Things Will Never Be the Same

…If we are to retain the time-honored benefits of copyright—enabling creative groups and individuals to remain in business—it will require society to accept that some kinds of proprietary interest in data can be claimed, at least for a limited length of time.

Copyright cannot continue in the path it has traveled these last few decades, controlled by the large publishers and huge media giants. It is time for Copyright to return to what it once was meant to be: a limited system meant to encourage transparency and creativity, rather than to control creativity and build profits.

The change most likely isn’t going to come from the top. Congress is happy with their fat wallets and the publishing industries are happy with their huge profit margins. The change has to come from smart individuals, smart content creators, and smart businesses. The Creative Commons licenses present a useful core and a set of good stepping stones to help spread this change, but the change in technologies and the spread of the Internet have already started these large changes in how intellectual property is thought about and handled.

In the business world, as this change spreads from the bottom-up, big businesses will be asked to adapt or die. New businesses and small businesses will have the advantage, particularly if they strike while this iron is still heating up. Those that do will help to enhance and better our culture, instead of trying uselessly to sit on it and keep it from moving.

"We are not evil."

Lest anyone misunderstand when I urge that tomorrow’s dataways remain unfettered and clear, this means easy availability of information. It does not imply anarchy or never having to pay for what others worked to produce…

The slogan of the independent record label Magnatune is “we are not evil.” Magnatune, founded by in 2003 by John Buckman, uses that slogan as a badge of honor. Magnatune is out there proving that a practical, open approach to copyright can generate a profit. Magnatune focuses on quality artists across the wide range of music genres, guarantees them at least 50% of all revenue, and lets them keep their own rights.

Magnatune offers, for free, access to simple, medium quality (128 kbps MP3) sound files of its albums under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. This explicitly allows several forms of free use such as using the music in non-commercial projects like school projects. This acts often as free advertising for the label’s catalog. This license also allows for other creative people to create their own derivatives as long as they license their derivatives in the same Creative Commons license. One of the artists, Victor Stone, signed to Magnatune created his music entirely from samples and phrases from other Magnatune artists. Victor Stone has also helped to encourage others to do similar creative remixing through his involvement with the CCMixter community site started by Creative Commons.

Magnatune then makes its money from CD sales to those who would want an old-fashioned CD, from sales of higher quality formats (such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or WAV), and from sales in additional licenses, such as non-Share-alike for those seeking to make derivatives and not license under the Creative Commons license ...

Creating the Future

Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

It is not in the interest of the current business climate, the entrenched elite, and the representatives they control, to change these over-extended copyright laws. An attempt to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act failed at the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft. At this point the power of change rests solely in the hands of individuals. It may take a revolution, but things will need to change eventually.

The smart business will be the one that adapts to change and that joins the revolution. However, this isn’t a bloody revolution and there isn’t risk to a company’s bottom line; the revolution is easy to join and doesn’t ask much. The spiritual home of the revolution is the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is an organization patterned off of Richard Stallman and his Free Source Foundation. The Creative Commons offers a set of alternative licenses to the current copyright. These licenses run the scale between very open to only somewhat open. This provides content creators and the businesses working with them to pick “buffet style” the type of license they think will best fit their work(s). Each license is accompanied with a simple, human-readable document called the “Commons Deed”. In plain English with a few useful and easy to spot icons the Deeds explain exactly what freedoms the license allows to those who consume it. Of ...

Technology Makes Things Better

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free.

The current domineering corporations are free to wage their war of cultural walls and ceases and desists. However, customers are free to take their business elsewhere to companies that don’t try to control them or their freedoms. Here as well, technology is changing the rules. The Internet allows people to better organize and better watch the actions of corporations. The Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of 95 theses of how modern companies must do business, was written entirely as a warning to businesses that they needed to listen more to both their employees and their market. I believe that the Manifesto sums itself up best in Thesis #34, “To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.”

Companies can no longer afford to put the bottom line above the heads of their customers. Anything you do can be held against you and knowledge of it will spread across the internet as quick as you can do it, and faster than you can apologize for having done it. As Cluetrain Thesis #80 states, “Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.”

Technology has also evened the playing field. No longer does it take special equipment and large ...

Technology Makes Things Worse

For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

Technology has given copyright holders the means to enforce “rights” they’ve never before held. While copyright law gave copyright holders more control over what people could do with derivative products, technology has simultaneously given them much more power to track what people are doing with their products.

In the past, if a fan group had put together a film in homage of their favorite film, they were free to distribute it amongst friends. Today, such groups are often sent Cease & Desist letters from the lawyers of the company that owns the film being referenced. One recent example is the cover band Beatallica which wrote and recorded songs that infused Metallica and Beatles songs. They posted these songs on the Internet, for free listening for the fans of both bands, and were given an injunction by Sony, which ferociously protects its ownership of the Beatles’ very profitable copyrights.

The Doctrine of Fair Use has been established, in theory, to help provide some distinction of where commercial interests can control copyright and where they cannot. In practice, however, the Doctrine is merely a set of guidelines, not a set of hard and fast ...

The Cloudy Copyright

When it comes to patents and copyright, the practical social goal has always been to encourage maximal openness and minimal secrecy. Profits for the owner of a creative work are of secondary concern, except as incentives to encourage creative effort and rapid sharing.

Congress was given the power to maintain intellectual property laws in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution which states that Congress shall have the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. Copyright was never meant as a means solely to a profit, it was a means to promote the Progress of the useful Arts, using a potential for profit as merely an incentive. Congress and business interests have taken several steps towards “Copyright for Profit” and away from “Copyright for Progress”. Most recently, for example, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was backed heavily by large American corporations, of particular note being the Walt Disney Company whose mascot Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in the short Steamboat Willie was quickly approaching the public domain line. The Disney Company has made large profits through long term monopolistic control of Mickey Mouse and related intellectual properties.

The original copyright law in the United States granted writers only 14 years, with a one time renewal opportunity of an additional 14 years. To obtain the copyright required registering with the copyright office. The copyright only controlled the author’s right to selling (copying) his or her work. Today the extended copyright law grants 70 years, after the death of the author. It grants control over ...

Soma?

Does it bother anyone else that there is a drug on the market now called "soma"?

The Business of Liberty: Why Businesses Need to be Cognizant of How Their Choices Affect Their Culture

Final Draft, for CECS 311: Computer Ethics & Law; recieved no direct grade for this paper

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

Intellectual property rights laws expanded over the last two centuries to give businesses a near unprecedented control over the growth of culture. This is not just bad for the culture, but it is bad for the business. As technology changes the rules of the markets, the old models of publishing and the old concepts of information ownership are forced into reconsideration, and those that aren’t changing are becoming obsolete. The biggest problem is that these expanded intellectual property laws have become a life support system for these outmoded content models. Where these laws once used an incentive of profit to promote a free culture, corporate culture and modern politicians seem to belief the purpose of these laws is solely for profit control having seemingly forgotten the original intent of the law. In the interests of a free culture, forward-thinking businesses will need to break from this life support by embracing new models and new choices.

The issues in question shall be dealt with in reference to the laws of Copyright, but could be applied to the other intellectual property rights just as easily.

The Wealth Diaspora

David Brin has a well written blog piece entitled How the US saved the world by buying stuff... or Saving the World through Wal-Mart?. It's a good read on a subject I've tried to explain. Being involved in the field of computing I've spent decent amounts of time explaining why I'm more concerned about stagnant job growth, stagnant venture capital, and stagnant creativity than I am about job out-sourcing. The point I usually try to make is tied in with my view of the dot-com bubble. I believe that the bubble was not a fluke, and in fact was both well over-due, and cut short in such a way that some of its primary lessons were lost (ultimately paving the path for a possible second dot-com boom, I would suppose). Basically, to me as an armchair economist, the dot-com boom was the re-evaluation of one of the pillars you learn about in basic economics: Entreprenuership. (The other pillars include Capital and Labor.) The Internet provided a place where suddenly every person could have a near equal voice and what came out of that was that Entreprenuership finally had a truly free market and that talented individuals could now compete directly with the old school Entreprenuers in boardrooms. This in turn gave businesses a need to re-evaluate how much a brilliant and innovative thinker was worth to them. No longer were the innovators of a company restricted to upper management (and thus easily tracked) especially when some of the smartest and innovative could out-compete, from scratch, the biggest companies that weren't paying attention to innovation or Entreprenuership. Jeff Bezos, when the Amazon caught fire, caused many retailers' 60-year-old tenured old school innovators heart flutters and ulcers. Again, I believe that these lessons still aren't completely ...

Quotes of the Moment

From the Interview with Hammer & Tongs, the co-directors of the upcoming big screen H2G2:

I like the idea, that when we release the DVD, you get the actual film as the bonus DVD. We have filmed a lot of extras!

From the Wikipedia article on the English language:

James D. Nicoll made the oft-quoted observation: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Movie Collection

I realize this page will mostly be useful just to my Mom. My roommates might find it useful on occaision, but I doubt they would check the internet for such a thing. All of these are DVDs and most are Widescreen (where applicable).

• 12 Monkeys Special Edition - Gilliam collection. Twisted noir sci-fi film. One of Bruce Willis' best performances, and IMO Brad Pitt's best performance.
• Adaptation - Kaufman collection. Interesting meta-film.
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Gilliam collection. Unique fantasy, fairy tale work with a python-esque humour.
• Back to the Future Trilogy - One of my favorite trilogies; just great sci-fi.
• Babylon 5 - JMS collection. Babylon 5 tells the story of the last of the Babylon stations. Its 5 year story arc is one of the best ever shown on television. Empires rise and fall, "human" drama connects and binds the characters, and decisions have consequences and repercussions.
  • Babylon 5 Season 1 Box Set
  • Babylon 5 Season 2 Box Set
  • Babylon 5 Season 3 Box Set
  • Babylon 5 Season 4 Box Set
  • Babylon 5 Season 5 Box Set
  • Babylon 5: The Movies Box Set
• Barton Fink - Coen collection. Twisted tale of a 1940s era New York playwright struggling to make it in Hollywood.
• Being John Malkovich - Kaufman collection.
• The Big Lebowski - Coen collection. Simple stoner story with a heart and a style all its own.
• Big Trouble - Barry collection. Dave Barry's first fictional novel. The movie was killed by including a satire of airport security and then being released a couple months too late. Obviously, the book was better, but this one (forgiving the airport security satire) is still funny.
• Blazing Saddles - Brooks collection. Classic western send-up.
• The Brak Show Season 1 Box Set - [Adult Swim]. Equal parts crappy space villain showcase, crappy television sit-com satire, and weird musical numbers ...

Request for Comments: Mythoi and Unlore

I've gone ahead and set up basic websites on Mythoi.com, Smeap.com and Unlore.com. All three are running my Blog's Drupal code with seperate configurations and sharing the same user database.

With that accomplished, I'm opening up the future of these prime WorldMaker.Network websites to your opinions. I know what the focus of Smeap.com is, but I'm not entirely certain where to take the focus of Mythoi and Unlore. I'm hoping to encourage some form of collaborative fiction writing on each, but what sort of fiction, what style of collaboration, and who is collaborating, hasn't been decided.

Are you a writer or an aspiring writer? Do you want a Creative Commons by-nc-sa/2.0 playground to play in? I think Mythoi.com and Unlore.com could be great venues for that, I have several unique CC by-nc-sa/2.0 universes to play in, and you could be in on the ground floor. It is as simple as making a comment to this post or, you can email me. Artists, map makers, creatives of all sorts are welcome to comment as well.

Max Battcher / WorldMaker, owner and proprietor

PS, the naming rights for the main character of The Untitled Mythoi Novel are still up for grabs.

TikiWiki - ick...

Remind never to try TikiWiki ever again. Completely butt ugly PHP codebase, and I know butt ugly PHP code (and ColdFusion code, now). Someone needs to introduce these guys to "code reuse", "code simplification", "organization", and this big hip new deal called "subdirectories".

You can the feel the Madness!

Boo-yah! Louisville is making a well deserved return to the venerable ranks of the Final Four! This huge college sports time is excited. You can feel it, the air is nigh electric. The heart-pounding, last minute over time game was a hell of a thing to watch, and now the relief is palpable. It's looking like we may yet see another Dream Game Championship this year if our big brothers at UK can keep their end up.

Playing with ad code...

I've been playing around with Google AdSense code on this site. You may start to see them here and there. I added a Google search box to select pages (the front page and /node/# pages, which is largely only blog entries). On all but the front page of those same pages I've added two ad blocks that may display randomly (at the moment I've set each to display about 1/3rd of the time.) I didn't do it to make money (I have no illusions of big ad revenue; I tried that game when ad money was big and still made nothing) or because I needed ads. I'm doing it largely as a trial basis. I was curious about the way the system works, and particularly about the new "AdLinks" type which acts more like a "Related Pages" system from what hear. I was also curious as to what sort of ads my semi-random blogging might generate (I always love the weird and random keywords my site gets high rankings in). But also because, Google's AdSense policies require a website to be "content-focused" and this blog is the most content-rich in my Network at the moment. However, I keep having big ideas on content-rich new sites, but I just haven't had the time or energy yet. Should I do, this AdSense test might prove useful.

For more interesting discussion: the Louisville Cardinals are heading to the Elite Eight after another "blowout" tournament win! This is really energizing this city (my friends, alone). We haven't had a team get to the Elite Eight since I was in middle school, but I think that we've been due for it for a couple of years now.

Movie Mini-Reviews: A Ferocious Foursome

I always try to blog about books more than I do about movies, mostly because I believe books just so often affect my thinking day to day than movies. Rarely a movie will jump out and bite me and I'll write about it. Most recently it was I [Heart] Huckabyes, and before that the list is fairly slim (mostly Charlie Kaufman sci-fi comedy tragedies). Last week while recovering I spent most of my time supine on the couch (for obvious reasons) watching random NCAA coverage, Comedy Central, and collection of four films. Individually each movie really didn't quite make it to my "that was a great movie, it really made me think" list, but collectively they all had their strong points and worked together to keep my mind somewhat active.

The Incredibles was a film I had been wanting to watch since it first came out, but I generally wait for a "kiddie" film like this to hit the discount theaters first if I'm to see it alone and my family never decided it was worth a gathering for. Due to its power with audiences this film made it to DVD at just about the same time it finally settled into a berth at the local discount screens, which worked out nicely for me and the timing of my surgery. It was a beautiful movie, but I was expecting just a little bit more from it. It wasn't because it was Pixar film, it was because I really liked The Iron Giant, particularly its pulp era style. Where The Iron Giant was largely a "serious" telling of an old fashioned pulp comic, The Incredibles was merely a charicature of a silver age comic. That isn't to say a "mere charicature" was bad, it was in ...

I, Masochist

Back at The House tonight because of classes tomorrow. For those who haven't heard, I got the fun Spring Break vacation known as "wisdom teeth removal". On the whole the experience was about like a three day bender in Cancun, then waking up to find your kidney removed except than in my case I didn't get the benefit of the three days of drinking and instead of a kidney going to grace the insides of some anonymous mexican kid I had four teeth go by way of the "medical waste" facilities. At this point, the major hangover is gone, but the wooziness is still a factor, and the swelling, albeit less than its peak, with its connected pains is still a problem.

It's funny, but the only pain that actually kept my thoughts this week was the slowly dulling pain of the previous weeks' tests, and the soon to be sharp pain of this coming week's work. I'm finally starting to think that any school program that can make surgery look like a cakewalk is probably worth it. I'm also, sadly, starting to use war analogies for it, so let me apologise for those that will inevitably show up later in this post.

I've been thinking about this silent treatment I'm currently getting from any company I submit my resume to, or ask to even just contemplate my employment as a possibility. I'll admit it, my GPA says that I'm a mere average guy amongst a few brilliant giants here at Speed. At this point, I've come to terms that my colleagues in this school are all geniuses in their own right, and being average amongst them is fine with me. But, my resume, my website, and my writing ...

It's worse than that!

This was to be a comment, but the website didn't seem to be accepting it, and I thought it too good to waste.

Why is it you hear Repug after repug spout out their rehearsed and repetative "save life" over and over but you don't hear the wishes of Terri herself.

Because Terri herself doesn't matter. She never has to the Republicans. Their reason to be unjustly involved in this case is political and political alone, and that has to be the most selfish and demented facet of this situation. They couldn't given a damn about Terri's life... Unless it's able to give them a few more votes.

No no, if only it were about a few votes! These slimebags have these votes already! No, the reason there is so much focus on this is because it takes pressure off the real foci of these stupid times. Fox News can spend just short of 24 Hours spewing about this shit and reduce Darfur, the ongoing bullshit war with Iraq, Syria, Iran and whoever the fuck wants some after that, and every other real issue to a fifteen minute talking point in between rants between incomprehensible "journalists" with neither integrity nor balls.

Beyond that, the reason this shit is being broadcasted so much is it furthers their damn agendas! Darfur genocide doesn't help them block abortion and the people's control of their own lives here in this country like yelling about this vegetable can. It's the exact same reason the Peterson trial took 24 hours a day of time on Fox News. It's the exact same reason the Conservatives were clamoring for the head of Peterson on a pike. The sad and ironic part of this tale is that the lower ...

The Growing WorldMaker Network

Added yet another domain to my ensemble of hosted websites. I'm really happy with my new host DinoHost, and they've been really kind about letting me host the weird assortmnet of domains that I host. It makes things a lot easier for me.

• WorldMaker.net - my main website
• Blog.WorldMaker.net - this weblog
• Photos.WorldMaker.net - random photo albums
• UnderwoodParrish.com - insurance agency I do website work for
• WatchDude.com - my grandfather's watch website (that I put together years ago)
• Smeap.com - beware the flamingoes

There is probably more to come, too.

Confusion

Wasting time on a Friday morning...

Wednesday night really screwed up my sleep pattern, as if it needed it. Somewhere between the combination of outside temperature and downstairs temperature the house's boiler decided to kick my ass. The heat led to a shallow, short sleep full of crazed dream-like images. I couldn't fall asleep again, so being a geek I ended up doing some programming at 5 in the morning. (My latest infatuation is I keep thinking that I just might write a full Canasta implementation using the libraries proffered by Game Gardens.) So, this morning, with caffeine and a long afternoon nap I've stayed up much later than I probably should have. Not that this a new phenomenon for me, just that I've been pretty good about restricting it this semester, and I guess seeing as how "spring break started" with my afternoon nap, I think that I'm allowed.

So, I've been conversant with some, and spending way too much time with The Facebook. I've been on other social networking sites before, and actually comparatively The Facebook has fewer features than some, but the focus on college networking yields it surprising power because college is one of those "small worlds" where after a while, everybody is interconnected in some way. Already in only a few weeks of finally opening up shop for UofL students, the "place" is full and lively. It's intriquing to watch the dynamics after it has been open for only a short period. I've met several new interesting people already who I might not have met due to the seperation of Speed and A&S. It's also incredible to be able to hear someone's name or meet a new person and almost immediately put a face and/or interests right up ...

Lewis Black on Saturday

Lewis Black appears Saturday at The Palace. I probably should have waited to see if any of my friends wanted to go, but I went ahead and bought a ticket. I found it only thanks to a random search through TicketMaster (hey, we were talking about TicketMaster in Ethics and Law, so it was somewhat on topic to this class).

AllOfMp3

AllOfMp3 was precisely what I was looking for when I first heard about iTunes. It gives me much more choice in the format I want, and thus I can get the format that I would have gotten if I went to a store and bought the CD, then ripped it myself. Through making choices in format quality I even get a choice in the price I want to pay. For that single song that is decent put not great I can grab in Vorbis for cheap. For a good album I can download FLAC, generate my own Vorbis file for my hard drive and burn the FLACs to CD (resulting in a CD logically equivalent (same data, without jewel case or cover design) to the one in stores).

We've discussed this tool in Ethics and Law, and through deciding to defend it in class discussions came to deciding to use it. It will make a mainstream compliment to Magnatune for me. The RIAA doesn't want people using AllOfMp3, but the reason appears to not be because the artists themselves don't get paid, but that the Russian music copyright group pays the artists directly and the RIAA members get much less in booty royalties. Apparently when the Russians were setting up their version of ASCAP/BMI (where radio stations get cheap rights to those top 40 hits they play in non-ceasing repeat) they decided to cut out the middle man, and I find that awesome. The only thing left to worry about are importation laws between Russia and the US, but so far the federal government has stayed out of Internet import/export law other than cryptography export (for national security concerns).

On Following a Lesson in Networking: A Pirate Tale

This semester in my Communications 112 class (yes, I've put this class off for way too many semesters now), I was asked to interview someone "in my field". This was a tough thing for me, and it wasn't because I didn't know where I'd like to head, but because I did know. For me the question was how seriously to take the assignment.

I've long been interested in, and have felt my skills best suited for, the industry of Virtual Worlds. Right now it is a burgeoning economic field, and yet populated by only a small number of visionary designers. One is Richard Bartle, from whom I've been reading [Designing Virtual Worlds]. There is also Raph Koster (Ultima, EverQuest, SW:G), and Jack "Statesman" Emmert (City of Heroes) from whom I've read several articles/interviews. Another is Daniel "Captain Cleaver" James, with whom I was much less familiar, but whose Puzzle Pirates has become my current virtual world of choice.

I decided to ask Daniel James for an interview. It took a couple of emails to get a response, but he reminded me that sometimes such persistence can be the key to getting things accomplished. I would have been hard pressed to pick a worse time to ask, because as busy as he is, the week I had to get the interview taken care of was also a week involving several large code releases, and an announcement of a publishing deal with UbiSoft. He wrote a ton of responses to the game's forums about all of that, but was still willing to answer my questions (of which, I gave him more questions than I actually needed). Needless to say, I appreciated the fact that he took such time out of a busy ...

Interview Transcript with Daniel James

I interviewed Daniel James for a Comm 112 assignment.

arr,

First of all, I just saw the announcement of the publishing deal with Ubisoft (and the follow-up slashdot post). Congratulations on that. How do you feel about that? What do you think retail box sales might be able to do for Puzzle Pirates?

Hopefully bring us a LOT more subscribers. All but one of the MMORPGs on the market have benefitted tremendously from a retail release.

Background Information

What sort of degree is "Computing and Philosophy"? Where are its foci?

It was a strange degree largely the result of a couple of professors being split between two departments. I ended up doing a lot of Logic, which I don't like very much, along with classes in Computer Science and Philosophy.

What things have you learned in your academic career that have been insightful in your business career?

Relationships and mentoring are tremendously important. My relationships with my goood teachers were definitely the most valuable part of academia.

Do you plan on going for a graduate degree?

That's the plan. I need that PhD to be a professor.

How much did you focus on grades/marks?

Before going to University I was a triple-A student. Later I realised that I could get top marks without such ludicrous over-work.

What courses, looking back, do you regret taking? Not taking?

I wish I'd taken less Logic and more Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Biology and other varied courses more related to making games.

When did the realization hit that you wanted to be working with virtual worlds/muds?

I realised this when I was around 13 years old, after I made Wizard on Essex MUD (the first of its kind) and started making my own. I re-confirmed this realisation again at 18 ...

Skee Ball

Last night was a social with AOPi at Chuck E. Cheese. As usual, I spent all of my tokens at the skee ball machine. We rallied our tickets and as a group made 8188 tickets. I helped put a small dent in that total, in several games of skee ball I managed 100-200 tickets. Chuck E. Cheese is suffering from Skee Ball inflation, though, because the number of tickets a skee ball game produced just wasn't what it should have been. I've said it before, but if anyone feels like giving me a costly present, I'd enjoy having my own Skee Ball machine. (Shipping alone is around $500-$700.)

Comments

The only comments I get are spam, so I keep wondering if there was something I wasn't doing to encourage comments. I finally moved the add comment form to the bottom of the "read more" pages (and highlighted the read more links), but the reason I didn't do it earlier was I'm a stickler for good CSS and nice looking printed output (go ahead, try Print Preview on one of my articles or stories). The problem is that Drupal 4.4's comment module produces some nasty, un-semantic HTML. I finally got it so that the form and its header won't print, but it's an ugly CSS 2/3 hack that works in Firefox but not IE. (For the curious, the needed selectors, with the comment options bar below the comments, were form[action="comment"] + form[action="comment"] for the comment options, form[action="comment"] + h2 for the "Post new comment" header, and form[action^="comment/reply"] for the post comment form itself.)

First Thoughts on Matrix Online

Well, instead of doing the homework I needed to do tonight I decided to try the Matrix Online Stress Test (the second one for those keeping count). Actually, I did get the homework done, thanks to the 2+ hour patch (downloaded the 1GB installer while in class, which installs to nearly 7 GB; the patch was 140 MBs and touched 1700+ files). My biggest complaint, other than the sheer size and reliance on patching techniques from the last decade (of course, GuildWars has spoiled me in the realm of patching), was the latency issues, but I can't complain too much because, after all, it is a Stress Test. (If you care, the patcher was more nicely themed than the last MMO* I played using a special patcher/launcher.)

I predicted when I heard Monolith was in charge of development, that if anyone could, they could do a good job at pushing the story elements. That was why I was even more tempted to try the game this Stress Test because they announced that some of the story elements were being pushed into the beta this time. The character creation and tutorial was well put together (with the Operator "Link" from the films voicing). I discovered that all the Greek and Roman god/hero names I tried where reserved by the game, which was interesting and fitting within the mythos of the Matrix.

I met several such named characters in the few missions I got through. Missions were interesting, but the mission map layouts were repeating after only two missions. I realize that that is the curse of the graphical MMO*, but I guess it was all the more grating because the map layouts so reminded me of City of Heroes'. In fact, without the Matrix green tint and Matrix ...

Zhevoon of Chaos

Somewhat connected to at times, and yet completely different from the other Azeroth stories are the tales of "Joe" Zhevoon, an agent of the Chaos Corporation working within the Azeroth (and connected) universes. Thus, Azeroth is the easiest categorization of these tales.

Azeroth

Azeroth was one of my earliest attempts at a fairly large "metaverse", in which multiple universes played a role. The main and major of these being named, itself, Azeroth and characterized of the destruction of an Earth-like planet named Azeroth, something about Unicorns, the formation of a great catalog, and the Volis who add to it.

DRAGONzine

For nearly a year I released 2-3 short stories to the Internet on the 25th of each month. There were a few stories I was able to post from friends/people I met, but the bulk of the content was my own. At its peak I wrote somewhere between 5k-6k words in a month.

Read the collection in book form, for the diehard collector in random internet-posted writings.