A short while ago I had the pleasure of being the deciding vote that published a video showing the first level of Wolf-3D on Video Sift.

The thread of comments lead to a discussion of fan mods for Wolf-3D and its immediate successor Doom. This totally launched me on a long reminisce about a project that littlegirltoast and I worked on back in like grade 7 or something. How many of you, I wonder, even know about QED, our old punk band, much less QEDoom, a proposed comedy sketch that we were working on?

My response in the Video Sift thread was thus:

I think I still have a video around (VHS unfortch) of the Doom mod that we made back in junior high for our punk band. You've heard of three chord punk? We were QED, the world's only one chord punk band, and our game was QEDoom.

Our symbol was chuck, our smileyface- we put him in the bottom of the screen. But whats better is we turned him blue and made him un-smiley and rendered him in 3D Studio 3 to become the vicious unchuckodemon. I also modelled Clyde, the Pacman ghost to replace the uh.. flying flaming skull dudes....

Man, I wish I had some of this stuff. It was pretty hilarious. I think we even midified one of our songs and replaced the music.

Our unrealised plan was to create an ingame short using our sprites and sounds. The script ran something like this:

ext, Doom Street, Doom; Daytime;
mrio (that's me) arrives at his friend Ron's (Baron of Hell) place.

mrio: Heya Ron, how's it going?
ron: I just baked muffins, HAVE SOME!
ron: HAVE A MUFFIN!

at which point ron starts to throw muffins at mysterio. Each time, he yells HAVE A MUFFIN! The muffins make a metallic clang sound when they hit the wall

mrio: No thanks, but lets go visit our good friend Un-Chuck!
ron: HAVE A MUFFIN!

they walk down the street to unchuck's place.

mrio: Hey unchuck, how's it going?
unchuck: What the hell is ron doing here?
ron: (throws a muffin at unchuck) HAVE A MUFFIN!
unchuck: (throws muffins at ron) I HATE MUFFINS!

they battle to the death.

mrio: Oh ron, I can't take you anywhere!

:rimshot: fade to black, FIN

Y'know, I have a few regrets in this life, and not completing QEDoom is definitely one of them. I think my friend Jesse might still have the plans... heck, I've got some old hard drives around, I might still have QED.WAD kicking it someplace.

Our main obstacle was level design. How can we constuct a level so that one player can act as a "cameraman" to film the scene as it unfolds? Levels were extremely hard to create for Doom. I made some simple ones, but creating something like that would be quite complicated.

It doesn't help that we were like 14 years old.

Our goal was to have all of the dialog actually in the wad file itself, so each line would be a sound effect triggered by the monsters themselves. Obviously, ron and unchuck's lines would be said over and over again, as they try to kill you/give you a muffin.

Still though, the vid that I had of us running around with graffiti'd walls and our samples and unchucks running around... those were truely priceless. The voice samples of my friend Jesse yelling "I JUST BAKED MUFFINS, HAVE SOME" is hilarious- it makes me laugh just thinking about it, even after all these years. I bet if there were something like youtube back then that we could have shared our QEDoom on, we would have finished it. And I bet it would be top15 Video Sift material.

If only...

It's totally obvious that Jesse is poised for total market domination with his creative genius and skills, etc. What's my excuse?

Oh yes, in other news, i have some advice. Administer first aid to yourself before going to the emergency room. Once you're there, you're going to have a hell of a time even getting a frikkin' band-aid. grr!

Yes, I almost severed the tip of my left thumb off this afternoon making staff meal, and had to take a visit to the hospital. Good thing I brought a book. Four hours and three stitches (one of them excruciatingly painful) later, I have an enormous dressing on my thumb that looks like a miniature hockey sock.

The feeling is back now and yup, it hurts. What ya gonna do?

PS: I know I've mentioned how much I like greg egan before, but every time I read his fiction I'm reminded how much i like it. Do yourself a favour and look him up. Distress is good, Quarantine is probably a better first read, but Diaspora is head-spinningly good. Truely some of the best fiction ever read. Especially the first chapter, Orphanogenesis, which you can read on his webpage, and Wang's Carpet, which not only has the most alien alien species I've ever ever heard of, but is often credited as having completely redefined how science fiction authors think about space travel. Oh and is also AWESOME!

Here's a clip of one of my favourite authors speaking about the singularity at a symposium last year:



This is great. I agree with his sentiment- the need for more debate with futurists and singularitatians. Funnily enough, I actually send Hofstadter an email in 2004 and he sent me a copy of the chapter that he had written for a book to be published by the oxford university press. It's great that he is still thinking and speaking about this topic, and basically saying what I expected him to say: "Calm down! You guys need to have more critical minds looking at this"

He asked me not to share his response, as the book was at that time yet to be published, but my question to him was thus:

Greetings Professor Hofstadter,

I'm a fan of yours, and not currently an AI researcher, for some reason that is outside the scope of this email.

I read GEB:EGB compulsively in highschool and have since bought 6 copies and given them to many friends. I've also read Metamagical Themas many times, and your magnificent Le Tombeau De Marot. Several years ago, I discovered a crackpot who claims to be a fan of yours by the name of Eliezer Yudkowsky, spouting off at great length about the forthcoming Singularity. The subject has captivated my imagination, despite its trappings of fanatacism, and I've luckily discovered slightly less crackpot adherents since that time. In particular I find Ray Kurzweil and Hans Morevac convincing.

I am very interested to know what your thoughts are on the singularity, and if you think that predictions of an asymptotic ascension of technology in our near future are realistic.

I suppose I shouldn't assume that you are familiar with all of this 'crazy-talk' so here are a few links:
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

If you have any comments, or better, if you have written any articles concerning this subject, I'd very much like to read them.

The chapter he sent me goes into great detail about his symposium and some of his skepticisms. Douglas Hofstadter is fantastic, and I'm thrilled to learn that he is working on a new book.