djpretzel

We raised about $2400, which translates to 8 months of hosting. Of course, we've still got the (fading) google ads, and the more people use our Amazon store, Zzounds, and buy shirts, the better. Bottom line: This was a huge success, I owe Jimmy big time, we should be really solid for 2008, and I'm not biting my nails. Well, I am, but now it's more over site development projects than funding. That being said, it's not like we raised $10,000 and are set forever; I'm still going to be looking into better, more relevant advertising for the site, we still need folks to use the Amazon store when they can (and Zzounds), we've still got a lot of T-shirts to sell, and so I never really consider anything 100% stable/done. Nevertheless, April was awesome, and puts us in a far, far better position than ever before.

... I think I'll just stick to ExciteBike. Hope you heal expediently!

These shots are approximately 100x funnier if you swap the captions around Sorry we couldn't make it, but it was good we didn't try and do the meetup plus TooManyGames, as TMG nearly killed us from sleep deprivation and constant MCing.

No issues here, knock on wood. I might actually buy a second 360 when they start shipping with blu-ray drives... makes no sense to me buying a blu-ray player for $300-400 and not adding the extra $50-100 to make it a PS3 or XB360...

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It's nice, to be sure, but it appears to be theirs, as in proprietary, and from what I've seen, they're not sharing it. One issue is that in order to see how far I could "fix" the crap layout of vb blogs, I think I'd have to actually buy it. $60, not huge, but would still suck to buy it then find out it's not... salvageable. I might end up doing this anyways, because as you say, login integration is the real headache. Any talented web designers wanna take a shot at mocking up a retemplated version of vb blogs, OCR style, with the same information & features, but with less suck? Proof-of-concept?

We're actively looking into this. Still. Our issue is this: if we do blogs, we sorta want them to kick ass. And vBulletin's blog implementation is a little... questionable. We could do a Wordpress-MU install, but then everyone would need separate accounts. We could try a vbDrupal integration, but... those can be insanely complex and error prone. You can see vB's implementation at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php; any thoughts on it, the options above, or other options I'm not thinking of are more than welcome...

Twofer, baby. Super Greenbacks 5X! He got 5000 dollars, he got 5000 dollars.... May can STILL be support OCR month... if you BELIEVE!

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I've gone ahead and done this, although in my opinion the uneven floating had substantial benefit for users at 1600x1200 and above. Ultimately, there's far more of you at 1024x768 and 1280x1024, so perhaps the visual "evenness" in this instance is more important. I'll continue to make tweaks, but the dark grey employed matches the grey in the site header, and in my opinion the contrast really helps visually separate different types of information on a page. As for those complaining about grey space because they're using adblock... I'm never going to design for adblock users. Also, even if you don't click them and never will, simply viewing them helps out statistically. Furthermore, I've already promised never to re-enable pop-ups, and am working towards getting more relevant ads on the site and getting rid of the ringtone crap. I'd really prefer you disable adblock when browsing the site; it helps me, it helps OCR, and it prevents confusion when you're not seeing what most everyone else is and you then complain about grayspace that I'm not seeing (yes, there's legit grayspace elsewhere, but in this instance it seems like the adblock was the primary culprit). On a sidenote: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.ocremix.org&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

On the homepage we appear to have some severe issues with IE6 that I'll try and look into, but no promises - upgrade if possible! Elsewhere, esp. on the detail pages for composers, games, systems, etc., I feel like having the page divided more clearly help identify different types of data, etc.

UPDATED: OC ReMix will be returning in 2010 for ROFLCon II: Electric Boogaloo Judgment Day (This Time It's Personal)!! If you're in the Cambridge, MA area come see us embarrass ourselves and treat Internet like the serious business it is, academically speaking. Our panel is 11:30 to 1:00 on Saturday, May 1st. It is called "Running the Tubes" - because we do! It will also be STREAMED LIVE like back in 2008, so you don't have to miss a single second of Larry Oji even if you won't be there in person. Here's cool stuff from ROFLCon I, where legendary things happened such as our giving the one and only Leeroy Jenkins an OCR hoodie and Tron Guy stealing the show from everyone: http://roflcon.org/2008/04/26/really-short-summary-incubating-the-mindvirus-meme-infrastructures/ David Lloyd & Larry Oji with Drew Curtis of Fark.com (Brawndo has what Larry craves).

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Dhsu and others - the fact that Sam's created an alt account and persists with ban evasion should be evidence enough. The post in question was made from 69.200.95.107, his account. I know he seems like a nice guy, and I know he's got some issues, but there's no excuse for this type of shit.

He certainly has, and it's difficult to know for sure, but we see stuff coming from Sam's IP. We had an issue with passwords leaking when Sam was a judge, as well. After a certain point, you have to ask yourself: if it's Sam being "duped" by Ari, how come he keeps getting duped.... over... and over... again? I know it seems like Sam wouldn't harbor any ill intent, and at the very least I don't think it's the same nature as Ari's, but he's either helping Ari out, or he's got the worst learning curve in the history of mankind, is the most gullible person on the planet, and refuses to take my advice to disassociate. I don't know, somehow the former seems more likely than the latter. Either way, it's a problem for us.

I believe that they were trying to manipulate the system with Ari's help, as I know he specifically thinks Jill and Andy's success at OurStage was suspect and based on OCR "fanboys" as one of them put it. Looks like they failed. Let me put this in no uncertain terms: these three people, regardless of the musical talent they possess, have been consistently causing bullshit for OCR, vgmix, ThaSauce, and other sites, have been targeting Jill incessantly, spamming her site, attempting to hack OCR via all sorts of means (DragonArmy), and in general being hostile and unproductive. Collectively they've wasted hours of my time, time I'd much rather be spending working on the site. Sadly it seems like Jared Hudson is on board with them as well. It's the exact opposite of the awesome support we've seen this month from lurkers and veterans alike, donating to help with bandwidth costs - these actions directly affect my time and therefore my ability to run the site effectively. These individuals are calling Jill an "attention whore" and spamming their message on our IRC channel and trying to do the same on our forums. Who's the real attention whore, in that scenario? I don't understand why these talented and otherwise intelligent guys can't spend their time working towards productive goals. It seems like there always has to be an enemy, always has to be a (perceived) injustice, and that they always have to resort to the same tired means of expressing their thoughts, namely with hacks, spam, etc. It's downright boring. It's the original with drum loops on top. It's a MIDI rip, in the form of post-adolescent rage. If their creativity in this regard matched their musical creativity, perhaps they could create something new, a new website, instead of trying to continuously disrupt someone else's. Of course, I wouldn't recommend anyone register there, because they'd simply have their password stolen. When Ari essentially got kicked off this site and eventually banned, there were rumors he was working on a competitor site of his own. Indeed, it does look like he's spent at least a little time on songportal.org. And yet, sooooo many years later, it's basically live but totally broked. Nothing. Nada. Zilch to show for all the angst, all that planning, all those criticisms leveled at me and at OCR. Perhaps if he'd spent more time coding or working on more (excellent, btw) ReMixes, he'd have something more to show for himself, something that - instead of wasting my time and spreading hostility - was actually positive and appreciated. Instead these guys continually try to disrupt OCR and other sites, making personal threats aimed at Jill, all under the very cowardly protection of anonymous proxies. Actually, sometimes they forget to be oh-so very clever clever, and we actually get real IP addresses. It's sad. At any rate, sorry to totally derail this thread. I don't doubt that Sam in particular could put out a track capable of legitimately doing well at OurStage, but I believe in this instance it was yet another attempt at their version of ROFL, which is always at someone else's expense.

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Gentlemen, we need to work diligently to ensure that future generations of box art designers make similar mistakes with the OC ReMix logo. That is all.

There's two things that are stupid here. One is Capcom's gaf. The other is the continued practice of sites like IGN and mobygames of watermarking other people's cover art, screenshots, etc. in the first place. It implies some sort of ownership where there really isn't any, seems like it would fail any "fair use" test miserably since the only modification is branding, and furthermore suggests that these sites are doing soooo much work on these images that they couldn't afford people using the images elsewhere without benefiting from free advertising in the process. I'm anti-watermark, and it seems like specifically the large gaming sites are just so darn fond of them, something like this was bound to happen. No excuses for Capcom, but imo the more problematic thing is the underlying reason why this happened in the first place.

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And of course, last.fm goes down It was all the traffic from OCR!!11!

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Next time you shop inebriated please be sure to use the OC ReMix Amazon Store... April is support OCR month, sober or otherwise...

I was far more bored than annoyed, to be honest... Then again, I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocaine powder...

I've spent tons of time recently manually reuploading the entire OCR library of mixes to www.last.fm, organized by ReMix ID in sets of twenty so I can manage them better. We went from missing last.fm previews for over 350+ tracks to missing under 40, and some tracks whose previews were broken or only 20 seconds long should now be fixed. The remaining tracks need to be fixed here on ocremix.org first, since most of them are not to standard 44.1khz frequency specification, which we require and which last.fm requires as well. Furthermore, for usability I moved the previews from the download tab right to the main writeup page for each mix. I really feel like this makes it easier to read about the mix and listen at the same time, and in general should make the site friendlier to the type of exploration we encourage. I'm going to try to keep things in sync and upload to last.fm for each new mix that's posted, which again I personally find useful. Hopefully you will too! As a side note, this was extremely monotonous work that took hours, but it was made a lot easier by seeing the support we've been getting this month. Thanks!