Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Small world…

 Posted by (Visited 5680 times)  Misc
Oct 252005
 

I step off the plane in Austin, and there’s Samantha LeCraft, in town for the Austin Game Conference. Every time I come back to Austin I am reminded how it still has that small town vibe to it…

As you might see if you look over to the left, Kristen kindly entered every single news post from the old website. Now we have a nice substantial archive section…

Welcome to the new website…

 Posted by (Visited 7996 times)  Misc
Oct 232005
 

Yep, I’ve got my own domain. It only took ten years or so…

Anyway, I’ll be moving over all the content from the LegendMUD site eventually… But for now it’s still all over there. Hopefully, when we move it all, we’ll be able to redirect every page to the right place, but given how big the site is, I can’t make any guarantees…

Keep an eye on this space for the official opening. It’ll be… well, whenever we actually finish. 🙂

Travel and speaking schedule

 Posted by (Visited 8420 times)  Game talk, Misc
Aug 272005
 

Whew… I think I am going to be on the road a lot. Upcoming speaking engagements in chronological order:

  • CSSW Ludium 1, held at the new Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds, at Indiana University. I’ll be one of the “Artisans” so this isn’t really a speaking engagement.
  • Web 2.0, in San Francisco. I believe I am on a panel.
  • Training Fall, in Long Beach. This one is directly related to the book, and is entitled “Why Games Matter.”
  • Austin Game Conference, in, duh, Austin. A couple of panels here.
  • Korea Games Conference in Seoul. I’ll be keynoting.
  • Online Games Summit, Paris. No website is up for this one yet, but it’s put together by the Informa folks with help from the IGDA. I’ll be a keynote at this one too.

And I didn’t mention it, but I’ll be going to the Game Designers Workshop for the first time in years, since it’ll be in my backyard. But you can’t come unless you’re invited. 🙂

The Internet is a small place. My wife, who plays Discworld MUD, has found someone to translate those Dutch reviews. So hopefully I’ll find out what they say sometime soon!

Jessica Mulligan did a brief review in English, which makes my life much easier. It’s posted up on the press page now.

Guestbook Issues

 Posted by (Visited 37497 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.

Recent News

 Posted by (Visited 10612 times)  Game talk, Misc, Writing  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 112000
 

Another year, another birthday. Next year will be the big 3-0. Ah well.

I’ve done a big update to the Online Worlds Timeline (under Gaming/Essays). A bunch of info on PLATO, Minitel, MTrek, new info in the year 2000, and a somewhat nicer format.

Saw lots of citations of the Laws (& a nice quote from “Current and Future Developments in Online Games”) over at the Games Domain Review.