i don't think i'll sleep very well tonight. i got back from the lan vs nd around midday today, thanks to nex's father who had some business in limerick that morning and was able to give us a lift home. the house was empty... and not an easter egg in sight, so i wiped the blood out of my eyes and spent my bank holiday monday dreaming of dm6 and t4. after 72 hours staring at a computer screen, i'd feel sick if i had to play another game of quake, but when the withdrawal symptoms kicked in after 10 hours sleep i knew that without a monitor in front of my face i could be dead by morning.

me and nex arrived at the lan around 9pm on friday, we had a couple of warm-up games in his house before we left so the people who were there a few hours earlier didn't have too much of a head start over us when we got there. i got my brand new logitech mouseman from koopa... a beautiful, sleek, black dell model that perfectly matches my laptop. still the best mouse ever... so nice and comfortable to use, the dots along the side... the sloping, curved shape, the easily pressed mouse buttons... perfection. almost... it loses tracking very easily with low sensitivity when you move it fast across the mat, like any ball mouse i've used. i didn't think this would be a problem since i used medium sens, but over the course of the weekend i lowered it until it felt comfortable at sensitivity 3. but that meant i had to go to sens 2 in quakeworld, which was too low for my mouse to handle. i know that to fix this i can make m_yaw higher than m_pitch (or vice versa.. i get the two mixed up) so i'll do that tomorrow, but that is the best argument for optical mice.

when collie came on saturday we had 10 pc's, and he brought me a 19" monitor and keyboard which meant i wasn't crippled by a gay laptop screen. 10 pc's meant we'd have to play a game of ctf at some stage. to save the hassle of installing/learning maps, we just played a game of ctf2 with mixed teams. since nd don't play ctf, and we only had 3 regular ctf players there, it wasn't a good game tactically or anything, but my setup was so good that it was the best game of ctf i've had in a long time. at home i play on a p3 450, so my fps are a bit dodgy on ctf2, and when the computer is loading its unplayable, especially on insanely lagged isdn (so if people see me warping in game, its either due to my computer loading, or lag, or both). this map was like a dream on lan.. and i can imagine the advantage low ping broadband clans have over everyone else on it, a much bigger advantage than on most maps. gman had gone home but there were still loads of q3 players there, me, nex, vin, collie, robbo, saik for fh and zero, bunny, beast, overlord, koopa, and devore in nd. with so many players and 10 computers, i think we should have played a bit more ctf for fun, made sure everyone had the maps, and taught the basics. maybe we could have converted a few people. but at that stage, people were still motivated to play team games, so it would have been a waste spending a lot of time playing ctf. later, when we were all sick of the strain of tdm, and too tired to concentrate, we could have played more ctf, but we probably didn't have 10 players who would have played, and qw was the favoured secondary game (ya nex, secondary ).

on sunday, we were all warmed up as expected. most of my weapons were as good as i could make them, but when i was tired and my concentration slipped, i often resorted to instinctive isdn railing, since its what i'm so used to. for the important games i woke myself up a bit, but every time i used the railgun i had to remind myself to put the crosshair on the enemy. when zero came back from going home (easter sunday) we were all ready for our "official" games. at the last fh-nd lan, nd had been winning most of the games we played, and we upset the odds with a l33t 1-frag win on dm6 8) this time around, nd had been winning all weekend, but once again, our staple diet of pro-dm6 on the internet proved worthwhile and we bate the cuntors in a jammy comeback in the last minute. i was delighted to get a win, since until that game, a lot of our performances had been very grim, but even when we our teamplay was at its best, they still outplayed us. we had couple of more games after that on other maps which nd won, but we refused to play pro-dm6 again until our official sunday-evening dm6 game at the next nd lan

the lan was great, thanks a lot to zero and bunny and anyone else who is responsible for it, it was good to meet robbo and collie, 2 fh players that i had never met in real life before that. i learned an insane amount about q3 again this time around. and i'm a lot better now than i was last friday. on lan you learn so much, 3 days playing at a lan like that is worth 3 months online. on the internet, its difficult to improve, since you are restricted by your connection and you always have that obstacle to overcome. teamplay and communication is at a completely different level when your team is in the room with your, and same with the other team. its so much better than voice coms or anything, and it makes the game a lot more enjoyable. it must be so easy for lan clans like sk, where they're all in one room, on super connections playing a team without that.

so tonight fh have a bwdml game on cpm4 and ospdm6. theres no way i'm playing in that if i can avoid it. i haven't played q3 since i got home, and i'm not looking forward to the pain either. last week i was going to update a column on how utterly pointless q3 is on the net, after the the laggiest league game in history, but i was too angry. theres no point paying a lot of money for isdn when you're going to get pings going to 175 in league games, and you can't compete anyway. the isdn would be sufficient for pickup games, and friendlies on good servers (like jolt), but for me those games have always been preperation for league games, which makes them worthless if you can't even compete in the leagues. i play a lot of messabout games for fun, but they would be almost as good on modem, and i could duel modemers, and at the end of the year, take all the money i have saved and buy a boat and spend my sunday and tuesday evenings out fishing.

having realised how pointless q3 is when your connections mean you can't compete at your level (or sometimes at a level below your level) in barrysworld leagues, why am i still playing it? i know i'm not going to quit, i enjoy the bwctfl regardless of connection (even though i should take a break since i have exams and all that and i haven't been to a lecture since early november). i think it would be great if jolt or some other gsp started up a league (i have nothing against barrysworld league except the connections, i have been told that this problem is caused by "bad hops" in the routing. if through some peering these bad hops were to go away, i think i would enjoy q3 tdm online again. i know the problem wasn't always there, the start of last season i remember it wasn't there, but it was for some games later on in the season. i had always blamed the map, but now i know that that is only a contributary factor.

anybody who read all this is probably very disappointed because i didn't really say anything that would interest the average quaker, since writing this column was mostly just to fullfil my need to stare at this screen for an hour. but, since you read this far, heres a joke for you: "two blondes walk into a building. you'd think one of them would have seen it". hahahahahahahaha ahahahahahahha!!11 (i'm sorry its not about fish or peanuts, i'll try and get one of them for next time).