Guestbook Issues

 Posted by (Visited 37131 times)  Misc
Jan 212001
 

Some people tell me that I should just take down the guestbook. It’s “an attractive nuisance,” so to speak. It’s just an invitation for the many jerks too afraid to post under their real name to get some cheap laughs by posting puerile twaddle. In the past I’ve gotten two separate instances of “I wish you had died in your house fire,” multiple verbal sexual assaults against my wife, and two death threats against my kids on the guestbook. And until tonight, they were all still up, because I had a policy of not removing anything.

Why? Because frankly, words are words, they don’t mean very much. It was always clear that the people posting all that junk on the site were socially inept anyway, incapable of actually forming a decent argument or expressing their feelings coherently. At best they were amusing, and at worst, just pathetic. Of course, there was the time they impersonated me on some poor girl’s website and posted rather heinous messages under my name there. That crossed a line, because it dragged bystanders into whatever bizarre vendetta these nutsos have against me. But by and large, I left it all up because it was a good way to emphasize that I didn’t really consider those posts worth worrying about.

Tonight, however, I removed 11,600 lines of spam garbage from the guestbook. It was all posted in the last few hours by someone with a bit too much free time. Oh, it was supposed to be sexually insulting, in some quaint ASCII way, I suppose. It was mostly just a waste of hard drive space. And once I got done deleting it (which took a lot less time that it probably took to paste in) I went ahead and deleted some of the most egregious posts from the past too. It just seemed like giving these idiots any sort of air time was, well, pointless. The reason why I left their posts up in the first place was probably too subtle for them to grasp.

So if the guestbook seems shorter, now you know why. I left up posts that disagreed, insulted, argued, and even flamed me. I just got rid of a parade of babbling by people whose vocabulary seems limited to four letter words. Next time, guys, if you want to bug me, at least make it worth reading. Semi-coherent would be good. If you can manage it. Thanks.

Jan 072001
 

Let’s see, what’s up.

I’ll be speaking at the end of January at Entertainment in the Interactive Age. The official invite looks like this:

The University of Southern California’s

Annenberg Center for Communication

&

The Interactive Digital Software Association

Present

Entertainment in the Interactive Age

Join leading game designers, critics, researches and educators for a

two-day exploration of the art and craft of interactive entertainment

and game design.

For conference information and to register online, visit our web site

at:

http://www.annenberg.edu/interactive-age

Some of the other folks who will be there include Geoff Zatkin, Warren Spector, Will Wright (keynote for him, of course!), Drs. Greg & Ray from Bioware, Janet Murray of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Hal Barwood, Tim Schafer, and more. It should be a lot of fun, and it’ll be nice to see some of these guys at a place other than E3 or GDC! The project is going well, but I can’t talk about it. But check out the official Star Wars Galaxies website for info. I have been posting there under the name Holocron. Yet another handle to add to the ever-lengthier list… *sigh* I have a bunch of updates to the Online World Timeline to do, but I didn’t get it done for this update. I kinda want to rearrange how I did the timeline, since it seems to have turned into a somewhat more widely used resource than I expected.

Crossroads of WWII Online recently reprinted a little thing I wrote on monthly fees being necessary for online games as part of their FAQ. I hear it also made the news at Evil Avatar. Maybe I should add it to this site too. 🙂

Got a note asking to use Declaring the Rights of Players as a debate topic in a debate society on Cybertown. That should be interesting, but I never heard about it again…