"[Planet Moon] was founded in 1997 by the Shiny Entertainment team that created MDK." - Planet Moon's front page.
That would tend to explain the similar art styles. Who knows how much design they did on Sacrifice before splitting, how amiable the split was or wasn't, and how much of the work they did stayed in the game? And how much of PM's art team was trained by Shiny's, or vice versa?
And then there's the other studio that split off from Shiny, Neverhood.
I met my boyfriends partially via online gaming. I knew them in other online contexts, but it was on a MUCK they started that things really began to happen. Things are going well but we're not at the point of marriage quite yet, either ceremonial or legal - the former probably being more likely than the latter, as America has this silly issue with families made of more than two consenting adults.
Obviously you've never played Treasure's work! I'm not much for the Nintendo properties; finding a used copy of their "Mischief Makers" for five bucks was why I picked up a used n64, and I was delighted when a friend got me "Sin and Punishment" for my birthday. It's a simple rail-shooter, but it's gorgeous, and stylish, and a lot of pick-up-and-play fun. Plus all the dialogue was in English, with Japanese subtitles.
It happens. I thought I'd never quit playing videogames, but I started getting more and more tired of them. Last year I pretty much dropped them.
I don't even own a console right now. And I never got into the sorts of games found on PCs.
Oh, I'll probably buy a few used consoles again sometime, and some blissfully mindless and pretty twitch games; I have a few simple arcadey things on my computer, and now and then I drop a few virtual quarters into MAME.
But I just don't have the desire to spend several days straight swearing at the controls or camera angles of a game that's pretty much done with once you finish the story. I've found better things to do with my time, like having a love life, or working more on my art.
You can make stuff in SL anywhere that the land owner hasn't set 'no building'. You can play with scripts anywhere that hasn't been set 'no scripts'.
This accounts for something like, oh, 80% of the world, I'd guess.
There are specific sandbox areas; some are small chunks of heavily-loaded sims*, some are entire sims given over to the task. Sandboxes are build-enabled, usually script-enabled, and have very lenient auto-sweep times, so you can just plop yourself down and start Making Stuff.
Popular sandboxes are an attraction in and of themselves; you'll see lots of builders who don't bother shelling out to own land working on their projects. People whose projects involve scripting will often hand out beta versions of their toys, just for testing, or just to watch someone have fun with their work.
You need to have land to put a vending machine for your stuff. But you can rent space in a mall, or perhaps a friend who has land would like to offer a little space for a vendor, or perhaps you might join a group to share some land. There's a lot of options. I make my own avatars, and I've gotten several offers of vendor space, including one in some very prime space in one of the oldest sims in the game, near the newbie area!
If you want to run a club or be a land baron, yeah, that requires money for paying for land. But you can do a lot of stuff with potential financial return in SL without ever paying for more than the initial account, and that's free nowadays.
*a 'sim' in SL is the fundamental division; each one is handled by a different server. So a very populated sim is on a pretty overloaded computer.
Buggy and frustrating UI is pretty much par for the course when you're dealing with Macromedia, in my experience.
me, I tend to go "oh, gawd, a Flash app" as soon as they start making sounds on button rollover, and bail. But I spent enough time beating my head against Flash, and having bad experiences connected with it, that I'm biased against it.
I used to be a professional Flash geek and I can't tell what the hell Flex is. I dunno if this is an inherited Macromedia name or an Adobe name - probably Macromedia, as I found a lot of their tool names to be cryptic and uninspiring. Blah blah 'rich applications' blah blah blah. Blah blah same hype as 'AJAX' except with Flash wedged in.
But Flash has been going down this "platform" route for the past several revisions, with increasingly more annoying UI in the editor for animators - the 5->MX transition threw a bunch of speedbumps right in the middle of the animation workflow, and they seem to be slated to linger forever. I keep hoping the Adobe buyout will mean they actually fix the editor UI to not require about twice the clicks it used to for basic symbol-oriented animation...
Wow, Slashdot's anonymous cowards really value their right to be assholes, don't they?
There's no law against being an asshole, but once you're done being a child trying to feel more powerful by making other people feel worse, there is an informal social contract against being an asshole.
Hey, maybe some of those people will think for a moment, put themselves in your shoes, and say "geeze, I never thought of it that way, I'm sorry." - and stop doing it. Maybe it'll even help them grow a little more social conscience, and avoid doing other things that make them feel like shitheads when they're pointed out to them!
Maybe. We can hope. It works often enough to be worthwhile; growing up takes a while sometimes.
Seriously, stop being such a fucking asshole. My feelings ARE your responsibility if you taunt and insult me to the point of doing something nasty, to myself or to you. What if a "faggot" you keep insulting pulls out a gun and shoots you because they've had enough?
Nobody deserves to be spit on all the time for nothing. Not even people whose favorite form of entertainment is being a sad little troll on the internet, as a quick look at your recent comments suggests you are.
"Gay" and "Fag" are common parlance of annoyance and insult with the younger set.
Yeah, and it makes people who are gay really uncomfortable to have those words thrown around as insults. It's hard enough to come out in the first place; I can't imagine what it would be like to come out if everyone I knew was clearly hostile to my sexuality because they used those words as insults all the time.
What's your ethnicity, what's your kink? Search and replace "gay" and 'fag" and so on with "wop" or "kike" or "Jap" or "nigger" or whatever term is instant fighting words, when applied to you. Looks like a pretty hostile environment, doesn't it?
I've actually gotten younger people I know to stop saying "That's so gay" when they mean "that's stupid" by pointing out that, hey, I'm gay, and it hurts every time they do that.
Unfortunately one of them is the Keeper of the Router.
Fortunately they're moving out at the end of this month.
My boyfriend also tends to leave the filesharing client up and running when he's out, but he lets me dabble with his machine for things like that.
Really, though, 'how many people do share your connection with?' should be asked right after 'what kind of connection do you have? []modem []cable []dsl'. But all these things seem to be written on the assumption that you have no friends and family.
So how many of these let you throttle their bandwidth use at all?
And how many of them ask how many people are sharing the same connection as you when you install 'em, and offer a default throttling that leaves some bandwidth for your housemates?
(she says, wanting to kill a housemate who leaves BT running constantly, eating all the upstream bandwidth of the ADSL line to the point that even simply web-browsing can be painful.)
You could set one up for the purpose of having a game of Lexicon! A good example is The Toothpaste Disaster, set in the 'Paranoia' RPG.
Similarly, some friends and I used a wiki as an adjunct to a far-future MUCK: character bios and area reference got dumped into the wiki, to help us remember what the hell was going on in our real-time text roleplay as things got more and more complex.
I think I've also seen people using wikis as multi-author choose-your-own-adventure platforms; pretty easy to make that work.
My room-mates and I experimented with a wiki for our house, but that didn't go anywhere.
I've heard of some people using a wiki running on their own machine as a sort of free-form personal information manager. A little bit more complex than the 'live in one giant text file' ethic some practice, but almost as portable and future-proof.
Jameth has a history of being part of these sorts of things - he was involved in 'ljdrama.com', a website dedicated to pointing people to LJ entries full of 'drama' to point and laugh, and possibly troll, and was also involved in 'frienditto', a spinoff of LJDrama that would make publicly-viewable archives of friends-only posts... if you gave it your username and password to log in as, of course.
Interestingly enough, Hepkitten, who is mentioned in the Encyclopedia Dramatica page cited in the article as being Bantown's site, is also part of the ljdrama/frienditto/etc circles.
Yeah. And, of course, are the Bantown people telling the truth, or lying?
I mean, a little googling found what looks to be their real site, with a tempting file in their source repository called "pw-lolercaust-0.2.tar.gz"... that's only 2k. Bet it's a pathologically deformed.gz that expands to many, many gigs of "LOL" over and over again.
LJ disallows Javascript in user styles or posts for precisely this sort of reason. Flash too. No, I don't know how these people managed to get a Javascript-based attack to work; presumably they found some hole in this ban of Javascript.
I mean, people are commenting all over this thread, "you can hack an OSX box easily if you do this", but forgetting that OSX ships with all this stuff off by default.
Whereas your average Windows machine ships with a firewall that's off by default, and a whole ton of services on. I just helped my mother wipe a new Windows laptop machine clean, and I was amazed by how open all the defaults were. Just this is why OSX is "inherently more secure than Windows" - it ships pretty closed, and if you need something, you open it up, as opposed to leaving everything wide open and hiding the switch to turn it off somewhere obscure!
Slashdot Mirror
I just looked at the 'test' user I keep around for isolating problems - it's never launched Safari before. And the 'open safe files' box is checked.
.3, or .4 - I'm not sure.
This test user was created under 10.4.2,
"[Planet Moon] was founded in 1997 by the Shiny Entertainment team that created MDK." - Planet Moon's front page.
That would tend to explain the similar art styles. Who knows how much design they did on Sacrifice before splitting, how amiable the split was or wasn't, and how much of the work they did stayed in the game? And how much of PM's art team was trained by Shiny's, or vice versa?
And then there's the other studio that split off from Shiny, Neverhood.
I met my boyfriends partially via online gaming. I knew them in other online contexts, but it was on a MUCK they started that things really began to happen. Things are going well but we're not at the point of marriage quite yet, either ceremonial or legal - the former probably being more likely than the latter, as America has this silly issue with families made of more than two consenting adults.
Obviously you've never played Treasure's work! I'm not much for the Nintendo properties; finding a used copy of their "Mischief Makers" for five bucks was why I picked up a used n64, and I was delighted when a friend got me "Sin and Punishment" for my birthday. It's a simple rail-shooter, but it's gorgeous, and stylish, and a lot of pick-up-and-play fun. Plus all the dialogue was in English, with Japanese subtitles.
It happens. I thought I'd never quit playing videogames, but I started getting more and more tired of them. Last year I pretty much dropped them.
I don't even own a console right now. And I never got into the sorts of games found on PCs.
Oh, I'll probably buy a few used consoles again sometime, and some blissfully mindless and pretty twitch games; I have a few simple arcadey things on my computer, and now and then I drop a few virtual quarters into MAME.
But I just don't have the desire to spend several days straight swearing at the controls or camera angles of a game that's pretty much done with once you finish the story. I've found better things to do with my time, like having a love life, or working more on my art.
It does, indeed, feel like a stage of growing up.
You can make stuff in SL anywhere that the land owner hasn't set 'no building'. You can play with scripts anywhere that hasn't been set 'no scripts'.
This accounts for something like, oh, 80% of the world, I'd guess.
There are specific sandbox areas; some are small chunks of heavily-loaded sims*, some are entire sims given over to the task. Sandboxes are build-enabled, usually script-enabled, and have very lenient auto-sweep times, so you can just plop yourself down and start Making Stuff.
Popular sandboxes are an attraction in and of themselves; you'll see lots of builders who don't bother shelling out to own land working on their projects. People whose projects involve scripting will often hand out beta versions of their toys, just for testing, or just to watch someone have fun with their work.
You need to have land to put a vending machine for your stuff. But you can rent space in a mall, or perhaps a friend who has land would like to offer a little space for a vendor, or perhaps you might join a group to share some land. There's a lot of options. I make my own avatars, and I've gotten several offers of vendor space, including one in some very prime space in one of the oldest sims in the game, near the newbie area!
If you want to run a club or be a land baron, yeah, that requires money for paying for land. But you can do a lot of stuff with potential financial return in SL without ever paying for more than the initial account, and that's free nowadays.
*a 'sim' in SL is the fundamental division; each one is handled by a different server. So a very populated sim is on a pretty overloaded computer.
Minter seems to have enjoyed GW. No word on what Jarvis and DeMar thought of it.
*shows off her 'Greatest Hits' side-of-the-case banner*
I got replay value, bunky. What's that thirteen-year-old gonna talk to you about after sex?
Buggy and frustrating UI is pretty much par for the course when you're dealing with Macromedia, in my experience.
me, I tend to go "oh, gawd, a Flash app" as soon as they start making sounds on button rollover, and bail. But I spent enough time beating my head against Flash, and having bad experiences connected with it, that I'm biased against it.
I used to be a professional Flash geek and I can't tell what the hell Flex is. I dunno if this is an inherited Macromedia name or an Adobe name - probably Macromedia, as I found a lot of their tool names to be cryptic and uninspiring. Blah blah 'rich applications' blah blah blah. Blah blah same hype as 'AJAX' except with Flash wedged in.
But Flash has been going down this "platform" route for the past several revisions, with increasingly more annoying UI in the editor for animators - the 5->MX transition threw a bunch of speedbumps right in the middle of the animation workflow, and they seem to be slated to linger forever. I keep hoping the Adobe buyout will mean they actually fix the editor UI to not require about twice the clicks it used to for basic symbol-oriented animation...
Wow, Slashdot's anonymous cowards really value their right to be assholes, don't they?
There's no law against being an asshole, but once you're done being a child trying to feel more powerful by making other people feel worse, there is an informal social contract against being an asshole.
Hey, maybe some of those people will think for a moment, put themselves in your shoes, and say "geeze, I never thought of it that way, I'm sorry." - and stop doing it. Maybe it'll even help them grow a little more social conscience, and avoid doing other things that make them feel like shitheads when they're pointed out to them!
Maybe. We can hope. It works often enough to be worthwhile; growing up takes a while sometimes.
Seriously, stop being such a fucking asshole. My feelings ARE your responsibility if you taunt and insult me to the point of doing something nasty, to myself or to you. What if a "faggot" you keep insulting pulls out a gun and shoots you because they've had enough?
Nobody deserves to be spit on all the time for nothing. Not even people whose favorite form of entertainment is being a sad little troll on the internet, as a quick look at your recent comments suggests you are.
"Gay" and "Fag" are common parlance of annoyance and insult with the younger set.
Yeah, and it makes people who are gay really uncomfortable to have those words thrown around as insults. It's hard enough to come out in the first place; I can't imagine what it would be like to come out if everyone I knew was clearly hostile to my sexuality because they used those words as insults all the time.
What's your ethnicity, what's your kink? Search and replace "gay" and 'fag" and so on with "wop" or "kike" or "Jap" or "nigger" or whatever term is instant fighting words, when applied to you. Looks like a pretty hostile environment, doesn't it?
I've actually gotten younger people I know to stop saying "That's so gay" when they mean "that's stupid" by pointing out that, hey, I'm gay, and it hurts every time they do that.
Unfortunately one of them is the Keeper of the Router.
Fortunately they're moving out at the end of this month.
My boyfriend also tends to leave the filesharing client up and running when he's out, but he lets me dabble with his machine for things like that.
Really, though, 'how many people do share your connection with?' should be asked right after 'what kind of connection do you have? []modem []cable []dsl'. But all these things seem to be written on the assumption that you have no friends and family.
So how many of these let you throttle their bandwidth use at all?
And how many of them ask how many people are sharing the same connection as you when you install 'em, and offer a default throttling that leaves some bandwidth for your housemates?
(she says, wanting to kill a housemate who leaves BT running constantly, eating all the upstream bandwidth of the ADSL line to the point that even simply web-browsing can be painful.)
You could set one up for the purpose of having a game of Lexicon! A good example is The Toothpaste Disaster, set in the 'Paranoia' RPG.
Similarly, some friends and I used a wiki as an adjunct to a far-future MUCK: character bios and area reference got dumped into the wiki, to help us remember what the hell was going on in our real-time text roleplay as things got more and more complex.
I think I've also seen people using wikis as multi-author choose-your-own-adventure platforms; pretty easy to make that work.
My room-mates and I experimented with a wiki for our house, but that didn't go anywhere.
I've heard of some people using a wiki running on their own machine as a sort of free-form personal information manager. A little bit more complex than the 'live in one giant text file' ethic some practice, but almost as portable and future-proof.
Getting attention. Causing "drama".
It worked, too. They got their group's name mentioned on Slashdot. Pretty good attention if you're a geek.
Jameth has a history of being part of these sorts of things - he was involved in 'ljdrama.com', a website dedicated to pointing people to LJ entries full of 'drama' to point and laugh, and possibly troll, and was also involved in 'frienditto', a spinoff of LJDrama that would make publicly-viewable archives of friends-only posts... if you gave it your username and password to log in as, of course.
Interestingly enough, Hepkitten, who is mentioned in the Encyclopedia Dramatica page cited in the article as being Bantown's site, is also part of the ljdrama/frienditto/etc circles.
I'd take that email with a salt mine or two.
Yeah. And, of course, are the Bantown people telling the truth, or lying?
.gz that expands to many, many gigs of "LOL" over and over again.
I mean, a little googling found what looks to be their real site, with a tempting file in their source repository called "pw-lolercaust-0.2.tar.gz"... that's only 2k. Bet it's a pathologically deformed
LJ disallows Javascript in user styles or posts for precisely this sort of reason. Flash too. No, I don't know how these people managed to get a Javascript-based attack to work; presumably they found some hole in this ban of Javascript.
It would've been nice if LJ's news post on starting to fix this vulnerability had said which "popular browser" was affected.
Also, I somehow find myself suspecting that the anonymous person calling this 'Bantown' group 'notorious' is probably a member of it.
Details are scarce; all I could find in the LJ_Dev community relating to this wasone post about the effects of the first phase of the fix. Especially check Brad's comments.
CNN claims we are about to be overrun by flying monkeys. Link-as-headline is eminently readable!
But isn't it off by default?
I mean, people are commenting all over this thread, "you can hack an OSX box easily if you do this", but forgetting that OSX ships with all this stuff off by default.
Whereas your average Windows machine ships with a firewall that's off by default, and a whole ton of services on. I just helped my mother wipe a new Windows laptop machine clean, and I was amazed by how open all the defaults were. Just this is why OSX is "inherently more secure than Windows" - it ships pretty closed, and if you need something, you open it up, as opposed to leaving everything wide open and hiding the switch to turn it off somewhere obscure!
Hell, on OS-X, you could even have it download and compile the virus SOURCE behind the user's back.
OSX only comes with compilers if you specifically install them from the dev tools disc. Most people won't have done this.