I guess I forgot to upload this last week? The title probably explains why.

If this seems poorly written, that’s just because I did it in under 15 minutes. Having to leave for work in fifteen minutes will do that.

I’m not a huge roleplaying fan, but (largely thanks to Futurama)I do know who Gary Gygax is. But no heartfelt sentiments here, you’ll have read the one at Websnark because he’s a better writer (and roleplayer) than I am, and I have to leave for work in about… one minute from now. Scratch that, right this second. Seems that sentence took more than a minute to write.

Anyhow, this is probably the best (but not most heartfelt, that would be the one at Websnark) sendoff for the good mister Gygax. (Of course, what self-respecting geek doesn’t read xkcd? You probably saw it before I did.)

“Oh jesus, he’s getting out another rulebook.”

Seriously, Psychonauts is one of the best games I’ve ever played, but I now use “Meat Circus” as an adjective to describe an immense clusterfuck. For the non-gamers I describe it as “climbing a rope, but there’s some asshole with a winch lowering the rope just slightly faster than you can climb.” But I have to echo Yahtzee’s sentiments in that you should buy Psychonauts fucking yesterday. If (and only if) you have a reliable gamepad for your PC, the game is on Steam, as well as a free demo if you’re still not convinced after the Dark Lord Croshaw hath spoken. Otherwise, you can likely find it used for cheap for the Xbox or PS2, and my brother in law tells me that it runs fine on his 360. (After telling me, at length, that it was about time I bought the fucking game.) But for the love of christ don’t use the mouse and keyboard.

Also, Ficlets is really cool, but I really need to go to work so I can’t actually detail why. Meat Circus fucks me again.

So I have a bad shoulder, that’s not news. What is new is that my good shoulder is giving me trouble very similar to my bad shoulder back when it was still healing. (As it will never be completely right one could argue that the bad shoulder is still healing, but let’s ignore that for now.) Except this time I didn’t drop 160 pounds of manflesh onto it, so it’s got me stumped.

My clocks are hopefully set to the right time now, otherwise I’ll be an hour early to work tomorrow. (Which would make up for being an hour late last Monday.) While digging around for the microwave’s instruction manual, I found a slip of paper in the manual for my alarm clock which specifically tells me how to reset it to change the time on the correct date. Really wish I’d bothered to take care of that when I bought the fucking thing six months ago.

Webcomics vs Wikipedia is on again. FOIGHT OF THE CENTURAH! (Predictably, the Rob and Elliot site is down so I can’t link that, ensuring that nobody will get that reference.) Now, I think Taylor said it best:

“Wikipedia appears on my referrer list as having provided 401 out of 293,781 referrals for the month of September. In October (the month during which I stirred the pot again) it provided 395 referrals (as of this writing). Webalizer rounds this down to “0.00%” of my monthly traffic.”

But I have a few points to add:
1) Rym and Scott of Geeknights have said, and I agree, that most of the parties involved don’t get the point of notability: there has to be a verifiable source for any and every bit of information on Wikipedia, and that’s the way it’s always been.
2) However, that should not be grounds for deletion. It should be grounds for a big tag describing that entry as “lacking citations, information on this page could be wrong, cite this shit up if you can.” Only more formal, because god knows it’s impossible to be involved with wikipedia without having a damn redwood up your ass.
3) That’s not to say that anything should be added. Spam should be deleted. If the entirety of an article is “this exists,” delete it. More to the point, if the article doesn’t contain more than the first page of a Google search for that term, axe it.
4) Otherwise, deletion should be a last resort, and used sparingly. Deletion of information is and should be the antithesis of everything a wiki is about.

Lastly, comixpedia exists. This should be where you can find all the comics that don’t meet wikipedia’s notability guidelines. I think that every webcomics-related article should have a link to comixpedia at the bottom. Deleted comics should have a page with an explanation that it’s not wikipedia material (yet) and a link the the relevant comixpedia page. And most importantly, all you whiney fucks should be updating the goddamn webcomics wiki! I’m not saying I need to be able to find a fucking entry for every two-bit hack ever to hold a pencil, I’m saying that the articles there need to be expanded. I have not once looked up something in the webcomics wiki and found anything I didn’t already know. In most cases, the wikipedia article was more in-depth. So well fucking done on that count, people.

And while I’m bitching and moaning, why is it that when Mediawiki can’t find something, it suggests that you write the article yourself? If i knew enough about the subject to write an article, I probably wouldn’t be searching for it. Cocks.

Well, I should’ve gone to bed 45 minutes ago, so I’ll wrap this up. Now if there’s any justice in the world (and I got this blog set up properly) those links earlier won’t send a ping to the corresponding trackback uri. Not just good on principal, but good because nobody needs to see this train wreck of a rant.

I’d love to see the hidden “disable trackbacks entirely, fucking forever, NOW goddamn it” option that Wordpress ought to have but I can’t find. Bad enough I get all this comment spam because I’m too lazy to install a CAPTCHA plugin, but now I get trackback spam. Nice to know that a useless system to further enable the automatic counter-fellation all bloggers seem to engage in is being used for the sole purpose of adding spam to the comments section of a site next to nobody reads. (And since I don’t use the “More” tag often, if ever, there’s no reason to actually click through to the articles, hence nobody sees your goddamn spam, assholes.) I guess I have to dig further into the archives and manually turn talkbacks off on more posts. Yay.

I wonder if Spam Poison is still around… Regardless of if it works (I think it does, but I have no real proof), I get a very fulfilling sensation of pure unbridled malice at the thought of even potentially fucking up their little spam spiders. (Ostensibly, the link code they give you, and maybe any link back to Spam Poison, will send the spiders that way, as spiders are wont to do. Their server then detects spam spiders somehow, and sends them a different page than we see, full of complete garbage data, with links back to itself or pages much like it. This apparently jacks the signal to noise ratio of the spider’s lists up somewhere way past anything even remotely usable. Again, I don’t have anything but their word that it works, but it seems to have worked on the old brimzero homepage, when my email was listed in full after every newspost.

Oh, look at that, I’ll be late for work if I don’t leave within the next sixty seconds, assuming traffic is good. Pretty sure the spammers won this particular battle. (Then again, I had somewhere between one and three separate dreams where I was doing something and ended up being late for work, and I’d hate to let a portent like that turn out to be false, as the rest of my dreams centered around the book Interworld, and it would be cool as hell if that came true too.

Oh look, I’ve now got thirteen minutes to make a minimum twenty minute trip. Upon identifying a problem, it’s good to know I swiftly do nothing to resolve it. I did add a new tag, which applies to 90% of the shit I write here. That count for anything?