Linearity

Thank you for the heads-up about Darkstalkers. I moved the "s" outside of the [[ ]] tags but kept it within the ''' ''' tags. The "s" stays orange, but the link points to "Darkstalker," which is fortuitous. EDIT: Nevermind, I was completely wrong. I guess I will undo my edits and just insert absolute links for the singular "Darkstalker" links. Is the title of the Ganondorf article "Ganondorf" or "Ganondorf Dragmire"? I'll leave the link as "Ganondorf" for now.

The wiki makes it easy to link between pages. I would rather just change the bio to say "Jedah Dohma" in the first mention, which is the only place we link to another wiki page, and leave the rest of them as "Jedah." It requires less work to fix, I think.

The disadvantages to my idea of using linked handles without real names are: 1. that the real name, if posted, is one click away instead of immediately available, and 2. that publishing a real name for authorship requires publishing a real name in every one of your forum posts, since your name is integrated into your forum profile. I just became aware of this second issue, which I think is a serious problem. We shouldn't use my idea for the style, because some writers may want their real names posted only in the wiki as writer credits and not all over the forums. In light of that, I suggest that we use the style of the album page, and credit writers as: "Article by: writer's real name (writer's handle)"

The editing process I mentioned leaves a large number of instances of the string "] " and I simply replaced all of them with "] ". They come at the end of URLs. Edit: I prefer using pseudonyms in the wiki articles without mention of authors' real names. They would all link to forum profiles, which immediately display the author's real name if they choose to reveal it. This would address The Coop's preference and the issue of the mystery authors at once, and afford all the authors easy privacy control in the future. Also, I think the "Article: author name" style is ambiguous. I think that "Article by:" or "Article author:" or "Article written by:" would be more specific and would look better.

Some notes about editing: I automatically replaced bbcode bold tags with the ''' tag. Similarly I automatically replaced italics tags with the '' tag. After that I auto-replaced "[URL="[/code] with "[". After this, the only instances of the "]" character were in the middle and at the end of a link, as in [code][http://www.ocremix.org]OC ReMix as well as in notes about duplicate bios, as in [#47] Because of this, I changed the latter brackets to parentheses, and I auto-replaced "]" with " ". Finally, I replaced "[/url" with "]". I think that takes care of most of the replacement without too much manual work. Also, if we want bold text to be linked to other wiki articles, we have to use the bold tags outside of the "[[" and "]]" tags that MediaWiki uses to link articles together. So, it should be '''[[Jedah]]'''

Thank you, Larry. I appreciate what you said. I'll defer to Dave about whether or not we should link to replacementdocs. Whether or not we have linked references to manuals isn't that important to me, and I agree that it's safer not to link to them. Here is my reasoning for omitting the references altogether. A reference to a source is meant to give credence to what we have written. Since Dave wants to officially distance OCR from replacementdocs, it is counterproductive and disingenuous to officially claim credence from it even if we pretend that we actually own the manuals. We could keep the references; it's plausible that we somehow have legitimate access to all of those manuals. But it's bullshit, and I don't feel like bullshitting our readers. Polo, I'll take Sol Badguy through Ken Masters in your file.

As for splitting up the work, should we do as Polo said? Before you do too much work hand-fixing URLs, I think I might have a method of doing it automatically. Larry told me that using the command Ctrl+H, you can have Notepad replace one string of text in a file with another string. For example, you can replace "" with the " character to make all of the bold text show up as bold in MediaWiki. I'll figure it out tomorrow, but we might be able to do URLs automatically too, if we do these automatic replacements in the right order.

I am disappointed that this is the first we have heard about this. We all worked very hard finding and reading through those manuals, inserting and double-checking the links to them, and replacing the links and checking them when GameManuals.net went down in favor of replacementdocs. The time to tell us that we shouldn't bother with it was before we did all of this work, not now, when everything is done and polished. I don't think that we should refer to the manuals as sources if we don't want to link to them. If we deny that we have access to the manuals, what's the point of referring someone to them who likely has no access either? The only purpose would be to hint at replacementdocs without actually mentioning it.

rgr that 10char.

Aren't they all in text files? I thought we'd each copy and paste about fifty bios from the most recent text files.

First, all that was in my PM was my wiki password. I meant that I had not gotten the password otherwise but that now I can get into the wiki. That means that I am still waiting, just as you are, for Liontamer to tell us how he wants the wiki editing done. Second, I see no reason why we couldn't all work at the same time. If the software is like MediaWiki on Wikipedia, then we can work simultaneously. If this isn't possible, the software is overly restrictive.

Or another "Gloom of the N.H.C." They say that the music is "perfect." That is about as large a thing as you can say; I might be ready to trust them on it and get excited. Thanks for posting that.

I got mine, so I'm in. He might have figured that you had your info already through e-mail.

My e-mail address was out of date when you sent the e-mail. It's fixed now, but I didn't get the wiki info. I'll wait for the PM. Thanks for the update!

Heavy! The electric guitars and the synthesizer sound really cool, and you guys crafted a sound that suggests an unrelenting attack. The drums keep the same heavy kick and the snare backbeat throughout the entire song, and that got boring. Also, I wish that there were more melody and development, but that's purely my own preference.

I sent a PM to Liontamer asking when he expects to start implementing the bios in the web site. He hasn't responded in a few days. It is slightly bothersome, since we're so close to being done, but I suppose he has other business and maybe a real life to work on.

I'm sure they'll just heavy-handedly tell the audience right at the beginning (spoilers), "Will is a little boy who lives in our world instead of Lyra's world. Lyra's world is still there but displaced along a different dimension; one can get there from Will's world by opening portals in the air that lead into it."

I thought it odd that 10 years after the fact, when Pullman says that his books are about children killing God, there's a sudden controversy about it. For 10 years, people were fine with his books, which are quite obviously about rebelling against God and killing him, but they wait until he repeats himself in an interview to get angry about it. The movie was decent. It lost the subtlety and pacing that the books had; instead, it bluntly hammers the fantastic aspects of the book into the audience with lines like "this is a gateway to another world, and there are thousands of worlds like ours but different. There are even ones where there is no Magisterium" (not a spoiler, first ten minutes of the film). It felt rushed and bereft of an overall idea or mood that connected its parts. However, between the characters' arrival in the north and the ending that happened too early, the film had a bit more identity than in the beginning, and was enjoyable to watch. Sam Elliot did a great job playing Lee Scoresby. Whenever he spoke, I felt as if I were really in Lyra's world, rather than being shown and told about it. Dakota Blue Richards and Nicole Kidman also expressed their characters well. I still can't fathom why they took out the awesome ending of the book, which practically mandates further reading (or viewing).

This is getting a lot of mainstream news coverage. I am repeatedly surprised at finding video game news on the front page of the business section of The New York Times. Maybe I'm missing the point, but it bugs me that this coverage always seems ignorant of the days of Ninja Gaiden and Road Rash; it's almost ignorant of video games themselves. It's dry market analysis for businessmen. I suppose the industry has always been about business, but it's becoming more apparent as games become more mainstream. It symbolizes ever more clearly a shift away from my nostalgia about video games.

I love these books. I read them about two years ago and it was like carrying a whole universe around in paperback. From what I hear, the themes of religion have been all but excised from the film, and they were replaced with hackneyed themes of dictatorship. I understand why the producers decided to do that, but it's still sort of lame. I'm still excited to see the movie, though.

Does anybody here practice Kendo? I've been at it for two years. I'm halfway between casual and serious at this point as I try to hammer out a college degree.

This is like waiting for Christmas when I was seven. I'm impatient and I'm being extra good so that Larry der Weihnachtsmann brings us accounts or whatever he is planning to finish the project. Here's hoping that it's done before Christmas!

He doesn't come out of the shadows for just anybody. The New York Times printed a story about Super Mario Galaxy, and the writer mentioned that for a week they tried unsuccessfully to contact him for comment. He didn't talk to even The New York Times about his own game, which, from what I hear, is being lauded spectacularly. All that people can fucking talk about is Grand Theft Auto. Old hat.

The next episode is about "grittier heroes like Sonic the Hedgehog?" It looks like it could be interesting and worthwhile. However, I sometimes can't stomach video game-related articles or documentary films written by non-players for other non-players. They tend to be caricatures. I'm interested to see how the series eventually plays out, though.

I'm game. Just tell me what to do. Edit: And that User ID is actually very bizarre.