Aran

Quote: Quote: Milla Australian, Misc era, posted on Shadow Vale a bit I think? She was on Polaris (for pretty much all its recorded history, 2004-2008). I can't find her on the SV archive, but it's notoriously hard to search so I'm not sure. The only posts I found attributed to her there are actually guest-posted scenario reviews copied from the Lyceum. Edit: this member list states there was no SV account starting with "Milla". Quote: Quote: Rupert Misc era, British?, irritating, also went by FatBatMonkey Wow, I know FBM, but I didn't know he went by Rupert. Amusingly, I confused Ephesos for him for a while early on in the MoS RP.

The more common misinterpretation (but apparently also wrong) is that exactly one man and one woman survived. The "killed by a man and a woman" is more of a long shot grammatically, but I'm an ESL speaker myself and pretty much learned English by playing Exile.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Fun fact: I watched the above video during a moment when nobody in my lab had any questions. Apparently the TA's computer plays sounds, so now all my students share your love of Atrus's voice. (Also, I just watched the Haven video made by the same user, and just realized that Achenar was locked away in an Age with trusting animals.) That's actually so much of a plot point that I should probably not even say it for fear of spoilers.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Gentlemen, I ask you the following: do either Channelwood or Spire feature Brad Dourif screaming "NO!" repeatedly? I submit to you that they do not. Narayan wins. The gentleman raises an excellent point. I have Saavedro's scenes memorized to the point where I can mentally act them out while listening to the soundtrack. Yet I must reply that Spire is composed of islands of floating black rock in orbit around a green star in the middle of a perpetual storm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ztAEQtljM (As an aside, for voices I could listen to endlessly, Rand Miller ranks just behind Carl Sagan alone.)

Originally Posted By: Ephesos *-even though Channelwood will always be the best Age Spire 4ever. I also really miss Aimhack. When I have time, I want to join another campaign...

While obvious, it should be pointed out that people have been reminiscing about the good old days of SW for at least the past nine years. I don't think we miss the way SW was at the time so much as the way we were. Many of us grew up posting here, so this place represents a part of childhood. Satellites do play a useful role for the reasons you mentioned. They keep a sort of cohesion and continuity between "generations". I don't know half the people now here (Slarty's mistake about Xelgion/Vergil and Nebulan would happen to me with loads of members whose names I can't keep straight, even before my extended absence). To that extent, I don't miss Shadow Vale or Polaris, but rather the kind of community that was vibrant and connected enough to use satellite boards.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Last I checked, The Grand Endeavor was still offline. That's actually what I was referring to when I initially asked about Ermarian, not the PPP. I'm a bit hesitant to bring it back up (aside from the fact that it is, like the old PPP, an unsalvageable mess and needs a rewrite) because that data is somewhat more personal than archived posts. On the other hand, back in 2007 I locked down on it anyhow and only made PDN/Title changes and postcounts trackable. In that form, it should be fine. The rewrite, however, is still needed.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus There isn't one. I have to check my name now. Tyranicuss. Really, was that the best you could do? I'd have gone with Tyrannosauricus or some play on Darth Tyranus, myself.

Originally Posted By: Things were more nostalgic then. I'm not quite sure. I think it maybe had its roots in the collective scenario-building exercise before BoA came out that also never got anywhere, but I might be getting confused because that collective scenario started from ideas SMoE and I bounced off each other before Polaris existed. The scenario and Calithon were definitely distinct; Calithon was conceived more as an RP setting than for Blades. I can't recall who came up with the idea, but a cursory look at my incomplete backup shows Nazgul contributed a lot of the early stuff. I definitely can't claim credit for starting it, though I was involved early on, as were Tumbleweed, FZ, Omlette and mef. I remember we did some work on a world map, on writing races and nations and languages etc. My backup shows Calithon-related posts dating to January 2004 just after a forum crash had erased all prior work on it. Some of the later work survives, but everything we wrote in 2006 was lost in another forum crash, and after that it was mostly dead until the final forum crash which took care of Polaris for good. (Anyone notice a pattern? ) I later repurposed some of my conlang work (link) in NationStates. Quote: If I'm remembering right, the predominant sapient species was a lagomorph. That may well be, though I recall some variety of lizardfolk or amphibians being predominant. Or maybe we're both right. We had the Larpin, the Velpan and the Mok... Edit: And a dozen subspecies/cultures; Velpathos, Iranoch, Urwa, Humai, Tauvendi, Velnoganen, Mok'ul, Mok'el, Wraith, ... these names bring back so many memories. All in all, I have 73 posts with around 25,000 words remaining in my archive, but no time to sort through them right now.

Originally Posted By: Micawber I think it's the autocensor that has been messed around with, e.g. when you type Avernum it displays as Avernum. Which is wrong on multiple levels. ... (quote edited to match output) Quote: Question: does bypassing the autocensor count as cursing regardless of what's being censored? Yes - you're banned forevar!!

Windows is the herpes of Windows. There is an effective solution that involves a penguin. Other than that, you can just leave it be and use another browser; it won't hurt just by being there.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Thank you, Diki! The best part of that thread, given the current context, is: Originally Posted By: John S After the next PPP of General, will this thread conveniently disappear from both the boards and the archives? Damn! I knew I'd forgotten something. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I found a couple errors: Avernum Reloaded IC 2 Avernum Reloaded Summaries 2 (For reference, Avernum Reloaded OOC 2 works.) Thanks! That's actually a bug in the xbbcode module; I just fixed it.

Opera and Firefox show the same thing for me. Chromium shows something different. I don't have access to IE sadly(?)

http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/ It is done. Please point out any problems you notice, but unfortunately I won't get around to fixing them until next week.

Oh, I haven't spent my vacation like this; I just finished up some of the theming late at night. Sitting outside on the terrace right now listening to the roaring waves, and watching the unbelievably clear night sky. I mean, damn, this is awesome. (Unfortunately this is my last day here.)

Database dump is being transferred. I have to upload the entire archive data again as I did some stuff with it locally. I'm also on a shaky wifi behind a DSL line in a little taverna on the coast of Xora Sfakion (Crete), so it'll take a while (probably an hour or so).

One does not simply post a clapping Gimli.

Update: The old PPP is this close to going online again. Since the old site is a complete unsalvageable mess of undocumented spaghetti code, I've started from scratch. Written a module that can access the old archives in a read-only form, and created a new theme for it (which will be reused in the new archive site too, whenever that's done). If I finish writing the user profile page and post list tonight, I can upload the whole thing and launch it.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Polaran Since you mentioned Carl Sagan, I'm guessing you already saw all of Cosmos, but it's worth mentioning again specifically. Awesome stuff. don't forget about of his work While we're on remixes of Sagan: Symphony of Science. I know autotune irks a lot of people, but some of this stuff is simply awesome.

There are a lot of excellent speakers on Youtube in this field, too. For example, Cristina Rad does some really good and witty stuff. Since you mentioned Carl Sagan, I'm guessing you already saw all of Cosmos, but it's worth mentioning again specifically. Awesome stuff. Other than that I've probably watched less than you have; the commentators I follow are mostly bloggers rather than speakers.

On one hand, I can understand him; I have a Blades scenario concept I've been perennially chipping away at since 2002. On the other hand, I haven't spent the past ten years repeatedly pushing back a six-months-away release date.

(Bump) Encyclopedia is back. I've basically replaced the codebase with a fresh SVN copy, and also reset the skin and so on. I'll bring back skin customizations (like ads, not that anyone sees them ) eventually. The one thing I've learned in this is that a cluttered doc-root folder is a security risk. I will only keep parts of the actual deployed website in there, and keep all my development stuff on my own computer. Also using .htaccess to block files based on a whitelist: Only a few PHP files, and only image files in the skin and upload directories are accessible. All other sites are still down. I'll fix them up one by one. Some will take a bit longer while I make sure they don't have vulnerabilities (Drupal 5 is out of support, for instance, so the Blades Forge and PPP may be down a while), and some will have to be completely reorganized (eg. ermarian.net is an organically grown mess of scripts and pages and things I randomly made up over seven years; that won't go from now on). Edit: I'm still unsuccessfully trying to track down a copy of the illusive self-deleting script installer12.php. What I have found is a surprising number of sites with PHP shells.

Oh, that's actually an older issue. Sorry, I forgot to tell you - I'll send you new passwords. My user account has no write access on your files (unless you added group write permissions to them, which are off by default), so the attack should be limited to my own sites. Edit: The attacker was thorough with the backdoor as well. Left not one, but roughly a hundred backdoors scattered throughout random places. If I hadn't grepped every single file for the hex-code "create_function" string ("\x63\x72\x65\x61\x74\x65\x5f\x66\x75\x6e\x63\x74\x69\x6f\x6e"), I'd never have found them buried in all those folders. I still don't trust that I found them all, so I'm doing a bit more based on timestamps. Don't have time to manually inspect every single PHP file, but I can run more detailed check on the ones changed at the right time. Edit: The files were created by an installer script that then deleted itself. ARGH.

Sorry, "JIG" doesn't ring a bell...

In theory, anything goes. They got shell access, so they could read every single settings file containing database passwords. The script also has an SQL shell. (They can't connect to the database remotely, mind you.) In practice, the attack appeared highly focused and possibly automated, so it's unlikely they poked around just out of curiosity. I'll change the database passwords just in case.