice old tunes from Cabaret Voltaire, FSOL, Legowelt, Safety Scissors, and more.

Right-click save-as here or on the spectrogram above to download this mix.

As mentioned above nothing here is a "new" release really so I'm going to pick & highlight just a couple pieces starting with track #3 Pipio by Claudio Solis. Solis's sound, his production, is solidly house / minimal / techno I think. The tracks where he strays from a four-on-the-floor beat are super interesting to me, particularly most of SOLIS003, SOLIS004, and SOLIS006. Track two Pravritti from the more recently released SOLIS010 is also very cool & worth a listen.

I'd also like to call attention to track #12 Brutal But Clean by Cabaret Voltaire from their 1994 album The Conversation released on Apollo Records (and Instinct Records in the US). I've played a few pieces from The Conversation for this series over the years (including Brutal But Clean) and have recommended the album before & I'm doing so once again today. It's the last Cab album to be written by both Kirk and Mallinder (as far as I know) and deserves to be heard in full, it's really excellent.

Three weeks late! (Approximately three weeks, anyway). Episodes may be irregular in the coming months as I try to ramp back up, try to find my ear (and some inspiration). In the meantime as usual the links above will take you to where you can purchase these tracks (more of them are available digitally than I would have thought). I'll try to be back next week with another mix, maybe some fast electro to go with the approaching summer heat.