This journal is now being re-syndicated at Harrisonburg Blogs, a service for blogs that talk about stuff in this local area (or, at least, blogs written by people who live here). I thought about signing up a few times in the past, but I wasn’t sure I posted about local stuff enough to really justify it. But, now that I’ve been doing this awhile, and significant portion of my posts (not counting the ones reposted en-masse from my LiveJournal) are about local news, I figured I’d give it a shot.

So, if you’re reading this on that site, or got here from there, welcome! There’s a lot more to my website than just a blog (though, admittedly, this probably gets updated the most), so feel free to look around. And, if you’re interested in hiring my web design services, don’t hesitate to email me

Since this seems to happen every couple of days, I want to clarify something. The IM client I use, Trillian, has a very annoying habit of resetting my Yahoo status to “Available” and clearing my auto-responding away message whenever my connection to Yahoo flakes. And, it tends to do so with annoying frequency, usually when I’m actually not here.

So, here’s a good rule of thumb. If you see me set as “Available” on Yahoo, but not on any other protocol/SN*, it’s a glitch, and it’s extremely unlikely that I’m actually there. And, if you IM me, and I don’t respond within a few minutes, I’m definitely not there.

This post brought to you by the fact that I just came back from a 4-hour road trip to find Yahoo set to “Available” (but nothing else), and over two dozen different Yahoo windows open, with people chatting as if I were actually there. Which is why I stopped using Yahoo for awhile (and because this was happening nearly every hour).

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* = The screen name I use for work (which is not on Yahoo) is exempt from this guideline. It has a separate buddy list, on a different client, usually on a different computer, and therefore has no relation to my personal accounts.

This is an awesome new site/blog set up by a friend of mine, and she’s doing a really good job with it. Basically, she posts reviews of different candies, of all types, including gum, mints, chocolate, and so forth. She includes a variety of manufacturers in her reviews as well, from the small (See’s), to the huge (Hershey), and her reviews are quite balanced.

So, if you’re looking for some awesome new sweet treats to try, or if you just want to hear an outside opinion on something that looks tasty, check out For the Love of Candy.

To test the graphics on my new laptop, I decided to fire up SL. It’s a game that always ran like crud on my desktop system, and I hadn’t logged in since like June anyway, so I figured I’d use it to see just how awesome this system is.

The result: HOLY CRAP IT RUNS WELL! On my desktop system, I typically coerced it into running by stripping the graphics down to the absolute minimum, and I was able to average 15fps on a good day in a medium-density mainland sim. Thus, it was easy to let it go. On the new laptop, however, I get 30-40fps in the same spot, with pretty decent eye-candy (I can actually have cloth-rendering and flexi-prims!). This also makes building a much more enjoyable experience than it used to be (and there was a time when I did a LOT of building in SL).

It also occurred to me that, on several levels, I really do miss SL. The social aspect has long since disappeared for me, except on small occasions when I encounter old friends from a brighter time in SL history. But, I really miss the creative aspects of this game. It was a very unique and enjoyable creative outlet for me, and no other game, application, or artistic medium has been able to replicate its appeal to me. There’s just something awesome about saying “I’m going to build a 3D interactive environment”, and a few hours later, I have a fully-furnished house that I can immerse myself in mentally.

So, the idea of getting back into it has crossed my mind. It’d be nice to have something other than old screen shots and tales of happier times to show for the countless hours I once spent there.

There are downsides, though. I’m still very disappointed with what SL has become in recent years, compared to my “glory days”, and the idea of giving money to Linden Labs is a bit uncomfortable, to say the least. Plus, I was once pretty heavily “addicted” to SL, to the point where I spent most of my waking hours playing it (it was not a happy time). While I don’t think that would be a problem this time around, it is very easy to completely immerse myself in this fantasy world and leave the real world for awhile (which is, admittedly, still a small portion of its appeal).

There’s also the financial aspect. Given what I want to do with it, I would need to purchase land, which requires real-world money (my car business is not profitable, nor do I have the time or interest to make it self-sustaining). Now, there are two ways I can go with this. Option 1, I get a big enough plot on the mainland to restore my car dealership, plus things like trees and what-not. That would accomplish my primary goal of bringing back the lovely car dealership that built for me, with a monthly cost that I can justify as casual spending. Then, there’s option 2, realizing my old dream of buying an island and creating the forest utopia of Lupinia. It would be a long-term project, with a pretty hefty monthly cost (3-4x the monthly fees of option 1), but if I can create what I’ve always envisioned for the project, it would be worth it in the end.

Sadly, due to ridiculous increases in mainland land prices in SL, both options would cost about the same up-front, with option 1 giving me 1/4 the land of option 2 (or less). It seems I should’ve held onto my ~16 acres of mainland land a bit longer, I could’ve made more money on its sale

I’ve had ideas in the past on how to get my SL building fix without paying for it (partnering with existing estates, building temporary stuff in sandboxes, renting from the f***ing land barons who killed SL in the first place), but none of them are particularly desirable or feasible for one reason or another. Which is unfortunate, I really wish there was some way I could construct the peaceful forest hideaway of my dreams without paying for the privilege.

I mostly posted this to ponder my thoughts on the matter, but what do y’all think? Am I making any sense? Should I take the hidden Option 3 of cynicism and just say “no one else in SL cares about making pretty things anymore, why bother”? Due to the costs involved, it’s unlikely that I’ll be doing anything with this before the first of the year.

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For those who are unaware (since I never really posted about it), there was about a 3-year period where SL was a major part of my life, and a few months one winter where it was one of the only parts of it. During that time, I created a small business designing and selling cars, and gradually accumulated land on the mainland to create the Republic of Lupinia, a dense forest with lots of areas to explore, and a variety of buildings, roads, and trails. At its peak, Lupinia spanned nearly 16 acres of in-game land across three regions, at which point we (the staff of Lupinia) decided to move to an island. After selling my land, and looking over my finances, as well as the $1500 sitting in my SL account from the sale of said land (an overall profit of roughly double what I paid for all that, I might add), I decided that I could no longer justify the expense of monthly land fees, so I cashed out and basically stopped playing.

It’s a decision I’ve regretted in many ways, but rescinding it was never a feasible option until recently.

FA is down. They have no idea why.

I lol’d.

Then I got frustrated, because I read through my LJ friends page. People are starting to use FA again, and FA still sucks ass despite having obscenely overbuilt new hardware. So, $16k later, the site’s uptime has seen only marginal, if any, improvement.

Lame. Not surprising, but lame.

As mentioned in Mitchell Irons‘ Oregano blog, Google’s new Knol project is now live. It’s basically a copy of Wikipedia, with an important difference: Users are strongly encouraged to use their real names, instead of internet handles. In other words, there’s no anonymity on this project.

Admittedly, in this instance, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The idea behind Knol is to create a reputable source of information (perhaps trying to improve on the non-reference-material reputation of Wikipedia?), and without the shield of internet anonymity, the information gathered is theoretically more likely to be accurate. However, this also marks a new step in the removal of anonymity on the internet. Sites like Facebook, and even more-anonymous sites like Myspace, are creating an environment where one’s online activities are directly traceable to their real-life identity, even moreso than they used to be.

Now, in some situations, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, some people don’t like tossing their real-life information around so freely. Personally, I grew up at a time when online predators were the new scary thing, so from a very young age, I was ingrained with the “don’t ever post your real-life information on the internet, or bad people will get you” advice that seems to be ignored by kids today. And, for one reason or another, that advice stuck with me over the years. I’m not afraid of predators, stalkers, or anything of the sort, but I do find it liberating to be able to express myself freely online without having easy traces back to my real-life identity and professional career. So, to this day, I’m not comfortable posting my legal name, physical address, amateur radio callsign, phone numbers, or photos of myself in any public form online. Which is why you’ll never find me on sites like Facebook, which are dedicated to sharing such information.

By contrast, as early as age 15, my little sister had her real name, street address, phone number, photos, and even her f***ing school schedule posted on Myspace. As far as I’m aware, she’s never had problems resulting from such disclosure, but I spent years worrying about her, half-expecting to have to chase some creep away from the house with my rifle one day.

I’ll be curious to see how this trend progresses in the future. I fear the day when my real identity is blatantly attached to everything I do online, because that day will mark the death of the internet as we know it; a place to freely communicate with others and share ideas that can’t be shared in the real world.

Over the course of developing/using my Wordpress journal, I’ve decided that I definitely want to use it as an active component of my website, beyond just storing backups of my LJ posts there. It’s an ideal method of writing site news, and using it even to the limited extent I currently am has encouraged me to post more often. Plus, the nerd in me loves having absolute control over every aspect of it (in fact, I recently modified it to respond to the same user-chosen colour scheme settings as the rest of the site).

At the same time, I wish to maintain an active presence of some sort on LJ. The community aspect of it is very much a part of my online social life, and that’s not something I can just walk away from. Plus, many of my posts are a bit personal, and Wordpress doesn’t have a very good way of making things friends-only or using filters.

So, here’s what I’d like to do, my bright idea as of tonight. I’d basically split my posts and have two journals. My LJ would receive a change of username, and be primarily used for personal/furry/filtered posts. The things that a random visitor to my website wouldn’t care about. The Wordpress journal built into my site would contain more generalized posts, things that aren’t out of place on a public website. I make enough of those posts to make this a worthwhile pursuit.

To get an idea of how you, my friends, family, colleagues, and random readers feel about this, I’ve created a poll. It’s on my Wordpress journal, because I can’t make polls here on LJ, but you don’t need an account or anything to vote. So, please, tell me what you think

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Things to keep in mind before voting:
- I know people are going to say “It’s your journal, do what you want”. I know that, but I’m doing this because I care what all of you think on this matter, so please vote anyway.
- My Wordpress posts would still be available here on LJ, via lupinia_studios.
- Anything major would be posted to both locations.
- Unfortunately, there aren’t any good options for allowing OpenID registration/logins for Wordpress. But, creating an account isn’t necessary to post a comment on it, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
- I’ll be changing my username on LJ at some point anyway, regardless of the course of action I pursue. Since this is a public post, I don’t want to get into details of what my new username will be, but all of you should be able to figure it out by now.
- My previous idea of posting everything redundantly has proved to be excessively tedious. Plus, I don’t like having the capability for comments to be posted in two places independantly of each other. So, unless the votes for this option show an overwhelming majority, it probably won’t happen.

Hi everyone! A friend of mine has launched a new forum for all you furs with military backgrounds, Military Furries. So, if you’re currently in the military (in any country), or used to be, join up to meet your fellow servicefurs!

This site is proudly hosted by the Lupinia Hosting Community, and I personally had a lot of fun setting this one up. So, enjoy!

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting really, REALLY fucking tired of hearing “I have new art/photos/writings/whatevers to show off, but FA is down, so I can’t”. I see this on LJ, on forums (including one with an integrated image gallery o.O), on IRC, and in IM conversations. I can’t turn around without hearing someone whine about FA being down, and claiming that they can’t share media on the internet without it.

Here’s a bit of a newsflash, people: This is the internet! It was built for exactly this purpose! There are literally thousands of websites out there designed solely to help you share your media, whatever format it happens to be in. Some of them have communities surrounding them, some of them don’t. Some of them like furries, some of them don’t. Some of them have as piss-poor reliability as FA, but the vast majority are more stable. But, they’re out there, and the selection is overwhelming.

Plus, if you can’t find a site out there to your liking, you can even make your own! It’s easy, really, and there’s no complicated licensing or anything. Just decide whether you want to pay for this or not, find a host that doesn’t suck (hint: if it’s not AOL, Geocities, Tripod, or Freewebs, it probably doesn’t suck), and throw together a basic website in the application of your choice. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can build a website; it might not be the greatest, but it’s better than whining about FA and doing nothing.

Or, if you must have social networking feedback on your media, there’s plenty of those sites too! And almost all of them have ways of sharing text, images, and audio. They come in many flavours, with varying degrees of suck, but they’re out there and easy to find.

Even LJ (where you’re probably reading this) has a rudimentary, poorly-designed gallery that, while difficult for random people to navigate, will allow you insert your images into LJ posts.

In any case, there are infinite solutions to this problem that are more productive than whining about FA. So, find one you like, use it, and stop whining! You can always go back to FA if/when it comes back; this is the internet, it’s not like you need a passport to go from one site to another. But in the meantime, if you do something productive, you’ll still be able to share your work (or your commissions; I should clarify that most of the people I hear this bullshit from are not artists themselves), and your internet life will continue. And, who knows, you might even find a new social group to interact with, or you might find that you really like running your own website. Just stop whining about it, ok?

This was posted by maikujaku, and I’m reposting it because, not only do I really hate FA for precisely these reasons, but someone sang it in our room one night at AC and I’ve been trying to find some evidence of the song since

Sung to the tune of “Still Alive” from Portal.

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This was a failure
I’m making a note here EPIC CRASH
It’s hard to keep the servers up and running
Amateur Coders
The searches are down because we suck
Donations you sent to us We don’t know where they have gone.
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake
Fur Affinity’s searching Has turned out to be fake.
And you gave us a ton
So our systems all could run
But the searches were all Just a lie

I bet you’re all angry,
Cause everything’s 404 not found
It’s visitors not DOS attacks That killed me
My website’s in pieces
The servers all run like they’re on fire
As you wait it hurts because We don’t know what we can do
We just made a website Without planning it well
We had no idea we’d be going through hell
So we asked for your cash to buy servers that would crash
Seems donations were all just a lie

So how long is ’shortly’?
Been looking at this dumb fox for days
Maybe you’ll find someone else to host you
Maybe FURNATION
That was a joke HA HA Don’t leave
Hardware in a cardboard box Was just a figure of speech
Look at me still singing while the site is offline
Maybe all the donations Should buy bandwidth next time
But I got a new car And some drinks down at the bar
While the servers are all still offline
FurNations running and We are offline
And so is VCL but We’re offline
We’ll be back shortly but now We’re offline
We’re up an hour but now We’re offline
We should all give up and just Stay offline
We’re online! Back offline!

The Site Is A Lie (c) Joey Porter/Corsi Mousehold