Aran

I did it like Niemand and Nikki said - restart it after a tick-timer that relied on an imprecise, empirical estimate of how quickly the party would explore. If I had to do it again with more time, I'd probably just split the town instead. In my use case, it was done by walking through a door, which would have made a staircase feasible. If you have a special event that changes it, duplicate towns are less nice - the mini-map will reset. I suppose the player might forgive the discontinuity if the intervening event (cutscene, big combat) is significant enough.

I've missed out on so much! Well, I'll spectate the next session on the 22nd if I can. Never actually played D&D (or any DM-based roleplaying game, really), but the transcript of Nikki and Eph sounds fun. Maybe I can join in at some future session.

Piracy is not welcome here. I'm not talking about BoE.

All this satellite bickering is a load of bollocks. This balkanization, more than anything else, is the cause Blades has no healthy community anymore. And because the value of Blades is user-added, the lack of a healthy community means Blades never sold as well as it could have, which in turn made JV abandon the concept. Now I'm seeing people compare this conflict to other historical conflicts, while others respond that this conflict is by far not as cool as the conflicts we used to get back in our day. Whether Calamity Refuge versus Shadow Vale is like Polaris versus Desperance is not the point. The point is that Polaris versus Desperance was a broken concept. Polaris and Desperance are dead. They are dead like the Chance Forums are dead - the only difference is the nostalgia, and communities based on nostalgia don't work. If you want to live long as a satellite, you need to avoid these mistakes, not re-enact them. ... Now that I've got this off my chest, I'll gladly participate in this discussion at any place you'll name. If we can agree on a scoring system, maybe it can even be integrated with the Blades Forge's scenario list. Speaking of which, as I said to ADoS privately, I would very much like the next Blades Forge to become a team project, because I'm not up to doing that on my own again (witness that the Forge hasn't really been overhauled in almost two years). Anyone who messes about with PHP and Drupal would be welcome.

Originally Posted By: Ephesos Express Delivery was not a challenge for a well-equipped level 5 party on Normal. Honestly, that's about all I can say about it. Only one potion dropped anywhere, but I never needed it. However, I did realize just how annoying it is to have to re-cast Light every twenty turns. It's good exercise for your mage.

Originally Posted By: w-dueck If I may offer the suggestion of moving to a Drupal CMS? Any decent webhost should have PHP and MySQL available, and the only really hard part would be moving all the content, but I'm sure someone could make a script for that... Edit: Sorry, I was interpreting that as a suggestion for moving all affected Geocities sites, not for Jewels to move her site.

Originally Posted By: Niemand the basic command will like: Code: sed "s|http://www.geocities.com/tracihedlund/|http://www.truesite4blades.com/Home/|g" < path_to_input_file > path_to_output_file I think with find and xargs we can make it recursively be applied to all files of a given type in a directory. Huh, you can use sed for that? I do find-and-replace with "perl -pi -e 's/old/new/g'" pretty much exclusively.

I've found another possible Spiderweb Software cameo in the Foglios' Girl Genius - A Professor Strout is mentioned here. Given that Professor Vogel and General Krizsan are also in the cast, and Jeff also gave cameos to Foglio, I doubt it is coincidental.

...okay, I know DreamHost called them web 2.0, but why do they have a design with less aesthetic value than a parked domain page? To build a "retro" atmosphere?

Links on your site aren't broken, per se. But you appear to have three different game sites which do not link to each other - requiring an archiver to enter each URL separately.

If your format cannot be decompressed with a normal archiving tool, then there is no purpose whatsoever to using a compressed ASCII format rather than a native binary one. The file can only be opened with your software, meaning your software may as well handle all its manipulation rather than exporting it to a form humans could read if they could figure out how to decompress it.

You still need a version number. Even if it's just a third byte numbered 0x00 (or, preferably, 0x01 since the 0th version is the old BoE one, even though it doesn't call itself that) byte after the 0x0B0E (which admittedly is a nice pun). The reason is that there will doubtlessly be further versions of this format, and having to add a new distinguishing feature every time quickly gets tedious. Better to code the thing robustly.

Originally Posted By: Sss-Chah according to a lot of people, a good way to not get a really big job is forgetting to untag yourself in embarrassing facebook pictures. Slashdot ran a piece on employers advising their HR department to stop doing that to avoid discrimination lawsuits. So in the (rather ironically, but this board is curse-free) censored words of Randall Munroe, "be lovingly intimate with that natural fertilizer".

Quote: I would even go so far as to say this data can be ASCII as opposed to binary to get rid of the cross-platform portability issues This is an interesting point. If you do go with a plain-text readable format, however, I suggest it be gzipped (like Battle for Wesnoth does). You could save substantial space at no cost. Edit: The proposal to make the SDF matrix dynamically sized opens a different can of worms, namely, "why use a matrix at all"? The one benefit of using a matrix is that you can hardcode its position and size in a binary file. The cost involves having to use coordinates instead of variable names, keeping notes to avoid collisions, and either running out of space or leaving much space unused. If you decide to go with an ASCII-based format, you could as well use variable names like "town42.rentar.isDead", "town1.motrax.isHostile" etc. Of course, that is a drastic digression from the existing save file format, and it would be difficult to convert old save files to new ones (if that is what you wanted).

Just to be safe, I have grabbed a copy of the canal story and cleaned up the formatting a bit. It contains all the ten files (and 47 parts) there were on Edwin's site, and if it is okay with Saunders, I can upload a zip file somewhere. Edit: Turns out that two more files, one part each, were added in 2004 which I'd missed.

Yes it is. Or as much as I've ever seen of it. Edit: Linked to 2004 instead of 2002, since the old index only listed 5 files (though you could click "Next" to get to the rest). Edit: And another date change, since two more files were added later in 2004.

Originally Posted By: DreamHost WebRing was a free service for people with related sites to automatically trade links, written by co-founder Sage (it’s not just me and Dallas around here!) back in 1994, while he was still in high school! Now that's something I didn't know. The BoE webring is still around, though it's less of a ring and more of a list of dead links these days. It's how I first found Saunders' canal story, I now recall.

Slashdot reports on a global archiving effort. We would be best off making sure ourselves, as some sites can only be accessed with specific knowledge of URLs (such as on TimesSquare pages), but this might save some work: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1961

Originally Posted By: Loneliest One Originally Posted By: Academician Prokhor Zakharov Remember, genes are not blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you can do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. —Alorael, who thought it seemed necessary. A glowing dog isn't so far away. GFP is easy! A dog with weird organs? You may have better luck waiting for your flying car. Let me just add an "OMG Alpha Centauri Rocks". Particularly the quotes. The problem with engineering new organs is that the genome is about 1.5GB of information[1], and the only parts of it scientists have been able to understand are chemicals. Sure, the arms are in there somewhere, in a complex mixture of growth rates, cell types, mechanical factors that will give the arm its shape - but they're beyond comprehension, let alone ability to alter. I haven't heard of anyone being born with arms they shouldn't have. The closest event I know would be the birth defects resulting from Thalidomide, but that was damage to the embryo's growth, and did not affect their genes.

There is still quite an inference going from "they went to college together" to "they dated". I went to college with many girls (even considering that they were outnumbered more than three to one) but much to my regret never dated a single one of them.

... Cherimich?

Quote: [X1-2, A4, N] Shaynee = Shaynee Snider? I don't recall Shaynee, but the name immediately made me think of Bigail's capital. If Shaynee Snider already has one name cameo, then "Shayder" could be another.

I copied Jewel's link list into a URL list in the first post, in preparation of the wget stuff. Here's some stuff I found out: Luz makes our job easy - the "blazingblade.html" can be removed from the URL to see the entire directory listing, ensuring we get it all. Be on the lookout for this on other sites specifying a HTML file (Rosycat's doesn't work as she has a blank index.html). If you aren't actively using your site anymore, likewise consider renaming your "index.html" to something else for the same effect. Directory listings are always archived fully; on sites cloaked by index.html we must rely on internal links (which Zeviz and Caligula show to be awfully unreliable). Note that some, like Luz's are on localized sub-domains (eg. es.geocities.com) and not available via www. Also, TimesSquare seems to be a network of unlisted multiple sites, enterable only with a word and four-digit code for each. I have no idea why they wanted to make life difficult, but there we go. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I'd offer to host sites, but seeing that Aran's already offered... :-P I'm hosting you, right? ...OH ARGH. All this reminds me that TM asked me for webspace like months ago, and I completely forgot about following up. I'll do that immediately, so he can move his site.

Originally Posted By: lampshade Sites that must be saved: http://www.geocities.com/blyceum/DForum/index.html http://www.geocities.com/tracihedlund/PixleProfusion/Pixle_Profusion.html http://www.keeperofni.150m.com/ I'll update this later Two out of three. Guess which one doesn't need saving.

To aid the effort, I will make a small archiving script that can copy an entire user's visible (ie. link-connected) site. wget, the obvious choice, will need some specific options to deal with Geocities idiosycracies: 1.) All Geocities sites share the same domain, so wget will need to filter by sub-directory to avoid downloading all of Geocities via the six-links phenomenon. 2.) Geocities prohibits external hot-linking of images, so wget will need to send the correct Referrer URL when downloading each image. 3.) Geocities serves ad-frames, which we should try to avoid downloading. I will probably use a shell-script calling wget (possibly with some PHP/Perl thrown in). --------------- Meanwhile, I strongly urge everyone who owns a Geocities site to enter their file manager and download the stuff that isn't linked from the front page, perhaps in an unlisted directory. Likewise, it's best to email the other site owners and tell them the same.