Killed in a smiling accident.

I understand why blogs and forums might need to employ a CAPTCHA; there’s one on this very site for comments, added after spam-bots decided our massive readership would be really interested in wombat accessories or whatever other rubbish they’re peddling (blame/praise Melmoth for the word choice, though).

The Age of Conan forums employ a captcha whenever you want to search, which seems slightly over the top to start with (possibly to stop DoS attempts, I dunno). It suffers from one oh-so-minor flaw, though: it doesn’t show you a slightly deformed word to recognise, it vomits forth a Jackson Pollock tribute which allegedly contains six numbers and/or letters, though you can’t tell ‘cos they’re strangely distorted and rotated to start with, then a five year old has been let loose on them with a whole box of crayons (and not one of those little boxes with about six colours, oh no, we’re talking jumbo deluxe party selection). There were obviously plenty of people posting, maybe it was just me having trouble with the thing; I went to search on “captcha” to check, only I had to… oh yeah, pass the captcha…

Figuring it might only be required for non-registered users, I went to sign up, completed the form and… oh look, it’s a captcha (understandable, on registrations). After a mere thirty or so reloads, I finally found one where the resident child had missed most of the letters with the crayons and got through, and sure enough that avoids the need on every search. Except by that point I’d got bored and forgot what I was looking for in the first place, and went off to YouTube to find the source of this post title (6 minutes in), but at least I’ll be ready next time I need to search. So long as I can remember the login…

I have mentioned in the past that I am somewhat of an alt-a-holic when it comes to my game characters. Be they MMO based, single player RPG or otherwise, as long as there’s a way to customise a character then I’ll need to re-roll at some point, usually it’s because I find the dot product relationship between the eyebrow vectors to be sub-optimal, or some other desperately important trifling niggle. I can’t explain it, like crop circles, it just is.

However, it occurred to me this morning that I recently re-rolled my blog.

It would seem that the disease is spreading. I begin now to wonder whether I am the singularity for a world-wide epidemic, the focus point from which a wave of alternative zombies will spread out and ravage the Earth with indecision.

Or maybe alternative mummies, yeah I like mummies better.

No, wait! Make them werewolves. Yeah. An army of werewolves would be awesome.

Hmm, maybe I should just stick with my original zombie main. I know, I’ll create one of each and see how they get on. Whichever one destroys England the quickest is the one that I’ll stick with and use to destroy the rest of the world. That’s it! That’s the plan.

Although vampires would be pretty cool…

Via Slashdot, I just found out I’m in mortal peril. When they talk about the “nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet”, I know just what they mean, it’s not easy coming up with random waffle here every couple of days (apart from weekends, public holidays and when I can’t be bothered).

Actually, it is *quite* easy. And if I get stuck I can just post links to the New York Times. Mind you, the advertising revenue isn’t so hot, the Welcome Break, Low Wycombe still haven’t sent us the promised 74p, makes me glad I cleared them out of little bottles of shampoo at the time, the bastards.

And so the reveller that is the internet groggily cracks open one eye, peers around the wreckage of the party that was April Fool’s Day, declares “man, I was so wasted”, tries to piece together what happened over the last 24 hours between the pulses of an industrial hangover, and gets that feeling of creeping horror as it remembers what seemed like a really hilarious idea after a couple of pints of Crème de Menthe and a Co-op cider chaser…

Amidst the vast sea of Fooling, the BBC’s flying penguins (also in The Telegraph) were very well done, bonus marks for effort there. I missed their ice-skating greyhounds, though.

Blizzard kept up their usual standard, my favourite being Molten Core for the Atari 2600. There was also the Bard (though I still reckon the lute bayonet is a winner there). On a similar note, GAME’s Double Bass Controller would seriously rock (somewhat reminiscent of The Onion’s Sousaphone Hero). Actually, that’s a point, what do The Onion do on April 1st?

NCsoft’s Visual Sounds for City of Heroes announcement is disqualified, as it’s not Foolish at all, it’s a bleedin’ brilliant idea. FREEM! Also getting in on the Atari 2600 act, there’s a rather splendid fan-made effort.

ThinkGeek have a whole heap of excellent products, and I should probably wrap up here, as I’ve probably inflicted a billion years of bad luck on myself for linking all this stuff after April 1st.

For anyone starting work on next year’s drollery, just try and remember that madcap japes and pranks work best if they’re in some way humorous. For example:

“The government are going to raise income tax by three percent”.

That’s not an April Fool, that’s Making Up Stuff That Isn’t Funny.

“The government are going to start taxing something highly improbable. Spokesperson Geoff MySurnameIsAnAnagramOfAprilFool said ‘this is bound to have hilarious consequences’.”

That’s a (rubbish) April Fool. If you’re having trouble, maybe a hearty breakfast will help you come up with something.

Forsooth.

The City of Heroes boards demonstrate the problem with analogies. Obviously they should have posted that City of Villains is actually like City of Heroes, only wrapped in a carpet and taken to an ice cream factory.

I was channel hopping the other day and found a programme on The Biography Channel about Guns N’ Roses, so settled down for a bit of late 80s nostalgia with a can of Tab Clear and a packet of Pacers. The narrator sets the scene, we get a few interviews, there’s some generic heavy metal guitar noodling in the background, we reach 1987 and the release of Appetite for Destruction and… more generic heavy metal guitar noodling. Not a single note of an actual Guns N’ Roses song (well, I say “not a single note”, there might’ve been plenty of notes from their songs, just not necessarily in the same order, as I believe Oscar Wilde might have said. If he was paraphrasing Eric Morecambe.) Guess they didn’t want to pay the royalties or were caught up in hilarious legal wranglings or something. It was all interesting enough in a drink-and-drugs-and-rehab-and-riots way, but if talking about music is like dancing about architecture (as either Elvis Costello or a whole bunch of other people (but apparently not Oscar Wilde) said) then a documentary about a band not featuring their actual music is like dancing about architecture and holding up rather poor quality pictures of buildings, only not the actual buildings you’re dancing about (then taking an otter to an ice cream factory).

It reminded me how great the Classic Albums series was, granted working on the slightly smaller scale of a single album compared to an entire career, but the few I saw were superb, particularly The Dark Side of the Moon. That was like the World Architecture Interpretive Dance Champion performing alongside a renowned professor of architecture giving a particularly fascinating presentation about architecture. Then taking an otter to an ice cream factory.

[The whole otter/ice cream factory business stems from the typical problem of using analogies in a message board discussion, where the analogy become ever more elaborate and eventually everyone’s just arguing about that instead of the original subject. One particular discussion a few years back about writing web pages in a WYSIWYG HTML editor vs a text editor developed into an ever more elaborate scenario where the former was like riding a bicycle compared to the latter being walking, and then different journey lengths over various types of terrain were introduced to represent different styles of web pages, and content management systems were possibly trains while emacs and vi were tanks that could easily cross any terrain but were too busy shooting at each other to do so… it was all a bit weird. Anyway, Melmoth then chipped in with “Using an HTML editor is like taking an otter to the ice cream factory, wrapping it in carpet and using it as a kite.”, variants of which are now deployed as standard whenever analogies start getting too elaborate.]

Hello world!

Is this thing on? Testing, 1, 2, 1, 2…

Mmm, new blog smell!

OK, enough waffle, proper posting to follow…

(If you arrived here entirely by chance, previous burbling, mostly about MMOGs, can be found at MMOG Musings)

The show must go on.The show must go on.Inside my heart is breaking.My make-up may be flaking.But my smile still stays on.My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies.Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die.

Hey, my make-up is just fine thank you very much.