#like how about providing a tutorial fuckers
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fuck mp4 gifs
#my latest gifset (posted on dailybtvs. queued to post later) looks like shit#i looked at other gifsets too and yeah the quality is noticeably worse and the color is a bit less saturated#and it just really strips the hard work people put into making their gifs look nice and high quality#and i also dont understand the workaround they mentioned if we wanna opt out for now#of like include a transparent pixel in the first frame of the gif#like how about providing a tutorial fuckers#but also i have a lot of already finished gifsets that i just havent posted yet and i dont exactly feel#like going back to change all of them before posting them so they dont get turned into mp4s#which i'm not sure how to even do right now#personal#tumblr update#mp4 gifs#gif update
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how to mash up
this is for full-track beatmatching, or changing the length of a whole song to match another. there are absolutely other techniques to make mashups, and automated processes, but this is the old fashioned way, kind of like stretching out two tape reels until they’re exactly the same length. (or, until the measures are the same length, or until the “beats match,” if for instance the songs have a different verse/chorus structure.)
what you need:
files of each song
key and bpm of each song (ideally)
audacity (it’s free)
strength of will to calculate a percentage and/or be wrong
let’s say you have two songs, one that is 139bpm and GMajor, and one that is 170bpm and Eminor. let’s gloss over the fact that Em is a sympathetic minor to GM, so we don’t have to change the pitch, and let’s not worry too much about music theory, or how to immediately know that, because in most cases you can just change the pitch of one track by +1 or -1 until you find a good match.
drop the tracks into audacity. you can do this in any order you want, but make sure you apply transformations to the correct track. the most important thing you need to know about audacity is these little fuckers!!
the cursor icon selects portions of a track. the two arrows move tracks around. i don’t know what the others do and honestly fuck them, but if you don’t make sure have the right type of “select” selected, you’re going to struggle. for most of this tutorial you will need the double arrow, because we’re moving tracks around to match the beats, but if you want to select a portion to cut and paste (see end) you will need the cursor.
for most of this tutorial, you want to have only one track selected, but the entire track. to do this, click the empty area below the volume/pan sliders on the left.
you need to either speed up the slower track, or slow down the faster track. i think you can use the same number for both but i might be wrong about that because i usually have to do a lot of fine tuning. this could also be because key/bpm sites are not always accurate. you can always try tapping out the tempo with a tap metronome, but i usually just proceed with guesswork.
let’s slow down the faster track. i just google “139 is what percent of 170″ (smaller tempo is what percent of bigger tempo), and i use geteasysolution because it provides enough decimal points (we need 3). the answer we’re looking for is 81.764. subtract that from 100. 100 - 81.764 = 18.236. that’s all the math, i promise.
select the faster track (if you don’t select a track, audacity will transform all tracks, so be careful), and select effects > change tempo. (don’t select “change speed” because that will change the pitch as well, which you could do, but it’s much harder.) enter the number we calculated above, and because we’re slowing down the faster track, make it a negative number:
if you wanted to speed up the slower track instead, use the same number, but as a positive value. (i could be wrong about this, and maybe you should calculate the percentage differently depending on which transformation you want to make, but really any number that’s close enough is good enough.) you can can change either track, or a little bit of both (cut the number in half, speed up the slower track by the positive half-number, and slow down the faster track by the negative half-number). however, some songs are occasionally just too gosh darn different to mash up without degrading the audio quality. sometimes you have to double or halve one of the tempos before you start calculating the percentage. (i.e. for 80 & 180, you might want to calculate “80 is what percent of 90,″ depending on how you want the measures to match.)
at this point you probably need to zoom in at the very beginning and match the first downbeat, unless you’re very lucky and they happen to occur at the same point in each file. the first downbeat might not be the first spike in the waveform, so you might need to mute each track, and look at and listen to each individually, until you can tell which spots need to vertically align. i’ve added red lines (in mspaint, audacity doesn’t have red lines) surrounding the alignments we’re looking for:
they are not always obvious and it’s easy to lose hours doing this. these are the first beats of each measure and (because both songs are in 4/4 time signature, which most but not all songs are), you could count them to ensure there are 4 beats per measure in each track and they’re matching up correctly, but i usually just sort of go by feel more than by precisely counting beats.
if they’re a little bit out of alignment, you need to figure out which one’s faster and slower, and make small adjustments. it’s easy to hear and see, over the course of a four minute song, a difference of as little as 0.01%, but it’s not always easy to make the correct adjustments. sometimes i change a song, in tiny increments, by as much as 2% or something, in addition to the original number calculated. i know i said there wasn’t any more math because this is, uh, applied, audio engineering?
there are any number of ways you can match the beats, and none are necessarily more correct than any other, but you might want to zoom out and look for the biggest spikes and drops in the waveform and try to match those. these usually correspond to verse/chorus transitions, and not all songs have verses and choruses that are the same length, but more often than not, if you get the tempo right, it sort of falls into place, even if the larger structure is made of different shapes.
let’s assume for the purpose of this tutorial you’ve picked two songs that have the same verse/chorus structure, that are the same time signature, that don’t have any tempo or key changes -- although you can work around all of these things using the same basic tools (cut and paste, change pitch, change tempo)
i’m really sorry if these verse/chorus transitions aren’t immediately obvious, but it gets easier after you make like 150 of them, i promise. you can go back and listen to this mashup to compare if you like, and you can even probably form a reasonable argument that i’ve put them in the wrong place, and the mashup would be better if i rearranged them. you might be right. you might also notice there’s 30 seconds of silence at the end of the bottom track. the actual mashup has a third track (tracks > add new > stereo track), where i copied & pasted the first 30 seconds of the shorter track to fill the gap:
because the 21 pilots track just sort of cuts off at the end, i was able to pretty easily just cut it off at the end of the measure, but for other songs you might need to add a fade out (also available in the effects menu).
you probably want to get the tempo transformations finished before you start doing any cutting or pasting, because if you have tracks split up into multiple pieces, or if you try to apply transformations to multiple tracks, they may not maintain the alignment you had before you applied a multiple transformation. audacity works best if you keep the track whole; if you want to split it up into 64 pieces for each 2 bars and apply transformations after dropping markers, use a different program. audacity’s split track (cursor-type select + ctrl + i) does not work like markers. ableton would be great for that kind of control, and you can get a free 30 day trial, or if you’re willing to fork over $99 you can get the basic version (i did, but i don’t use ableton for mashups).
in order to match pitch (and really most of the time you should do this first, but the example in this tutorial was an example that already matched pitch), it can get complicated quickly but basically the rule is, if both songs are in major, or both or in minor, the letter needs to match. (i.e. for GMajor and CMajor, you need to change them to be the same letter. you can raise G +5 semitones or half-steps (the unit audacity uses in effects > change pitch) to match C, or you can lower it -7 semitones. you can raise C +7 semitones to match G, or you can lower C -5 semitones to match G. this is actually a bad example because that might be too large a transformation to avoid audio distortion, and if the two songs were that far apart i might split the difference.
if one song is in minor and one song is in major, you need to make the major one’s letter be two later than the minor one. in the example here, Eminor is two earlier (in the alphabet) than Gmajor. Aminor is two earlier than Cmajor. Emajor is two later than... surprise. C sharp (#) minor. good luck! learn the circle of fifths lol. (again, close enough is good enough to start fine tuning -- if your pitch is 1 semitone off it will sound obviously wrong, and you can try some +1 or -1 guesses until you find something that sounds right.)
audacity exports to .wav -- i use an online mp3 converter but you can also download an... encoder library...? to make audacity capable of exporting to mp3
audacity also might be how some of the (bass boosted) or (playing from another room) remixes are made. i also have an entire blog dedicated to simply slowing songs down, which never caught on, but i did all of them in audacity too
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Right fuckers I’m absolutely fucking done, I literally canny be fucked anymore// is the simulation gonna reboot soon??/ I fucking hopes so. This is been too much for a while now, and this whole faith in the simulation and the programmer is one of the most draining things that I’ve ever had to deal with. Now don’t get me wrong, I adore the fact that I now have something to pray for//to but seriously starting to question this. I hated the fact the people dedicated their lives to these fucking religions and changed their whole perspectives and personalities just so the some ‘’god’’ somewhere can fucking accept them. Well listen to this fuckers, ye gotta accept yourself. It’s never gonna work any other way. God is here to fuck u up, u are here to fuck you up. So stop it. Stop over thinking. Stop telling people ur a cunt. They know. Stop believing that someone, somewhere is gonna come and rescue u. this is ur life. This is your home. Your house. Your bench. I don’t know where the fuck you sleep but wherever is it, it’s yours.
Think about this. When u wake up in the morning, what’s your first thought??? I can tell you right now, whatever lie you just tried to tell yourself, it’s not tru. The first thing u think about is yourself. It’s not selfish. It’s never selfish. I canny stand people who say that you can’t think about yourself, you can’t do things solely for the purpose of you. Well fuck that. Of course you fucking can. No one else in the world gives a fuck about you. Cause when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter how ‘’nice’’ or fucking caring you are. Everything is about you. And who fucking cares. I am proud to be a narcissist. There aint a thing wrong with it. I wanna think about myself, I wanna care and be kind to me. Praise myself. I am proud of every goddamm cell that courses through my simulated body. And thank fuck I feel that way, cause I swear to whatever the fuck made us, I canny be fucked being let down by every soul that walks through my life. Everyone just needs to give up, if you truly, truly care about others more than yourself then fan-fucking-tastic, but you’re lying.
What is anyone gonna do, honestly? If we all just decide one day that it’s just us, just individual things trying their hardest to make it through the day. Some might disagree with this and I know that, trust me, especially that fucking Jim Hamlyn, but hear me out eh? If we all fended for ourselves and no one else, how would things change? Would we get everything done the way we want it? Would we teach ourselves so many more skills cause we don’t want to seek out others for help? Honestly, yes. If I wanted to learn how to sail, but we were all self-centred, then I have to teach myself, I can’t seek someone out, they’re too busy wrapped up in themselves. So there we go, I’ve just taught myself to sail, and I’ve grown. Made mistakes probably almost drowned, but I did it. Myself.
This simulation is designed for something and whether we have to figure it out or not, it still rests in my chest every day, and I’m sure it sits with others too. What the fuck is the point in all of this. Well I can tell you this for sure, it’s definitely not anything we’ve ever proposed it is before. Take this into consideration. When u play a game, most of us a too lazy to take the tutorials, even though they explain in explicit detail how to win. Instead we struggle, level after level after level. And then suddenly, after you’ve fucked it for the 800th time, something clicks, you realise the aim of the game and from there on out it’s the simplest fucking thing anyone has ever achieved. Once we’ve got the game and we’re winning, what do we do? Post it. Make videos, start channels, write blogs, create art. It all comes at once. All the right things. So in theory, if we had figured out the meaning to this life, this simulation, life wouldn’t be shit. You wouldn’t wake up every morning wishing you hadn’t. Or maybe that’s just me. But who cares if it’s just me, that’s for me to worry about, not you.
You see this just makes me think that maybe, this specific simulation is supposed to be nice. It’s not designed to let us live our best existence, we’re definitely part of some fucked up experiment// I don’t know maybe to figure out how humans a real shit heads. Cause let’s be honest, we are. Maybe in the future we fucked up so bad, and now they’re trying to figure out if it could have been fixed at any point in history. So our world is the opposite of what it should be. And to be fair, it might be evident to people who aren’t /thick\ I mean come on for fuck sake, trump is president and the voting system hasn’t worked in a long time, doesn’t fucking matter what u chose the government has chosen well before they ever released posters. So what are we supposed to do if this simulation will never give us what we want? We could work our fucking asses off, and never get where we want to be. We will always, always, almost make it. It’s the sim the grew up wanting to be an established artist, spent their whole life dedicating themselves to the practice, spending all their money on exhibitions and flyers, trying to get their name out there, but in the end they’re a lecturer. And don’t get me wrong, they’re probably a fantastic teacher, always there for their students, whether its academic or personal, never letting them go through things alone, they love their job, it’s so fulfilling and the salary is amazing. But when they get home, put the kettle on and sit down to check emails one last time that night, they can feel it, in their chest. This isn’t right. It’s not what the dreamed of. But they can never be ungrateful, cause they have a cushty life, big house, big job, good friends who don’t bitch that much. How can you be ungrateful???? You can’t// there’s the problem. That’s the simulation for me. It give you everything you could ever ask for but not quite, just a little bit off the mark. But you can’t do anything. Is that not just fucking torture???? Cause it is for me. This place is a fucking prison and I’m sick of it. I just want them to finish this whole fuck up cause literally none of us want to be here.
Have you spoken to millennials lately???? When we say we can’t wait till we’re old, it’s not cause we’re wishing our lives away. Well I suppose we are. Cause this is shit. Nothing we achieve will ever be good. We will never afford to be on the housing ladder, never qualified enough to live our dream job. So we just want to get to the end. To the part where we get to sit and relax and not worry about how the fuck any of us r going to survive on minimum wages and vegetables that cost £8 each. Most millennials, excluding ones who got pregnant during or after high school, don’t want children. Mainly cause their pals had kids in high school, and it’s easier to help them, plus they help them for so long that they feel like they’ve raised a child. People used to raise children communally, and it seems like millennials are reverting back to that. Even though I don’t get to see my niece and nephew every day, I still feel like I’ve been part of their life enough that I might have fulfilled the child sized gap in my existence. So many of us don’t want to get married either. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to be loved. I think we’re all just aware enough that a bit of fucking paper and a party doesn’t change how you feel about someone. And yes while it’s a nice idea to celebrate your love for one another, and I think weddings are magical and beautiful, just think about what you could do with the money. Instead of spending tens of thousands on one night with friends and family, and then a few days in the Bahamas having a shagadelic weekend, you could buy a plot of land and build a fucking house. Do you know what that provides????? All the nights you could ever want with family and friends and a shagathon whenever you feel like it. Plus you get to do it all in a space you designed, a place that feels safer than your mother’s womb. Because it’s yours, every bit of it, right down to the bloody door jams.
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So because I’m an aesthetics whore I decided to get and try out Horizon Zero Dawn even though I don’t tend to like openworld sandbox games unless they are a very rare and special beast. Aloy’s design and fucking mecha raptors caught my eye though dammit. Not enough to justify spending 50 bucks on something I might have ended up hating. Thankfully I was able to find it for 20.
I’m a bit of the ways in now. Finally got past the fucking tutorial segment and have been given the freedom to do shit. Just got through my first Cauldron. I have to say I’m liking it a lot. There’s been a few times when I’ve been like why this. Such as when I finished a quest to protect a camp and then got fucked up the ass by two Sawtooths and like five Watchers before I was able to collect myself and the NPCs wouldn’t let them be so I couldn’t even rely on de-aggroing the fuckers. Generally though I’m very happy with the thing.
My boyfriend commented “So this is your Breath of the Wild?” idly while I was playing it the other day. To which I just kind of blew off that comment because meh. After this most recent session with the thing though if I think about it that comment appears to be true. He apparently experienced what was mostly just joy and wonder with Breath of the Wild and that appears to be what Horizon Zero Dawn is providing me. And without the frustrations I have with BotW. I don’t have the fuck awful combat to deal with, stealth mechanics are more fun, there’s a strong linear sense of direction with the progress in the game, I’m not being destroyed fucking constantly early on, and it isn’t taking out the parts I liked best from a franchise.
I really like my Focus which I just call my google glass because I can hardly ever remember what its actual name is. I really loved scanning in Metroid Prime and it kind of serves the same function where lore collecting is concerned. But it also does neat shit for my hunting and combat? I suppose it’s a hideously video gamey thing, but it does help add to the sense of my being some fancy hunter bitch expertly taking down dinos. And even when I know where weakpoints are on a machine it’s sometimes super helpful to mark the thing anyway because of the way the weakpoints glow when marked. Makes things pop more and thus are easier for me to aim at. And I really, really love the stupid track marking function. I can only do it to one dino at a time, but it helps make stealth a bit more manageable for me? It makes it easy for me to figure out where to lay down my triplines too, which is nice.
Not sure how I feel about overriding yet as I just got access to more dino-takeovers. I do like the concept though? It was exciting learning that I could mindcontrol dinos and ride Striders or have a Watcher just go all gung-ho on a herd of Grazers. I’m hoping there will be more neat things like the Strider override, though I kind of fear it’ll mostly be things like how Watcher and Grazer overrides work.
And just. MECHA DINOS. SUPER BIG MECHA DINOS. THAT I CAN STAND ON AND STUFF. FUCK.
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Do dan/amy with #1
1. Things you said to me at 1AM | Post s-6, in which Amy is eight months pregnant, there's a crib that needs building, and Dan is a complete fucking tool.
(Bitch, I went well over a thousand words with this, so… thanks for that.)
-
Arriving home, she hadn’t expected to see a couple dozen boxes - some smaller, some larger - littering the rooms of the apartment.
“Dan!” She’d called out, hoping to find her roomate-come-baby-daddy-but-definitely-not-partner nearby. He’d called to say he’d be home early. And it’s gone twelve, so where the fuck-
“In the other room.”
She’d found him crouching down on the floor, all jeans and crinkled shirt, holding up two pieces of white wood.
The crib. Right.
She’s been here ever since, in a room bound to become a nursery, watching him toy around with the unassembled pieces of the child’s bed.
“You know, Catherine and Marjorie just ordered theirs. And it came pre-built.” She clicks her tongue, types some shit into her phone, looks over at Dan, “Then again, they aren’t as fucking extra as you.”
“I’m not gonna be fuckin’ upstaged by a sophomore lesbian and her backup sperm donor.”
Amy rolls her eyes, tries to avoid cracking a smile, “At least she chose the baby’s genes.” She doesn’t bring up the fact that Dan was the original donor, “This baby’ll probably come out with a head full of gel, clutching a fucking iPad.”
She holds her phone until her knuckles turn white - nothing new there - as if to demonstrate her point. Then she crosses her legs, and lets it drop (odd) into her lap, keeping a straight face as she watches him.
It’s past midnight, and they’re still no closer to having the fucking crib built.
“Remind me again why you didn’t just let the delivery guy do it instead?”
There’s a hex key, a couple dozen pieces of varnished white wood, and some bits and pieces laid out on the floor. They’ve been there for about an hour and half, and Dan doesn’t seem to have even built one side of the fucking thing.
“I’m not having some white trash truck driver’s grubby hands all over my kid’s bed, alright? Fuck, do you really want those kinda germs hanging around the apartment?” He scowls.
Yeah. Sure. That’s it. He’s such a cheapskate when he wants to be.
“I can build a fuckin’ crib, Amy. Jesus.” He grumbles, tosses down a wrench (she’s pretty sure he doesn’t need a wrench), and rests his hands on his hips, untucking the shirt from his pants. “You wanna give it a shot?”
“Because you can’t?” The blonde raises a brow, smirks, “No. It’s actually kinda fun watching you struggle.” She reasons, crosses her legs comfortably, sitting Indian style.
“Oh, yeah?”
Amy hums, nods her head and leans back in the rocking chair. It’s uncomfortable as all hell, but Sophie suggested they buy one. (And she listened why?)
“Even Mike can handle a little DIY, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah, well, that neanderthal was around when they were still making tools out of wood so that’s not surprising, Ames.”
She grins, “Hell, I’m sure even Jonah could do it if you gave him a tutorial.”
The daggers he shoots her make her smile widen, and Amy raises both brows at his retort, “Fuck you.”
Dan bites at his bottom lip for a second, wipes the bridge of his nose with his wrist. (As though he’s been working hard. Please.)
There are two slats of wood at his feet, perpendicular and screwed together. It’s the most he’s done so far. (Is that even right?) She could probably have the thing built in ten - no, twenty - minutes or so, but she won’t lend a hand. Fuck no.
He said he could do it. He can prove himself. Besides, it’s really kind of amusing to her to watch him fail miserably. Then again, he hasn’t exactly been trying very hard.
Reaching down, Dan picks up the instruction sheet, balls it up in his fist before tossing it in the box the unbuilt crib arrived in. They had a bunch of furniture unloaded several hours ago, but so far none of it has been constructed.
Luckily she’s only eight months along, and they’ve still got some weeks to go before the little fucker arrives.
“Well, that’s good. Now what are you gonna do?” Amy teases, leans back so the chair sways back and forth, creaking against the hardwood floors of their apartment. Damn him for making her move in with him. “I mean you couldn’t even build it with instructions, so now-”
Dan holds up a finger, lifts both brows confidently. “I’m waiting for a moment of genius.”
“We don’t have all night.”
“You got a better idea, Mom of the Year?”
“Yeah. You could call the store, and they’d send someone out to do it.”
“It’s one in the fuckin’ morning. What kinda service do you think they’re providing, Amy? Fuck.”
“Not right now, you fuckwit.” Amy frowns, rolls her eyes and head back so she’s staring at the ceiling. How did that mark get- “I’ll call them first thing in the morning.”
“No.” He damn near cuts her off, walking over until he’s stood in front of her, resting both hands on the sides of the chair. “No, you won’t. Because I’m gonna get this thing done, even if it kills me.”
“Wow, you really don’t like sucking at stuff, do you?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You knew that already.”
“True.” She agrees, lowers her gaze to meet his, but she keeps her head titled back, hands running along the armrests of the chair, carefully avoiding touching his hands, “I don’t want you to overexert yourself to death, though. I mean, you didsay you’d help out with the kid. And you did promise that I could be the one to kill you when you’re ninety if you haven’t already died of natural causes.”
“Well, Amy, this is me helping out with the kid.”
She snorts back a laugh, “Really? Because it looks like this is just you trying to prove yourself. No need to compensate for anything, Dan. I’ve already seen your dick. It just about does the trick.”
“Just about?” He stands up straight, traces of a smirk beginning to form on his face.
Ah, yes. One of his three facial expressions. Disgust, confidence, terror. She likes imaging which face he’ll make when she gives birth.
Amy shoots him a look à la ‘Shut the fuck up and get on with it’. Looking up through long lashes, she notes how he hasn’t moved, is still towering over her. “Are you going to fucking build it or not, asshole?”
“Are you gonna fuck me if I do?”
“God, you’re a child.”
“No, Amy. I’m a man who would like some recognition for his hard work.”
Wait. Did he- That fuck weasel.
“Have you been screwing me this whole time?”
Dan smirks, wider than before, and he shrugs, nonchalant, “Maybe. That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I’m gonna ignore the fact that you’ve wasted over an hour of my life by pretending to be bad at something you can apparently do, because it was kind of fun to witness your would-be emasculation anyway. But, no. I’m not going to fuck you. Jesus Christ, you were just playing me like one of your little college bimbos.”
“Ames, you know I gave up sleeping with other women for you.” He tilts his head to the side, all proud and smug, like it’s a massive accomplishment. She wouldn’t believe him if it weren’t for the fact that she threatened to chop his dick off, and she knew just how much he treasured King Danny - God, that name - and he knew just how serious she was with her threat.
“But I still don’t wanna be upstaged by Catherine and her side-bitches.” His eyes crinkle then - is that a fucking smile? - and Amy can only frown. “I guess I just have more interest in getting our new bed up and ready instead.”
They don’t even have a new bed to build, so what the fuck is he getting it ready for-
“Oh, fuck, no.”
She pulls a face, shakes her head, stands up and goes to walk off all in the flash of a second - because fuck him - until his hand catches her elbow. It’s gentle, and she kind of hates him for it. Then again, she’s eight fucking months pregnant and he’s not a complete animal.
“Amy.”
“Fuck, Dan. I can’t believe you ever roped me into this in the first place.”
“Into fucking?”
“Into moving in with you, you goddamn unflushable turd.”
“You love it.” He smirks - because of course he does - and Amy hates herself for smiling back.
“I don’t love you, though.”
“You like me more than you like anybody else.” He reasons, steps closer until she’s flush against him, all bump and breasts. Fuck.
“Yeah, well, I’m the only person that you like, so-”
“Yeah. You are.”
It’s one o'clock in the fucking morning, which means they should be sleeping, not having a heart to heart. Or, well, a… discussion pertaining to matters of the heart had either of them possessed a heart?
“I do like you, Amy.” He grins, reaches for her chin.
“You’re an asshole.”
“And you love me.”
“Fuck you.” She steps back, wills herself to ignore his lingering gaze, “Build the fucking crib, asshole.”
“Are you going to bed?”
“Yeah. You’re not welcome to join.”
“After I build this fuckin’ IKEA piece of crap?”
She comes back into the room to pick up her abandoned phone, shoots him a brief look before spinning back around, knowingly letting his eyes dance along her back and ass, “If you can build it in the next twenty, no… ten minutes.”
“I can do it in five.”
Amy rolls her eyes down the hallway, waves a hand behind her, rests her free hand on her stomach, “Your dad’s a fucking moron.”
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6 Real Crime Waves From History That Were Hilariously Insane
Thanks to the news, it’s easy to feel that right now is the most dangerous time to be alive. However, the truth is that the world in general keeps getting safer. You see, not only was the past lousy with criminal terrors, but ye crime waves of olde were also bit more … eccentric. Case in point …
6
A Bootleggers’ Turf War Included Tank Battles And Bomber Planes In 1920s Illinois
Illinois was both a great and terrible place to be a beer fan during Prohibition. Sure, there was no real shortage of booze, but there was a decent chance you’d be shot while drinking it. But while we all know about the glamorous gangland violence of Al Capone’s Chicago, a wholly different criminal empire was tearing it up in the southern part of the state at that time: the hillbilly mafia. And when they got into fights, it wasn’t with blunderbusses and cussin’, but with homemade tanks and aerial bombs.
During Prohibition, the booze king of Southern Illinois was a bootlegging antihero named Charlie Birger. He was loved because he drove the KKK out of the area, omitting that he did so mostly because they kept trying to steal his liquor. Soon after, he joined forces with the Shelton brothers, who agreed to take a cut of the profits from Birger’s speakeasies in exchange for providing him with only the most primo hooch directly from Florida. And if Floridians use it to blot out their reality, you know that’s some powerful hooch.
The partnership quickly dissolved, however, and the two sides went to war. Like, actual war. The Sheltons’ retribution involved attacking Birger with an armored truck they’d made themselves which rolled through the streets equipped with “an assembly of weapons” — i.e. a freaking tank.
As if that wasn’t enough, the brothers then performed perhaps the first aerial bombing on U.S. soil ever when a plane they hired dropped a few bottles of nitroglycerin wrapped in dynamite over one of Birger’s hideouts. You might be okay with dozens of people dying on the street, and you might be okay with criminals blasting each other with Tommy Guns, but when your criminal element is better-armed than the Army Reserve, it’s time to move.
5
19th-Century Sexual Harassers Were So Bad That Women Would Stab Them
While it’s oddly comforting to know that street harassment is not a modern problem, we should all long for a return of the Edwardian era, and not only because their catcalls involved complimenting a lady’s ankles and expressing a strong desire to experience the sublime sight of her ravishing bosom. At least in our great-great-grandmothers’ day, harassment had to be done face-to-face, which gave them a lot more options regarding what to do with said faces.
By the end of the 19th century, it became commonplace to fend off unwanted advances by plucking one’s hatpin out of one’s fashionably enormous hats and stabbing the fucker. These were no puny little thumbtacks, either — they could be well over a foot long and do fatal damage.
San Francisco Sunday Call
Cutting-edge fashion.
One woman even forced robbers from a moving train armed with nothing but her hatpin, while 100 factory workers all wielding theirs fought off police who had come to make one of them as a political prisoner. You simply don’t see that kind of sisterhood anymore. Two women in Chicago, upon the former’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity with the latter, “drew hatpins and circled each other, duel-style, until policemen broke it up.” Cops just don’t get called to bust up hatpin phalanxes anymore these days.
And while today there’d be badly kempt rioting in the streets if dudes got stabbed every time they “accidentally” brushed a woman’s derriere on the sidewalk, 19th-century society still had a strict “gentleman or GTFO” attitude. Reporters were only too happy to dub someone a harasser, or “masher.” Even asking “insulting questions” was all it took to find yourself cast as the mustache-twirling villain. It was such an accepted part of society that it became a trope in the fiction of the era, and newspapers printed tutorials on how to get the most out of your deadly accessory, mostly by encouraging the lady to go straight for the balls. The clothes might make the man, but a hatpin can reverse that process in a pinch.
Brooklyn Museum
Repeat: One foot long. Right through the balls.
Unfortunately, errant hatpins had a nasty habit of stabbing people by accident, too. At least, that was the purported reasoning behind laws banning or regulating hatpins — which, coincidentally, women weren’t allowed to vote against. Those laws are presumably defunct now, so if any fashion industry moguls happen to be reading, please bring back ridiculously huge hats and their pins. Plenty of people need reminding of that particular fashion tip.
4
New York Had a Gang Of Child Criminals Run By A Kindly Matron
When Fredericka Mandelbaum emigrated from Prussia to New York City in the mid-19th century, all she wanted was for her husband and herself to eke out a modest living to feed their children. She didn’t count on becoming the country’s first female crime boss.
Starting out as a snazzy street peddler, Mandelbaum discovered there was a fortune to be made befriending the countless Dickensian pickpockets in the city and buying their stolen wares. “Marm” Mandelbaum then used her motherly charms to recruit these baby criminals as her own private ragamuffin army.
Valerian Gribayedoff
To supplement her regular muffin army.
Mother Mandelbaum used her stolen-goods-for-candy-and-affection racket to move up in the criminal world, leasing a store as a front from where she ran her operations, which ranged from financing bank robberies to moving stolen livestock. As a devotee of continuing education, she used the back as a classroom to teach her young delinquents how to become better at crime, a sort of finishing school for repeat offenders. She particularly exalted her female students, whom she was proudly saving from “wasting their lives being housekeepers” — a weird glass ceiling to break. With her sharp eye for business and nurturing of young talent, Mandelbaum soon had enough resources to buy the most important thing for a criminal: friends in high places. She had everyone from the local cab drivers to the police to the city’s highest-powered defense attorneys in her pocket.
In the end, it took a private detective agency hired by the district attorney to bring her down, as no local cop dared to raise a hand against Mother. But before the law could close in, Mandelbaum simply packed up and retired to Canada, making everyone to feel bad for never visiting. She lived there quietly under an assumed identity until her supposed death in 1894. Rumor had it that her coffin, transported back to New York City, was filled with stones, and she had in truth returned in the flesh under the name Madame Fuchs, indicating how few of them she gave. In any case, at her funeral, many mourners reported having been pickpocketed. It’s what she would have wanted.
3
Bandits Used To Steal Wigs All The Time
These days, a secondhand wig is worth about as much as the cheap bald bastard who bought it. But in the days of dandies, having a fancy wig was both necessary and expensive. That meant wigs, which cost about as much as the average worker made in a year, were right alongside jewels and cash on every highwayman’s wish list.
Wigmaking was a process that took “six men six days working from sunup to sundown” and a complicated pre-UPS importing system. That’s a lot of money for something that looks like a Bond villain’s pet died on your head. In fact, getting your hands on a bigwig’s big wig was such a score that it made other types of robbery not worth the risk. Instead of slyly trying to cut a purse or pick a pocket, all a would-be bandit had to do was cut a hole or two in the back of a carriage, grab a few fistfuls of powdered perfection, and take off before their now-unsightly owners had any idea what hit them. Boom, that there’s a year’s worth of absinthe.
And with way less needless crotch contact than pickpocketing.
One story tells of a thief so bold as to simply replace his mark’s wig with his own cheap rug when he wasn’t looking. The mark, not feeling the difference, simply walked away, not realizing he had lost a fortune in doll hairs. Unfortunately, the bandits too fell victim to fashion. Wigs eventually stopped being stylish, thereby killing one the criminal underworld’s sillier sources of revenue.
2
17th-Century Dairy Farmers Used To Dye Their Cheese To Jack Up The Price
Food coloring is an important staple in today’s food, especially when it contains little to no actual food. That’s why we’d be more upset at finding out that Cheetos do in fact contain cheese. But back in the day, fake cheese was a huge scandal.
Before we needed an advanced chemistry degree to read food labels, a food’s color was often a sign of its quality. For cheese, a bright orange color signified that it came from quality breeds of cows that eat certain types of grass, which affected the taste greatly. However, in the 17th century, English farmers had figured out that they could get more bang for their cheese by separating the cream first and using it for other products. But it was the cream that had all that orangey goodness, and while their now-white cheese was of the same quality, there’s such a thing as branding. Paint those McDonald’s golden arches green, and it’s game over, baby. Game over.
So the cheese makers came up with a way to disguise their stupid white skim cheese as the full-fat good stuff. They started using natural dyes from a number of plants, including saffron, marigolds, and carrots, and the monocled masses were none the wiser. Later, they started using an extract called annatto, which is what Kraft now uses instead of artificial coloring, because you can even make fraud more lucrative by making it “vintage.” In a matter of decades, the ruse had become an industry standard, being used by cheesemongers all across the UK and the U.S. (except New England, as they prefer to dine on their own smugness). However, the practice of coloring cheese eventually backfired, as it became so common that orange cheese came to be regarded as low-quality instead, begetting an industry of “artificial cheese products” and giving previously exalted cows low self-esteem.
1
A Gang Of One-Legged Men Terrorized Australia
Everything in Australia is deadlier than it should be, and that extends to their old-fashioned gangs. Around the turn of the last century, the scourge roaming (or rather, hobbling around) the streets of Melbourne was a gang called Crutchie Push, and it consisted almost entirely of one-legged men.
They might not have been fast, but death was certain if you were caught by the Crutchie Push (“push” being so hilariously appropriate Australian slang for “gang”). It was a requirement to be one limb short of a set to join the gang, meaning most of them went into battle already on crutches — except for one berserker who still had both legs and ran into fights swinging a brick stuffed inside his sweater sleeve like a low-rent Mr. Fantastic. From there, everyone else (hopefully in choreographed synchronicity) balanced on one leg and used their crutches as weapons. Their signature move was to jab an opponent in the stomach with the tip of the crutch, then swing it around and beat him with it while he was doubled over. It was a surprisingly effective way to force compliance from shop owners and random people of whom they demanded money, food, and booze. Still more reliable than Social Security.
But for a bunch of people who were physically unable to run, the Crutchie Push were bizarrely hard to catch. You’d think you could just lead them to a staircase and be done with it, but when an officer became involved in a brawl with leader Valentine Keating, the one-legged man actually outran the officer before he could be arrested. That’s either Olympic-level crutch skills or a hilariously unfit cop. Eventually, the police became so frustrated with the gang that they assembled a task force made up by the ten most violent police officers in Australia. These “Terrible Ten” were sent out to track the Crutchie Push down and beat them with hoses, because there is apparently a very fine line between legitimate Australian history and the fever dream of a wealthy conservative business owner looking to build a casino atop an Army veterans clinic.
Keating was eventually imprisoned for beating a cop to death with his crutches, after which he … um, went on to a nice, quiet life as a barkeep until his death from tuberculosis. In all of his days tending bar, he never called the police to break up a fight. Why use them as a crutch if you can beat a man to death with your own?
You don’t have to steal to get this wig for your dog.
Also check out 8 Unsolved Crimes That Were Clearly Committed By Satan and 4 Terrifying Historical Crimes No One Can Explain.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Why Thomas Edison Was History’s Biggest Dick, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!
Follow our new Pictofacts Facebook page, and we’ll follow you everywhere.
Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal. Subscribe for funny, fascinating episodes like Rape, Pee Funnels and The Dolphin: Female Soldiers Speak Up and Inside The Secret Epidemic Of Cops Shooting Dogs, available wherever you get your podcasts.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-real-crime-waves-from-history-that-were-hilariously-insane/
from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183703998612
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6 Real Crime Waves From History That Were Hilariously Insane
Thanks to the news, it’s easy to feel that right now is the most dangerous time to be alive. However, the truth is that the world in general keeps getting safer. You see, not only was the past lousy with criminal terrors, but ye crime waves of olde were also bit more … eccentric. Case in point …
6
A Bootleggers’ Turf War Included Tank Battles And Bomber Planes In 1920s Illinois
Illinois was both a great and terrible place to be a beer fan during Prohibition. Sure, there was no real shortage of booze, but there was a decent chance you’d be shot while drinking it. But while we all know about the glamorous gangland violence of Al Capone’s Chicago, a wholly different criminal empire was tearing it up in the southern part of the state at that time: the hillbilly mafia. And when they got into fights, it wasn’t with blunderbusses and cussin’, but with homemade tanks and aerial bombs.
During Prohibition, the booze king of Southern Illinois was a bootlegging antihero named Charlie Birger. He was loved because he drove the KKK out of the area, omitting that he did so mostly because they kept trying to steal his liquor. Soon after, he joined forces with the Shelton brothers, who agreed to take a cut of the profits from Birger’s speakeasies in exchange for providing him with only the most primo hooch directly from Florida. And if Floridians use it to blot out their reality, you know that’s some powerful hooch.
The partnership quickly dissolved, however, and the two sides went to war. Like, actual war. The Sheltons’ retribution involved attacking Birger with an armored truck they’d made themselves which rolled through the streets equipped with “an assembly of weapons” — i.e. a freaking tank.
As if that wasn’t enough, the brothers then performed perhaps the first aerial bombing on U.S. soil ever when a plane they hired dropped a few bottles of nitroglycerin wrapped in dynamite over one of Birger’s hideouts. You might be okay with dozens of people dying on the street, and you might be okay with criminals blasting each other with Tommy Guns, but when your criminal element is better-armed than the Army Reserve, it’s time to move.
5
19th-Century Sexual Harassers Were So Bad That Women Would Stab Them
While it’s oddly comforting to know that street harassment is not a modern problem, we should all long for a return of the Edwardian era, and not only because their catcalls involved complimenting a lady’s ankles and expressing a strong desire to experience the sublime sight of her ravishing bosom. At least in our great-great-grandmothers’ day, harassment had to be done face-to-face, which gave them a lot more options regarding what to do with said faces.
By the end of the 19th century, it became commonplace to fend off unwanted advances by plucking one’s hatpin out of one’s fashionably enormous hats and stabbing the fucker. These were no puny little thumbtacks, either — they could be well over a foot long and do fatal damage.
San Francisco Sunday Call
Cutting-edge fashion.
One woman even forced robbers from a moving train armed with nothing but her hatpin, while 100 factory workers all wielding theirs fought off police who had come to make one of them as a political prisoner. You simply don’t see that kind of sisterhood anymore. Two women in Chicago, upon the former’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity with the latter, “drew hatpins and circled each other, duel-style, until policemen broke it up.” Cops just don’t get called to bust up hatpin phalanxes anymore these days.
And while today there’d be badly kempt rioting in the streets if dudes got stabbed every time they “accidentally” brushed a woman’s derriere on the sidewalk, 19th-century society still had a strict “gentleman or GTFO” attitude. Reporters were only too happy to dub someone a harasser, or “masher.” Even asking “insulting questions” was all it took to find yourself cast as the mustache-twirling villain. It was such an accepted part of society that it became a trope in the fiction of the era, and newspapers printed tutorials on how to get the most out of your deadly accessory, mostly by encouraging the lady to go straight for the balls. The clothes might make the man, but a hatpin can reverse that process in a pinch.
Brooklyn Museum
Repeat: One foot long. Right through the balls.
Unfortunately, errant hatpins had a nasty habit of stabbing people by accident, too. At least, that was the purported reasoning behind laws banning or regulating hatpins — which, coincidentally, women weren’t allowed to vote against. Those laws are presumably defunct now, so if any fashion industry moguls happen to be reading, please bring back ridiculously huge hats and their pins. Plenty of people need reminding of that particular fashion tip.
4
New York Had a Gang Of Child Criminals Run By A Kindly Matron
When Fredericka Mandelbaum emigrated from Prussia to New York City in the mid-19th century, all she wanted was for her husband and herself to eke out a modest living to feed their children. She didn’t count on becoming the country’s first female crime boss.
Starting out as a snazzy street peddler, Mandelbaum discovered there was a fortune to be made befriending the countless Dickensian pickpockets in the city and buying their stolen wares. “Marm” Mandelbaum then used her motherly charms to recruit these baby criminals as her own private ragamuffin army.
Valerian Gribayedoff
To supplement her regular muffin army.
Mother Mandelbaum used her stolen-goods-for-candy-and-affection racket to move up in the criminal world, leasing a store as a front from where she ran her operations, which ranged from financing bank robberies to moving stolen livestock. As a devotee of continuing education, she used the back as a classroom to teach her young delinquents how to become better at crime, a sort of finishing school for repeat offenders. She particularly exalted her female students, whom she was proudly saving from “wasting their lives being housekeepers” — a weird glass ceiling to break. With her sharp eye for business and nurturing of young talent, Mandelbaum soon had enough resources to buy the most important thing for a criminal: friends in high places. She had everyone from the local cab drivers to the police to the city’s highest-powered defense attorneys in her pocket.
In the end, it took a private detective agency hired by the district attorney to bring her down, as no local cop dared to raise a hand against Mother. But before the law could close in, Mandelbaum simply packed up and retired to Canada, making everyone to feel bad for never visiting. She lived there quietly under an assumed identity until her supposed death in 1894. Rumor had it that her coffin, transported back to New York City, was filled with stones, and she had in truth returned in the flesh under the name Madame Fuchs, indicating how few of them she gave. In any case, at her funeral, many mourners reported having been pickpocketed. It’s what she would have wanted.
3
Bandits Used To Steal Wigs All The Time
These days, a secondhand wig is worth about as much as the cheap bald bastard who bought it. But in the days of dandies, having a fancy wig was both necessary and expensive. That meant wigs, which cost about as much as the average worker made in a year, were right alongside jewels and cash on every highwayman’s wish list.
Wigmaking was a process that took “six men six days working from sunup to sundown” and a complicated pre-UPS importing system. That’s a lot of money for something that looks like a Bond villain’s pet died on your head. In fact, getting your hands on a bigwig’s big wig was such a score that it made other types of robbery not worth the risk. Instead of slyly trying to cut a purse or pick a pocket, all a would-be bandit had to do was cut a hole or two in the back of a carriage, grab a few fistfuls of powdered perfection, and take off before their now-unsightly owners had any idea what hit them. Boom, that there’s a year’s worth of absinthe.
And with way less needless crotch contact than pickpocketing.
One story tells of a thief so bold as to simply replace his mark’s wig with his own cheap rug when he wasn’t looking. The mark, not feeling the difference, simply walked away, not realizing he had lost a fortune in doll hairs. Unfortunately, the bandits too fell victim to fashion. Wigs eventually stopped being stylish, thereby killing one the criminal underworld’s sillier sources of revenue.
2
17th-Century Dairy Farmers Used To Dye Their Cheese To Jack Up The Price
Food coloring is an important staple in today’s food, especially when it contains little to no actual food. That’s why we’d be more upset at finding out that Cheetos do in fact contain cheese. But back in the day, fake cheese was a huge scandal.
Before we needed an advanced chemistry degree to read food labels, a food’s color was often a sign of its quality. For cheese, a bright orange color signified that it came from quality breeds of cows that eat certain types of grass, which affected the taste greatly. However, in the 17th century, English farmers had figured out that they could get more bang for their cheese by separating the cream first and using it for other products. But it was the cream that had all that orangey goodness, and while their now-white cheese was of the same quality, there’s such a thing as branding. Paint those McDonald’s golden arches green, and it’s game over, baby. Game over.
So the cheese makers came up with a way to disguise their stupid white skim cheese as the full-fat good stuff. They started using natural dyes from a number of plants, including saffron, marigolds, and carrots, and the monocled masses were none the wiser. Later, they started using an extract called annatto, which is what Kraft now uses instead of artificial coloring, because you can even make fraud more lucrative by making it “vintage.” In a matter of decades, the ruse had become an industry standard, being used by cheesemongers all across the UK and the U.S. (except New England, as they prefer to dine on their own smugness). However, the practice of coloring cheese eventually backfired, as it became so common that orange cheese came to be regarded as low-quality instead, begetting an industry of “artificial cheese products” and giving previously exalted cows low self-esteem.
1
A Gang Of One-Legged Men Terrorized Australia
Everything in Australia is deadlier than it should be, and that extends to their old-fashioned gangs. Around the turn of the last century, the scourge roaming (or rather, hobbling around) the streets of Melbourne was a gang called Crutchie Push, and it consisted almost entirely of one-legged men.
They might not have been fast, but death was certain if you were caught by the Crutchie Push (“push” being so hilariously appropriate Australian slang for “gang”). It was a requirement to be one limb short of a set to join the gang, meaning most of them went into battle already on crutches — except for one berserker who still had both legs and ran into fights swinging a brick stuffed inside his sweater sleeve like a low-rent Mr. Fantastic. From there, everyone else (hopefully in choreographed synchronicity) balanced on one leg and used their crutches as weapons. Their signature move was to jab an opponent in the stomach with the tip of the crutch, then swing it around and beat him with it while he was doubled over. It was a surprisingly effective way to force compliance from shop owners and random people of whom they demanded money, food, and booze. Still more reliable than Social Security.
But for a bunch of people who were physically unable to run, the Crutchie Push were bizarrely hard to catch. You’d think you could just lead them to a staircase and be done with it, but when an officer became involved in a brawl with leader Valentine Keating, the one-legged man actually outran the officer before he could be arrested. That’s either Olympic-level crutch skills or a hilariously unfit cop. Eventually, the police became so frustrated with the gang that they assembled a task force made up by the ten most violent police officers in Australia. These “Terrible Ten” were sent out to track the Crutchie Push down and beat them with hoses, because there is apparently a very fine line between legitimate Australian history and the fever dream of a wealthy conservative business owner looking to build a casino atop an Army veterans clinic.
Keating was eventually imprisoned for beating a cop to death with his crutches, after which he … um, went on to a nice, quiet life as a barkeep until his death from tuberculosis. In all of his days tending bar, he never called the police to break up a fight. Why use them as a crutch if you can beat a man to death with your own?
You don’t have to steal to get this wig for your dog.
Also check out 8 Unsolved Crimes That Were Clearly Committed By Satan and 4 Terrifying Historical Crimes No One Can Explain.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Why Thomas Edison Was History’s Biggest Dick, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!
Follow our new Pictofacts Facebook page, and we’ll follow you everywhere.
Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal. Subscribe for funny, fascinating episodes like Rape, Pee Funnels and The Dolphin: Female Soldiers Speak Up and Inside The Secret Epidemic Of Cops Shooting Dogs, available wherever you get your podcasts.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-real-crime-waves-from-history-that-were-hilariously-insane/
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Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow.
But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve. For Doom 2016 (which I argued was the best-feeling shooter of last year), reaching design goals and staying true to what makes Doom, Doom, was all about establishing clear development goals and maintaining a sharp focus.
"From a high-level perspective – this is going to sound overly simple for a dev audience – but it was absolutely 100 percent 'fun first,'" says Marty Stratton, game director at Bethesda-owned Doom developer Id Software, where he’s worked since the late 90s.
"I know a lot of developers would say 'yeah, of course, we all do fun first'...I dunno," he said incredulously. "I think that was definitely a big, big thing for us, always. We let the game tell us what it wanted as we played it constantly, and always steered into the fun.
"And that came back to the most fundamental design things: bad-ass demons with tons of personality, great guns, and fast movement – push-forward combat – that created [what we call] 'combat chess.'"
Mentioning the plodding, cerebral turn-based game of chess when explaining the fast-paced demon-slaying combat of Doom sounds like a stretch – and maybe it is – but that concept is one that the development team was able to understand and use as a guide.
"Making that combat chess really, really fun, and making it feel like you’re on this ultimate power fantasy just was really, from a gameplay perspective, the guiding principle,” Stratton said.
Here’s how Stratton and Id creative director Hugo Martin defined the idea of "combat chess": speed of movement; individuality of the demons; distinctiveness of the weapons; overall power of the player; and the idea of "make me think, make me move."
"We let the game tell us what it wanted as we played it constantly, and always steered into the fun."
"Players play games because they want to think, whether they’re playing a strategy game or whatever. We play games to think – to solve problems," Stratton said. "In Doom, the problem is combat – I’m surrounded by 10 enemies, and I size them up based on how they look like and what I know they do."
Because of the speed of Doom, all of the information needed to solve these "combat puzzles" had to be quickly digestible and understood by players. Pieces of the puzzle needed to be distinctive and available in order for players to solve them on the fly. "It’s just about introducing those [puzzle pieces and tools] over time,” said Stratton.
Even before the start of the production of this latest Doom, Id knew a thing or two about killing its darlings. Somewhat famously, Id got deep into development of a previous version of the game; a story-heavy interpretation of the franchise announced in 2008 that was later referred to as "Call of Doom" due to its apparent inspiration from Call of Duty and other shooters of that ilk.
But a full-on cancellation of that project and a complete restart put the game on the path of Doom’s 2016 iteration. Taking "combat chess" from concept to a polished product was a process of playtesting and iteration. This involved constant editing and course correction; an exercise in staying focused on design goals and cutting and fixing what didn’t jibe.
For example, Stratton explained how for a period of time during development, the game’s demon AI would run straight at players, aggressively closing the distance. "We’d end up in these situations where you [as a player] would instantly start backing up – you’d go on your heels," he said. "It’s a very natural thing [to do as a player]. It was basically 360-degree combat, with everyone coming at you from all sides."
"We cut a lot of stuff that is completely valid in a lot of [other] games, just to get the game to feel like Doom."
During playtesting, players would find a wall to back up against or a choke-point to take advantage of in order to stay alive, which was a cheesy way to play supposed chess.
"The combat just wasn’t working at all," Stratton said. "It really took some effort to get everybody geared around the idea that demons, except for melee demons, should hold their position, and we can't put too many melee demons in [an arena] at the same time, because then you lose that feeling of combat chess. If all the pieces moved all at the same time towards you, chess becomes very much not fun."
By having demons to hold their ground longer than before, the design put the impetus on players to move in on enemy positions. "The player was [now] the one initiating, picking his way through the arena and through the space," said Stratton.
Martin said there wasn't anything inherently "wrong" with how the creatures initially behaved – other games have enemy AI that swarms players. But that tack didn’t follow one of Doom’s core design filters, which is "push-forward combat."
Martin added, "We just edited a lot of stuff, and said we don’t necessarily want the player to have multiple ways to accomplish their goals – there’s only one way to play Doom…We cut a lot of stuff that is completely valid in a lot of [other] games, just to get the game to feel like Doom."
Doom’s combat, Stratton said, is designed to make you feel like you’re up against overwhelming odds – that all of the demons of hell are coming at you at once. But even though there might be many demons in an arena at any one moment, you’re actually only going up against a small amount of them at any given time.
"You almost need the capability to engage one guy, and think about one guy, and then move on to the next guy, then the next guy, then the next guy,” he said. The team wanted players to prioritize their engagements with enemies on the fly. This approach heavily influenced level design, as designers needed to give players opportunities to break line of sight with certain enemies, but force them to keep moving.
Stratton said, "We did hit a point where we got the AI doing the right thing and the arenas [were] coming together with the right kind of geometry, and it really started to feel like it should – like I’m maintaining my control, but I’m always playing the game in a way we’re intending players to play."
The team behind the new Doom wanted to recapture the essence of the original game, and one of those key elements was speed. Id wanted to move away from the more plodding survival horror pace of Doom 3 and return to a rock and roll-inspired, high energy format.
Stratton said he couldn’t remember exactly how many times the team changed the game’s speed, but he knows it definitely increased from the earliest prototypes to when it went into full-on production. "We knew early on that it needed to be fast, under control, and we had to make a game that worked equally well on PC and consoles," he said.
One of the game’s developers put together a movement map that became Id's test bed for nearly every change made in the game’s development. "It was just a matter of finding a balance and testing," Stratton said.
In the game, players could also set up rune abilities to boost their speed, so more speed was also available if players wanted it. Martin also noted that it’s not just actual player speed that makes Doom feel fast. The feeling of speed is also enhanced by the size of the game’s arenas, and the enemy encounters.
"The right size arena, with just the right amount of space, actually made the player feel even faster,” he said. "Your top-end speed is good but you’re more agile than you are fast. If you’re in the right space, it can just feel perfect. We spent a lot of time during development finding exactly what the right-sized spaces are for Doom to make you feel quick and agile, but still under control."
Doom cuts the cruft from the modern first-person shooter format. There’s relatively little dialog, there are "missing” mechanics like reloading, and the tools provided to players in order to progress require little overt explanation or tutorializing.
Like many things that "just work,” reaching that level of simplicity was not so simple. "It’s funny,” said Martin, "because we still talk about this stuff now [at Id]. It’s kind of gotta be simple – like Apple simple. We really feel like if the audience can’t understand [a complicated idea] really fast, I mean in seconds, then it just doesn’t [belong] in the game."
"We really feel like if the audience can’t understand [a complicated idea] really fast, I mean in seconds, then it just doesn’t [belong] in the game."
Stratton explained one anecdote in which the team edited for simplicity. He said at one point during development, the team was considering whether or not the player had enough information to know at least where to go. For a while, Doom developers experimented with having a voice in the player’s ear; a helper. They wrote some lines, keeping the dialog "light and cool,” he said, and even implemented it in several levels at one point.
"It works in tons of games," Stratton said. "More games have it than not, where someone says, 'Hey, you gotta go do this!' Fundamentally, that works. It worked [in Doom]…at a mechanical level."
But what works in other games won’t necessarily work in your own game. "For Doom, when you played it, you’re like, 'I don’t wanna hear this fucker," Stratton said. "Get him out of my head, because this is my game. This is me making the choices."
This type of trial and error happened throughout the game’s development. The team made sure to cut the extraneous material that fell outside of the game’s filters, and in the end there was a focused, cohesive end product.
"There are those moments where you implement something and you implement it well, and make it exactly like you want, but when you play it you’re like, 'This just isn’t us. This isn’t our game,'" said Stratton. "Those are all good learnings."
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