• 14:23 I'll give WoW this: At least I installed and played the thing for a bit. I gave up on the latest MMO during the installation process.

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TheFull-power (as in, assume I have lots and lots of power to back it up) version of "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu", the duplicate-yourself power from Naruto. It has an INCREDIBLE number of applications in real life as well as in superhero situations, especially when you have enough power to manage not just one, but dozens or even hundreds of yourself.

Being horribly intimidated by an idea, but I need an idea to get creative furry juices running...

I was thinking about doing a request day (Mainly, because I can't think of a person alive that doesn't love free art in one way or another), but I am really afraid of doing it in a real public place, as I've seen the crazy mayhem that some artists put up with at that point, and I don't know if I could handle like 60 or so requests for art... I'm more of a "Maybe I can handle 10 at a time?" kind of person...

Do you think it might be an okay idea to let myself be opened up to such a thing, or that maybe it's just a dumb idea right now?

And now we reach our third chapter for this week; back to DuQuesne's point of view...


 Yes, Marc has his secrets, but he does seem to also be aware of the difficulties of his new companions...

• 13:08 The two-headed troll slung three natural 20s, but it wasn't enough to overcome our heroes. #dnd

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Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

EDIT: Thanks all for the responses, I'm not wasting my time, so I will continue!

I've seen virtually no replies (except from people already on my Beta list!) on my snippets, so I don't know if anyone is reading those posts. Some people on my friends list I know would not care to, or need to, read the snippets, so I suppose it's possible that anyone who IS interested in reading my stuff (at least prior to it actually being available in paper form) has already joined my Beta list and thus posting it here on my LJ is wasted effort.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Lucca Comics and Games

(It's hard to even write the title of this entry without hearing the chorus of the official song of the convention in my head.)

What do you get if you take ComicCon, add in GenCon, and put them both in a beautiful Medieval walled city in Italy? Don't answer yet, because there's more. Fill it full of local citizens that actually embrace it and love it, and pepper it liberally with restaurants with the best food you've ever eaten. Now what do you have? Lucca Comics and Games, a 140,000 attendee convention that embraces all things geekly. It's really nothing like anything I've been to before. The convention basically takes over an entire small city in Tuscany, with the narrow streets of the city becoming the hallways and the open piazzas of the city (covered with massive pavilions) becoming the centers for events and dealers.  Every shop in town has comics or action figures in the window or some kind of display to get into the spirit of things.

It's big, but that's not really what's so amazing about it. It's the warmth and fun of the people meshed with the beauty of the surroundings (and did I mention the food?).

Wednesday night before the convention started, Sue and I hung around while they built my showcase. This was a real honor for me--a massive glass cabinet (two actually) to display a number of the products that I've worked on over the years. The showcase was on display throughout the entire convention. We ended the day with a late dinner. Sue and I spent a lot of time that evening with another guest of the show, French boardgame designer Bruno Faidutti. It was great to get to know him.

On Thursday, I started the show by opening the roleplaying game tournament with a silly little presentation. Each day I had a signing at the Wyrd Edizioni booth, aided by my friends Elisabetta and Massimo. This was always a great time to meet a lot of Italian game fans. In the afternoon, I ran a short, simple little 2-hour game that we added to my schedule at the last minute. It went over really well and in retrospect, I wish there had been time to do more. Lots of people watched, and the players were all excellent. We had a translator on hand, but--although she was excellent--most of the time she wasn't entirely needed. The players' English was very good. (My Italian, on the other hand....)

Thursday night was an awards ceremony, where all the guests were given nice plaques and awards were given to various comics and games (and their creators). It would be tempting to compare it to the Origin Awards or the ENnies, but in truth it would probably be more accurately compared to the Eisners. A nice affair in a beautiful theater, with local government dignitaries and others in attendance. One weird moment of the night was when I discovered that I had actually won some of these awards in the past (for D&D 3E and Heroclix, although I wasn't given credit for Heroclix, as is often the case). I'm certain that the companies that published these games knew about the awards, and either didn't think enough of the award or the designers in question to even let me know. Probably the latter. But that's a topic for another day. 

Friday's special event for me was a Roleplaying Game Design Workshop. A pair of translators were on hand and this time they were invaluable. The two-hour event went well, I think. I've done talks and Q&A sessions with a translator before and it's always challenging, mostly because you need to pace yourself to wait for the translator to do his or her job, but you don't want to break up your own flow and lose ideas and information. The convention even provided certificates for all the attendees, signed by me, at the end, which I thought was a nice touch.

On Saturday I conducted a very strange (to me) and challenging event in which I reviewed prototypes of games that people had designed. It's very difficult for someone to explain the ins and outs of their rpg in just a few minutes and its just as hard to provide meaningful feedback on what I see (or don't see). Add in a language barrier and the need for a translator in many cases and I'm not 100% certain that those that brought their games to me really got too much out of it, if I'm going to be honest. It's hard to both give and take advice in such a situation. But I enjoyed it, and I hope--at the very least--that they did too.

Sunday came and brought with it a speech and Q&A session. Again I had excellent translators at my side to help out. These kinds of events are not as big a deal at Lucca as they would be at an American convention, which was interesting because the signings in Italy were a bigger event than they would have been at a US con, I think. I certainly don't think I'd have a signing every day in the US and expect lots of people to show up each session. Maybe because it's a big comic book show, signings are more important.

Sunday night brings the convention to a close and with it an odd tradition. This tradition is rooted in the past, when a young gamer annoyed members of the staff to distraction and they ended up chasing him around and gave him a faux beating. Now, every year, this gamer (now grown up) hides at the end of the show and the staff seeks him out, chases him down, and pretends to beat him. Artists on hand draw sketches on his (prodigious) belly. And the subject, in true gamer geek fashion, loves every minute of all the attention. It's odd, but not a bad way to blow off some steam and have some fun at the end of the show. (Not being an artist, when asked to participate, I wrote a game rule on him rather than attempt a sketch. You do what you gotta do.)

Each night was a great dinner at one of the fabulous local restaurants. Both Thursday night and Sunday night were seven course meals in a banquet fashion. It's funny to me that at a US convention (game or business), you hear "banquet" and you think of some sad little cornish hen and some half-cooked vegetables. But this is Italy, so of course the food is absolutely mind-blowing. As the courses keep coming, you think, "surely I can't eat another bite," but then the next one arrives and it looks and smells so good and the next thing you know you've eaten it.

Even lunch, from what passed for the nearby "concession stand" was impressive. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't amazing, but it far surpassed the traditional hot dogs and nachos fare you get at any convention here. I guess what might be considered bad food in Italy would be halfway decent stuff here.

The gamers and fans at the show were similar in most ways to gamers and fans everywhere, of course. Except thinner and more stylish. The nerdiest, shlumpiest Italian geek has got nothing on his American counterpart. Lots of attendees, particularly teenagers, came to the show in costume. Probably about the same proportion as you'd find at ComicCon. We saw a lot of impressive costumes, most of them manga, anime, or video game influenced. Just like here.

Throughout the show, I did a lot of interviews for Italian magazines and websites, chatted with gamers, and hung out with the convention staff, but I also got to look around a bit. The Italian comic book market is extremely strong, with both American comics in translation and a wide array of cool-looking Italian comics as well. As for games, many were on display: board games, rpgs, and video games, with all the major manufactures in attendance. More interesting to me were the local sellers, however, with games I sadly could not read but enjoyed perusing nonetheless. Surprisingly, one booth was selling old D&D stuff (not translated) and offered the best selection of rare classic stuff for sale that I've ever seen all in one place. Not just the white box and its ilk, but the rare RPGA modules like the To the Aid of Falx and Investigation of Hydell, The Dragon #1, and so on. Good stuff. But they knew what they had and priced it all appropriately, which is to say, really high. And it wasn't just books. They had the old yellow plastic D&D wallet, the coloring books, merch from the cartoon, and more. Incredible.

Lucca was a great show in every respect. It's been going on since the early 60s, and the con staff is made up, in part, of people who came to the convention as little kids. Fun, well organized, well-developed, and well-supported, it's one of the best conventions I've been to. My thanks to Emanuele, Andrea, Silvia, Gabriele, Anna, Skippy, Antonio, Cristina, and all the others who put the convention together and treated us so well. Also thanks to Massimo, Elisabetta, Sonia, and Bice of Wyrd for being good friends and helping us with the signings, the game, and more.

And did I mention the food?

Oh, what the heck. I'll post three a week. I just may have to stop snippeting a month or so before the book comes out. :)

 

( So let's get this row on the shoad... )


Well, Simon, since we have like 145,000 words to go, you can probably bet on that.

Source: Circle Dot Square

I just watched last week's episode of Supernatural.

I think I may actually have split something open internally from laughing so hard.

Saw it on succedblog.com, it's amazing!

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

Italy!

Sue I returned from our trip to Italy last Wednesday night. Neither the flight there nor the flight back was particularly pleasant (nine hours is a long time to be crammed into a small seat surrounded by crying babies), we both caught nasty colds there, and I couldn't ever seem to get onto a regular sleep schedule while there (and still can't). And the trip was still 100% worth it.

We had an amazing time. The weather, first of all, was really nice, with sun and temperatures in the 60s and 70s. The first three days we toured around Florence, seeing all the sites in the central part of the city, like the massive cathedral there (a Renaissance church so grand you would say it wasn't even built to human scale), the Palazzo Vecchio and its numerous statues, the Santa Croce Basilica, the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge covered with shops that have been in operation for hundreds of years, and a lot more. We saw a number of Michelangelo works, including the David, of course. It was a great trip for history and art.

After Florence we went to the walled city of Lucca. Lucca was a city of Medieval importance, but because it (thankfully, I'd say) decreased in strategic value by World War II, it suffered little damage, unlike the surrounding region. This means that much of Lucca looks just as it had long ago, making it picturesque--and challenging to get around. Lucca was where the Lucca Comics and Games show was held, a 140,000 person convention at which I was a guest of honor. But I'll write about that tomorrow.

Toward the end of the trip we went to Pisa and saw the infamous leaning tower. (As the folks from Lucca like to say, "Pisa's only claim to fame is a mistake.") The tower had just been renovated, so its white stone glistened--practically glowed--in the sun. The nearby cathedral, while not as large as its counterpart in Florence, was very impressive and very beautiful on the inside.

It's been difficult for me to write even those three paragraphs about Tuscany without mentioning the food. I'm no foodie, but even a pedestrian like me was blown away by each and every meal we had in Italy. I'd often find myself saying things like, "This is just a potato. How can a potato be this good?"

Thankfully, my tour director, Sue, likes to maintain an aggressive schedule on vacations, and so we did a lot of walking and stairclimbing to work off all the fabulous meals. (And to be fair, our schedule was likely not as aggressive as she would have liked.)

I'd love to go back someday. I hope to see Rome and Venice someday, and more.

And now we get to meet our third (and last) main/viewpoint character...

 

( He's a bit different than the others... )


The main players are on the stage now; let's get the comedy underway!

...included such lines as:

"I'm going to create an illusion of a dining room table, and make it flicker in and out. Nothing works better to capture elementals than a periodic table."

(When faced with a choice of whether to stand and face a trio of demons or flee through a semi-animate forest) "I'd rather face the living trees. Their bark is worse than their bite."

"Mmm, magic sex. It's finger-Wiccan good."

Last night's game was weird... ;-)

(And no, not all of those lines were even mine, though two of them were.)

If you see this, could you please tell me what kinds of foods are on the no-no list? I want to make apology food, but I don't want to make BAD apology food, which would make me feel worse then I already am, because nothing sucks worse then giving apology food that people can't eat because they can't eat what is in the apology food.

• 10:06 I like it when I can work Iron Maiden song titles into my work.

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