Frozen History

Now, I could have sworn that I wrote an entry about the closing of GeoCities, because I distinctly remember doing it....

Oh nevermind, that was done a lot further back than I thought it was, no wonder I couldn't find it. Since I Do It Live, I will leave my mistake there.

Anyway, as of Monday, GeoCities is now completely closed. Although it's a far shot from the internet being relieved by horrible website designs, the historical significance of one of the oldest internet hosts being taken offline is pretty immense, and a lot of the internet has been now removed from circulation, removing it from sight, removing it from mind, and removing it from existence.

That is, if not for efforts to preserve it, of course. I've talked of the Internet Archive before, which has set up a special section dedicated to the GeoCities archive specifically. However, they weren't the only people this time to hold up the idea of a New Alexandria. A small group threw together a project called Reocities, to download as much of the GeoCities servers as possible, and rehost them. They have a nice detailed account of how they did it, too, which is a pretty cool read for the technological aspect of the feat.

"Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make," so said Douglas Adams. And because of that, the importance of preserving as much as we can about the reality of things is paramount, so that we can prove things as they really were, instead of just rumor and hearsay. Thanks to the Archive, as always, and thanks to Reocities, for seeing the need to preserve a major part of the Internet's history.

Persona

Well, Windows 7 is officially released now. Unlike when Vista was released, I won't be switching to 7 immediately. My desktop is slowly spiraling to it's death, so I'm going to wait until i get a chance to build a new machine for that, and my XPS I don't want to change until I'm done with the work on Spiral Island. So I have a copy of 7 just sitting here waiting to be installed. 

I'm finding the advertising scheme Microsoft came up with for Japan rather surreal, though. In an odd way to try and appeal to the geeks there, they decided to play off the internet's OS-tan phenomenon and sanctioned an artist to make an "official" OS-tan for the system: Nanami Madobe (which is a play on words derived from Windows 7). There's even a Windows 7 theme Microsoft released for 7 with a collection of wallpapers of the character and a sound scheme made up of various voiced recordings for the character.

I just find this turn of events incredibly strange.

Power Ballad

So this week Brütal Legend came out. It's a combination of Adventure and RTS elements in a sandbox environment, gameplay wise, starring actor and comedian Jack Black. But, perhaps best of all, the game's story is High Fantasy set in the world of Rock.

In Brutal Legend Jack's character, Eddie Riggs, is transported from a rock concert into a parallel world, which was once ruled by a god-beast made of fire and molten steel, and it left influences of heavy metal around the world. There are stone monuments of guitars, old car parts, and walls and roads made of large speakers. But best of all is the soundtrack, with over 100 Heavy Metal songs sitting as setting for the game's main sequences, and a musical score written by LucasArts composer Peter McConnell based on those tracks to fill it in, make it an absolutely enjoyable game, soundtrack wise. If you're into metal, anyway. It's a fun game, full of  witty humor and random comedy of errors, so I would recommend anyone who likes that type of music to play it.

I would have liked to have heard some Blind Guardian in the soundtrack as well, though.

Unbalanced Load

I started using Google Analytics a while back to track visit information for this site, because my server logs and AdSense report very different things. And Analytics doesn't report anywhere close to the amount of traffic, either. Where Analyitics may say I only get 15 page views in a day, AWStats will show I've at least 100. It's never made sense, so I decided to make a little tracker of my own. A simple PHP script I added to the end of all my templates for a couple days, to just record a few peices of information. And when I checked them, I found a lot of those 100 hits were various search engine bots, some more were spambots that are filtered, leaving relatively few of them actual people.

Since I'm all about the sharing of code snippets, here's the code for the script. It's removed now.

$namefile = "../../log.asw";
$fn = fopen($namefile, 'a');
$ip = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
$name = substr($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],
       strrpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],"/")+1);
$curdate = date("m\-d\-Y");
$fullname = $ip . ">" . $curdate . ">" . $name . "\r\n";
fwrite($fn, $fullname);
fclose($fn);
?>

The Green House

So after I cleverly quoted the line from my old halloween story, and since it's October once again, I remembered it's existence and that I can post it on here now. So I decided to do so, and put it on Booksie as well, and after I wrote the prologue for The Pocketwatch, I got the idea to maybe do a collection of short stories joined together by that line. I've got one more idea, but I might do a fourth one after those are done to tie everything together, depending on how I feel then.

"Celebration" wasn't ever an actual title for it, though, so I decided to give it a proper title. I wanted to follow up with the naming convention of The Pocketwatch and name it The House, but Booksie said there was already something had that name, so I altered it to be "The Green House" since it's an ugly green house. I didn't realize until after I had finished putting the two peices I did on Booksie that the title could be interpreted as "The Greenhouse" which this is not, but I don't care now. Not all of what was written in the Google Doc is here or on Booksie, because I hadn't finished writing the next part.

Starting off talking about the house, since I haven't really talked about that before, the house I pretty much came up with from scratch. I don't particularly know any houses with the floor plan I described. The spoon is a recurring joke I use whenever it fits, based on the random changes in Final Fantasy IV for the original SNES release (the first Final Fantasy game I ever played), and the fact that according to that a spoon is the most powerful throwing weapon for a ninja.

Switching to talk about The Pocketwatch, I hadn't originally conceived of placing any specific dates or locations on what was happening, just that it was somewhere in Europe at the late 16th Century, because that's when and where pocketwatches really started picking up. My "Celebration" line, though, had reminded me of one of the parts of the Otherland series, the second book to be exact, where the character Paul Jonas was in Venice during Carnival, and had mentioned something about a recent battle victory where people were even more pumped up. I decided to pull out the book and find out more information about that, and found it was the Battle of Lepanto. After reading it a bit, I decided that would be the setting, and worked it into the conversation between the witch and the watchmaker.  

Because for some random reason Word decided to paste completely different than it did when I posted the prologue of The Pocketwatch, and AbiWord, which I used to put up every page before, has decided to betray me and hard force every paragraph tag to have a margin, individually, the two pages of The Green House have their tabs intact, which I don't usually use for the space constraints, using a double line to separate paragraphs instead. Oddly enough it created those as well, so I don't really know what it's smoking. I'll fix it later, I don't want to mess with it right now.

The Pocketwatch

I haven't really said much lately, because things have been relatively uneventful. The main necessary functions of the NPC scripting engine for Spiral Island are nearly complete, special things can be made later as they come up but in it's current state a good amount of the game's needed scripts are in place and events can be written. 

But aside from that, I have been bothered trying to come up with an idea for a story. A little while back I got a pocketwatch, modern built but made with old mechanical methods. Ever since I received it, though, I have had the urge to tell a story. But what, I could not figure out, and it was bothering me.

I finally figured out what I wanted to do, and so have begun the story. I'm not sure if I'll have enough to make it a full novel, so for now I'll just consider it a short story. But there is the story, "The Pocketwatch", which is now added to the side navigation of the site. It is the first time I've written in first person in years, so it may be kind of odd. But we'll run with it, and see where it goes.

I'm also posting this onto Booksie, which I recently found by accident while doing some research.