Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

  • The people you meet on planes

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 9 Comments

    There I am in the U.S. customs line at LAX, and I notice the girl in front of me, part of a smallish gaggle of young people. She’s got this long dark hair, quite noticeable. Tired looking — hey, it was an 11 hour flight from London — and she’s digging in her bag for her passport, trying to fill out the arrivals card on the fly, and keeps holding up the line. Something familiar about both her and her boyfriend, who has really startling blue eyes and keeps looking at me strangely because I keep looking at them trying to place them.

    Then I realize I’m standing next to the stars of High School Musical, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, and nobody has recognized them. The two other folks traveling with them are constantly checking their Blackberry, and the conversation is something like “Yeah, when we were in Australia…” After we get through the passport stamping, I tell them quietly how much my kids love their work (didn’t want to cause a big to-do in the line), and they are very gracious despite how tired they are. I end up with the soundtrack stuck in my head the whole rest of the trip…

  • Jeff “Dundee” Freeman

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 54 Comments

    jeff_freemanYears ago, when I was a young punk kid on UO, there was this really sharp, really witty, really annoying guy named Dundee on the r.g.c.u.o newsgroups. He challenged everything I said, and I got into epic discussions with him. He was an avid opponent of the PvP and PK structure that UO used, and had no patience for all of my endless reasons why it was important to allow player freedom and agency, saying that I was allowing jerks to run roughshod over everyone (and in the end, I came to agree with him).

    His reasoning got more and more sophisticated as we argued. It was clear he was very knowledgeable about games. So eventually, I dared him. I don’t recall what it was in regard to, but I suggested that he go grab a mud codebase and just try his ideas.

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  • Happy birthday, blog: 10 years

    Hours Categories Misc, Open thread
    Comments 30 Comments
    The banner today

    The first posts on the ancestor of this site went up ten years ago today. The site was dark blue. It used this newfangled HTML tag called frames, and I added each post by handcoding the HTML and uploading the file to the server.

    I feel old. 🙂

    Some of the oldest things on this site date back before the site itself, to when I was a young punk designer of 25 or 26, cocky and arrogantly sure I knew everything. I turn 37 in a week. I like to think I’m still a young turk tilting at the windmills.

    Ten years ago, I started the site to archive some of the things I was telling the UO community and the LegendMUD community, things about the ways in which online communities can self-determine, things about how virtual worlds can serve as bridges, as ways to connect. To talk about how something people see as “mere games” can mean much more. I eagerly read everything I could by people like Randy Farmer & Chip Morningstar, Richard Bartle, and other pioneers. I collected aphorisms from mailing lists and gathered them into a reference source. I tried to share it back, to do my learning in public.

    The previous banner, aka "the pixelly look"

    In some ways, the site has become a book — most literally, in the way that A Theory of Fun was born from blog posts and snippets from MUD-Dev, but also in the over half a million words I have written here.

    "Wood site #2" -- there was a wood site #1 before that one. This is where the knotwork thing came from.

    I thought a good way to celebrate might be to turn things around on you. I am pretty sure that there are plenty of folks who haven’t been here that long — given that the site has gained several thousand daily readers in just the last year. So I thought I would ask some questions and use the anniversary as a chance to point people to some of the older material they might not have read.

    So I want to turn it around on you! I have questions for you!

    I don't seem to have that old art anymore... and there was one design older than ths, all dark blue.
    I don't seem to have the old art for wood site #1anymore... and there was one design older than this, all dark blue.

    I have my favorites and am thinking of showcasing some of them over the next week, but I am curious, because I suspect that to some degree I am better known to many of you for what I have said than what I have done. So many of the things I have done aren’t really there to see anymore, but the things I have written and said are still here, for better or worse. 🙂

    So thanks for coming  on the journey! Here’s to another ten years, another half a million words, and more learning in public.

  • WordPress 2.6 upgrade

    Hours Categories Misc, Open thread
    Comments 9 Comments

    I am doing an upgrade to WordPress 2.6, don’t be surprised to see the blog broken for a bit.

    Later:

    OK, I think it’s done, and there seem to be no adverse effects. During the few minutes that it was defenseless, 7 spams came in. 🙂

    And my Visual Editor conked out beforehand — the dreaded “visual editor just doesn’t work” bug that apparently plagues many. Sigh. Here’s what fixed it:

    • The upgrade, at least on my machine, put everything up with the wrong permissions. I set the wp_includes folder and all files under to 755.
    • I also deleted the contents of wp-content/uploads/js_cache

    Apparently there are several things that cause this. So here’s some useful threads.

    Oh, and you need to add captions to your existing theme if you want them styled right on the images. I found this, though I then started tweaking it. (See below).

    Even later:

    All my accented characters were broken, and it’s because the wp-config-sample.php file has utf8 for the DB_CHARSET, but my blog is old enough that all its tables were creates many versions ago when the default was latin1_ci_swedish. There’s no easy way to change the DB, so I fixed it by changing the DB_CHARSET in wp-config to just ”.

    OK, now that caption stuff:

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