~Lord Licorice
~Lord Licorice
Get spooked, fuckers!
~Lord Licorice
If you can read this, you're in the right place!
Update 2021-12-13: Patience please! None of the archive data is lost. It takes a while to unpack ~500GB of shitposts, believe it or not, so the archives are being backfilled by year. 2015 is unpacking right now, as an example, followed by 2014 and so on. You'll get the 'requested URL was not found on this server' generic 404 on most older threads until then. I'll announce when the unpacking is complete; THEN you can start reporting missing threads.
... and please for the love of fuck TELL ME THE THREAD NUMBER WHEN YOU DO GODDAMNIT
Update 2021-12-14: So there's a handful of completely arbitrary threads missing on the new server, but they're safe and sound on the old server. I'm going to write a script to test and rsync every entry in the database to ensure the gaps are filled. In the meantime, go ahead and keep reporting threads, I appreciate it. (PS: For those of you sending messages on Twitter, I'm still banned for a couple days for telling someone to 'fuck off a cliff', which apparently is promoting suicide, so I can't reply to your messages. Sorry!)
Update 2021-12-17: I've found additional problems and fixed them. For instance, there were a lot of threads that didn't get updated permissions after transfer, so they were just 403ing; they should all work now.
I also realized that the new thread schema - /archive/year/threadnum/ vs. /archive/threadnum/ - broke every URL on the internet linking back to the site. Oops! My bad. I added a little .htaccess and PHP magic to properly redirect requests still looking for the old URLs. Your bookmarks and TV Tropes links should work again, hooray!
One of the remaining orders of business is to fix the SSL cert, which I'll do Saturday or Sunday, depending on whether I die in the upcoming blizzard. As usual, if any threads aren't working right, please leave a comment below or contact me on IRC/Discord.
~Lord Licorice
Another year's gone by, and another Axetoberfest gone too soon. Like the previous posts state, we're actually still very much alive, just on IRC/Discord mainly these days. I'm not even sure how many of you will even read this message! Still, it's good to let people know we're still going. It's been... a long time honestly.
Before I start waxing poetic, this is just a notice that we'll be transferring to a new VPS very soon. This shouldn't mean anything to usual archive-goers, but it may mean temporary downtime while the shift is performed. This may include disabling new archive entries for a little while, though I don't expect any extended downtime (and the old server will stay up until the new one is completed, regardless).
In addition to just moving some 14 years' worth of /tg/ over, I also need to rewrite a lot of the site for new PHP versions and such, so that will take time as well. Things might break for a bit after the move, though most of the services on this site have gone away, so again, I'm not sure what might even get noticed. In any event, we'll be on Discord/IRC (the IRC is moving too, so maybe hit Discord first).
~Lord Licorice
Happy Halloween month! We're still around, I just never get around to updating the homepage. Everyone's here for the archives or in our IRC or Discord, anyway! I feel like I should make a more substantial update, but I'm not sure what to say, or to whom I'm writing, so...
It's been a really long decade this year, so I'm just hoping things get better next year, really. In the meantime, join us in the IRC/Discord for AXETOBERFEST activities!
~Lord Licorice
HAPPY 4TH
I don't have any messages, I just realized the last update was in 2018. We're still here and always active in the IRC if you want to come join us!
~Lord Licorice
... 4channel? ... just... just why.
Uh. Anyway, the... interesting decision to move all of the worksafe boards from 4chan.org to 4channel.org has not apparently impacted the archive, as it was correctly following the redirect between domains. However, to be on the safe side, I've updated the archive to retrieve threads from the new domain. Please let me know in the IRC (preferred) or via email if you see problems with the archival process.
~Lord Licorice
~Lord Licorice
Happy new year, jerks. Let’s hope 2018 is less terrible, eh?
(it’s going to be worse, isn’t it)
~Lord Licorice
IT BEGINS
~Lord Licorice
Merry Christmas, dorks! So it turns out something on 4chan's end changed recently, so images weren't getting pulled down correctly (both /tg/ and /qst/ archives). I spent some time this evening unwinding from a busy holiday by fixing it. (Yes, this is how I relax. DON'T FUCKING JUDGE ME)
So, just wanted to make you aware of it and that I've already fixed it. Most of the threads self-repaired shortly after I made the adjustments, so that was nice. Threads that fell off the boards before I fixed the bug will still be borked, unfortunately.
Anyway, enjoy your various winter holidays!
~Lord Licorice
Well, it finally happened, you maniacs. /qst/ is now a thing.
Until the shitstorm settles, I've created a separate /qst/ Archive to make sure nothing is lost in the transition, if a transition even occurs. Please do not archive shitposts or just downvote everything into oblivion if you don't like it; I'm just trying to help. Take it up with 4chan administration.
Recently, some rapscallions have been deliberately misarchiving threads, mainly quests. Some threads' details are switched, while completely random threads have been added as if they're part of a series. These nefarious individuals have succeeded in wasting tens and tens of my objectively worthless precious minutes fixing the entries. If you're a victim of these ne'er-do-wells, you can either email me or reply to this post, and I'll get around to fixing them eventually.
Please be sure to include the thread number and correct fields (title, description, tags) so I can more rapidly process these requests.
I know I say this all the time and only half-follow through, but for realsies, I'm going to be purging the archive soon. My laziness came back to bite me today when something got stuck in a loop and ate all the drive space, so I had to start culling just to get shit working again. I deleted the graveyard (no whining, you had like two years to grab shit) and specifically killed a bunch of .pdf dump threads that were taking up massive amounts of space. We're fine now, but culling will definitely help space issues.
Speaking of .pdf files, these are no longer archived, and I'll be removing existing .pdf files specifically. .pdf threads are the even-more-wasteful bastard brethren of image dumps; this is an archive, not a filehosting site. As for /tg/ projects, anyone seriously working on something is going to have their own site for hosting copies of their work, so they won't need outdated versions cluttering up the archive. (I don't think many people will even notice or care, but someone always complains about change, so I'm letting you know now.)
Anyway, repent and so on, the end times are nigh for your elf slave wat do quests!
Addendum: I'll see about adding .webm support going forward.
Happy holidays, everyone! We've been experiencing some technical difficulties the last few days with connectivity. Things seem to be stable again, so hooray and shit! If you had a thread lost during the upheaval, send me a .zip of the content and I'll see what I can do.
~Lord Licorice
Howdy folks, it's that time again~
I've taken this week off to get some shit done that I just haven't had the energy to do. This means getting my car cleaned, license and registration renewed, and a variety of other crap. But you don't give a shit, do you? You just want to know what horrible quest threads I've removed this time. Here it is!:
Completed: January 2012, February 2012, March 2012, April 2012, May 2012, June 2012, July 2012, August 2012, September 2012, October 2012, November 2012; January 2013
Total: 964 culled threads, ~7.3G
Full Listing
Highlights:
Actually Good Threads:
Special Mention: Live With Your Shame
I was debating on whether or not to call out this particular archivist, because he's made a habit of adding the worst of the worst /tg/ threads to the archive. Whether deliberate or ironic, shitposting is shitposting, and I'd prefer this not happen. However, I do have to say at least he's 1) made it much easier for me to remove this garbage and 2) he's actually fairly funny with his descriptions.
Special Mention: Troll archival
I realize there are a number of people that really despise quest threads, and after cleaning literally hundreds of non-starters out of the archives, I can certainly see where you're coming from. However, by mis-archiving quests with shitty labels, you're only serving to accomplish two things: one, you're taking all of thirty seconds out of my day to fix the tags, and two, you're training quest creators to immediately archive their threads to avoid mis-labeling, which just exacerbates the issue. Post-It Quest is a prime example, it had all of twenty replies, but was archived as soon as the author could refresh 4chan after posting it.
The only way you're going to stop quest threads on /tg/ is to stem the tide at the source. Shitting up the archive isn't helping anyone's cause. For the record, I am not, have never been, and, saints preserve me, will never be a janitor or moderator on 4chan. I have no power, authority or influence to stop quest threads from existing on /tg/; I'm just an archivist. By definition, by the time it reaches me, it's already too late. You're going to need to change the community's mind, and that can't be done with goofy labeling.
More coming.
I'm not really sure how many people actually visit the front page, but Viral asked me to link his Engine Heart Kickstarter, so here it is!
From the site:
Engine Heart is a game about little robots. When the humans were around nobody paid any attention to them, but now the humans are all gone, and they're on their own in a world that's falling apart.
You can download the game completely free here if you're interested, but the Kickstarter will get a physical copy in stores. Go check it out!
Hey guys, sorry about the downtime earlier, they moved the server to another location in Luxembourg and I totally missed the announcement. Everything's back to normal~
~Lord Licorice
WELCOME TO LUXEMBOURG
So I was going to make a post about how we're migrating to Luxembourg at the end of the month, but my VPS provider decided I'd forgotten and just moved the whole thing for me. So, as of last week, we're in Europe now. Amerifags may see some latency while Euronurds will undoubtedly have a better connection; however, overall it should be far more stable and bandwidth-friendly than it's been in recent months.
If you notice any severe fuckups or shit getting crazy, please let me know, but otherwise enjoy the newer, faster, farther server!
IT BEGINS
I'm finally getting around to culling the archive of low-rated and useless threads (e.g. image dumps). I'm going to do one or two months' worth tonight and press on until the content is cleaned down in preparation for a server move in December. Someone's also working on getting the older archives' files up as torrents for me so it doesn't get messed up if I switch servers while seeding.
As usual, I'll be keeping the killed threads in a separate graveyard archive for a while so I can recover anything I may need or provide threads to any interested parties. On a related note, I've still got the graveyard files from last time, so if anyone needs them, now's the time to ask. (I was going to make a full torrent out of them as well, but I think the interest is low enough that I can simply FTP it at whoever really wants it. Yes, anon from like a month ago who was looking for a particular story thread and had no idea what it was called, hit me up on the IRC again and I'll give you the files.)
I've put this off for long enough, so with the deadline of jumping ship to the hosting provider's new datacenter, it's given me the incentive to finally get off my ass and do this thing. I'll keep this post updated with a running record of culled threads in a separate page so you can see what was removed.
Thread deletion progress
List of deleted threadsAnd now, some actual cool threads!
April Fool's and shit! I hope you enjoy the stupid pages I've put together this year! There's only two so far, I may do more but it's 5am.
Links to past years:
~Lord Licorice
~Lord Licorice
Suddenly, Muju Little Ponythulhu: Ftaghn is Magic:
Congratulations! If you're seeing this, you're at the brand new site. I'll add more notes here as I continue to migrate, but for now, you're at the right place. Note: IRC is at irc.thisisnotatrueending.com; if you were using xen.thisisnotatrueending.com, it'll time out, so check your settings.
The IRC and website migration went off without a hitch, which is a pleasant surprise given my usual track record with this sort of thing. As far as I'm presently aware, the entire archive should be moved and available, so you can start browsing, voting and adding new threads. If you run into any weird issues, please post them here, along with the URL and full error message. (Yes, the game, player and hamachi listings are all down right now, but I need to clean out the spam that got into them first...)
Reminder: July 1 is when the old server goes down permanently, including the graveyard. LIST OF GRAVEYARDED THREADS If there's a good thread you want saved, make a case for it in the comments here, otherwise just save a copy (I suggest DownThemAll!) or transcribe the content onto 1d4chan.
Once I'm satisfied that everything is working correctly, I'll be hosting torrents and direct downloads of the entire archive, from October 2007 through June 2011. I already have the files, I just need to make them available without taxing the server too heavily. Fortunately, I've got more hard drive space and bandwidth than I know what to do with now; I don't know what the pageload speed will be like under the new provider, but you're welcome to let me know if it's faster/slower, I'm curious.
And now, as it's 6am, I'm going to sleep. There's a couple other services to migrate (TeamSpeak, icecast, etc.), but it can certainly wait. Let me know if anything breaks.
Edit June 22: I just found a config error that prevented threads archived in the past 24 hours from being correctly updated; you may see some threads with incomplete content. If you happen to have the full HTML for these threads (likely quest authors) let me know and I'll update the thread with your copy.
Edit June 29: Per popular request, I've resurrected LoliQuest from the graveyard (and even grabbed the very first entry off Easymodo, which apparently put the /tg/ archives back up). I'm adding them back to the database and uploading the files as I type this. For anyone that wants the graveyard 7zip, PM me on the IRC and I will give you the download link for the file. The graveyard and old server are going away on July 1 or shortly thereafter, so you've got two days to get it if you want it!
I've started graveyarding. See LIST OF GRAVEYARDED THREADS. Completed: June 2010, July 2010, August 2010, September 2010, October 2010, November 2010, December 2010, January 2011, February 2011, March 2011, April 2011
I've also found a VPS provider and set up a box, so it should actually be a pretty simple process now to just move shit over. I'm going to finish the graveyarding within the week, move files, and have everything done by June 20. The old server will remain online until the last minute on July 1. After that, at the new host, I'll begin offering downloads for the entire archive piecemeal (e.g. August-September 2010 in a single file, torrents probable).
As before, if you see a thread you think should be preserved, name the thread number and make a case for it. Nine times out of ten, instead of it being preserved in the archive, you should rip the content out and throw it on 1d4chan. And there's always... uh, hm. It looks like Easymodo took down its /tg/ archiving service. Whoops! I guess it really is all up to me now.
Current Stats: 842 threads removed (6.3 GB), plus 57 drawthreads removed (3.8GB)
~Lord Licorice
The server move finally has a hard deadline: July 1, 2011. I have to move sup/tg/ to a new provider by then or everything simply disappears into the ether. So that means it's time for a culling!
Like the last time, the archive is going to be purged of unwanted threads by whatever poor assholes I can rope into helping me a team of qualified, highly-trained content experts. What are the criteria, you ask? Wait, you didn't ask? WELL FUCK YOU I'M TELLING YOU ANYWAY:
Like before, the deleted threads will be moved to a graveyard where anyone who really wants that aforementioned horrible thread can still download it. (Image threads will not be given this treatment this time around. You knew better when you added it.) I will update this post or a future post with the growing list of graveyarded threads and links to download them.
When the culling is done, I will begin uploading threads by month to Dropbox, Megaupload, or whatever other service I can find as a failsafe. If I get hit by a bus, I don't want the archive to just disappear and lose the last four years' worth of amazing /tg/. I'll likely be moving to Varsbox unless someone else can suggest a good VPS provider that will fit the following criteria:
I'm going to get started on getting people to cull the archives. For those of you who give no shits either way, I've updated the archive page so that you can hide quest and draw threads now, so there's that.
Edit: For those of you helping me, I'd like you to go through a full month at a time (helped now by the handy dandy new archive page), and give me a list like the following:
Thread Number - Title - Score - Reason
You don't have to get fancy with the reason, just "quest thread" or something so I know why it should be removed. Remember, these are just recommendations; I may end up keeping a thread after all, though most of the time I'm sure the thread deserves to be eliminated. Please also include a separate list of just the thread numbers so I can plug them more easily into my tools. Extra lists of questionable items or threads to make into collections are also good.
Edit 2: Of the 6805 threads currently archived, 465 threads contain the tag 'draw' (drawfag, drawthread) and 2090 contain the tag 'quest'. That's right, a full 30% of the archive is composed of quest threads. ಠ_ಠ
Edit 3: 392 draw threads at a total of 3.8GB removed on the first pass. (Culled List) Also I guess I should clarify: I'm going to leave the "deleted" threads online until Friday or something, then they're permanently being deleted. The graveyard I'm going to leave for as long as I still have this server. I could leave Deleted and Graveyard together I guess but this gives me a directory to dump so I can get more disk space as I archive and transfer batches of threads.
Edit 4: Jesus Christ there were fucking 335 threads in May alone, 137 of which have "quest" in the tags. I need to look about changing the way threads get archived, or be extremely aggressive in future culls. Maybe something like deleting threads below 5 or 10 or something, or (ugh) requiring multiple votes to add a thread ala 4chanarchive.
Ultimate question: Should I ban quest threads, or just aggressively cull them?
Edit 5: Anon raised a good point that made me wonder: how long does Easymodo store threads? Do they have a purging policy or any of that? How far back does it go? Hell, it'd make my life massively easier if I just hosted a listing service for /tg/ that linked to archived threads on Easymodo. Would Eksopl mind? What does he use for a hosting provider, anyway? QUESTIONS, MAN.
If anyone could put me in touch with Eksopl so I can ask some questions about how he runs things over there, I'd be much obliged. Either I could just set the archive to link to Easymodo, or buy hosting from the same company.
Happy April Fool's Day everyone! I hope you're enjoying the shit all over the internet today! It's also fucking 7:30 in the morning christ I need sleep oh god why am I awake.
Only three pages today, I'll likely add one or two more later, but sleep now, oh god why. Old pages:
~Lord Licorice
So because my life is a fine example of decay and entropy in action, the PSU on the old sup/tg/ server died today. This is the model I need to replace; if anyone can find this cheaper and/or with a more reliable vendor than random people on Ebay, it'd be much appreciated. (Likewise, any leads on cheap, legit copies of Win7 Professional or better would be great.)~Lord Licorice
BEAR CHEF SAYS
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
~Lord Licorice
Hey all, quick update. Sorry about the glacial pace of the restoration; I'm trying not to fuck it up when I move it, and I've been having trouble properly getting these threads to compress (and then extract with full paths to the right location, which is, you know, kinda important, what the fuck 7z why is that the common command).~Lord Licorice
We're done culling the archives! Yaaay!
You presently have 48 hours* until Friday, August 6* to get everything you want from the following list:
*or however long it takes me to turn off the server.
Anyway, the links on that page have all been updated to the old website, so you can download whatever you'd like to keep. Do not scrape the website or you will be banned. Art dumps and drawfag threads will be uploaded later to MegaUpload or something so don't bother with those, you'll get them in a tidy .rar at some point, or they're already on tgchan (I'll get the links for those and add them here). If anyone would like to officially or unofficially start transcribing writefag threads to 1d4chan please go ahead.
Remember, this is a general 48-hour window, but I'm not going to delete the threads for a long while (if ever), so if you miss it don't fret. Just ask and I'll be happy to send you a copy of whatever you'd like. Again, don't scrape the site because you feel like everything deserves to be saved; it really, really fucking doesn't, and if you haven't seen the culled list yet, you'll quickly figure out why.
After the window I'll start moving ~5GB of the surviving threads to the Xen a day until it's up to speed, cull July, and we should be all set. By next week or so we should be up to speed, unless of course I get sucked into Minecraft to the exclusion of all else... again...
Edity: Oh yeah, you'll notice the "saved" thread still show up in the culled list. I can't be fucked to bother removing them from the list, but if you asked me to save something (like those mislabeled quest threads and the like) I'll be restoring them during the move.
Edity 2: I've decided to leave the graveyard up until at least Friday, if not beyond that; the bandwidth usage from people snagging "killed" threads is way less than I thought it was going to be. Remember, the graveyard is here. I'm going to start transferring tonight.
~Lord Licorice
Everything's proceeding quite a bit slower than I'd planned, but it's still proceeding. I'm almost ready to begin uploading; I figure I'll move things in an orderly fashion, something like 5GB a day, until the archives are back up to normal. As you've likely noticed, the request interface and new threads still work, so it's not like we've been losing new content during this downtime. (And Comcast hasn't exactly been stable lately, so I'm going to pick a good time and start uploading.)
As before, add any requests to save material to the post below this one (do not ask for threads to be saved anywhere else or they may be missed!).
~Lord Licorice
Okay, so here's the deal. I've roped some poor suckers politely asked a few members of the sup/tg/ IRC to help me cull the horrible, horrible threads in the archive so whittle the filesize down to a manageable level. Their guidelines are:
As mentioned previously, the list of culled threads is here. You'll notice more subentries for individual months, and the pastebins where the aforementioned chumps beautiful, beautiful people handed me their lists, along with their commentary or reasoning. If you've got a problem with something being removed, well, first, think long and fucking hard before you ask, and if you still decide it's really worthy of remaining, let me know in the IRC.
Once we're done culling, which may take a couple days (the archives are still accepting new threads), I will restore everything at the old location for 48 hours. This will give everyone enough time to retrieve content from the graveyard (surviving threads will probably not be restored yet at that stage). After that, I'm going to completely wipe the graveyard, upload the content back in stages, and finally decommission the old server for good.
Special thanks to schlubs goddamned Internet Heroes Aeros, PurpleXVI, Phaethon and Symmetry for mucking out the e-stables for me. Five months' worth of threads, anything under -5 and all threads tagged 'image dump' have dropped 8.75GB, and we've got many months to go.
Edit: If anyone has an answer for where to put the drawfag content, please let me know. I can't keep it for bandwidth/space reasons and certain elements inform me that 1d4chan isn't the place for them (apparently it's not the place for fucking anything). I don't want to start administering a drawfag gallery, which is why 1d4chan would have been ideal, so if someone has a solid suggestion on where I can upload everything just so people can get copies of it or something, let me know in the comments.
Edit 2: 2010 is done and most of 2009; only three months graveyarded so far but we're up to 10.3GB culled! Yaaay progress.
Edit 3: 2009 is done, total of 15.4GB removed. 2008 to go and then we start the migration.
Edit 4: 2008 is done, up to 17.5GB removed. Going to hit 2007 and start uploading piecemeal.
~Lord Licorice
Important notice!
So it looks like Comcast has finally started actually enforcing their bandwidth caps, which are presently 250GB per month; I've used 450-475GB for the last three, and it looks like at least 300+ of that has been from the site. While I'd normally be kinda proud about that, they've threatened to terminate my service if I don't cut it out...
Over the next couple days, I'm going to be transferring sup/tg/ to the Xen server. This does have a couple benefits, such as being able to throttle bandwidth limits (to prevent scraping) and provide a faster site experience in general. The downside, of course, is that this is going to take me a lot of time and effort to move everything and get it running the way it was before.
To help make this easier on myself, I'm also going to be doing a vicious purge of the archives, since there's just a lot of shit I've left there and figured "eh, why not?" Now I need to transfer 40GB of excrement flecked with nuggets of gold over to the new location, so it's time I started mucking out the stables a bit.
It's going to be pretty bumpy, but I don't foresee any major issues, other than the usual weird complaints about culling and a few things that ran in a Windows environment that I'll need to reconfigure under Debian (like the PDF creator for the Dark Heresy chargen). Who knows, maybe all this newness will help kick me into actually completing any of those projects I've been putting off, like updating the DH chargen or creating an EP chargen.
The current list of graveyarded threads is here, though you won't be able to view them yet. As I said, this is a very strict culling, so I may kill an item that deserves saving (particularly pieces of quest threads that may or may not need to be kept for completion purposes). Point out anything I miss in the comments here or in the IRC.
As noted, many parts of the site won't function until this is done, and a few pieces are going away entirely (the art archives for example). Don't bother reporting things unless they're still screwed up a week from now.
Addendum: I've put people to work slaving in the horrormines to start culling shit. Be prepared for lengthy lists. I've also moved Maid Quest and Frost Giantess Quest under the Collections section (which may not show up until I'm done moving shit around).
It's been a quiet month, site-wise. I finally fixed the Battlefield Calixis bug in the chargen and deleted characters created before January 1, 2010, removing 16,497 entries. I also parsed and compressed another 9GB of logs from the same day 'til present (goddamn do I get a fair amount of traffic).
Nothing else much to report, other than we've got a guild on Guild Wars now. Jump into #guildwars if you're interested. Writing the Eclipse Phase character generator and adding characters from Ascension and The Radical's Handbook to the Dark Heresy chargen have been on my mind, but I've been pretty busy with work and other things. I do fully intend to get these things done one day, you'll see!
I can't think of much else to report. I also need to remember to pageinate the archive, at least when you're filtering it (so it doesn't show hundreds of entries all at once); instead of showing the last month, maybe it should just show the last 50 entries. I'm not sure how I'd like to reorganize it, but it needs organization. (And yes, this will include deciding if I want to finally put Quests in another section, or maybe just have a checkbox that lets you filter out quests specifically.)
Okay, well, apparently I missed a bunch of thumbnails between December 29 and January 10, because nearly 160 threads were full of 4chan leech images for no readily apparent reason. I manually fixed the lot of them (well, using a script, but still had to do it one-by-one to double-check myself). If you notice anything clearly broken, please let me know so I don't spend a couple hours fixing shit.
Heeey I'm finally going to start cleaning out the archive! Happy day! It's only been... most of a year!
As a result of the really... really long while it's been since I've purged the unwanted content from the archives, I'm going to try to delete as much shit as possible as quickly as possible. This means no more funny comments, unfortunately (except for really egregious threads), and I'm going to cull pretty much everything in the red.
I made myself some new tools to make it easier to cull shit, so hopefully I'll get rid of more, faster, and more accurately (e.g. easily removing all threads tagged "troll"). As usual, I'll put everything deleted into a graveyard first to allow people to save copies of anything they think deserves saving.
And now, the current list:
Oktoberfest's kicked off to a great start, with Dog Soldiers and Jacob's Ladder so far. You'll also notice a aesthetic change for the duration, just a little celebration for the month. I've also been hosting a number of horror games on the Livestream, including Afraid of Monsters, Korsakovia, AVP2 Alien and Human campaigns, and even a couple Left4Dead playthroughs. I'm open to suggestions for more games to play, though I have my hands full with Oktoberfest as it is.
In actual traditional-gaming-related news, the Eclipse Phase books should be shipping this month, and I should get my copy around mid-October (I hope). I haven't started the character generator yet, mostly due to a lack of time. I've also failed to make good on my promises to clean out the archives (including combining quest threads, yes I saw your request Gnome, I'll clean up the Dwarf Quest threads and compile them under the proper roof), change up the site content, rework the layout, and even related topics like finishing my Artificial Girl 3 horror story. Work's been too busy for me to take time to really do any of these things, and I continue to fill my off-hours with real-life chores instead of online chores. I'll get them done, though, they're on my to-do list, I swear.
There seems to be a problem with the VPS instance at the moment. It went away! HOT POCKEEEETS Emergency server is thisisnotatrueending.com directly if shit really hits the fan, but it's 5am so I'm going to bed.
In non-outage-related news, I did a Livestream of Afraid of Monsters last night. It was a lot of fun. I might clip it down and make a Let's Play out of it on YouTube or something, or string together the entire play into a single two-minute clip accompanied by Yakkety Sax. WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS? You can view it below or go to the stream at http://www.livestream.com/lordlicorice
Edity: I made a new streaming page, which includes everything from my Livestream to instructions on connecting to the SHOUTcast.
We've started playing Dungeons & Dragons Online recently, so I figured I'd post the announcement here so people can make sure they join the right server: We're currently on Khyber, so join us if you're interested! It just went free-to-play and we're going to start a sup/tg/ guild, so stop by #ddo if you're interested.
In other news, October's right around the corner, and I'm going to try and host a horror movie marathon. I plan on running at least one movie a night, every night, all October long, culminating in 24 hours of awesome on Halloween itself. I've still got that pile of 100 public domain and disowned grindhouse movies to play, and a number of more modern, mainstream classics such as Event Horizon. I'll likely be streaming around 10:45-11pm Eastern Mon-Sat, though it's possible I'll skip a day or two here and there. (Normally I'd ask for recommendations, but I've got a massive surplus right now. If you're interested in hosting the stream, let me know!)
Finally, I've been reading the hell out of Eclipse Phase lately and actually plan on hosting a couple games. Amazing! I'm also going to likely make yet another character builder, since I haven't seen any yet outside of custom Excel spreadsheets. It's going to take some effort (there are a lot of variables to work with) but I think it'll be worth the effort. I may need help with data entry, but we'll see.
Edity: Apropos of nothing:
It appears there's more than a little interest in doing some Infiniminer, so I'm going to set up a Brominer server this evening (around 10pm EDT). I don't really have any details other than we're going to be broing it up like bros; it's been so long I don't even remember if Hamachi is required anymore or if you can just connect to the server normally. The password will likely simply be loldongs, like it is on every other gaming server I've ever hosted forever.
Edity 10:27pm: Server's up! thisisnotatrueending.com, password loldongs.
Apparently something changed during 4chan's server move, and the archive isn't getting new threads or posts. I'll fix it later this evening.
Edity: I had a sneaking suspicion that I already knew what the problem was, and I was right: I had an ooold zip.4chan.org entry in my HOSTS file, which overrode actual DNS. "When are those IPs ever going to change?" I had thought to myself at the time. "I'll take it out later. It's not a problem right now."
The archive's fixed again. Maybe tomorrow or the day after I'll cull the archives a bit; as Gnome noted, Dorf Quest could use its own entry ala Ruby Quest at this point (and yes I know some of the entries are screwed up for DQ, I'll get that too), and it's been months since I've deleted shitty threads.
Edity #2: Apropos of nothing:
Andre the Giant was the biggest dwarf who ever lived. We know that he was secretly a dwarf because only a dwarf could ever say "It usually takes two liters of vodka just to make me feel warm inside."
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SILVERMYR! I mean me. Happy birthday to me.
It's that lovely time of year again! The filthy mongoloids that wired my house decided it was a smashing idea to wire the entire living room and half of the basement on the same circuit. This means that the server, television, air conditioner, freezer, washing machine, and dehumidifier are on the same circuit (the latter due to the fact other filthy mongoloids improperly sealed and insulated the basement), among countless other devices. Oh, and the microwave on completely random occasion.
So, you can probably guess how often the server loses power.
If the site is down for no reason, it's the damned power. Again. Just as an FYI. Ffffff.
It's been a while since we've had a Dwarf Fortress succession game, and now we've got two running concurrently: Issyl's and recon's. Check out Strike the Earth! for more information on the games, as well as the archive of previous forts and journals.
I've had a copy of UnrealIRCD and Anope running on the Xen server for a long while, but I just haven't gotten off my fucking ass to move people over to it. I've finally rectified that; if you're connecting as new, you shouldn't see any difference, since irc.thisisnotatrueending.com has been updated to the new location. The Java applet should work as well (in a minute, still poking at it). All registered channels and nicks were moved without a problem since it's the same everything.
This move is partly for stability (prompted by yet another fucking thunderstorm) as well as being easier to administer remotely. That's about it; there shouldn't be any real performance changes, though with luck people will find themselves getting peered less often.
That's all. If you can't get to the "right" server the first time, connect via xen.thisisnotatrueending.com directly (DO NOT USE THIS IN THE LONG-TERM IN CASE I HAVE TO CHANGE IT BACK).
Edity: Oh yeah, and:
(Cut for length)Goodnight, sweet King of Pop~
~Lord Licorice
So let this be a lesson to you, kids: update your WordPress installations periodically so shitty Javascript hackery doesn't end up embedded in your outdated security-hole-ridden shitware. Even if it's not your WordPress.
Seriously. If you have a WordPress installation and you're reading this, go just update your shit right now, even if you've done so in the past couple months. Just do it. At least it will help mitigate the number of things that can go wrong in your pathetic, worthless life (just like me!). (No, sup/tg/ wasn't affected. I just hate everything, is all.)
We've been playing the shit out of Team Fortress 2 recently, especially since the delicious Sniper and Spy update, so I figured I'd at least announce what's been eating up a lot of our time. Sure, it's not exactly /tg/-related (even the 'rollthedice' plugin crashes the damn thing), but... you know... shut up..
Anyway, if you'd like to join us, the server is xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:27016. On the occasions where it's got a password, said password is "loldongs". Here's our current list of active custom maps (in addition to all the usual maps):
You can find the manual downloads for these maps here (may need 7zip to decompress). I'm working on creating custom respawn times in config files for most maps, since a number of the maps have pretty crappy defaults; if you have a recommendation (time for each time) I'll put it in. We're using a new fast respawn plugin for controlling wave times since apparently Valve doesn't like servers overriding map settings in some cases...
Speaking of plugins, other than an "instant respawn for defeated team during humiliation time" plugin, we're not using much. Once I update SourceMod so RTD/slap/slay commands work again, if you have suggestions for plugins, maps, or anything else, let me know. I also need to come up with a list of rules for the server that's more descriptive than "don't be stupid", especially for admins. "Micspam is fun until it's not" is hard to write a rule around.
There's a freeware game called Infiniminer that was released a few days ago, and it was a lot of fun last night. It's a FPM (First Person Miner), like Dwarf Fortress without the carp, in 3D, and first-person. You mine ore to build blocks, jump pads, dynamite, and other things. The object is to either find a certain amount of gold and jewels before the opposing team, or simply building neat structures deep in the earth (while trying not to fall into the lava). It's way more fun than it should be.
As noted, it's freeware, and easiest to play using Hamachi. When you download it, make sure you also download the XNA Runtime or it will instantly crash when you run it (a lot of people including myself skipped that step). Once you get it, make sure you choose Edit Player Configuration in the start menu item to give yourself a name (if you're making a server, which is shit-easy to do, likewise increase the ore from 10% to like 80% if you want to do a lot of building). Then just pop the Hamachi IP into Direct Connect and tada, minin' fun.
Edity: I decided to add a couple screenshots of gameplay. Here I've dug down a bit into the earth and found some lava:
Stupid lava. I decided to build a bridge over it, a ladder to the surface, and used some blue force field blocks next to the ladder to make it harder for the pesky blue team to use it - blue players will fall through it while red players will be able to walk over it:
Special thanks to Ralewyn for finding this for us.
Edity 2: Quick note, current server is MisterSyn's (see IRC for details), but his version is 1.3 while the latest is 1.4. You can get 1.3 here. NEVERMIND HE IS NOW 1.4ING NOW 1.5 GET IT NOW DO IT
HOPE YOU LIKE EPILEPSY!
(Cut for length)Happy very belated birthday to Jeanstealer! If you really want a headache, try this one. Also, here's a non-seizure-inducing static version.
Edity: okay god christ that's enough oh jesus
Happy April 1, guys! I hope you enjoy the, ahem, alternate frontpage indexes. (Frontpage stuff will probably be a little wonky, like comment posting bringing you to the right page, but you're big boys and girls and can deal with it for a day or two.)
Yes, that's indices plural. Hit Refresh on the index to cycle through them at random. Enjoy! You can check out the 2008 pages here.
Edity: April '09 can still be seen here.
Edity II: By popular request (one), here are the individual links:
April 2008:
April 2009:
OH GOD I ACCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE RUBYQUEST
IS THIS BAD
Someone pointed out that the highest ranks of the archive are flooded with Ruby Quest threads, and how this made it difficult to view things if you were interested in, oh, I don't know, anything else. After making fun of him for a while, I decided he was right and added a new feature: Thread Collections.
Thread Collections are special, manually-created compilations of famous threads that are separate from the normal archive. These threads still appear to a 'show all' or tag search, but standard view and score sorting will hide them. A single entry will appear at the top of the 'highest votes' page (ala Editor's Choice) to give them the spot they deserve without taking up more space than necessary. There's also a sidebar link to view all Thread Collections (when and if I make more, such as Dorf Quest and Joan Quest).
So, if you jump into the archive looking for Ruby Quest and don't see it immediately, click the link on the sidebar or sort threads by score to get to the page. For a direct link, the Ruby Quest thread collection is here..
After witnessing a particularly shitty thread get archived, I realized I hadn't purged it in a while and have taken a cursory swing at the lowest votes. I really need to just kill everything under a certain value but the more personal touch lets me save things that deserve saving elsewhere before giving it the axe. Here's the latest list; as usual, anything deleted is put into the graveyard for a time. All graveyard items previous to these have been deleted.
The title says it all: PaintChat sucks and I'm fucking tired of dealing with the broken, outdated, outmoded pile of fail. For some fucked up reason there doesn't seem to be a good replacement that anyone knows of that isn't either some paid piece of shit corporate collaboration tool (that still doesn't do what we want) or is a fucking hypothetical ("We've got a Java-based PChat-esque application but we haven't got a public release yet and our last update was 2006!").
So, post your suggestions here. If someone just knows of a modified PChat 3.66 that has working admin functionality and doesn't, you know, shit the bed for no reason at random intervals, please post that as well.
So, Garry's Mod's been a lot of fun lately; usually the game outlives its novelty after a day or two, but playing with a number of friends and using cool maps really makes a hell of a difference. The amount of shit you can do with it when you factor mods into the equation extends its entertainment value by orders of magnitude.
Speaking of which, I think it's time for a new post that has updated information about all the mods and maps we've been using lately. Some of these addons require SVN to download, so get Tortoise SVN. Once installed, right-click your desktop, choose SVN Checkout from the list, and enter the URL provided in the entry. You'll connect to the SVN server and download the latest copy of all the files. When you're done, just move it to garrysmod/garrysmod/addons. You can update your copy at any time by right-clicking the folder and choosing SVN Update.
And now, the list (last updated 4/14/09):
First the light stuff: We've been playing a lot of games recently, and the topic is getting ridiculously long, so here's the breakdown:
I think that covers the gaming. Now on to more serious stuff: /tg/ is not /b/-lite or /d/ — Monster Girls, and neither is #suptg. We've all been pretty laid back about topics and discussions, but Jesus Christ, conversations about the perfect position in which to fuck a futa is the breaking point.
It should have gone without saying, but I guess we need a rule now just to make it clear for everyone: No more porn discussions, /d/ shit or talking about your goddamned fetishes or announcing your intent to or current activity of masturbation. Are we trying to make the IRC worksafe? No, that's stupid. It's just making clear what should have been unwritten social rules, which in hindsight is probably too much to expect given this is a companion site to a board on 4chan.
Again, this doesn't mean we're completely outlawing all discussion relating to certain topics. It just means we don't want to fucking hear about your sex life and sexual proclivities. Are you a furry? Foot fetishist? Dogfucker? Necrophiliac? That's nice. Just don't tell the rest of us when you're sneaking off to the morgue to rub yourself on your lucky dog's paw.
We may have a few other rules coming up but that's the major one. It's not that much to ask, it's just sad it has to be asked out loud at all.
The requested URL /tg/imgboard.html was not found on this server.
jesus christ what did you guys do this time
i cant leave you alone for a few hours without someone eating /tg/
goddamnit you guys
I've made yet another generator thing. This one's for Arkham Horror Investigators, and lets you quickly create Investigator sheets. It's a bit more niche on /tg/ than the other generators, but it was also a lot easier and faster for me to code.
For those of you wondering why my generator is superior to Strange Eons, it's not "superior" as much as:
If you're looking to create a full, professional expansion for Arkham Horror, use Strange Eons, but otherwise my online generator's probably more useful to most people. I'll be expanding it with Ancient Ones, Heralds and Guardians next.
Next up after that, WotC has personally offended me by forcing me to download and install a 44MB "demo" of their D&D Insider online character thing, which includes the fucking .NET framework. This is un-fucking-acceptable. It actually asked me to restart after hanging for a good four minutes at the end of the installation. The fucking nerve! I'm going to check it out and see if I can't do better than these hacks.
I love this place but Jesus Christ can we stop with the power-outage-inducing storms already, goddamn
Oh yeah, the power went out for a few hours today. It wasn't even that bad out, but windy + heavy wet snow = suddenly dongs. Also I found out that attempting to load websites on my cell phone to see if I can temporarily migrate the domain elsewhere caused it to lock for a good thirty seconds and then fail. Damnit.
Once again something minute changed on 4chan, and the threads have been kinda fucked up a bit for the past few days. I've fixed the issue and made sure it won't happen again, since now it'll just append a predefined header on the top of the page above the posts. It'll also remove the the adbars from the pages, not because I want to deprive 4chan of revenue, but because they just 404 and it's a worthless waste of time to keep trying and failing on them. Pages should load far faster now.
I've also modified the way the archive script works to ease the "load", more or less; it'll now update a thread every two hours until it finally 404s, after which it'll toggle off and not check that thread again. It will only disable on 404, so any other weirdnesses shouldn't hurt it... but, who knows. So, if you see anything weird at all, please let me know immediately at [email protected] or on the IRC.
Edity: Happy Birthday Aun!
So I was enjoying the shit out of Arkham Horror today and realized I'd put off updating the Dark Heresy Character Generator long enough. Really, a few hours of my time to make sure the product works, I should be ashamed of myself!
Anyway, it turns out there were only a small handful of changes, including one that made me re-fix something back to the way I'd originally had it. The errata list is here; as you can see, some changes I fixed for existing sheets, others I've left up to the players to fix. Any affected sheets are clearly marked with a note about the errata.
I've been considering going and adding the ability to advance your character to the DH chargen, but that's a massive undertaking (arguably large than the base generator itself). I'm going to look into it though, and if I'm feeling crazy I might give it a shot. I'll let you all know either way.
Nothing else to report. Random link to something awesome, random link to something extremely fucking useful.
Edity: The link for the repair kit is gone, fortunately I thought ahead and have it hosted locally. (88MB, please be mindful of my poor bandwidths ;_;)
Happy Valentine's Day.
Edit: also relevant:
oh hai, i upgraded ur suptg
That is, I finally got off my ass and took the twenty minutes necessary to create Hamachi network listings for /tg/. It's pretty straightforward, if anyone has ideas for things to add to it, let me know and I'd be happy to improve it. It was so quick I feel like I missed something, so please feel free to point out what I'm obviously missing.
Now that I've added this, maybe I'll get to work on some of the other shit that's been piling up on my to-do list (I'm looking at you, Dark Heresy chargen). ... or maybe I'll play moar City of Heroes. Decisions, decisions...
Edity: Tags are now required on thread archival, since tags actually do shit now and people use them to find like threads.
You can't be a Noble Psyker. [citation needed] Under the actual Noble Born segment ( IH pg. 16 ) is a list of possible character paths, a Psyker is not one of them. Fantesy Flight has posted erreta about the incorrect table on pg. 20 Table 1-7 Career Paths. [citation needed] Even though I wish I could be a Noble Psyker it is just not possible. [NPOV]
Seriously now, you've emailed me twice and can't provide any verification for your claims, and apparently ignore my requests when I ask for them. I'm not going to bother FFG over something that may be working as intended.
So, does anyone know where to find this mythical Inquisitor's Handbook errata, or can anyone provide a compelling argument one way or the other regarding the conflict between the tables (especially taking into account the information at the link)?
Recently, the archive tags have proved to be very useful as a way to link multiple threads together. For example, this tag search for Ruby shows all of the Ruby game threads, and this tag search for Collective Game shows every thread in the same genre, including Dorf Quest, The Adventuers of Joan and a couple of one-shots.
However, I've had to manually fix some of these tags to help keep them all linked up properly, so it's occurred to me that maybe I need to elaborate on them. If you're adding a thread to the archives, you absolutely should include tags to help people locate them later on. It's especially important if it's part of a series, e.g. the Ruby Quest threads, so that people looking to read all of the content can find them all by the tag.
When tagging a thread, you should include both a specific and a general tag. The Ruby Quest threads are a perfect example; their tags are Ruby, Collective Game, allowing people looking for the specific Ruby threads to find them while letting people looking for threads in the same vein to find more of that type. Don't use ultrageneric, useless terms like epic or tg (are you fucking kidding me?), and try to use terms that others have before you (dorf fortress and dwarf fortress both bring up two completely different sets of threads... and don't get me started on the variations of waaaaagh).
When in doubt, more tags are better than less or none at all, but don't go overboard; the tags Tenacious D, Macross Plus, Spinal Tap, Cyberpunk, Live Aid, Wargames are only ever used once apiece and therefore are little better than no tags at all. They're too specific; a better tag for this thread would have been simply campaign ideas. (Not that this stupid thread should have been archived at all...)
I'm going to write one of those "popular tags" pages that show how many tags are used how many times, which should help users archive threads with useful tags. Again, the ideal tags for a thread contain one specific term and one general term, without going overboard in either direction.
Oh, and one last thing: UBOAAA
Edit: OH YEAH AND PUT A GODDAMN COMMA BETWEEN THE TAGS, GOD
Edit 2: Here you go: a visual representation of tag usage on sup/tg/, as seen pretty much everywhere else tags are used.
FIXED THAT FOR YOU
IS THAT BETTER
Edit: FIXED AGAIN. WHAT NOW
Ahaha, oh man these are fucking awesome. We watched Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter and Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory tonight. We are going to watch all 100 of these motherfuckers, they are that much win.
See the previous post for a full listing of the titles available. Anything crossed out has been viewed, anything bolded is transcoded and ready for viewing. I've also started grabbing awesome ones that either looked interesting or I saw three seconds of and decided was campy awesome (see One Frightened Night).
For anyone that wants to show their own horror (or horrible) movies, my NSV tutorial is still here, waiting to be read and used.
So, about a year ago (last Christmas in fact) I bought a pair of 50-DVD movie packs from Amazon: Tales of Terror and Chiller Classics. Usually these packs contain ancient, dusty public domain movies, or grindhouse movies so awful or obscure that copyright's been lost or virtually disowned. I was going to play some of them for Halloween but they were borrowed and not returned until just today.
Now that I have them again, I think I'd like to start playing them over the SHOUTcast, likely starting with the oldest of the old-school: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Other than that, well, here's a list of the movies in each pack. Post a comment on your top five picks and I'll take the best and queue them up.
(Cut for length)Update: Bad Taste has been selected. I'm going to have to veto Manos, I could barely stand watching it with MST3K and this isn't the MST3K version. Keep voting!
Edit #2: It looks like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Vampire's Night Orgy and The Long Hair of Death are also winners. I managed to find my copy of A Chinese Torture Chamber Story so that makes five, with a runners-up tie between Virus and Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory.
I'm not entirely certain when we'll start the movie showing, but probably this weekend. Maybe tomorrow night (Friday).
So, I haven't posted in a while, I figured I'd just make a quick note so I won't keep forgetting. I've gotten a couple emails about this and that: Nobles can't be Psykers so I need to fix the chargen, some info on Gametable (basic synopsis, in fact I'll probably do this right now done), a link to a cool dwarf name generator (again, a change I can make now done), and a request to create a database of Hamachi rooms (still don't see the point personally but a lot of people have requested it, so apparently it's useful to someone!).
That's about it. Site's been fine, the Ruby threads are pretty damn popular. Oh, if the site crashes, it's probably the Christmas tree causing the power to hiccup. I'll take it down tomorrow or Sunday, so that should stop happening.
Nothing else of interest. Move along, nothing to see here!
Just a real quick note, I added the Ruby threads 1-4 to the archive in case you wanted to go upvote those all purple so they'll fit in with the others. There's another thread or two I'm going to add as well, if they seem also awesome. Also someone kindly pointed out a problem in the DH chargen which I will rectify tonight or tomorrow or something (Nobles can't be Psykers).
So just like before, some people are apparently having problems with caching and can't find the right IP for the IRC. It's 24.128.254.61. You guise need to become more self-reliant in terms of fixing problems, I swear. Go learn about dig, ipconfig /flushdns, and closing down your applications and reopening them if they're getting old information.
oh god I'm finally home
The power came back on at some point today (Saturday), and my house is ice cold, but it's got power. No phone, but it still has internet, a phenomenon I still don't really understand. I'm going to have to call Comcast shortly and yell at them to fix my shit. But we've got cable TV and internet, so the site's back up (as you are currently reading it).
At this time (5:23pm EST) I haven't set the IRC back over to sup/tg/. Hugbox and Dicemaid are currently sitting all alone. SO RONERY. I'll switch the IRC back over after I talk to Syn about server linking and shit. THANK YOU AGAIN SYN FOR PROVIDING IRC WHILE THE SITE WAS DOWN.
I'll get that Flickr photo stream up fairly soonish, after everything else around here has settled down. We had to move out all of the canned goods and compressed canisters of various types (e.g. hairspray) to ensure they didn't explode, and all food to make sure it didn't go bad; we're in the process of moving everything back in. Fortunately, the driveway is plowed so I don't have to go out and shovel yet, though a storm's coming on Sunday...
So it appears sup/tg/ is more or less back, hooray!
god its snowing on topo f everything eles in my life sucking
still no power, thye rewired the outside of my house and the utility poles all up and down ando ther houses have power and I still don't and now there's a half-foot of snow down with more coming Sunday
everything sucks
also some asshole says "Merry Christmas to you, too, Cultist-Chan, hope the season treats you well. :3 PS: Kinda missing you." he made me wait before going to bed to put this here oh god why does everyone hate me
so tired so cold
whats so merry about christmas i wont even have a home
Tonight marks the one-week anniversary of a sup/tg/ without power, and there's no real ETR in sight. The power company said 95% of my town would be fully restored by Wednesday, and it's now Friday, and I have no idea when my home's electricity is going to be restored. To make things just super special peachy keen I've been super fucking sick the past few days; I've taken Wednesday and Thursday off from work, and will likely take Friday and Saturday off as well if things continue to deteriorate. I'm on Round 2 of antibiotics for this motherfucker and I'm not getting better.
I'd say something about hoping when the power comes back but at this point I have no goddamn answers at all. My grandmother's house is one of the only two on this side of the street that has power; the rest of this very long road is dark, and one road over is main street. If houses this close to the hub of town still don't have power, what fucking luck do I have? If this is "95% restored" how many fucking people live here? Did they misplace a decimal? Maybe 9.5% is restored. For fuck's sake. I'd ask if it could get any worse but it always can. At least I'm not hospitalized yet.
Just a general update. Power's still out, and with 153k homes without electricity in NH (state of emergency declared, schools closed, etc. etc.) it's not likely to return anytime particularly soon. Best estimates are sometime later this week, hopefully by the weekend. I need to make a point of moving certain pages off of sup/tg/ and onto the Xen machine here, like perhaps the DH chargen, and try getting a three-way (lol he said threeway) IRC network going between sup/tg/, Xen and Syn's network.
Nothing else of note, things are as they have been. Still sick, going Round 2 on the antibiotics. I'll try not to die or anything.
So apparently 1) mIRC is a pile of fucking AIDS-riddled rotting cowshit and caches IP addresses needlessly, and 2) nobody fucking tells me anything because they all expect me to be goddamned psychic. I changed the IP for irc.thisisnotatrueending.com (technically I replaced the CNAME with an A record set to the correct address, but I just lost 99.999% of you with that so Ill continue). Apparently people aren't able to connect for some dumb shit reason. If irc.thisisnotatrueending.com doesn't work for you try using the direct IP 64.247.123.93 instead.
And if shit doesn't work, for fuck's fucking sake email me or something, goddamnit I'm not fucking psychic
fuck
christ
Just a general update. Power's still out, and with 153k homes without electricity in NH (state of emergency declared, schools closed, etc. etc.) it's not likely to return anytime particularly soon. Best estimates are sometime later this week, hopefully by the weekend. I need to make a point of moving certain pages off of sup/tg/ and onto the Xen machine here, like perhaps the DH chargen, and try getting a three-way (lol he said threeway) IRC network going between sup/tg/, Xen and Syn's network.
Nothing else of note, things are as they have been. Still sick, going Round 2 on the antibiotics. I'll try not to die or anything.
So it turns out that the electrical cables were ripped straight out of the side of my house by a falling branch, so it may very well be quite a while before I get power back. In addition to the fact the rest of southern NH is in something of a crisis right now, my landlord is the type of guy that will get in a pissing contest with the power company over whose responsibility it is to reattach the duplex to the grid, with myself and my family in the middle. It would be a miracle to get power back by Tuesday; factor in the feet-dragging of my landlord, we're looking at maybe Thursday or Friday as a worst-case scenario.
On the bright side, I have a new desktop wallpaper. ORIGINAL CONTENT. I'll have a Flickr stream up of some of the cooler photos I took of the ice storm in a little while, but at the moment I'm a bit busy doing some work-related activities and continuing to try and ensure shit works right. Syn's server seems to be handling the IRC very well - thank you again Syn <3 - so we should be all set on that front for a while. Again, can't really do much about the archive or any of the other services.
That's about it, just wanted to give a basic status update. Enjoy your electricity. Jerks.
Hey guise, LL here. Pool's closed due to massive ice storm; most of Southern NH (anywhere near trees really) is without power right now. We happened to be in the perfect band of weather where it wasn't cold enough to snow but just cold enough for the rain to turn to ice as it touched everything, so just about every individual blade of grass is coated in an eighth of an inch of ice. It's beautiful chaos here.
Note! sup/tg/ is fine; it's just without power. No data was lost. I have the site backed up twice and an older archived copy on a thumbdrive. Shit's fine, no worries. We just lack electricity to physically operate the server.
Of course, sup/tg/ is hosted on a network where the power gets knocked out if it so much as rains too hard so of course I had no hope in hell when this shit came through. Within two minutes' drive of my house this afternoon I found three downed powerlines (two of which still had the branches on them) and a huge fucking tree snapped in half blocking the road. It's fucking madness out there.
Given the state of disarray, and the simple volume of downed trees, it looks like the pessimistic estimates of "power by Sunday" are looking like a reality. I'm on dialup AOL at my grandmother's house right now, so I'm not really going to be able to do much more than put up this temp. page on the safe, warm, snuggly Xen server in Boston and wait for my house to come back up. The Meebo chat above is about the most I can do right now; installing IRCD onto the Xen machine is probably not going to happen unless I really, really, really get bored here. And trust me, I'm going to be having to decide between installing IRCD or killing myself with power tools to alleviate the boredom before I go through that particular nightmare on dialup.
I'll see you guise in a while, I'll check in every so often. Enjoy your
traditional gaeman in the meantime. If there are awesome threads - and I
mean, mind-blowingly fantastic threads - if you save them and forward them
to [email protected]
I'll manually add them to the archive. (Remember, use IE or the like to save
full HTML plus images, then use DownloadThemAll to get the full-sized
pictures.) For those of you looking for your
gaming fix, the traditional backup room has been #suptg on Rizon, I believe.
If you're looking for an IRC game or the DM or whatever, check there.
Update 3:27: MisterSyn has graciously provided his IRC for the interium. I've updated the irc.thisisnotatrueending.com to the new IP, 64.247.123.93. Thanks again Syn!
Enjoy yourselves, sup/tg/ will return in a while.
FINE NO MORE UBOA ARE YOU HAPPY.
Anyway, it's been a pretty long while since I posted, and like a thousand years since I last did any cleaning at all to the shit threads list, so I'm going to hit it like the fist of the north star. Same deal as usual, I'm going to link the deleted threads and you can decide if they've got some redeeming factors. No one ever has so I don't expect this time to be different really.
And away we go.
(Cut for length)Okay that's good for the moment. I may do more later.
Edity: Jesus Christ I just deleted 46 47 threads and there are still 1137 in the archive
Fuck me sideways
Happy Thanksgiving!
(Cut for length)
jesus christ these are so fucking adorable
holy shit
So we've been playing the shit out of the Left4Dead demo recently. It's a lot of fun and it's pretty much sold me on the full version; I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of two of the twenty total levels as it is (out of four five-level campaigns), so my perceptions about its "shortness" don't seem to be a factor, especially as the game is nigh infinitely replayable. Throw in the sheer effort others have put into shoehorning zombie modes into non-genre games (UT2004, CS:S, etc.), I can't imagine the Steam community not leaping all over this.
... I had to pause here for twenty minutes as I wracked my brain trying to find it, but here's the best example: dotd_crookcounty. Look at this fucking thing. It's goddamned beautiful. Look at the sheer fucking size of this map. The download's somewhere along the lines of 80MB. (Yes, I realize it was originally a bomb defusal map, but the author repurposed it when he realized its true calling: zombies.)
Anyway, now that I've wasted a lot of time, I'm running two Left4Dead instances on the Xen server. They are both at xen.thisisnotatrueending.com; at the moment, the private server is on port 27016 (password is derp) and the public server is on 27017. To reach them, you need to enable developer console under keyboard settings, hit ~ to show the console, type openserverbrowser to bring up the server menu, then enter xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:2701# into the Add Favorite window, and then you'll be able to connect. You cannot add the server via Steam, it has to occur within L4D itself. (Hopefully that will change once the full game is out...)
I think that's about it, I had something else to note but forgot. Oh well!
Jeanstealer bought a domain yesterday - Le Fae Verte, to be exact - and I set her up with delicious DNS and a Wordpress installation. I also set up Simple Picture Gallery Manager for her, a PHP-based photo gallery thingamajig. It's very clean and friendly, and works like a charm if you've only got a few dozen images, since it relies entirely on PHP to do its thing.
So, of course, when I tried to apply it to the sup/tg/ image page - 1093 images, to be exact - it promptly shat itself in fear and cowered under the bed. Since SPGM was wholly inadequate for the massive image needs of sup/tg/, and since the other ready-made picture gallery software out there that uses MySQL seemed to hate me and/or suck, I spent... five or six hours today writing my own picture gallery software in PHP and MySQL (not counting the two or so hours I spent yesterday writing thumbnail generation scripts).
However, it works beautifully and I'm very happy with the results: now, instead of scrolling through an unhelpful Apache directory listing, the sup/tg/ Images page will let you actually see the fucking things before clicking on them.
I'm going to do the same to the art sections and probably clean up the Images and Artwork page to reflect the new galleries... but not tonight. No, I really should go to bed... instead I'm going to eat a sandwich, and play some Dead Space or something (still haven't beaten it!).
Happy Veteran's Day, incidentally!
One last thing. Apparently some people are unaware that we have an articles page that you really should visit. There's some good stuff in there, particularly Bob Smith's reviews of weeaboo fightan robots, Mitchell_Henderson's articles on HeroClix, and the huge pile of neat stuff by PurpleXVI.
As with just about everything else around here, anyone's free to submit an article on anything vaguely /tg/-related, so send 'em in!
In other news, I wrote a tutorial on streaming movies on the SHOUTcast. It's a fairly involved process and requires a lot of ripping, encoding and transcoding, so I figured a general tutorial will help people get most of the way there. It would be nice if it were easier, but this is as easy as it will ever get.
FUCK YEAH OBAMA
I have some actual news today, what are the odds? The first, and happy news, is that Earthflame has completed the latest version of ArtifIce: The Game of Machine Intelligence, wherein the players are AIs of various sorts - from rogue code on the net that gains sentience to spaceship pilots to maintenance robots run amok. The newest version, v2, is available here.
In sadder news, Earthflame today announced that he's going to be taking a break entirely from roleplaying games and the gaming community as a whole for a while for health reasons. This means, unfortunately, that his work on Mosaic and Eurid are at a standstill, and he won't be attending or DMing any games he had scheduled. He didn't provide any particular instructions to his players or contributors, though I'm sure he'd appreciate anyone that was working on them (e.g. playtesting) to continue doing so in his absence.
Please get well soon, Earthflame, we all miss you already. <3
In other news, Halloween is tomorrow! We'll be playing horror movies on the SHOUTcast pretty much all day, and hopefully we'll get some horror-themed games going as well. It should be a lot of fun. I don't know what movies we have scheduled yet, but we've got a collection of them, and I plan to have them going pretty much nonstop. If you want to DM a horror-heavy Dark Heresy, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies or similar game, now's definitely the time. (For those of you that hate the current color scheme, that will be going away November 1 as well.)
I don't really have anything important to say, I just wanted to post this.
Also I added the ability to view all by a particular author on the articles but most of you probably don't care yet. I've also added a "captcha" after some spammers posted a couple completely gibberish things and fully disabled all HTML on comments. (Spoilers, leave the CAPTCHA blank or it will fail.)
I'll clean out moar threads soonish. I've been playing too much Dead Space. Hopefully my free time will return when I'm not up until 5am playing that every day.
It's that time again! And man, is it ever overdue. The archive is up to an incredible 1,047 total threads, of which 178 are below -5, and 81 are under -8 (the point at which they generally stop appearing on the normal list). It's time for some delicious purging.
Much like previous rounds, any threads under -5 are up for deletion. They're not deleted immediately; they're moved to a graveyard for a period (I say "a week" but then forget after "a few minutes" and they're up for much longer). You'll find the list of deleted threads below, along with commentary on why it deserved purging outside of its score. (I do try to check threads that appear to at least have been contested before removing them.) This time around, the links to the deleted threads will be included in the list so you can see for yourself why they were so shitty. As usual, you can make your case for a given thread in the IRC or by email.
And now, on to the list:
(Cut for length)This list will increase as I go through them and delete more, so you may want to refresh if you're reading this shortly after it's been posted. If you're reading this days, weeks or months down the road, HELLO TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!
ps. why does everyone hate Dr. Skittles Bosch?
The very first post on sup/tg/ wasn't properly dated, so the exact date may be off in either direction by a couple days, but I'm fairly certain October 20th(ish) was the one-year anniversary of sup/tg/. (It's now October 21, but shhh.) This site has gone from a single webpage I put up to organize Timevan games, to, well, everything it is today: ~70 daily users on the IRC, over a thousand archived threads (which needs to be purged badly at this point), three character generators, and over 103,000 visitors and 792GB served so far this year alone. Quite an accomplishment given its origins and its nature as a simple companion site. If you're curious, you can view the first sup/tg/ post here (click Go Newer to scroll to newer posts).
I've been asked a couple times today in passing about where I'd like to see sup/tg/ go in the next three months or year. Honestly, I have no real plans right now; I'm quite pleased with the pace of its growth and where it is right now. I don't feel a need to expand the site into anything it won't become by itself; this entire project has come to life in a very organic fashion, which is part of the point. "If you build it, they will come" has always been the driving force behind this site, and it's going to continue that way for the foreseeable future.
As for upcoming features, I think I'm going to revisit some of the existing features and improve them anywhere I can. I have a tendency to wander from project to project almost at random, so a little more focus can only be a good thing. I've also learned in the professional world that you shouldn't put out new stuff until your existing material is in top shape, so things like the games and players listings, site organization, and archives need a once-over to clean out the crap and fix up the way they operate for the best utility.
To this end, I think the first step right now will be to set all the "relist weekly" games in the Games Listing to "no" and see which games get updated once they've completed. I also got a request from a "random fa/tg/uy" to make games accepting new players stand out in some way, so I'll do that as well. I'll repeat it a little bolder: Attention DMs: Games in the Games Listing are having "weekly" relisting turned off. Please update your games accordingly.
I feel like I should be saying something sappy, but it's a bit too much schmaltz I think. Still, I would like to thank everyone for making sup/tg/ the success it is today. Ruler, especially, has done such a wonderful, dedicated job keeping the site and community healthy; I know I can leave the site alone for any length of time and know he'll be keeping things together. So everyone thank him for helping to keep me from burning out, and make sure he goes to bed on time so he doesn't burn out.
Edity: I kinda fucked up the archive script a bit, threads were being archived but their info wasn't being added to the database. I've fixed the thread and will repopulate the list with the missing threads.
Man, today's been a busy day. We've already had four new articles added to the brand-new Articles section, including Schrödinger's review of an overhyped energy drink, CAPSLOCKGUY's announcement of his upcoming Let's Play: Dwarf Fortress, Purple's ramblings about game design, and MxSavior's tale of Razamon, Barbarian of the North. I haven't even had time to think about writing something myself yet, with all the articles I'm posting for people.
Some of my busy schedule included adding a new feature to the archive which likely few people will use or care about: the ability to sort archived threads by average score. This means a thread with a score of +10 out of 10 votes will appear higher on the list than a thread with +20 out of 40 votes. This required more work than it should have, but it was my own fault for coding it stupid in the first place, and it's another way to present data in a meaningful fashion so I'm happy.
Last but not least... uh. I forgot. We're going to try to watch Phantoms and Mind Warp this weekend, which should be fun. As always, you can submit articles to myself or Ruler or Purple or Jean or ... I don't think I gave Mx an email address yet but him too. One last note about the articles section is that I've added some legal licenses regarding copyright, so authors can feel safe that I'm not going to take their sweat, tears, blood and feces and use them for nefarious purposes. It's especially relevant (and the permissions especially strict) for articles regarding Game Design, so people can feel free to talk about their awesome projects without fear.
Oh, one last thing! I did end up moving Purple and Jean's articles on Exalted, Lacuna and Planescape into the actual Articles section, so if you're looking for them on the frontpage, they've been transferred over.
Huzzah, it's finally finished! The Articles section of sup/tg/ is now done. Once again, it took a few-hour up-until-5:40 day to do it, but it's done! The navigation is a bit shit at the moment, but whatever. People can start submitting articles for each of the categories, either by stopping in the IRC or shooting me an email. Ruler and Jean and Purple, too, and MxSavior soon!
I don't know how any of this is going to work yet, at least in terms of how new articles are announced; I might put a thin top banner at the top of the frontpage with the last couple posted articles visible, as well as any planned events or other notable things. I also don't have a particular posting schedule in mind, either; multiple simultaneous submissions will likely get posted one by one (preferably one a day), and I'll figure out how and when they'll get posted on a weekly basis.
Last and certainly not least, remember, this is for the benefit of /tg/ as a whole; you don't need to be a sup/tg/ regular to have an article posted. Hell, you could be visiting for the very first time today, and if you send something awesome our way it'll get posted. As long as the article's decent, we'll post anything related to any /tg/ topic, from your favorite DF stories to game design ideas or new homebrew systems to general (eloquent!) rants about why something sucks or rocks. So go ahead and submit your articles!
Yeah, so, just as T1000 finally made a visit to sup/tg/, and, literally, as he asked me if I wanted to play Timevan again, Comcast shit the bed. I have no fucking idea what's going on; the modem seems to think it's still got a connection, but the "cable internet" light is blinking at erratic intervals and the phone was silence, and now giving me a goddamned busy signal. I've never seen this happen before; they must be fixing something or changing a system somewhere and it's causing oddities that most normal people wouldn't notice at just before midnight-thirty, but it's rather disconcerting. The fact that their "lol voip" means I've got no 911 service when they fuck up my phone is actually, legitimately dangerous.
Oh man. It's threads like these that make me glad I started the archive. Slol Sluxslol indeed. I do believe I've found a new icon.
For those of you that haven't noticed yet, both the front page and archives now actually use those tags you've likely been ignoring for months. Both do partial tag matching, so a search for d'aw will likely come up with all the varying amounts of w, and a search for fag will bring up both drawfaggotry and writefaggotry. (You can edit the URL if you want to search for a specific tag, I'll add a real search function later.)
I haven't started the articles section yet, though Purple has gotten us off to a pretty good start with his post about Planescape, below. He says he's going to make more of them, so I'd better create the articles section before Purple floods us all with his verbosity. I suppose now's a good a time as any to tell you all that you can start emailing submissions if you're interested in having something put up on the site. This goes for game designers as well as reviews as well as, well, anything you want really. If you want to see your name in print and are too stupid to operate a Geocities account now is the time.
Edity: the poster above me is a faggot
It took me a bit longer than I had expected - 75% was futzing with the layout, the actual coding was cake - but I've added a comment system to the frontpage. Every post will automatically have comments available for your derogatory pleasure. (Also, I see nobody has topped my Angus Scrimm yet. I don't blame you. He's pretty awesome.)
The next step after this is, potentially, a polling system, although that's mostly just for fun; really, I want to add the articles section. Ralewyn had an idea for a kind of persistent world game experiment thing, and it reminded me how awesome it will be to have that sort of thing in an article format where people can post about it and discuss it. I also had a related idea, and would like to talk about it without filling up the homepage with it. I'd also like to start putting up story chapters from stuff on /tg/, so it has a home without being spread out over sagebombed crappy threads.
Nothing else of note to report yet, though this weekend looks like it's going to have a couple good movies (both in theaters and on sup/tg/ TV). Time flies so fast; it's already October 10 and I haven't watched nearly as many horror movies as I've wanted! I need to ship shit back to Netflix so I can get my annual favorites on DVD instead of the horrible VHS copies I own. Sad, yes, I might as well inscribe the plots in fucking cuneiform on tablets.
Edity: And just now I've added the ability to see and search tagged posts. Go me!
Edity the Second: And now the archive does it too, after all this time. Of course, given the hodgepodge of crazy tags, who knows how useful it'll be, but it's available now. (It also does partial matching on the tags so that should help a bit.)
Well, I still don't think anything can top Ruler's Goatse Headcrab, but I see your Alien and raise you Angus motherfuckin' Scrimm:
BOOOOOOOOOOOY
Presidential Debates in :30. I doubt it'll be as entertaining as Biden/Palin but it should provide some fun anyway. I'll be watching it from work on Hulu, and we'll be discussing it in #debates on the IRC. JOIN US!
So, the first sup/tg/ Horror Movie Night went off quite splendidly; we watched the original The Haunting from 1963 last night, and it was just as good as I remembered it. Our next movie night is scheduled for this evening. I'm not sure exactly what we're going to watch. I'd prefer older, public domain movies, partly because they're awesome and partly to avoid thorny legal issues; the exact same principles of watching a movie with friends in your own home and watching a movie with friends over the internet should apply, but given how copyright law has gone apeshit wild all over individuals' rights in this country there's potential for trouble. (While writing this post, I looked up "public domain" and "fair use" on Wikipedia, and it seems that everything ever forever is permanently covered depending on when it was created, if and when it was published, etc. etc. etc. ...)
If anyone knows a lawyer (real or internet) I'd be interested to know what the legal reasoning is behind allowing people in your home to watch a movie if they haven't paid for it, and how or why that wouldn't apply to internet viewing. Is all home viewing technically illegal? If I put a movie on at a party, is that legal? If someone peers in my window while I watch a movie, are they infringing copyright or am I? These questions and more, TONIGHT. Or not.
Hooray! It's finally done! The Maid RPG Character Generator is completed, including saving and viewing characters. This should let us record the best of the worst crazy characters we come up with. I did opt not to have a "Notes" section on each character; the characters stored on sup/tg/ for the various generators are more character summaries than fully working character sheets, so such a textbox doesn't really add anything to an entry. (Once UsuallyRandom provides a PDF character sheet, *then* players can add all the notes they want!)
Movie night was partially a success and partially a failure; on the one hand, I got it to work and just about everyone could connect with a couple exceptions, but the encoding was wrong (I used a too-low bitrate) and the audio ended up getting more and more desynchronized as time went on. I'm trying again, and hopefully tomorrow night we'll be able to watch this delicious film.
And now, I'm going to bed. We'll try to watch The Haunting again tomorrow night, probably around 1:00am EDT or so (no guarantees though). If anyone else would like to VeeJay, the steps are basically like this:
Live streaming video's easier, since you can just select an input and stream that, but getting from DVD to SHOUTcast is a bit of a trial. If anyone has a method of transcoding the IFO or ISO directly into NSV, please let me know, because I know it must be a painful hit on the film quality to keep reconverting it like this.
Edity: I just wanted to say that the first sup/tg/ Horror Movie Night went off beautifully. The Haunting was as creepy and scary as I remembered it and the stream was wonderful. We're going to be doing something else tomorrow (Monday) night, though we're not sure what yet. I would have made a new newspost but Ruler's masterpiece deserves to be up on the page for a while longer.
Oh yeah? I see your It and raise you a Thing:
Some people are afraid of clowns. Everyone is terrified of a fucking spider-head-thing. Also, Species? Pff, that wasn't scary, unless misogyny is terrifying. (Best part of the movie is where they find the guy with the needle, but it's just insulin for his diabetes; it's not like a male could possibly be evil in that shitfest and be hooked on heroin or something.) And as for House, the original was ntended to be horror-comedy; it's got too much silliness amidst the horror to have been a serious movie. (I prefer not to think about the sequel.)
The three movies I watch in rotation every Halloween are House on Haunted Hill (the remake, I didn't much like the Vincent Price original), Phantoms (based on the book by Koontz), and Event Horizon. You may roll your eyes at one or all of them, but they've each got some fucking spectacular moments. Phantoms has an empty town, brain-sucking moths, a few really good "boo" moments, and a bitchin' villain (or two). Hill has some great moments with Geoffrey Rush losing his mind, Jacob's Ladder-inspired special effects, and some pretty intense scenes (like when he's trapped in the scary-go-round, the asylum bit in the beginning, and anything with The Doctor). And, of course, Event Horizon. Haunted house in space. How can you not love that?
I completely reject the entire genre of torture-porn as "scary" because it's just idiotic. The only exception to the entire genre, which seemed to have actually started the whole mess, was the original Saw: a thriller-mystery with a brilliant plot and plenty of twists. I classify it as a thriller, not horror. The sequels basically forgot what made the first one such a smash success and all its imitators focused on the limb-removal instead of the "whodunit."
Anyway, yes, we're still on for tonight for horror movies. I'm fairly certain that SHOUTcast can stream video; I just need to get the right tools to encode a movie and then broadcast it to the SHOUTcast. Again, if anyone has any experience in doing this, please let me know as I'd love to have someone help me get this shit going as soon as possible.
I keep putting it off, so tomorrow night's the night: We're going to stream some movies on the SHOUTcast or by whatever means necessary, starting with The Haunting and In the Mouth of Madness. I don't know yet exactly how to do this, although I've got a few leads in that regard. Ideally I'd like to marathon some horror movies this month, and after that we'll see what else people want. I've got a sizeable (150+) collection of public domain or abandoned movies for sharing, and we can all heckle them together.
The chargen is almost completed, I copied the tables from Javascript to PHP tonight so it's just a matter of making it save to database and retrieve it. I could even potentially do this in work tomorrow, though I've got a lot of shit to do. We'll see.
Also BEARS. Also, nice icon, Purple. I see your Freddy and raise you a Jason:
YOUR MOVE.
Feh, have to get up early tomorrow, or I'd have this done tonight... quick note, the MaidRPG chargen is almost done, I just need to finish copying the tables into PHP and saving to the database (which is set up already). I really will try to force myself to have it done tomorrow otherwise.
For October's delicious HORRORFESTAN I'd like to start playing movies for everyone via SHOUTcast or some other medium, delicious grindhouse movies like Driller Killer or public domain stuff like the original The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill and old-old-old-school shit like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. If anyone knows the best way to accomplish this through SHOUTcast or some other application (ala /b/tv) let me know.
Also I'm making Ruler or Purple or someone update the frontpage just to get them to do it. So hopefully we can expect a post from one of them shortly. RIGHT GUYS.
So I did end up changing the color scheme at like 5:00 this morning, as you have probably noticed (unless you are colorblind, in which case the site might be hard to read, or you're blind blind, in which case I would ask how you got here). Normally I suck at the whole color selection thing, but then I found this wonderful Jack-O-Lantern palette over at COLOURlovers, and I decided to implement it there and then. I've left a couple pages alone and there are some spots where the CSS needs to be fixed but all in all I'm liking the new theme.
Also, I got my ASCII Art Reward from Bay 12 Games for donating a couple months ago. I'm on their Champions list now. Here was the art and story I got:
###,.@@@@,.///M The dwarves wandered up the side of the icy mountain. They crossed glacier after glacier in search of a spot to tunnel inward. It was said that great treasures abound in these mountains. Expedition leader Dornson held up his hand. A howling could be heard all around them, but the echoing canyons made its source impossible to pin point. Suddenly an icy boulder crashed into the mountain trail, nearly knocking a dwarf over the side. Dornson looked up to see the characteristic pointed ears of a blizzard man. "Oh creature of the mountain," said Thalman, the sculptor, "please let us share these great cliffs with you." "Yes," said miner Drak in a mocking tone, "ask your friend which way to the adamantine." Another boulder crashed down and Dornson told the two to hush. How would they pass this creature? Was there another way around the mountain? Another boulder crashed down, peeling part of the trail away. Now there was no way but back. The creature howled in a manner that almost resembled an evil laugh. Dornson reached for his crossbow.
Now I need to start a fortress in a glacier.
It's October first today, which means it's time to start delicious horrorfest. I'm going to try to watch a horror movie every night if possible, probably starting off with The Haunting from 1964. (Yes, that's right, the original, not the massively over-budgeted special effects shitpile from a few years ago.) I'm also going to finally sit down and actually finish reading the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I've had in ebook form forever but never finished.
Speaking of which, I'm also going to play the shit out of Arkham Horror... which is starting to inspire me to make a short browser-based game. I've loved randomly-generated events since I wrote a dungeon crawler on my TI-83 in high school (which included creepy events such as "The paintings seem to watch you as you pass"); now that I've refreshed myself on Javascript thanks to the generators, I can probably whip up a short little Lovecraftian browser game. We'll see, though, there are a lot of projects I need to complete (still need to set up the Maid RPG character database) before I can work on this one.
I've also got delicious candy corn, so, bonus. Mmm, candy corn. Maybe I'll update the site's CSS for a Halloween theme... no, will make changes later, it's 4:42am, must sleep damnit!
So, I'm going to the Deerfield Fair tomorrow in (hurrdurr) Deerfield, NH. I won't be around much, if at all, and I'm going to bed ridiculously early tonight (I can't even remember when "midnight" seemed "late" anymore) so I can get up at 6:30am. I intend to purchase an oversized, baked-just-that-minute honey glazed donut and delicious meat products of some kind or other, amidst what will probably be ceaseless rain. Yay!
The Maid RPG character generator is almost done, but I think I'll leave it off until tomorrow; I'm feeling a little feverish again and I've been coding all day for a variety of things, so a break would be nice. Some other people have access to update the frontpage now, so you can look forward to random things at random times from random people. Hooray! After this, I'm going to look at creating a comment system, then a poll system, and finally I'll put together the article section. (Yes, I could just use Wordpress or some shit like that, but really, it doesn't do anything that I can't do and it takes direct control out of my hands.)
Man, I'm really feeling feverish. That or it's just hot in here. I should go lie down or something. ... nah. It's not midnight yet.
So, I finally got off my ass and automated the frontpage news. Instead of just using Notepad and copypasta for new items, it's actually automated. Hooray for automation! I've also added an RSS feed, not that anyone will ever use it, but I recently developed one for another website for work and decided I might as well implement it while the memory is fresh.
In other other news, I'm going to be letting a couple other people update the frontpage with random shit, just to keep things lively. I'm still intending to do the rants/articles/fiction/whatever section, but for now letting a trusted few make general updates seems like a good start.
I'm going to have one of said trusted individuals make an update right now to test it, in fact...
So guess what I found waiting for me in the mail?
Ross Watson, senior RPG editor for Dark Heresy at Fantasy Flight Games, was kind enough to send me a free copy of both Arkham Horror and the expansion Kingsport Horror as a thank you gift for the Dark Heresy character generator.
Awesome. Now I just need to trick my friends into playing it with me. They trusted me with Catan, and one of them is a Lovecraft fanatic, so hopefully it won't be too hard to rope them into it.
OHGOD
I've added a new section for relevant /tg/-related sites to the sidebar. So far, I've got 1d4chan, CR 25 Hypermitotic Dungeon Master (the "This Just Happened" guy), Fantasy Flight Games (Dark Heresy), and Tony's currently empty Violent Bees. I've considered adding Dark Reign to the sidebar, but... I dunno. I certainly don't mind being linked, and they're not taking credit for my Dark Heresy character generator, but it would be nice to have been asked before they slapped it on their homepage sidebar. I only found out about it because someone from their forums mentioned their membership, and I happened to check out the site.
Anyway, this pile of links brings me to my actual question: What /tg/-related sites should be there? I guess FFG and VB don't really need to be there, but I don't want to have just two links. The only real site I can think of is 1d4chan. If anyone has suggestions for additional sites, or runs a /tg/-related site and wants a link, let me know.
So Comcast decided that I didn't need phone or internet service at 2am - who'll notice, amirite? - and everything went out for no apparent reason. It gave me plenty of time to work on the character generator without distractions, but it's seriously irritating. I'm trying to look up the string replacement function in Javascript, assholes! Give me my goddamn Google!
Oh, yeah, and the site was inaccessible as a result. Once again, it's here, you guys just can't get to it. Guess I'll just have to play The Witcher until it's back up.
Edity: UsuallyRandom, when you've got a moment, can you drop by the IRC? I had a couple questions, namely the kinds of notes you wanted and what to do about abilities like Giant Weapons when the weapons table is turned off.
Before I forget, a dear friend of mine asked me to give a link to his currently empty site, Violent Bees. He said giving him a link would make him get off his ass and put some content up, so here you go, Tony! It's under the sidebar, too, for those of you that look at those sorts of links.
Let's see, what else... oh, yeah. There are some general site changes I want to make, like:
The nice thing about sup/tg/ is that there's always something I could be doing to make it better, so I'm never stagnating. Of course, I did just pick up The Witcher, so that's going to be eating up some of my time between the changes.
I keep saying it, but I also would like to add some kind of article section. I don't know who will contribute or what they'll want to say, but it's something I've wanted to do for a little while. It'll happen one of these days!
Why do I do this to myself with the late nights? Anyway, Maid RPG character generator is looking good. It doesn't save characters yet and I think UsuallyRandom wanted me to add a comments field, but this looks pretty good and it lets you make the most goddamned ridiculous characters I've ever seen come out of a generator. It's like a Mary Sue Generator. I mean, just look at this:
Your name is Derp. You are 18 years old. You have pink eyes and pink hair, and wear a pink maid uniform. You are pure and cool; others describe you as unflappable, clean and fragile.
You are a vampire, with long fangs, pale skin, an aversion to light and an insatiable appetite. You know the spells necessary to summon demons, your tools of the trade being magic circles, a black cloak, and ancient books. Rather than a Western-style maid uniform, you wear a Japanese-style uniform featuring a kimono and an apron. For some reason, love just never works out for you; at this point, you've resigned yourself to your fate. You wield magic that lets you control the bodies and souls of the dead, your tools of the trade including skulls and black clothes.
In combat, you fight with a revolver. When you are extremely upset, you unleash violence on the other maids and the master.
Holy shit man. And yes, it really did manage to land on pink for hair, eyes and uniform. This chick is basically cotton candy with fangs. (Also the game recommends rolling two, and no more than three, random qualities... but where's the fun in moderation?)
Whoops. I have a bunch of services that I don't use which send me email reminders pretty constantly regarding their expirations. Since I don't want or need them, I just ignore the emails entirely... so when thisisnotatrueending.com expired I didn't notice right away. Oops! It's been renewed and should resolve just fine shortly. Most of you won't even notice unless your cache expired in the short interval between the DNS change and its restoration. But if you couldn't get to the site for a little while today (sorry Wearfe) it was because I am a gigantic idiot.
Just a quick note. The archive was making empty image files and not cleaning up after itself. Now it does. Hooray!
Man, I just spent way too long on this. Basically I discovered a security hole and closed it, but then spent three hours trying to allow the PDF generation utility to continue functioning normally. I've got it working again in a rather roundabout fashion; it's not perfect, but it does the trick. PDFs are now re-enabled for Dark Heresy.
Edity: I got mad at the sidebar at 6am and beat it up. Don't ask what it did; it knows what it did. Then Clarence made me do this:
It's like that all over the site now. Isn't CSS awesome? Also I will probably regret this tomorrow but right now it is fucking hilarious.
Just a quick note, I've turned off the PDF capability of the Dark Heresy character generator for the moment. I found a security error that has since been fixed, and haven't gotten around to re-allowing the PDF-generating .exe to, well, execute. I'll probably fix it tonight. If anyone else finds weirdness on the site, let me know and I'll fix that too.
Also also, happy birthday to Silver :D
Derp derp. I didn't get much done today; rather, nothing visible just yet. I added in a lot of information to the tables, but switched gears midway so that the Maid RPG character generator keeps everything on a single page before giving you a 'finalized' page afterward (ala the DH chargen). Ignore the old link, you can check out the latest progress here instead. UsuallyRandom is working on a writable PDF that will work like the one for Dark Heresy, so that's upcoming as well.
Also, happy birthday to Ruler :3
I was going to bed but Ruler was all "LL UPDATE THE WEBSITE YOU DON'T NEED SLEEP LL UPDATE DO IT" so now I am so there.
Anyway, I'm sure you've all heard that Maid RPG is out. Given the ridiculously hilarious characters you can create with its character generation, and given that it's 100% roll-based generation... well, you can probably guess where I'm going with this. It's far less data-intensive and edge-case-intensive than, say, Dark Heresy, so I think I'll have the Maid RPG chargen completed tomorrow night or so. You can fuck around with it if you want, though it's nowhere near complete, naturally.
As for all those site upgrades? Yeah, fuck it, not going to bother, I give up. I spent too much time getting nowhere to continue, and I managed to complete my original task of installing Perl (with ActivePerl) and AWStats for log analysis. Like any website, Apache logs basic information by default, allowing administrators to fine-tune the site, either to help people find what they're looking for, make certain pages more attractive to visitors and search engines, locate problems, see which pages people enter and exit from, and more.
Since my installation of AWStats, here are a few awesome things I've learned from traffic analyzed between January 2008 to present:
Neat shit. (Note to any paranoids out there: I don't sell traffic data to anyone and I don't use tracking cookies or any of that nonsense. The information collected is anonymous and uses nothing more than the vanilla default Apache logs, the same kind collected by each and every webserver on the face of the planet.)
Edit: ffff goddamnit ruler I just lost another half hour of sleep to this update it's 5:11 now
So, because things were working just so well I felt like I had to fuck them up to feel normal, I've been attempting (and horribly failing) to update various server components, e.g. PHP. Unfortunately I spent three hours or more trying to install a new version of XAMPP only to revert back to the original files (always back up your work, kiddies!). At least rsync with DeltaCopy went swimmingly, so if the server machine dies or I totally fuck it up at least it's on a different physical machine and drive.
I'm going to keep trying to upgrade components, possibly in advance of both analytics software such as AWStats (I'm curious about what kind of traffic I get) as well as installing a blog suite like WordPress. I'm still waiting on the "editorfag" for Nerd Journal to write me (I didn't get the email, by the way, please resend it!), but it seems like having a place for people to write articles and rants and the like is a good idea in general and seems like a good next project for me to work on.
Lastly, there's a new MUD using the GodWars 96 codebase up at xen.thisisnotatrueending.com on port 4000. Wearfe is currently screwing around with the source and attempting to add new classes; unlike SmaugFUSS the core content isn't shit and isn't geared toward horrific grinding, so it's already got one up on the old MUD. Since he's messing around with the actual code and recompiling it on occasion, the MUD might be a little... bouncy for a bit, but after all the random stops and restarts around here it really will feel like home.
Also, I didn't mention this before, but PurpleXVI is a recent addition to the IRCop team, along with Ruler, Jean and myself. If you need help or just want to bug him for shits and giggles, please feel free to inundate him with dongs and gibberish.
Success! I actually managed to get it to do what I wanted without sacrificing any more goats or Hot Pockets. You can now view a writable PDF of any character in the database. As it strongly recommends, use FoxIt so you can actually save your sheet (stupid Adobe).
This is the last work I'm going to be doing on the generator for a while; I need to take a break and do other things, such as install another MUD, upgrade the webserver to the latest version of everything, install AWStats so I can start actually checking out my traffic (I realized Webalizer already comes with XAMPP so I'll try that first), get back into Dwarf Fortress, potentially set up a rants and articles section for authors to write pieces on RPGs both homebrew and commercial... you know, the usual I-have-too-much-shit-to-do chaos I tend to thrive in. The next iteration would ideally include the ability to purchase advances for your characters, but that's a whole new level of data entry and I'd rather just, you know, not do that right now.
Anyway, it's crazy o'clock, so please have a wonderful weekend.
So, I am dumb and am up way too late these past few nights. Anyway. I guess the LHC must have caused a space-time rift or something because I've said twice now that the DH CharGen is complete and yet here I am still working on it. This time I'm trying to make the charsheet print to a writable PDF, and after a couple false starts and other general problems, I've started actually getting it to work. However, I've come to realize that PDFs are pretty much shit. They display weird for no readily apparent reason and unless you're willing to shell out money to fix someone else's mistakes, you can't actually edit the PDFs. Still, it'll be a neat option when it's done, albeit a potential resource drain (at 1.85MB per request), but it's certainly something no one else offers.
Also, yes, you can't save a modified PDF in Acrobat (e.g. if you edit the writable fields you can't save it with their free bullshit extortion software); however, you can do that in FoxIt, a free and lightweight PDF viewer. Granted, there are some other weirdnesses with FoxIt to consider and both applications seem to cause the filled information to fucking float unless you modify the fields in some fashion, but it's better than nothing.
Something something yadda yadda going to start a new MUD up again, blah blah someone apparently wants to run a newsletter and have me host it, herp derp still need to run the contest for upper-left site graphic...
Oh, a couple of neat last things related to the CharGen: Ross Watson of Fantasy Flight Games, the Senior RPG Developer for Dark Heresy, is going to be sending me some Arkham Horror stuff for my efforts on the generator. So that's pretty awesome. Also, it looks like Dark Reign enjoyed the character generator enough to put it right on their sidebar, which is also pretty neat. I just hope my body bandwidth can take it.
Happy Large Hadron Collider day! It's down at the moment and I'm sure it's just going to get the shit hammered out of it throughout the day, but CERN has a live video feed here. This is a momentus occasion; for those of you unfamiliar with particle physics and wonder how this shit's going to apply to normal life, methinks you need a bit of a history lesson on the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) - namely, the last batch of particle experiments led them to invent the internet because they needed a way to store, transfer and catalogue the data. Yes, that's right: Not Gore, not DARPA, but CERN invented the internet as a method to share their findings with researchers all over the world. The fucking internet was created by these guys out of simple necessity, almost as an afterthought. Imagine what other 'incidental' creations they'll come up with in this iteration.
Additionally, the CharGen is now 100% actually complete. With the very minor exception of a career memento list for Sororitas (since the .pdf didn't list them and I wasn't feeling creative), everything else has been implemented. There is now a standard view, a story view, and a printer-friendly plaintext view for every character sheet. If I can find a way to print to an image file or PDF, I'll add that (though I'm doubtful it's possible without licensing something). Version 3.0 of the CharGen will actually let you create higher-ranking characters and buy character advances and the like, but I'm putting that off for a while. (I haven't had requests for a WHFRP revamp, so it's not even on the horizon at this time.)
It's quarter to six, so I'm going to fall into bed. Please enjoy the hard work and please have a wonderful LHC Day.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Dark Heresy Character Generator 2.0 is complete. There are still a couple odds and ends - bug testing, a bit more error checking, career mementos, family generation, a "story" presentation of your character's features and information instead of a boring statblock (see the quick gen) - but the generator is otherwise completed, including the database. I hope you all enjoy it. Let me know if something explodes!
I'm not sure when any of you will actually be able to see this, but this status announcement will be patiently awaiting your ability to view it. Now that the server is nice and stable, of course, we have to have random outages just to make sure people feel at home. In this case, the internet died and seems to be weaving in and out of consciousness like an indecisive coma patient. The server never went down at any time, it's just your ability to reach it, so don't blame me! (What really sucks is that the phone is out, too. I hope nobody catches fire! No 911!)
I've added mementos to the character generator (world only so far, I'll do class next, though I still don't know what to do for Sororitas), and will be adding details like family next (ala the quick generator or WHFRP). I'll also be creating a "summary" instead of Eyes: X Hair: Y sort of layout to make things more interesting. I may or may not have character saving/viewing done tonight, we'll see if I can get it hammered out in the next 20 minutes (I have to get up early). Wish me luck!
Brief little update. I've been hammering away at the DH chargen, and it's nearly complete. My task now is taking all the info the users have selected and presenting it to them in a variety of easily-printable formats. The best-case scenario would be an actual character sheet, though printing to an image file may be difficult and I don't believe using a premade sheet will really do the trick. I may be able to alter one of the official sheets, but we'll see on that. If anyone has specific recommendations or desired formats, please let me know.
I expect to have it finished either tonight or tomorrow night, depending on how much extra crap I find myself needing to do. My favorite part, namely the little character summary of all the things you've chosen (including optional extras like mementos, family history, etc.) hasn't even been touched yet, and I'm not sure how long that will take me, but everything else is pretty much completed. I also need to do general error-checking (to help prevent players from missing a selection or section on the chargen) and make sure all the mechanics are functioning, but at this time you should be able to use the character builder right now and see all the little numbers add up, including bonuses from starting packages from the Inquisitor's Handbook and the like.
As always you can view the Dark Heresy Character Generator here.
So, uh. Remember, boys and girls, when replacing a processor fan, be absolutely, positively certain of what processor socket you're buying before you buy it. Also, be absolutely, positively sure that if you happen to buy the wrong part, you don't accidentally snap the bracket for the old processor heatsink, leaving you with a useless corpseputer.
Yeah. I kinda fucked up the old server machine. A replacement heatsink is $25, and I can't really return the old one ($13 fan, $9 to ship it back plu $2 restocking fee...); money isn't an issue, but I have, in the meantime, found a replacement machine to use in its stead. It's a little toaster Shuttle case, 1.7GHz Sempron, 1GB RAM; cute, probably uses less power. It runs pretty hot, but unlike the previous machine the processor isn't spiking crazily and the thing (despite its physical apparent heat) has an internal temperature of 55C which never moves up or down. It also runs far, far smoother than the older machine; despite the slower processor and less RAM, it seems to fly. I'm going to try it for a few days and if it crashes, too, or just seems to not work out, I'll order the new heatsink for the old machine.
In other news, I'm doing a lot of work on the DH chargen tonight; thanks to my brother, SniperGuyy, a lot of the time-consuming data entry has been done, so I can copy and paste into the chargen with ease. I don't think I'll have it 100% completed tonight, but it'll be damn near ready.
... still worried about the heat this thing throws off... I wonder what the max core temperature a Sempron takes...? Oh shit, this thing goes up to 90C according to some sites. The Celeron taps out at 74C according to Intel. The Sempron seems to be keeping the CPU usage down to a mere 1-3% instead of 5-10% with random giant spikes. Maybe I've got my new server right here...
God, I've been so busy these past couple days. First things first, I suppose: We now have a TF2 server, which can be reached at xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:27015. It hasn't seen much in the way of special configurations yet, but more will come, don't worry. Jump in and enjoy.
Second, there is now a sup/tg/ Radio by way of SHOUTcast. You can access the stream in your favorite media player of choice at http://xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:8000/ or http://xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:8000/listen.pls. For an embedded Windows Media Player page, try http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/shoutcast.html. You can also listen to sup/tg/ Radio in the TF2 server by typing !radio into chat (!noradio to turn it off again). There are a number of DJs that have been trying their hand at musican gaems, so who knows what it'll be playing at any given time.
Lastly, I feel like a bit of a butt for not doing more than cursory additions to the Dark Heresy character generator over the past week. Originally, the week of vacation had been slotted for getting the Xen server stuff up and running, with DH as th secondary project after that; however, due to incessant hammering on my house during my prime REM cycles (I get to bed between 4am and 6am, they start hammering at 8am), and delayed start on the Xen, I really got... nothing done on the DH chargen that I'd originally planned.
So, tomorrow, err, today, Monday, my last day of vacation, I shall dedicate to completing (or at least getting as far as I can) the DH chargen 2.0. There will be a bit more to add after the next iteration, but my last items will be the "flavor" (name, eye color, weight, etc.; family generation; extras from the DH site) and starting background packages from IH. I've also enlisted my little brother to help with the mostly-data-entry-intensive step. This will be followed by a text printable character sheet, then MySQL database (which I neglected to do originally but did for the WHFRP), then finally I'm going to try and get it to print onto a charsheet image. 2.5 or 3.0 will likely hold the ability to add promotions and do the calculations for you.
As a kind of addendum and note to self, I'm also going to be replacing the fans tomorrow, provided they've shipped and arrived (they should have been in on Saturday). I'm sick of the server constantly dying of heat after the processor spikes for whatever reason. It's pretty annoying for everyone and hopefully the new fan will fix this. I can't promise the problems will cease, but the fans should at least allevitae the issue considerably. I hope. It had better, anyway.
Why do I do this to myself? I know full well that this could all wait until the following day, but I stay up until six fuckin' o'clock anyway messing with it.
So, I could have worked on the DH chargen today, but instead it was brought to my attention that, yes, in fact, I now have access to the Xen servers in Chicago as opposed to the internal closed company beta servers (read: in the office on the floor in a closet). To celebrate, I've set up both Team Fortress 2 and Battlegrounds 2, a HL2 Revolutionary War mod. Battlegrounds is crazy fun, considering you've got a rifle that takes seven seconds to reload and you're bayoneting people in the face the rest of the time. Both servers will have Mani's Admin Plugin and Metamod, but that can actually wait for tomorrow.
In other news, I'm probably going to die an early death and become some kind of case study for long-term sleep deprivation. Oh, you mean about sup/tg/? Right, right. I'm not moving the site over, and I don't know if I ever will (it's still a "beta" and this could all vanish at any time), but I do know that I'm going to find a way to create a redundant IRC somehow using the Xen stuff. That way if one server goes down the other will be available. The only site stuff I may move over would likely be the DH character generator when it's finished, and then it'll just be a redundant page (so the DH will remain even if the rest of sup/tg/ keels over when my home server an heros again).
Speaking of which, the fans should be here tomorrow. The server's been behaving but the sooner I get that new fan in, the better. Well, my energy's run out so I'm going to go to bed now, everything else can wait until tomorrow.
fffftired
Quick notes. I've added a few more bits and pieces to the DH chargen, such as Wealth and starting insanity. I laid more groundwork for more features tomorrow, but I mostly need to check myself and ensure everything's working as it should up to this point. I will then add the starting packages and get to work on the data-entry-heavy background generation.
The Xen server has a TF2 server running at the moment, though I don't know how long it will be available or how well it will work. For now you can reach it at xen.thisisnotatrueending.com:53 by adding the server manually in Steam. Enjoy, let me know if it fucks up or if it works great or whatever.
Also Ruler is going away to Anthrocon Anime Evolution for a few days, so anyone that might be there should find him and make him feel awkward and uncomfortable! Here is a picture of him for reference:
Have fun at your con, Ruler! We'll miss yoooou~
So, I think I've finally, positively identified heat as the problem with the server. I installed a nifty little app called SpeedFan, which displays the fan speed and temperature gauges. After startup, the computer's temperature seemed steady at 48C, and crept slowly up to 50-52C, whereupon the icon changed to a fiery warning icon. It seems to be mostly stable somewhere in the low fifties, but every so often some process on the server spikes the CPU usage to 100%. This spike directly results in the CPU temperature jumping another four to eight degrees.
If the server manages to survive this spike, however brief, the machine remains running. If the failsafe mechanism kicks in, the server shuts off to preserve the CPU integrity. Basically, the computer runs uncommonly hot just as its usual state of being; when it's under heavy load, for reasons I cannot yet divine, it skirts dangerously close to (and then over) the failsafe limit.
So, as of right nowish, I'm heading out to go to Circuit City and pick up a new CPU fan. Something a little beefier should do the job. Right now I've got a frozen water bottle and a small fan (kinda like this) sitting next to the open case and trying to cool the thing. Yes, even with the new fan and a source of cold, the CPU is running at 53C on average. With luck, the new fan will do the trick and the server will remain standing... you know, outside of delicious Hot Pockets.
Update: Unfortunately my little trip to Circuit City, Best Buy and Radioshack was in vain. Each store had the same two or three Antec fans in stock and nothing else, and each store was more expensive than the last. So I went to Newegg and picked up not one, but three new fans for the price of one of the available brick-and-mortar items. This is the new processor heatsink I got; it should do a fine job. I think the one I have now just may be on its way out and requires replacing, and a case-installed fan should help additionally ventilate the heat away from the poor server. The machine, by the way, seems to be doing fine at a steady, slightly too-hot 52C, but as the processor tops out at 74C, this should be an okay stalemate until the parts arrive in three days.
Update the Second: For some reason the archive update script got stuck on something, caught itself in an endless loop, and jacked the CPU usage to 100%. This immediately resulted in the processor temperature jumping up to a dangerous 80C. I am considering disabling have disabled the archive update script for the next couple days to ensure the stability of sup/tg/ in general. You can still add them, and attempting to re-add a thread will update it with the current contents, but I really don't want to accidentally fuck up the computer permanently because of a script mistake on my part.
I just finished going through most of Strike the Earth! and making it look halfway decent. Instead of a bunch of boring black text on white background, I've given it a makeover similar to sup/tg/ and even added a sidebar picture. I've been thinking about doing this to sup/tg/ itself, so this is a bit of a "test run" for a new design.
Years one, two and three are now up on StE!, although as of yet no one has written an official journal (including myself), though CAPSLOCKGUY did provide this "teaser" entry to tide us over:
this one time i stuck a dildo up my ass and it shot out
like a bird with bacon in its teeth.
Exciting stuff. Also this is what DiceMaid, myself and Hugbox look like as lolis, apparently:
Good to know. I especially like DiceMaid. Thanks Minneso-tan!
In other news, I think tomorrow will be the day I dedicate to working on the Dark Heresy character generator. I really want to get it finished and promised myself I'd get it done this week. Really, all it needs to do now is spit out the user's choices into a usable format (e.g. text file, will try to make it print directly into a printable image file). I need to add a few more details for the worlds and the starting packages, but after that it should be pretty good to go. Version 3.0 (this being 2.0) will likely include the ability to add PROOOOOOOOMOTIONS to your character.
Out of fukken nowhere, the sup/tg/ succession game continues! Since Beryl derped out (the game crashed in Autumn of his year and he lost interest) and Xom apparently forgot that I told him it was his year, the game had fallen by the wayside... until Fatum came to the rescue!
Here are some overview shots of the game thus far:
Start of Year 1
End of Year 1 (a)
End of Year 2 (a)
End of Year 1 (b)
End of Year 2 (b)
It is now CAPSLOCKGUY's turn; I don't know whose turn comes after this, because everyone signed up for the turn order but nobody prompted me for it until Fatum took the initiative. If you want in on the game... well, screw the turn order; we'll have a vote or roll some dice or something when CAPSLOCKGUY ends his turn. You can find my total lack of a summary and save files for each years here. I'll write a journal at some point, I swear!
In other news, I'll be on vacation all next week. I don't have any particular plans (I will fucking eviscerate the next asshole that says staycation) so I should be around for some gaming of some kind. We've been playing a lot of Alien Swarm and UT2004 lately, so that will likely continue. I'll also take a nice chunk of that time and complete the Dark Heresy character generator.
Update: hurr wups I had a typo in the 4chan fix, THANKS A LOT ADSLASHIT. The entry was 'chan.org', which has been fixed to '4chan.org', and apparently 'www.4chan.org' was also missing from the list, which has now also been fixed below. I've also edited the HOSTS file on the server so it will continue archiving threads properly; I'd left it alone figuring it wouldn't be necessary and that 4chan itself would be back pretty quickly, but it's still down and unfortunately the archive tries to pull CSS from 4chan instead of locally (which I intend to fix at some point). This causes all archived pages to lag, timeout, then load all broken.
So it looks like Moot figured out that redirecting a perfectly good external page to a 4chan.org address only works when your domain isn't fucking broken, and thus 4chanstatus.blogspot.com actually works again (as opposed to trying to redirect visitors to status.4chan.org, which I swear it was doing earlier).
Ffff, okay, so, it looks like 4chan's down again. This time their DNS servers appear to be nonresponsive to queries, and blah blah jargon jargon flux capacitor inverse polarity discharge the ionic tacyon pulse you stopped reading at "DNS."
So, here's how you fix it, courtesy of Adslahnit's copypasta:
Go to C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc, open up the file called "hosts" with Notepad, and Ctrl+V the following into that file:
74.125.47.121 status.4chan.org
206.220.140.2 ns1.4chan.org
216.213.88.50 ns3.4chan.org
207.126.64.165 ns2.4chan.org
207.126.64.166 4chan.org
207.126.64.166 www.4chan.org
207.126.64.167 content.4chan.org
207.126.64.168 orz.4chan.org
207.126.64.169 tmp.4chan.org
207.126.64.171 rs.4chan.org
207.126.64.172 static.4chan.org
207.126.64.176 zip.4chan.org
207.126.64.177 bin.4chan.org
207.126.64.178 dis.4chan.org
207.126.64.181 img.4chan.org
207.126.64.182 dat.4chan.org
207.126.64.186 cgi.4chan.org
207.126.64.187 nov.4chan.org
Save the hosts file, clear your browser's cache, and then try refreshing 4chan again.
It won't hurt anything if you forget to take these out once 4chan's back up, although it'll mess things up if 4chan changes IPs and these are still in there.
Update: Oh, you want details, do you? Fine then. Below is a DNS trace of what happens when someone tries to visit 4chan. The first portion shows the root servers, the second portion shows the .org servers, the third portion shows the nameservers for 4chan, and the fourth... times out.
~$ dig 4chan.org +trace ; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> 4chan.org +trace ;; global options: printcmd . 311275 IN NS J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. . 311275 IN NS G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. ;; Received 488 bytes from 216.177.15.102#53(216.177.15.102) in 1 ms org. 172800 IN NS C0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO. org. 172800 IN NS D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. org. 172800 IN NS TLD1.ULTRADNS.NET. org. 172800 IN NS TLD2.ULTRADNS.NET. org. 172800 IN NS A0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO. org. 172800 IN NS B0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. ;; Received 417 bytes from 192.36.148.17#53(I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) in 97 ms 4chan.org. 86400 IN NS ns2.4chan.org. 4chan.org. 86400 IN NS ns1.4chan.org. ;; Received 95 bytes from 204.74.113.1#53(TLD2.ULTRADNS.NET) in 20 ms ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
See that last bit? When you try to ask 4chan where it is, it hurpderps the fuck out and doesn't answer. The website is there, everything's working just fine, but you just don't know where it is. DNS is like the phone book of the internet, and someone scrubbed out all the numbers for 4chan.
The HOSTS file is a kind of override for DNS. Any entries you put into the HOSTS file will be used instead of actually going out and asking the DNS servers for information. For example, if you look in your HOSTS file, you'll see a single entry for localhost set to 127.0.0.1, which is your computer's loopback address. A useful way to stop certain kinds of phone-home DRM validations is setting their destination to 127.0.0.1 in the HOSTS file, then running a little server on your computer that returns "good" to all requests. This tricks the software into asking your own computer for validation, where your fake server validates it, and the software goes on its merry little way.
As for why 4chan isn't responding to queries... well, I have no idea, honestly. It's possible that they're getting DDoSed from another angle, but I could be wrong. Maybe their DNS servers just crapped themselves. In any event, this is why it was nice when the 4chan status was at 4chanstatus.blogspot.com, as that's external to 4chan entirely; because 4chan's DNS is down, it can't answer questions about status.4chan.org, making the whole status page thing pretty damn useless.
If I figure out more or hear more information about why the DNS servers for 4chan are both down, I'll be sure to post it here, but at the moment I can't rightly say. I can only assume DDoS based on the fact they were getting DDoSed last week. 4chan should probably look into getting some external DNS hosting that can handle an attack... and next time the webserver's getting DDoSed, set 4chan's records to 127.0.0.1 so the hackers aren't actually wasting bandwidth, though they should probably reduce the TTL values for their records, as last I checked they're set pretty high and blah blah jargon jargon...
General quick update. I haven't added much to the DH chargen since my three-plus hour stay at the Ford dealership, but I did add quite a bit during that time, so I figure it evens out. I've added in the base statistics and will be adding special traits next. (I also need to remember to add Wounds and Fate Points which I missed initially.)
I'd like to get some Alien Swarm going at some point. AS is a top-down bug hunt (FILTHY XENOS), a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. It's great stuff. If anyone's interested, stop by #alienswarm on the IRC. (Make sure you upgrade to the latest version of both UT2k4 and AS first!)
I'd like to take a moment and reflect on a few numbers I've noticed very recently.
712207. This is the number of the second- or third-ever /tg/ thread about Timevan, the wacky crazy 3.5E game run by T1000. If there's any single credit that started the seed of sup/tg/, it was T1k's game; it gave me my moniker, and the small little website I put up for the game was this site's very first incarnation. I found the page again tonight, which prompted this little reflection. You can view it here if you'd like to see what sup/tg/ 0.1 looked like.
108. That's the maximum number of concurrent users that the sup/tg/ IRC has seen, a record achieved a few short hours ago. When I started this site, I figured I'd see a handful of users - no more than a dozen, maybe twenty or so if people liked the site - and never expected to see it grow much further than that. Then one day we had fifty people, and that was an impressive number, but probably a fluke. Then it was the average. Now it's seventy, and climbing. We've broken 100 at the cap, with the average hovering in the low eighties on busy nights. How I ever thought we could fit this many people into the Meebo chat...
734. This is the number of threads in the archive right now. The very first thread in the archive was added on October 29, 2007; counting the dozen threads stored in other secions and the dozens I've deleted, we've seen 850-900 total /tg/ threads ever recorded. Hundreds of threads, tens of thousands of posts. Sure, a lot of them a shit, but a decent fraction of them are liquid win, the essence of /tg/ in all its glory.
It's not often I just sit back and... marvel at what sup/tg/ has become, and how many awesome people have contributed to its growth and success. I'd just like to thank everyone - there are so many names, and I'm terrible with names, so please forgive me if I don't give a list - for everything they've done to make this site and /tg/ as a whole such a wonderful place to be. My life would be much more boring without you guys.
Thank you.
Stiiiiiiiiiiill waiting.
I've taken the day off from work (since it's pretty slow today and some of my particular projects are dead in the water due to required people being on vacation), so I'll have a lot of spare time today. I think I'm going to finally clean out the archives. (Whatever happened to "end of month cleanup?" More like "end of every three months or more" amirite?)
I'm going to pretty much kill everything in the red. If you have suggestions on threads to keep or delete, drop by the IRC and let me know. This is going to be a fairly significant culling this time around. There are a lot of really awful threads in there and I just haven't gotten around to deleting them... so today is their last day. I'll post an update with the statistics and list of deleted threads when I perform the removal.
Update 7:06pm: Here is the list of my first pass on the thread archive, which means deleting pretty much everything under -6 votes and anything with the word 'rape' in it:
Pre-culling: 778
Post-culling: 726
The threads have been moved to a 'purgatory' for a couple days, after which they will be permanently deleted. If there is a thread you believe deserves redemption, shoot me a message and I'll review it. Update 7:38pm: Now with humorous commentary!
I'm sitting in a waiting room at the Ford dealership right now while they replace my tires and headlight, so I figured now was as good a time as any to keep working on the chargen and make a little note about last night's excrement-related inclement weather event.
The long and short of it is this: Please don't bring your drama from /tg/ into the IRC, and please don't bring your drama from the IRC onto /tg/. If you have a problem with a poster on /tg/, keep it there; if you have a problem with a user in the IRC, keep it there. It's pretty straightforward. There is absolutely no reason for you to log into the IRC for the express purpose of publicly calling out an individual, nor is there any reason to post on /tg/ about someone or something you don't like in the IRC.
I apologize for overreacting last night, though in hindsight, threatening to (temporarily!) ban people for refusing to stop stirring up drama is a fairly common universal rule, whether you're a companion site to a Traditional Games board on 4chan or an official IRC server on any forum anywhere on the internet. Everyone involved knew the discussion was just a pointles whine-fest, and yet they refused to let it die. Even this post itself is a continuation of a discussion that didn't need to be discussed.
To beat the point to death with a tire iron, I will repeat it again: If you've got a problem with someone, bring it up with them in the same venue it occurred. If you're getting trolled on /tg/, keep it on /tg/, and if you're getting trolled on sup/tg/, keep it on sup/tg/. Sheer common sense aside, if you're having a problem, bring it to the attention of the moderators of the venue and they'll fix it. Drama cross-pollination is only an effective tactic if the individuals involved allow it to be effective, and I refuse to allow it.
And, finally, of course, no one person represents any group as a whole, for better or worse. I don't claim to speak for /tg/ or 4chan in any capacity, and no one save myself speaks for or acts on the behalf of sup/tg/. Furthermore, for those of you that can't seem to count, one person acting like a jackass that happens to frequent a particular site does not constitute a raid from said site.
Now back to your regularly scheduled gaming.
It's really, obscenely late, so I'll make this quick: Ruler has been made the first (and so far only) IRC Operator other than myself on sup/tg/. It's taken me a while to finally let up my iron death-grip on the server, but Ruler has more than proven his ability and desire to keep the peace and improve the quality of life on sup/tg/. If you need help with something, please feel free to PM or /ms either Ruler or myself and we will be happy to do our best.
I've done some more basic work on the character generator after skipping Friday night due to mysterious illness (my wrist was in screaming pain for no readily apparent reason). I'm liking the new layout already, which you can view here. As with the previous incarnation of the chargen, the vast majority of the time to complete it will be simple data entry, namely entering all the statistics, skills, class information, etc., then adding it all up and making sure the output looks right when it's complete. I'm going to try my best to use the data I already have in the PHP version, but I'm still going to have to duplicate a lot of the work.
I still need to get my hands on the background packages information from the Inquisitor's Handbook, but it should be fairly trivial to add the new information. (It should be easy enough to make special exceptions, e.g. disallow Sororitas as a class for male characters, and/or force the gender as 'female' if Sororitas is chosen; now that I think about it, simply forcing the gender to 'female' will probably be easier in the long run, since gender is technically one of the last things to choose.) The special packages and ability to create higher-ranked characters shouldn't be too difficult to implement, though I haven't really looked at it too closely just yet.
Lastly, I realized that a character sheet pre-printed with all the stat values might be annoying, since you won't be able to just erase it when you're using it. Then I remembered that a lot of the people that use the DH generator are DMs that want a quick method of rolling NPCs, and in that case they wouldn't care about the stats being pre-written onto the paper, so I'm going to try and do it anyway. (Yes, I realize I'm mostly justifying this to myself, but I figured I'd comment in case it dawned on someone else as well.) A "printer friendly" text-only version will also be available for players so they can fill in their own sheets.
Edity: Oh, and 4chan is still down. Delicious DDoSing is delicious. You'd think Moot would set the DNS for 4chan to localhost so his poor webhosting company stops getting hammered and he stops having bandwidth wasted, but... Oh well. He must have his reasons for keeping the DNS set the way it is, other than the really high TTL he has set for 4chan for whatever reason. Honestly, during problems like this, he should just point 4chan to someone he doesn't like and let them get DDoSed instead.
5:20 in the morning? Holy crap I need sleep goddamnit.
I've been asked to change the DH chargen to allow a player to pick and choose nearly every aspect of their character during generation, making it less of a random character generator and more of a character building utility. The previous chargen will still be there, but I'm essentially starting from scratch with the new stuff; PHP is great, but this requires the page to be updated per user input without refreshing it, so I need to redo just about everything in Javascript for the new chargen.
You can see the preliminary work here. I've also included the ability to choose your starting class as well on the regular generator, though it's still tied to your homeworld (since just about every stat, bonus and descriptor is derived from that starting trait). My goal is to allow the player to choose traits et al. that could have been rolled randomly, so the chargen won't let you pick a starting class that's unavailable to the chosen homeworld.
I think I was going to say something else, but it's 5:25am now. I'm sleeping. I need a "so tired" icon for frontpage updates or something. Oh, yeah, one last thing, my goal after the new improved customizable chargen is done is to take all of your stats and print them directly onto an actual Dark Heresy charsheet image, which you could then print out directly. I think that would probably be a decent "printable version" though I'll also have raw text output as well.
ohgodsotired
BACOOON!
Oh, um, right. Post. So, first, the Succession Game is underway; it's currently Beryl's turn. (Sadly, he had the first two seasons completed before DF crashed and he had to start over...) My journal will be here when it's ready (along with everyone else's contributions). If I could concentrate for even half a minute tonight, I'd start working on my entries, but... it may have to wait a day.
I received a rather surprising email today from Ross Watson, the new senior RPG developer for Dark Heresy at Fantasy Flight Games; either via Google or a post in the FFG forums, he came across the Dark Heresy character generator and - rather than sending me a C&D or DMCA complaint - asked if I'd like to improve it. So, I'm going to be finally finishing the character save feature, adding a couple other touches, and any other suggestions he happens to have. The same goes for you lot: Is there anything you'd like to see added to the DH or WHFRP chargens? Are there any other systems that could use a decent chargen?
Nothing much else to report. Xen hosting stuff is still ongoing, my company's external closed beta will start pretty soon and hopefully the service will go live in the first couple weeks of August. I'll be moving most if not all of sup/tg/ onto it; between the constant server failures and the simple bandwidth and power provided by the Xen machines, I would be a fool not to take advantage of it. My birthday's coming up on the 28th, good a time as any to buy myself a new coffee maker since I broke the carafe from the old one. And... um... bacon. Mmm, bacon.
Oh, yes, right, last bit. This site could use a bit of an overhaul. Even just a changing banner graphic in the upper-left corner would be nice. If anyone's got suggestions or actual graphics to use, I'm all for it. Additional suggestions for the layout would be good.
Edity: Note to self: DH chargen now includes ability to pick starting class; it needs to change available classes based on chosen starting world or something, or at least let the player know if the chosen starting world conflicts with the chosen class. Better yet, choosing a class first should restrict the planets from which the player can come. After this is settled, add the "save character" feature, add the ability to choose a starting class to WHFRP as well, and add a "printer friendly" version of the stats for both.
Wow, it's been a while since I've written a front page update; nearly half a month. A lot's been going on recently, so I haven't really had the time or need to write an update. Well, let's see... first things first, an update on the server itself: I don't know what's wrong with it. It keeps crapping out and I don't entirely understand why. I'm going to look into picking up a simple fan this weekend because I'm still fairly certain the issue is in regards to overheating; it worked just fine in the wintertime but with summer rolling around, the thing is just running into overheating problems and I can't risk losing the machine to these repeated crashes.
However, this may all become a moot point, because my company (I work for The Internet™) is going to start offering Xen hosting services. I'll very likely move all of sup/tg/ over to Xen wholesale. I was only going to move a few things or simply provide redundancy for what exists, but if these failures don't stop, I'm just going to push everything onto the hosted services and leave it at that. If I do decide I want to keep certain things local (e.g. thread archival and file uploads), the IRC will be moving to the Xen hosting to ensure it's always up no matter what happens to my box at home.
In addition to providing redundancy for sup/tg/ and the IRC, I'm also going to be able to use Xen to host just about any game server I could possibly ever need. We're going to have a sup/tg/ TF2 and Battlegrounds 2 server at the very least, for starters, and include anything and everything up to old-school BBS games like Tradewar and the MUD, Aliens versus Predator 2, Natural Selection, and so on and so forth. If I can host a server in *nix, I can host it on Xen.
Let's see, let's see, what else... I saw Dark Knight tonight, and it was fucking incredible. Heath Ledger... man, I really truly wish he hadn't died. I don't think I can get enough of him as The Joker. It's... a phenomenal performance. If you haven't seen it yet, see it.
Oh, now I remember: The new version of Dwarf Fortress is now out and with it are a whole slew of new features, mostly world-gen shit, including lengthy legends, war histories, and world generation parameters that let you build your own world to your desires, from a hellish post-apocalyptic nightmare world to an island world to this:
Unless I can somehow manage to build an entire normal-style world that's entirely Haunted, this will suffice. We're going to start a new DF Succession game, starting here:
Yep, that's right: Haunted warm woodlands with - get this - a brook, magma, an underground river, a chasm, adamantine, and no aquifier. It's even got sand for glass and a soil layer for farming! I didn't even really try hard to build this world and I've found such a wonderful starting point! I'll regale you all with some tales of its histories at a later time, perhaps; but tomorrow or Saturday, I shall strike the earth and begin our new fortress.
Well, that's all for now. Some of the sup/tg/ doods want to start making their own front page updates, which will be cool, but right now I'm a bit busy at work and with just keeping the server up and running in general, let alone writing new material. We'll see though.
So, after coming home to find the server had gone down for a third time in twelve hours - and also hearing the horrific grinding noises the power supply made when I turned it back on - I have finally replaced the fucking thing with a new one. I'm extremely glad I'm such a packrat when it comes to... well, everything, but in this case, holding onto a spare power supply from another machine has allowed me - a couple years after initially deciding to keep it - to easily and quickly replace the broken part.
Hopefully these shenanigans with the server falling over at random will be at an end (knock on wood). I can physically feel the difference in the air flow coming out of the new power supply, so it should no longer grind-'n-die.
Wikifag's new /tg/-specific wiki, 1d4chan.org, is up and running. Go and add shit!
Edity: Just to clarify, 1d4chan.org isn't my project, or a sup/tg/ project; it's a /tg/ project.
This Paintchat thing is probably the best thing I've ever hosted.
I wish I had even a fraction of Muju's (left) or Lolcron's (right) talent. Holy shit. We've been saving the awesome images on the Paintchat here if you want to browse them.
I was dealing with some other shit and realized there are some crap threads that deserve deletion:
So I log into the PaintChat to see if it's still running (due to earlier issues) and find the following:
I... I don't even... I'm not even sure what to say. Words fail me. I think I'm honored, or something.
Shortly after discovery of Chink's wonderful gift, of course, some asshole went and started scribbling over people's stuff while they were in the middle of drawing it. This led me to go and create a whole password protection system for the PaintChat. I can turn off the login system whenever I want, though, so at the moment this means it's still publicly available; however, when trolls rear their ugly heads, I will be able to easily keep our drawfags safe from the ravening hordes. It'll probably start along the lines of "if you ask for the single existing username and password in the chat that's good enough" until someone inevitably fucks that up and we go to individual registrations.
sup/tg/ now has a PaintChat! Come in and watch /tg/ drawfags at work. Just please don't draw dongs on things; it would make them sad. ;_; Maybe now I'll finally, gradually work my way up from such hideously childish scribbles like the one following this post.
There's not much else to report. I may be replacing the server soon, but at the same time the server I've got does reasonably well, and its replacement would be either pretty even or possibly inferior in terms of processor and RAM. Still, something that's been built more recently and consumes less power would be nice.
Delicious archived trolling is delicious and deleted.
There are, obviously, a lot more to be removed (including some *new* image threads), but I have some other stuff to do.
Well, it's the beginning of a new month, so it's time to clean the shit out of the archives from the old month. Let's go!
Well shit, actually it does look like the same person keeps adding these shit threads! 82.43.119.218, see me after class.
+-----------------------------------------------+-------+ | title | score | +-----------------------------------------------+-------+ | Medivh the Keeper of Secrets | -11 | | Star Wars Vs WH | -10 | | Ultralisks | -8 | | Females in WH | -1 | | Gladiatorial Combat | -1 | | Armour | -1 | | Pick my WH40k Army!! | -1 | | Is Tau technology superior to the Imperium's? | -1 | | Plot advancement? In MY 40K? | -1 | | Tau Advice | 0 | | Battleships Forever | 0 | | Imperium, FUCK YEAH! | 0 | | C&C in 40k | 0 | | Codex: Rogue Traders again | 1 | | Why Orks have no chance against Tyranids | 1 | | Puns | 1 | | Warhammer 40,000 MMO | 1 | | Blood Bowl Online | 1 | | Whose worst is best? | 1 | | Loli Army | 1 | | Revised Goo Girl Stats | 2 | | The Great Crusade | 2 | | Imperial Battleships | 3 | | Can Love Bloom? Love Can Bloom | 3 | | Epic Fail to Epic Win | 4 | | Codex: Rogue Traders | 6 | | Monster Girls 2 | 7 | | Monstergirl Template | 8 | | Map Making Tutorial | 9 | | Monster Girls | 10 | | Monster Girls game | 17 | +-----------------------------------------------+-------+ 31 rows in set (0.01 sec)
If you are 82.43.119.218, please stop by the chat. I'd like to have a little talk with you about the quality of the things you've been adding. Clearly, some of them were popular (Monster Girls) and clearly some of them were absolutely not (everything with a score of 2 and less).
Continuing on:
Before: 2.66GB
After: 2.56 GB
No, this is only a partial cleansing at the moment; I've been doing the deletion manually to make sure I don't fuck it up, but at this point I think it's more likely that I'll make a mistake if I don't write myself a short, automated method. TO THE LAB!
Update: Okay, made myself a page. It would have gone a lot faster if I hadn't been an idiot initially, but live and learn.
Another 70MB of crap removed. I'm feeling horrible right now so I'm going to go ahead and stop cleaning right now... fuck, need to lie down or something...
So, uh, the server kinda fell over at 4am and I failed to notice until 2pm. wupslol sorry about that. I'm thinking I need to replace the power supply, since the fan keeps making horrible noises and is likely the culprit for the shutdown (overheating). I'll jump on Newegg tonight and find a replacement.
I stayed home from work today to make up for all the days I've dragged my stupid ass in through sickness the past couple weeks, so I went and added a Random Thread Viewer. It just picks a thread at random, and shows the entry in the archive and lets you vote on it. Nothing special, but it's a good way to kill time and vote on old threads.
Also for the nth time, the archive shows ONLY THE LAST SIXTY (60) DAYS BY DEFAULT. If your old favorite thread seems to be missing, it's not, you idiot, click Show All Threads and it's under there or use Search. Come on guise, it's not that hard to read directions.
... uh. I had something to post and now I don't remember what it was. I guess it wasn't really that important.
Oh! Uh. Wait. I remember now. Okay. See threads like this? Don't archive these. Idiots. Even more to the point:
"Its current score is 0 after 8 votes." That means four people voted against it, and four people voted in favor of it.
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU UPVOTING A THREAD THAT CONTAINS A SINGLE LINK TO A WIKI AND NOTHING ELSE BUT BAWSAGING, YOU ASSHOLES. CHRIST. FFFFF.
In other news, I'm going to add a random thread button or something that will let you read a random thread from the archive and vote on it. This should help get more votes put into older threads (pre-voting) that would otherwise just stay permanently zero. In other other news we've got a UO shard running, though it's not really for public consumption yet; I think the MUD's falling by the wayside but we'll see what happens.
ps. don't archive shit you twats, wait for some real fucking content before you add it, don't add it because you think it will eventually have content, christ
Attention! I will be rebooting the MUD at approximately 11:00pm EDT tonight (Saturday May 10). If you are an immortal and are working on an area, you must use the savearea command (or fully finalize your zone with installarea) or your work will be lost! (After the restart, type loadarea to reload your zone; installed areas are always reloaded automatically.) You should always habitually use savearea just to ensure your work is saved, since a crash could occur at any time without warning and it sucks losing saved work, but this is my official forewarning on an official scheduled restart. Don't forget!
Uh... nevermind. The MUD restarted itself at 6:00am for maintenance or something. I kept receiving these warning messages like "the skies turn dark, the magic around you becomes unstable, thunder and lightning crashes," etc. and didn't know what it meant. Then the MUD restarted itself at 6:00am sharp... and I lost all my work. Don't worry! Anyone that actually used savearea/foldarea is fine, just use loadarea when you come back in. I lost my shit because I'd accidentally been working in the wrong number range... so every time I saved my progress, I was saving the wrong data. So I lost everything, but it was only my shit and it was my own stupid fault, so no worries. (Plus the vast majority of it was writing programs, which I had in my history, so no loss there anyway. Just annoyance.)
I made a little change to the archive to hopefully make it a little less... lagtacular. See, it's kinda pointless and takes forever to load if every single thread item appears at once; so, instead, the archive now just shows the last 60 days of threads. You can View All at any time, of course, but this should hopefully increase load speeds for peoples. Additionally, sorting by score now just shows the 'highest' (over zero) and 'lowest' (under zero), hiding totally neutral or unvoted threads.
We're learning more on how to use the MUD; we've started actually creating new stuff (oh shit Xom riding a 50-foot butter golem D:) and it's going well. I'm going to start plotting out Candyland and actually doing my best to write some interesting areas. We'll see how far we get, but it'll be fun nonetheless!
y helo thar 5am how r u today
Oh, uh, yeah, I was going to make an update like an hour ago and forgot. Repeatedly. The MUCK probably will never go anywhere (despite being infinitely easier to program than the MUD), so I've installed the MUD on the server (it should be running all the time now) and left the MUCK alone. You can reach the MUD at thisisnotatrueending.com on port 4000. I'm going to write a quick walkthrough for the beginning (since it's fairly nonintuitive) and try and fix some of the more glaring issues, then start actually worldbuilding a bit. Anyone with MUD experience or who just wants a god account/character just let me know and I'll make you one.
What is my fascination with technology that mostly exists on pages dated "Copyright 1999"? I know I've got other projects to do, like finishing the DH chargen (just need to let it save to a database), continue cleaning out the archive, maybe do more work on the bots...
So what do I do instead? I start screwing around with MUDs and MUCKs because I am apparently a masochist. (Well, not a super masochist but we'll get to that.) It turns out it's exceedingly easy to actually *host* a MUD or MUCK, to the point where I can just unzip and run it from my desktop. We fucked around with it a bit (I recreated Candyland in the MUCK) but when we went to the MUD, I ran into more problems.
See, for a MUCK it's really easy to create objects, rooms, etc. because it's basically just text descriptions. With few exceptions, you can build a MUCK fairly rapidly without needing much programming knowledge. @dig room, @describe room, @create items, @describe items, @open door, @dig a new room... With MUDs, of course, you need to define stats and actions for everything. Every creature has to have the full gamut of stats, abilities, drops, speech, and so on. Rooms are more difficult to make and describe, every item has to have attributes assigned to it... it's exponentially more involved than a MUCK/MUSH because it actually focuses on combat.
Add to this the fact you need to either do all of the content creation in-game, or through a text editor messing with the esoteric raw files, and it becomes a massive pain in the ass. I really would like to play around with this, make some kind of fucked up /tg/ MUD, but I need a server that was written sometime in the past half-decade and I absolutely require an offline editor with a decent GUI. We were playing around with SmaugFUSS until I realized the editor that worked with it only works with something five versions out-of-date.
So, /tg/, if you have any suggestions on MUD server software with an external editor, I'd be extremely grateful.
Well, a new month is upon us, and you know what that means: It's time for a culling!
The following threads in the archive have all had scores of -5 or lower by the end of last month; some of them hit that mark quickly and stayed there after their initial archival, others descended slowly over the month. Given their rating and the general descriptions, the following threads will have been deleted by the time you read this:
Pre-culling: 1.92GB; post-culling, 1.81GB
I may go back and kill some of the other threads I mentioned in my last reaping-related post (and have, such as the Monster Girl thread and the fa/tg/uy image dump). We'll see how it goes.
The Dark Heresy Character Generator is just about finished. All I need to do is make it save characters to a database and it's completed. You can start using the DH chargen now if you'd like. One feature I may add is the ability to select your class as well as your homeworld, but I think that will take more effort than it's worth and mostly encourage people to hit Refresh until they get a bunch of high rolls.
It's been a short while since my last update. Nothing major to report; the archive voting seems to be going smoothly and nothing's on fire, so that's always good. I've been working on the DH chargen, the data is all entered so now I need to do the actual coding. Since I've already got the WHFRP to crib from, it should come along fairly quickly.
I'm pretty sure I was going to say something else, but now I can't recall it for the life of me. Anyway, yes, the DH CharGen should be done shortly. I'm not sure what my next project will be, or even what my current project should have been, but we'll see. I guess I'll take votes again on my next project, but I'm going to wait until the DH chargen is really and truly finished before I even start thinking about anything else.
Oh! I remembered! We're going to try another Dwarf Fortress succession game. Stop by the chat if you're interested. We're going to modify the raws for this one, to allow cat bones to be used for nearly any crafting item in the game. Cat bone mugs decorated with cat bone, cat bone beds, cat bone instruments, cat bone everything. The fortress will subsist as entirely from cat meat as possible. Cat Fortress will be glorious.
Fuck yes Lolcron you are the best drawfag ever
Why can't I get to bed at a reasonable hour anymore? At least I was actually, you know, working on something. No, not that. No, not that either. No, I haven't even started th-- you know what, here:
I'm doing some basic cleanup on some of the oft-underutilized pages recently, such as the Epic Lulz page (now rebranded Images and Artwork), cleaning up the Reading page (now Reading and Links) under Resources, and tonight or tomorrow adding an About page and some legal disclaimers and all that happy crap.
Speaking of art, though, I've moved all of Dagda's epic art archives over into a new sup/tg/-specific folder and have started ripping image threads directly into the art directory itself. Unlike the rest of my images, the art threads and Dagda's archives are really easy to maintain in terms of organization, so it shouldn't get nearly as cluttered or disorganized as, say, the general /tg/ image folders.
The archive voting seems to be doing quite well. We've had our first 10+ epic thread (a Doc Aquatic thread, naturally) and some awful threads have dipped below -10 to be hidden from view (only a scratch on the surface but hey, it's something). The more people vote, the better the archives will become, so get to it!
I am currently in the process of adding voting capabilities to the archive. Until I'm finished, you will not be able to add new threads to the archive, though the rest of the archive (and site in general) should function just fine for the duration. If shit explodes, don't worry, I'll fix it eventually (though you might want to mention it in the chat just in case).
Update 2:05am: Success! The sup/tg/ thread archive now features voting, along with handy-dandy color-coding of awesome threads, a special Editor's Choice category for my own personal picks, and auto-hiding of shit threads at -10 votes and under. Please feel free to go through and vote to your heart's content, and if you find something broken please feel free to drop in the chat and yell at me.
Okay, in T-Minus a few minutes I'm going to be deleting most or all of the threads mentioned below. If someone wants me to preserve a thread, NOW IS THE TIME TO MAKE YOUR CASE FOR IT.
Updated at 4:55am: Reaping completed! There are still a few loose ends, like what to do with the Shas threads. The updated stats:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
|
|
All in all, not that much, but it's a start. This was a first pass removing the worst offenders (and there's still some left to remove, at that); next will be for quality and content, though this may be handled largely by the thread voting I'm going to start as the next project. That should let me just outright kill stuff that's voted down below a certain level. Here's my start on the next batch:
You can see information about what was removed, updated and left alone here. I've also added a new art section which will get properly linked up and organized. It's mostly Dagda's image threads. I'll throw in some other stuff from another folder I've got elsewhere, and we should have a shitload of art resources for inspiration.
Seriously guys, being on sup/tg/ doesn't make you part of any super special clique. It's a resource for /tg/ to use as /tg/ sees fit. The people that use this site do not "get shit done" because they come here, they get shit done on their own and happen to utilize the resources I provide - the archives, the IRC, games listing, and other myriad features.
If you think otherwise, and more importantly, if you bawww on /tg/ about how being here somehow makes you more special than everyone else, you can kindly fuck off. sup/tg/ is not your personal army because no one on 4chan is your personal army; claiming to be part of sup/tg/, name-dropping the site and its frequent visitors - and most especially my name - is bullshit. (Let me tell you, there are few faster ways of getting on my bad side than dropping my name into a conversation that doesn't involve me, as if I'm going to lend some sort of weight or credence to your arguments by simple association. I am not some bound spirit for you to invoke, I do not work that way.)
The only person that speaks for sup/tg/ as a whole is myself, and only then when I'm specifically speaking about sup/tg/; since I try to remain neutral in all things, and the site by its very definition is neutral, anyone trying to claim sup/tg/ is on their "side" is simply full of shit. Furthermore, my personal opinions on a topic do not reflect the opinions of anyone else, and do not reflect the way this site functions.
The picture above is extremely related. Everyone is welcome here, guys. Let's make sure everyone feels that way, okay?
Still adding threads for deletion. Here's my preliminary list so far:
They'll probably be gone in a half hour or so; I'm too tired now, SQUAD BROKEN. This is my note-to-self list of shit that needs removing. If you see something that you want to keep or have some to remove, let me know. The image threads will be moved to a new Epic Art section, and the Epic page itself rearranged a bit for prettyness.
Furthermore to helping the archive out, I've added some guidelines for the types of threads I'd like to see archived, and I'm going to be adding a voting system. It'll be pretty simple; just a + to vote up and a - to vote down, and it will auto-hide threads according to your preferences with a default "view". Shit archived threads will be bumped down and hidden, and periodically purged with greater accuracy. (As opposed to me asking myself, "is this a good thread? Why was it archived? Why do I think it should be removed? Do I just not get it?" I'll be able to see that five, ten, twenty people down-voted it.)
Happy April Fool's Day! You can find the pages here.
Just a quick note, but I've added a Google-powered site search to the archive page. This should make it easy to find something in the rapidly-approaching-400-thread archives. Here:
New! Search sup/tg/ site and archives:
It's done! You can now create your very own custom playlists for the sup/tg/ Music Player! You can also direct link people to a specific playlist, like so, allowing you to quickly get players on the same songs and themes as you need.
In other site news, I'm also going to stare pruning shit threads from the archive. There's a lot of awful stuff in there, and I'm starting to clean them out as I find crap threads or as people recommend them. I've already killed two so far today (neither of which anyone would notice or care about). The list of those nominated for the chopping block are above.
If there are any others in particular that look awful, let me know so I can task them for removal, either by email or using the note program in IRC (/ms send LordLicorice whatever). Also, make sure you note the warning below about timezones, and check out DiceMaid!
Okay guise, PLEASE NOTE: The Etc/* timezones are counter-intuitive (Etc/GMT+1 is actually GMT-1 and vice-versa) and do not account for DST offsets. Please use an appropriate city/country instead (e.g. Europe/Copenhagen or Europe/Stockholm for GMT+1). Very special thanks to Purple for noticing this idiocy. Seriously, why would you do that, and then proceed to not fix it? Thanks PHP devs, I'm glad you recognize the fact it's backwards and wrong and then choose not to fix it, leaving it available for people to still get tripped up on.
Enough of that, though, because DiceMaid!
Jeanstealer is <3
Gah. So tired. Why do I always feel compelled to create these updates at such a fucking crazy hour of the morning? Anyway, more work has been done on the music player; you can check out the basic tool here (it doesn't do anything at all yet, but it does show the lists). IRC is working out great so far, even visitors on networks where IRC is blocked seem to be able to get in using the alternate port of 9999. I'm also working on some bot scripts; I have some ambitious projects I'm thinking about doing, though at the moment DiceMaid-9001 is doing just fine.
I may need to revisit some of the other projects I've been putting off, like the Dark Heresy chargen (though I haven't heard any more requests or even comments about it since I stopped), a Hamachi listing (which should be really really easy to create, even if it gets to be a pain in the ass to prune it), and... and... fuck. I can't remember what else needs doing right now. So tired. I'm going the hell to bed.
Brief update. I've been working on music player stuff, so don't be surprised if your chosen playlist gets changed or fails to load the first time. Just either clear your cookies and reload the site, or simply choose the desired playlist out of the new list. (The old lists are still there, their names just may be changed.)
Jesus, I went from looking for something to do to overwhelming myself with new projects!
So, I was looking for a lightweight IRC bot so we could have a permanent dice roller available on the server at all times, without having someone running it from their client 24/7. Since IRC servers aren't designed with these types of hangers-on in mind, you have to run some form of client that monitors and reacts to input on a given channel, which ups the memory usage ante considerably.
In searching for a command-line client that required no fully-functional IRC client to run, someone pointed me to the Bones dice bot for Ruby. I've heard of Ruby before and I figured, why the hell not? I'll give it a try. Of course, it wasn't working completely correctly right out of the gate, so now I'm learning Ruby just to mess around with the bot. I expect to make it more functional as time goes on, but everyone say hello to DiceMaid-9001.
Because of this Ruby project, I didn't do anything with the music player project yet. I still haven't finished some of the other projects, like the how-to for using FG/MT/ORPG and such. Last but not least, of course, I want to draw more icons for myself, but that all takes a real back burner to the site coding. Shit.
Also, it's 5:30 again. Goddamnit. I'm going the hell to bed now. PS: If someone has another suggestion for an extremely lightweight IRC bot, let me know. Ruby seems to still take up ~7MB of memory, which is much better than a standard IRC client by any measurement, but I still feel there could be lighter bots out there. A command-line IRC client of some crazy type would work great, especially if it had a way to hook existing bots into it. Otherwise I just have to write everything from scratch, which is fun, but I'm not an expert.
Well, it's technically 4:44am, but thanks to Daylight Assholes Time, it's now really 5:44am. Great. I'm glad today is Sunday and I have the day off.
Anyway, I came up with some ideas to allow people to build their own playlists for music currently hosted here on the site. There's a ton of music that's just not linked and I'm sick of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane people telling me they're too lazy/technically inept to build their own playlist file. So I figured it would be easy enough to ma-- is that a Snakes on a Plane reference back there? Goddamn. -- to make a way for people to simply choose which songs they want and store it for sharing. A "random" playlist would be cool, too.
Still kinda working on getting zombies into Battlegrounds, though I'm still pretty sure it's not going to happen. It may very well be possible but I don't have enough experience with modding to do it. In other site news, nothing of interest is happening. IRC is working great, Meebo continues to randomly fail, haven't touched the Dark Heresy chargen, lots of lulz in the archives, etc.
Speaking of archives, I've had a request recently to add an archival program for /co/. Are there any other particular requests for particular boards? I'd prefer not to go outside of our little realm here, but /co/ has some decent stuff on it from time to time. So does /v/, but the encounters I've had with /v/irgins lately lead me to believe the underage B& jackoffs will shit all over it just because they can. More mature boards are something I'd considered, or at least quiet/laid-back boards. So, if you have a request, let me know. If I get enough votes for something I'll do it.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I need to write a tag/description search tool for the archive. I mean, you could just use Find in your browser, but a search tool is easy.
God fucking damnit, after 5am again. What's wrong with me?
If anyone's ever heard of a mod or plugin that allows the spawning of zombies in the middle of other games, please let me know; I've tried all day today to spawn zombies in Battlegrounds and it's just not looking like it's going to happen. The best I seem to be able to do is use 'npc_create npc_zombie' and some 'ent_fire' commands to make them attack people, but 1) I don't know how to give the create command a target X/Y/Z, 2) I'd need a timer plugin to make them spawn specific places on a make, and 3) it crashes the connecting client if you disconnect and crashes the server on map change. Oh, and 4) 'npc_create' doesn't seem to be available on a standalone server.
I've got a copy of Zombie Horde, the most recent version before they vanished off the face of the internet, which I may be able to fuck around with to spawn NPC zombies of some kind... though not likely. So, help me internet! I must have zombies in my revolutionary war!
jesus fuck me it's 5:30 again what is wrong with me
fuck
jesus
We've got a Battlegrounds 2 HLDS set up now, though it likely won't be running if you read this any time before 4:00pm EST, since the server's busy doing virus scanning and I can't be fucked to tell it to start the server on reboot when it's done. Anyway, if you have HL2 and want to play some revolutionary war fightan, jump in.
Thanks to an extremely long image thread, I realized there was a bug in the update script that caused it to create image files that were only three digits in length (e.g. 123.gif, 456.jpg). Normally this has no impact on archived threads, as it's a one-in-a-thousand shot of overwriting an existing image accidentally (or neglecting to download a new image, linking wrong thumbnail images, etc.), but when you get the number of images in a thread close to a hundred, issues start to make themselves known. I fixed the error, so it shouldn't happen again.
You're likely aware of how a Dwarf Fortress succession game works, with each player running the fortress for a year and passing the save off to the next player. Well, unfortunately, Grover Cleveland seems to have fallen off the face of the earth with the last Dwarf Fortress succession save, and I don't really care to continue until the Army Arc is completed or he comes back, so we should get a new game going. PurpleXVI brought up the idea of an X-COM succession game, where each player runs for a game month, which sounds fun... of course, I haven't played X-COM before, but it sounds like awesome, so maybe we'll do that next.
On the communications front, I've added a pre-chat interface to allow you to pick the type of chat you'd like to use and your default IRC username before it loads up both the IRC java applet and the Flash Meebo applet. This should help people that don't want one or the other avoid wasting resources, and it should also help people avoid accidental crashes or unexpected behavior as their browser tries to load two things at once like that. Let me know if you run into any problems or have any suggestions.
Last but not least, I did figure out how precisely to get a Battlegrounds server going without resorting to a stupid dedicated server. I may even install Metamod or whatever they're using these days for some real admin fun. We'll see, though, and as always it depends on demand. I'd like to get some Natural Selection going, but not everyone has a copy of Half-Life 1 or CS 1.6 to use to get access to it, which is rather unfortunate. It seems asinine that you don't just automatically gain access to HL1 mods with HL2, but that's Valve for you.
Happy Leap Day! I didn't realize it was some kind of special occasion, other than a result of our less-than-perfect system for keeping track of time, but Google had a special image for it so I figured it warranted a mention.
Man, people are stupid. There are, all told, probably thirty people that still play Battlegrounds for Half-Life 2. At any given time, there are two dozen servers, and of these servers only two are ever populated. So, of course, the admins on the two servers (owned and hosted by the same people, of course) are power-tripping, pencil-dicked motherfuckers that think they're awesome because they can ban people arbitrarily from a game they've played for "six years" that no one else gives a shit about, as they operate the only servers anyone ever uses anymore.
Don't worry, "B.O.D. GEN. SM{}KE" (yes, he really did spell "smoke" with fucking curly brackets), I won't soon forget your name. Whenever I need an example of unmitigated idiocy and how humans will cling to any scrap of power and authority they can possibly glean to make their pathetic lives seem infinitesimally less pathetic, I'll remember to bring you up. I'm sure if I ever need to interview you, you'll be right there where I fucking left you, squatting on the only hospitable islands in a sea of lonely desolation.
Oh, well, enough of my soapboxing. Anyway, this led me to recall just how little effort it takes to host a gaming server. Now, of course, hosting a gaming server takes a lot more bandwidth and processing power than the webserver and all the other services I run here at sup/tg/, so I can't run one 24/7, but if there are any particular requests or someone wants to schedule a /tg/ game of some kind, I think that'd be pretty fun. Battlegrounds and Natural Selection spring to mind as the top two contenders in that arena; anyone else has particular suggestions, let me know.
The IRC server seems to be running just fine now. I've added a new entry on the webserver - irc.thisisnotatrueending.com - which will redirect you to the chat page on sup/tg/ if accessed in a web browser or allow you to connect directly if you're using an IRC client. I've added an alternate port, 9999, for users with restrictive campus firewalls and the like.
Rather than getting rid of Meebo, I've opted to use it as a kind of 'media channel'; the default chat view shows the IRC java applet (which works beautifully by the way) on top and the Meebo chat on the bottom. This also allows users who can't or don't want to use IRC to still be able to chat, and it allows IRC visitors to have the media viewer from Meebo. Yes, having two chats on the same page seems absolute overkill, but really, the same could be said of all religions of having multiple IRC channels open on the same network.
That's it, really. If you run into a problem or really hate one of the chats in particular, let me know. Different view types are available on the sidebar to let you choose one or the other of the chats, as well as to view the IRC in a different, more feature-rich applet. This all will shortly be handled by cookies and preferences settings and the like; I may even be able to find a way to get it to remember your IRC information for when you visit the page.
As nifty as the Meebo chatroom is, the inability to properly moderate and control it and the constant random disconnects are starting to move from simple annoyance to full-blown problem. I've installed an IRC server, but I've got really no idea how to operate the fucking thing. If anyone's had any experience installing and setting up an IRC server, please stop by or send me an email or something.
Nothing much else to report. I still haven't even started work on the DH chargen, which I really should do. The archival system hiccups every so often whenever Moot changes something in the Matrix, but other than that it seems to be doing well and it's getting to the point where a tag or description search tool will actually be useful. In other news, still haven't finished the VTT tutorials, but I did add a page for Roguelikes.
So, once again, if anyone has any clue about installing and configuring an IRC server and can lend a hand (what the fuck is a NickServ), please do so.
Oh, I suppose you're probably curious as to where the IRC channel is. Well, it's the same fucking server as everything else but nobody seems to have caught on, yet, so, irc.thisisnotatrueending.com is the server, on the standard port 6667. It's up and running, even if it doesn't have fancy login registration bullshit. Just try not to be morons and everything should be okay as-is.
Well, that took me far longer than I had estimated for some reason, but it's finished and works beautifully. You can now add your character to the database and link other players or DMs. I figure keeping characters for 14 days is sufficient, so I'll probably have it automatically delete stuff after a while.
Behold the glory of my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay character generator here! Or perhaps behold other people's characters while you're at it!
In other, related news, Nasdaq of the Dark Heresy Wikia dropped by. I may start working on a DH generator next, and find some way to implement multiple random generators for each of the races and things made up by players for the Wikia. If I can find a way to load simple text files for new values, so people at the Wikia can more easily update or create files for a chargen, that would be pretty awesome. We'll see how it turns out.
Finally, I'm going to start looking (again) at getting IRC and using a Flash-based IRC client instead of Meebo. As much as I like the Meebo player, lack of control and weird errors are making me reconsider the awesomeness of that one component. If anyone has specific recommendations on server software or a Flash-based IRC client, please let me know at [email protected].
Addendum: ... uhh... heh. Whoops. The FTP auto-ban was set to '999 hours' for failed login attempts. That would explain why people had so much trouble recently... I've set it to just one hour and cleared the ban list. Sorry about that.
Addendum 2: Something's fucked up with the archive script, I'll fix it tomorrow. At least I've added a backup thing so it will create a couple backups of the original HTML.
Addendum 3: 6:14am EST. Fixed the archival script. It would have bugged the shit out of me to not know why it was broken; turns out 4chan changed the image path again, from src.cgi to cb-ws. Everything should work now, will manually fix other threads tomorrow.
The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay character generator is complete! Behold its glory! Now I'm going the hell to bed. Jesus Christ.
I'm going to make it so you can save and link characters tomorrow, clean up the interface a bit, and add the ability to generate genders, names and jobs for your immediate family as well. After that, if I'm really feeling masochistic, I'll get a copy of Dark Heresy and do the same for that system, too... though I may ask for some help with the simple data entry, which accounted for 80% of this project, what with all the varying charts. (Seriously, why the fuck couldn't they just make a basic "+2d20lbs." for weight like they did for height?)
Wow, a whole month without a frontpage update. Anyway, guise on /tg/ suggested I create a WHFRP and Dark Heresy character generator, so I've been working on that. The magic is here. It's not done yet, but it's basically a matter of adding in the raw data now that the rolling is complete, such as all the eye colors and careers per species. Shouldn't be anything GW can sue over. And before you baw that this is stupid and people should roll their own fucking dice for their characters, well, I'd tend to agree with you but the request was made and I was toying with the idea of doing it, so it's being done, don't baw to me about it. Just fulfilling an /r/.
Nothing else much to report. Welcome to Febtober. New Dwarf Fortress on Tuesday, woo! Also, Go Pats!
Oh yeah, had a list of shit to do down there, didn't I?
Why the fuck can't I get in bed by a reasonable hour? Technically I should be in bed every morning by 3am at the latest, and yet here I am at 5:00am once again, doing shit that can be done during the daylight hours but I just decide to do now, when I should really be sleeping.
Anyway, I got bored so I'm downloading the pair of 500-song torrents from OCReMix, and I'm going to make it accessible under the music folder. (By the way, I've added a couple disclaimers regarding copyrighted content. Please don't upload infringing content and then report it, it's rather rude and I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.) That should keep us busy in the lulz for a few days in the Meebo chat thingie. If shit be slow, it's probably my fault on account of this torrent.
Also, I suppose I could make a New Year's Resolution about getting shit done on the site. Here's my To Do list:
That's about it. This list is mostly a kind of to-do for myself, but if anyone has content or ideas, please send them to me or say something in the chat.
Durr hurr carol of the bells hurp derp. Sorry, I just had to get the Christmas music off the front page. Nothing to report.
Okay, so, we found out that Ventrilo has an eight-slot limitation. Unless I want to start my own business and host a thousand-slot-plus commercial Ventrilo server, I've decided to switch to TeamSpeak, which has a 100-slot limit. It seems to work just as well as Ventrilo, minus the elitism. It's not as pretty, but what can you do?
Consider the Ventrilo server officially decommissioned. Fuck 'em if they don't want non-commercial-class users.
Nothing really to report. Found this and used a Flash decompiler to rip the song out, and decided to throw it ^^^ up there. Merry Christmas!
Also, in case people aren't aware of this, sup/tg/ has a Ventrilo server and an FTP server for file uploads. If you'd like to join the Ventrilo server and bug everyone, stop by the chat and ask for details. Same with the FTP, especially if you've got some music you'd like to upload for a playlist for our music player.
Found an error where you could keep adding the same thread to the archive. It just made duplicate entries in the table, but it still meant checking the archived threads extra times and having more than one entry is obviously pointless anyway. FIXXED.
Also, http://chat.thisisnotatrueending.com is a redirect to that shitty Angelfire site where I've got the Meebo chat embedded. If the site's down for whatever reason (like today when I broke the site with an errant semicolon and then the server crashed later on) you can still get to it easily.
I currently use two basically identical scripts for archival; one for requesting and one for auto-updating. The former includes HTML and all that, the latter doesn't (since it doesn't need it). Making edits to two scripts is driving me batshit, and I just found a glaring error in the checking script that would have caused some problems.
So, I've made a single hybrid script containing both of the other scripts, and just differentiating what it does based on what I use to call it. The TL;DR is that I've made a major revision and if you see any weird shit, let me know immediately.
After losing a particularly lulzsy thread out of the archive due to Brb, Compromised, I've added some sanity checking to the archival script. Before, the script expected two results: a thread, or a 404. This third result, where a page existed but it wasn't 4chan, resulted in the old HTML being overwritten for the threads still available for archival.
Now, the script checks for certain META tags on the /tg/ thread page. This ensures the page being retrieved is actually 4chan, and furthermore is actually a /tg/ page on top of that. Also, it turns out the scripts were still downloading thumbnail images even if they already existed, which was wasting everyone's bandwidth. FIXXED.
4chan has been returned to its rightful owner! Everyone make sure you flush your DNS cache; Windows users, clear all cookies and caches in your browser, close all browser windows, then go to Start - Run and type ipconfig /flushdns. A black window should flash as Windows flushes its DNS cache. Now try visiting 4chan, and you should see it restored in all its wonderous glory. (You may still see a cached response if your ISP has it cached, and you may need to wait 24 hours or so for all things to be back to normal.
Hooray for Mootles!
Edit: It looks like 4chan's still not back up. The DNS is correct but it seems as if Moot is redirecting the domain over to Glexia's suspension page. It's weird, but that's as far as I can tell; connecting directly to the 4chan webserver brings me to this location. The nameservers are right... it's just weird. Hang tight.
Edit the Second: http://zip.4chan.org/tg/imgboard.html should still bring you to /tg/ properly.
Well, it looks like 4chan is still hijacked. For those of you who haven't heard the news yet or have no idea what the fuck is going on, check the status blog for 4chan here and read the Technical Bullshit portion I wrote up on ED for the crunchy details of the fuckup. 4chan control hasn't been restored to Moot yet, or the site would be back; he probably won't have the domain restored until Monday at the latest.
Someone suggested that I note a rally point for displaced /tg/ members. 420chan was a great refuge last time, and I really am thankful for them for taking us in during the Caturday Nap, but it's pretty dead-quiet this time around. Instead, Freechan has graciously opened its arms to fleeing 4channers, so head on over to Freechan's /tg/ board and say hello.
We'll get through this, people! This is the worst thing to happen to 4chan yet, but Moot will prevail. THE LULZ WILL PREVAIL!
Oh shit, son, 4chan is down! The domain's been hijacked. Thanks a lot, Network fucking Solutions! You guys are shit and ass, and cock, and you are awful at everything you do.
Edit: I added a full item on the details to the ED article on Brb, Compromised.tl:dr; someone stole 4chan.
The archival system broke because there's no sanity checking; it expects 4chan to return a thread, return a 404, or return nothing (in the instance of a DDoS). Since 4chan has a page but it's not a thread, the most recent archived threads are wiped out. Baw.
I've made a slight change to the sidebar; it should now show the current date and time based on your selected timezone, which should hopefully clue people in if their date/time is off, and help people determine timezones when viewing people's games or player listings. Also, despite the facelift on 4chan the archival program seems to still be functioning correctly for now (the last breakage was likely related to said changes).
Nothing much else to report. No real progress on the Succession game yet, since our first player started us in an incredibly difficult place. THANKS YOU JERK. Check striketheearth.thisisnotatrueending.com for any updates and the current game's player list. If you've got any DF-related materials or fortresses to share, let me know and I'll upload them to this new page.
People have added some new tunes to the Music Player, go check it out if you haven't yet. For those of you that would like to add a new playlist, please be certain that all of your music files are .mp3 (changing the extension does not convert the files derp) or the player will just choke on the song. Furthermore, please remove all spaces from a filename, I don't know if the music player can handle spaces in a filename and I'd rather not bother finding out. Please also example playlist format so I can just copy and paste a few things without having to tediously edit shit.
That's all for now. Dwarf Fortress is eating my life.
So, we're going to be running a Dwarf Fortress succession game. A DF succession game is where each player takes a turn running the fortress for a year, then passes the save to the next player. Play rotates until the fortress is finally wiped out. I plan on including plenty of screenshots and dwarven journal entries during my turns, though this is purely optional.
The exploits for the (likely multiple) succession games will end up here at striketheearth.thisisnotatrueending.com (what's with me and the double e in URLs?). We had a list of players but I eated it. Right now the site's just a derp page, but I plan on adding content and making it prettier later.
If you want in, pop in the chat and announce your intentions to join. If you've never played before, make sure you check out the Dwarf Fortress Wiki for more information on how to play, including some decent tutorials. It's tough getting started, but it's a ton of fun, Roguelikes meet Dungeon Keeper, with derpy dwarves and extremely rich gameplay and storytelling.
There was a power outage this morning that caused the server machine to turn off. To prevent system-melting restart loops, the machine is set to not auto-restart on power restoration, so it was out for a few hours before I woke up and turned it back on. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the server came back up properly or the router needed an ass-kicking as well, and it continued to sit there uselessly for a few more hours until I realized the machine was down while at work. The server's back up now (since you're reading this). It looks like everyone found the chat again via the Meebo listings, so that's a good thing.
Anyway, everything's fine, nothing is broken.
Okay, so I've managed to fix the archival script. I swear, it's like someone else writes the code while my body goes on autopilot; I only vaguely understand how it works after I've created it, even with copious amounts of comments. At any rate, it appears 4chan changed the way they reference thumbnail files, and blah blah derp derp hocus pocus I fixed it. It should be fine now; PLEASE let me know if it fucks up again.
I'm still thinking about the upload thing. I've been feeling sick lately, though, so I'm afraid I don't know when I'll get to actually work on it. Hopefully I'll feel better soon, but things seem to be steadily progressing downhill for me at the moment.
There was something else suggested earlier by someone, but I can't even remember anything right now, so I hope it'll come back to me at a better hour and/or condition.
p.s. Aun Shi is the derpiest namefag to ever derp
Quick updates. First, I've had a Ventrilo server installed since forever, and people asked about it last night, so I've upgraded to the very latest version (3.0.2) and it should be running just fine. The password is lolvent.
In addition to this, I've also made a couple changes to the Game Listings page. First, a couple weeks ago I added a feature that lets you toggle 'weekly' games, which causes the games to re-list themselves after they're over for the same time and day next week. I have also added additional fields for email, IMs and other contact (like IRC) to prompt DMs to leave contact information.
As for Meebo and a Flash-based IRC client, I don't think we're going to be getting one of these anytime soon. First, none of them offer the neat Flash player that Meebo uses (even if the Meebo one doesn't work half the time). Also, I've talked to Meebo support a bit, and they've noted the feature request for 'unlisted' rooms and I'm asking them about permabanning visitors that bother us. Of course, it's gotten to the point lately where bothering Meebo users has become a sport, so maybe this won't be a pressing need in the future.
Still to come is the ability to upload character sheets. I may be considering DMing a game myself in the upcoming weeks, which will take some of my time, but other than that the site's pretty stable at the moment. There's a game of some kind running just about every night now, so pop into the chat and ask around to see if something's running if you're new to the site.
Edity: And I just realized the archival script has started acting up again. It looks like a CSS issue due to some weirdness when updating shit. I don't honestly know what's wrong, but I'll fix it tomorrow. Threads look ugly until then, but the images and content is being saved correctly.
So, general update. There has been a MASSIVE influx of new people, so I've been just pretty much hanging out lately. I still need to add the character sheet upload function, and remember to update the game listing to allow DMs to add contact information fields. (Generally, you would expect this to appear in the game info field itself, but it also helps to prompt people.)
Nothing else much to report at the moment. Meebo is a pain in the ass a lot of the time lately, I'm trying to find a replacement. I don't really want to move to IRC; I like the embedded-in-a-webpage aspect of Meebo, but the only-occasionally-working Flash player and the inability to remove derps from the chatroom properly (including horny underage B& and spambots that pop in from the public chat listing I can't remove it from) are pissing me off.
If anyone knows of a good Flash-based IRC applet or something, which affords more control than Meebo but is the same general premise, please let me know. I don't mind running an IRC server, I just want the embedded client in a page.
So apparently the server machine decided to crash unexpectedly again while I was out and about Sunday night, resulting in who-the-hell-knows-how-long of downtime. My apologies. I don't know if it's a symptom of the machine dying or if I'd accidentally blocked a fan, resulting in another overheating issue; I moved it so there's better airflow and I'm going to check it periodically to make sure the damn thing's not on fire.
I'm also considering implementing a way for people to upload character sheets onto the site to help people playing games to show their sheets or other image files to other players. I'm in the planning stages now, as I'm not sure the best way to organize it. I could make it completely open, and let people add files with a per-image password (letting people keep their anonymity), or have visitors create accounts so they can organize and store their own image files.
The biggest concern is security, so once I develop or find a decent method of allowing people to upload only certain filetypes and file sizes without worrying about script kiddies, the rest is just a matter of preference and seeing what people are interested in.
Other items of note: I've added a playlist feature for the music player, allowing you to switch types. If you've got an idea for a specific playlist or just a theme, let me know. I want a few themes so players can keep the music player running in the background while they game for 'mood music'. Right now the Horror one is pretty awesome but I'd like some more, including suggestions for additional songs.
Lastly, I'm putting off the IRC server idea for the moment. I will implement it eventually, but right now I'd prefer not to install yet another separate service on the server machine, and personally I find it easier to use the Meebo thing than open up an IRC client. Once we get enough visitors to the site and there's actually enough people where multiple separate rooms is the only logical next-step, then we'll see about IRC. For now, even a list of popular /tg/ IRC chats would be helpful, e.g. #dungeonooc (though I'm not sure where the hell it is).
So, it turns out I treat my computers much like... oh, a parent that leaves their children in a car with the windows rolled up in the hot summer sun while they go into a strip joint, i.e. terrible.
Since the computer wouldn't even remain running long enough to bring up the Windows Recovery disk, I figured I'd actually check the hardware components again. (That will learn me to expect a certain type of failure to behave in a certain pattern!) The fan on the processor was so full of dust that it was struggling just to turn, and I thought I almost burned myself touching the metal on the processor. I'm pretty lucky I didn't lose the machine in its entirety to a fried processor due to my inhumane negligence.
I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and a bendy straw and sucked that fucker like a $2 whore. Things are running great now, and I think the server will be fine. I got the heat sink, the power supply and everything else I could get at with the straw.
Hopefully my server woes are over, for now, but at least I was able to identify and rectify the issue... this time. Comcast continues to suck, of course, so the site may be spotty even still until I figure out what the hell's wrong with them. But the server's going! Yay!
Uh, so, I'm a goddamn liar. Server maintenance did not, in fact, occur on the 15th, nor did it occur tonight (even though I did take the site down for a couple hours). I really will be reinstalling something somewhere sometime, either Saturday night or Sunday. I guess there really won't be any warning... not that it will matter much; there will still be *a* site, a temp. page with the Meebo chat and updates, and I can put it up and take it down within 60 seconds for DNS propagation, so really, it won't matter when I do it because shit will still kinda work.
Just, uh, letting you know.
The server machine has been acting pretty screwy lately. While it may be a hardware issue (the result of leaving a computer on pretty much 24/7), it may just as well be the OS, so I'm going to try making Windows stop sucking. If that fails, I'll likely need to reinstall entirely, and may switch to Ubuntu instead. In any case, the site may be down for a few hours tonight (hopefully less), so be aware. (Not that you'll see this message while the site is down, but hey.)
In other news, I'm glad to see more people using the site, including the chat, archival program and the game and player listings. Upcoming features and services may include an actual IRC server rather than this Meebo crap, and maybe a simple comments section for these front-page posts. As always, let me know at [email protected] if you want/need anything.
Hmm, weird. The Meebo chat thing broke somehow, and it wasn't showing a user list or recording posts. I just made a new room and changed the URL, and it works again. Oh well.
I may be installing an IRC server soon, but I'm still undecided. If you'd like to see one (or just hate the Meebo thing and want any excuse to see it removed), shoot me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment in the chat.
I checked the chat today and found a letter from a very famous personage regarding an error on the site.
Lord Licorice.
It is with deep regret I must write to you.
Hopefully, you shall receive this message, and rectify this situation before it spirals out of control.
Whilst delving into your archive of engravings, I came across an image labeled simply "Taft.jpg."
Curiousity erupted within me, for I (Though my wife does call it most frivolous) am among the many who admire's Taft's great countenance, and impressive body.
However, upon gazing upon this image, I did not see Taft.
I saw my own countenance gazing back at me (Well, actually in this newfangled photograph, I was staring to the left in contemplation of a passing gazelle, but the metaphor works better this way), regaled in my equipment, falchion in hand.
Therefore, I must remonstrate upon you Lord Licorice, to correct this immediately, or face the full brunt of a rise in tariffs by six point three percent.
Graciously,
Grover Cleveland,
President of the Bifurcated States.
Since I do not have the postal address of the good President, I must return correspondence here on the front page.
My dear, honored President Cleveland,
I am as honored by your taking the time to write to me as I am chagrined at having made such a grave error. I cannot fully express my regret in having mistakenly labeled a picture of yourself as William Howard Taft.
While it is true that you were both Presidents at one time, and your glorious moustaches could defeat even the hardiest of dwarves with but a single stare, it is impossible to mistake your impressive, imposing visage for that of President Taft, and vice-versa. You are both gods among men, but to mistake one for the other is unforgivable.
I hastily rectified the error upon realizing my mistake, and your image has been properly relabeled to its rightful appelation. Further, I have added a new image of President Taft for your viewing pleasure.
I hope you will find these changes satisfactory, and once again, please accept my deepest and humblest apologies.
Yours Truly,
I have a horrible tendency to download teh funny from /tg/ and other places on 4chan or the internet at large, and chuck them, unlabeled and unmodified, into a giant folder on my desktop called 'random'. At last count, this motherfuck was nearly a thousand images large. So, I've gone through, yanked some out, and thrown them into the images folder of the Epic Lulz section.
Feel free to peruse; about 90% in there are SFW, and I'll get around to marking the NSFW as such later (as well as generally renaming them all to something more sensible).
The Player Listing section has been completed! You can now add yourself, your gaming preferences, and the times of day when you're available for gaming.
Search features for the Player Listing and Game Listing sections will be made available eventually. Right now it's not really necessary, but in time it will be helpful for DMs seeking players available for a given time range, and for players seeking games to find a preferred game type. (Note to self: Don't forget to add a way for players to show as 'Inactive' so they don't need to necessarily remove their entry.)
As always, if there's anything you need or want, or shit breaks, you can contact me at [email protected].
I've made a great deal of progress on the player listing section. You can add yourself now if you like; however, you won't be able to modify the information you've provided, and at the moment it only tells viewers if you are currently available (based on the hours you check off, e.g. if you're available at 2:00am GMT+1 on Sundays and someone checks at 1:00am GMT+0 on a Sunday, it will tell them you are available for gaming).
Speaking of which, please make sure you set your timezone on the Change Settings page here. This will affect all date/time information on the site, including viewing games and players or adding new games and players. If your timezone is not properly set, you may be confused when everyone tells you how awesome that game was that happened six hours ago...
I've added a way to change the default timezone when viewing games, so now it will show listings in whatever timezone you set in your preferences. You can change these settings (including whether the sidebar Flash chat shows) on the lefthand sidebar.
I'm going to add a player listing, which will allow people to simply specify the dates and times they're usually available. This way, if someone wants to run a game, information for locating the players will be easily available to throw something together. If there any suggestions or requests, please let me know at [email protected].
Jesus Christ. Note to fucking self: Don't code after 3am. No matter how epic it turns out to be, you will NOT remember how it works the next day, despite copious comments. And God help you if you forget to put comments as you write, assuming you'll understand how you did it tomorrow.
Also note: MAKE YOUR TEST CODE APPARENT AS TEST CODE, SO YOU DON'T TEAR YOUR FUCKING HAIR OUT FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS BECAUSE OF A SINGLE ANTI-LOOP MEASURE YOU PUT IN AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT DURING TESTING. GAH.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Inquisitor Lord Elias pointed out that clicking images in an archived thread didn't work properly; I'd made a mistake when rewriting the URLs to local files, so while the images were properly stored, they weren't being properly referenced. I've fixed it, so all threads should now properly show the full-sized images if clicked in an archived thread.
Any new threads and any threads still live on 4chan have been fixed on update, but some of the expired threads need to be manually fixed. I'll be doing that with a simple find/replace in a moment, but if you find a thread that's not working right, [email protected] or just post it in the chat on the left.
Speaking of which, I'm going to be adding a way to remove it if you don't want to see it on the sidebar on every page, so if it annoys you, you'll be able to turn it off. Nobody's actually complained yet, but I'm sure it must be annoying someone out there, and the damn chat isn't smart enough to log you in only once if you've got multiple tabs.
A simple request interface has been added. Let me know how it works out for you all. It only works on /tg/, so I don't think shit will break under heavy use or anything like that. It's automated, so you should get the thread archived immediately after the request unless something goes awry. Fortunately, you don't even have to spam shit at people to get things archived; currently, it just saves the thread on the first request. Also bonus: no ads like on 4chanarchive. Also also bonus: You don't get fucking banned for mentioning my site!
As always, [email protected] if you run into trouble or have suggestions/requests. I'm going to make it so you can add notes, titles, descriptions and tags to threads next; right now it just archives the thread by the original number and that's it.
Not that I really needed one, but I found a really simple-to-implement Flash-based chat app. It's embedded in the sidebar, with a larger window available on the chat page. Go and talk about stupid shit. GO FAGGORTS.
I'm thinking of implementing a request interface to help archive threads. /tg/ is a relatively slow-moving board, so it should be easy for a manual request interface (which is how it'll have to remain for the moment): you enter the number of the desired thread, and I'll snag it at some point for archival. Hopefully that will further improve the utility of this site.
Hooray, 4chan's back! For now, anyway. It's still a little shaky, but I think things are back to normal. (If you can call anything about 4chan "normal," I mean.)
Jesus Christ. 4chan's was DDoSed into oblivion last Thursday-ish and it's still not back up. Wow. Isn't this the sort of thing /b/tards should be doing to other sites? I can't wait to see what the /b/tards are going to do in response once they can regroup. It should be very, very interesting.
In the meantime, it looks like a lot of fa/tg/uys have taken refuge at 420chan's /tg/ board. Use adblock if you want to get rid of the annoying flashing colors and sound; they've probably been implemented to keep newfags out of the boards until 4chan has returned to normal. Me, I just look at all the pretty colors and drool.
I'm still trying to archive popular threads, but with 4chan completely DOA it's hard to find anything anywhere. The reprecussions of a single site's meltdown can be felt throughout the interwebs:
By the way, I am searching specifically for the Rood threads: the original thread, the thread where he meets Sir Brian, and the thread where he hijacks Sir Brian's Spelljammer ship. If people happen to have these or other awesomenesses, please send to [email protected] for lulz storage.
That's all for now. Good luck in this dark hour, /tg/!
Pick an item from the left. The site's very bare-bones right now. If you've got more suggestions for content or links or whatever, send them to [email protected]
Site code and contents © 2007-2024 thisisnotatrueending.com. All rights reserved. Click here for legal information.
If you are under the age of 18,
please leave this site immediately. Asshole.
RSS
