• More on the blog hacking

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    I keep updating this post as I learn more. So if you’re affected, there’s new material at the bottom. I am currently running this full sweep every day, because each day I find something different. But three days ago there were twenty things, yesterday five, and today only one, so maybe I am getting closer.

    Latest news 4/25/08: blog seems secure again. But be sure to do the “secret key” thing newly listed at the bottom as well!

    So, I mentioned before that I was a victim of a hack. It was a spam injection attack — the one known as the Goro injection attack. But my symptoms were slightly different from some of the ones I have seen on the net, so here’s some war stories even though I suspect the blog is STILL not clean.

    First, read these two posts:

    Also read the advice from Jeff Freeman in the last post on this.

    OK, in addition to that advice, I also had the following problems:

    Read More “More on the blog hacking”

  • The Sunday Song: Polliwog

    Hours Categories Music, The Sunday Poem
    Comments 4 Comments

    OK, I lied. It’s not a song. It’s more of a jam session. Since it wasn’t fully grown and looked likely to have warts even upon attaining adulthood, I named it “Polliwog.” Drum tracks, bass, acoustic, two electrics, and the piano all piled onto a standard blues progression played really fast.

    Basically, I slammed together three different blues riffs I like to jam with, two for guitar and one for piano. They were originally all in different keys, but I piled ’em all into one. If you want to add to the cacophony, it’s in E.

  • Stephen King on videogame violence

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Stephen King fights the censorship!

    Of course, this is the same guy who wrote a short story about a man stranded on an island slowly eating himself because he had no other food. Classic last line, too: “Ladyfingers… they taste just like ladyfingers…”

    Could Massachusetts legislators find better ways to watch out for the kiddies? Man, I sure hope so, because there’s a lot more to America’s culture of violence than Resident Evil 4.

    What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

  • Blog issues

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 8 Comments

    Yes, it’s wonky. And it will stay wonky for a little while, there’s clearly some compromised files — spam stuff getting inserted into PHP files wrecking everything.

    I have upgraded to 2.5, and everything seems to be working correctly. For now, anyway.

  • Disney decides to close VMK

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 35 Comments

    Disney is shuttering Virtual Magic Kingdom. Nobody knows how many active users it has these days, and Disney is of course moving aggressively into more virtual worlds, encouraging users to switch to Toontown, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Club Penguin. But as longtime virtual worlders know, that’s not acceptable to the current community, who not only have a lengthy thread on the discussion boards, but have also started threads even on the new coverage elsewhere begging for their world to remain open.

    Generally, a virtual world with any momentum at all will not die unless it is actively killed. And the result is always heartrending posts like this one: Read More “Disney decides to close VMK”