Media - Page 14 | virtualwolf.org

A screenshot from Diablo II Resurrected in the "Legacy" graphics mode showing the software renderer in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. My Assassin is holding a sword and a small round shield and standing next to a shallow lake with a large tree beside it. It's all extremely pixelated by today's standards.

Another screenshot showing the exact same scene as the previous image, but this time it's using the new 16:9 widescreen high-resolution remastered graphics. It's still not a graphical tour de force of course, but it's a SIGNIFICANT upgrade from the original.

Tonight featured a bit of remastered retro gaming: I started with Star Wars: Dark Forces and then discovered that the Diablo II remaster was on sale for the princely sum of $23! So I picked that up and was delighted to note that it continues the grand tradition of remasters allowing you to flip back and forth between the new and original graphics. Check out this wonderfully pixelated art from 2000 versus the shiny new remastered graphics. And I realised after I'd taken these that that was at the gloriously spacious "800x600" resolution, there's an option to use the 640x480 resolution from the game when it first launched and you can see even less of your surroundings, haha.

The remaster also has a "Performance" or "Quality" toggle for the new graphics, and honestly I don't think I can tell the difference whatsoever except that "Quality" mode drops the framerate to 30fps. Though funnily enough I actually kept that on anyway because the original graphics only run at 30fps so it's much less jarring going from 60fps in the new graphics to 30fps when I switch back to old.

screenshot diablo gaming xbox

Posted on 16 June 2025, 23:17

A screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 taken from behind and a reasonable way above the car. The car itself is a black 1991 Nissan Pulsar hatchback, that wonderful early 90s not-quite-completely-boxy shape where car designers realised they could round off some of the edges. The car is blasting along a dirt road in the rolling hills of a rural area with dust billowing out behind it, there are a handful of trees around and a bit of scrub and it all looks very dry. There's a wooden telegraph pole at the right with a single cable stretching behind the frame, and out beyond the trees. The overall light in the scene is warm and it looks like it's getting towards late afternoon.

Book-ending the weekend with Forza Horizon! This time I'm blasting around a lot of the dirt tracks to get the "Drive on every single road" achievement.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 9 June 2025, 19:59

A photo of two round golden brown loaves of bread covered in flour, sitting on a cooling rack. There's a magnificent split along the top of both of them and I can confirm they taste as good as they look.

Yissss.

our house darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 8 June 2025, 16:26

It's the Friday night of a three day weekend and I'm in Forza Horizon 5 blasting through the deserts of Mexico in a hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510 while listening to the game's synthwave radio station. 👌🏻

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 6 June 2025, 21:03

A view looking down a path between a good six or seven blocks of four- and five-storey units on either side, plus another one in the distance at the end. The sky is completely blue, and there's at least a bit of greenery along the sides of the path.

A photo looking across into the middle of a sports field where there is a cricket pitch set up and a number of players conferring in the middle. Beyond them is the sports field building which presumably has the toilets and I guess some sort of canteen in it, and just peeking out over the top of that building are the tops of the roofs of the houses beyond.

We went for a big walk this afternoon, you couldn't have asked for better weather. We went up towards the new areas they're building closer to the train station, there are SO MANY unit blocks going up, this all used to be farmland. At least there are a decent amount of trees, and we also stumbled across a big sports field nestled away where there was a very intense game of cricket going on!

schofields darkroom people buildings cricket

Posted on 1 June 2025, 15:28

Metalhead Club Anthem

Back in June of last year @[email protected] tagged me into a conversation that some folks from metalhead.club were having about putting together an anthem for their server, they had guitars and bass and vocals and such, but no drummer. I figured why not, it might be fun, so I said yes and they invited me to their NextCloud server so we could more easily collaborate. The guitars came down first so I played along to the first draft of them, though it was 140bpm and it turns out I can't actually play decently that fast. 😅 So I ended up doing double time instead so I could essentially play at half the speed. We went back and forth with some tweaking of what I was doing to fit the song better, then the project kind of fell off for a number of months thanks to real life getting in the way for several people. It was started up again at the beginning of this year, we ended up getting a new vocalist and then everything really hit full speed and here we are!

I'm absolutely amazed at how well this came out, and you really can't even tell I was playing the drums at essentially only half speed compared to the rest of the song, it feels like your brain fills in the missing hi-hats or something. @[email protected] has written a much more in-depth blog post about the whole process here.

music drums audio

Posted on 30 May 2025, 18:24

A very wide angle panorama photo of a bunch of people sitting around a table in a pub, smiling at the camera.

Most excellent fedimeet! It was great to see @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] again, and to meet @[email protected] (who won't actually see this toot because I have mastodon.social blocked on this instance, haha).

sydney kristina darkroom friends fediverse meet

Posted on 28 May 2025, 20:58

A photo of a bowl of porridge with a dollop of butter on top, and brown sugar sprinkled on it.

Aw yiss, first porridge of the season.

(The timing in terms of suitable weather was a bit poor here because today is the first gloriously sunny day we've had after like a week of grey and rain.)

our house darkroom food portrait mode porridge

Posted on 24 May 2025, 9:42

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and short brown hair—although both are getting a bit scruffy—smiling at the camera. I'm holding a guitar and standing in front of my standing desk, which has an Arturia MiniLab 3 MIDI keyboard in black sitting on the desk. On the main computer display is Logic Pro with Arturia's Analog Lab plugin window open, and on my laptop's internal display to the left there is Toontrack's Superior Drummer 3 plugin window showing half of a frankly absurd number of cymbals and toms, partially covered by the window for Neural DSP's Archetype PliniX guitar amp software showing a cool-looking black amp with a red glow coming from inside it.

Current status: feeling inspired. 😎

(Of course, it's probably going to end up being another couple of months before I actually finish this thing. 😅)

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar midi keyboard

Posted on 18 May 2025, 20:47

A photo of a mostly-assembled single bedframe. Main components of it are thick black metal U-beams that make up the four sides of the frame, with another one running down the middle. There are wooden panels on the outer sides that attach to the metal to hide the frame itself (the panels themselves are solid wood too and quite hefty), and four panels of wood that the mattress sits on which have holes drilled in them to allow the mattress to breathe. These panels get screwed into the U-beams of the frame itself, and the whole bed is raised on four solid round wooden legs, with an extra leg right in the middle of the centre U-beam to provide even MORE support. The whole thing would have to weigh like 90kg, it's ridiculous.

And then this evening I put together the world's most overengineered bedframe, which weighs more than I do.

(We got this one specifically because a) we're sick of having to replace cheap bedframes because the slats either warp or the whole thing starts creaking, and b) all the other ones were too low to fit our storage boxes under them.)

our house darkroom tidying and rearranging

Posted on 10 May 2025, 18:36