Burrowowl

Today Privateer Press announced their first departure from the Iron Kingdoms setting in a major release. First they had the Iron Kingdoms RPG setting, released as d20 supplements. Then came WARMACHINE, a miniatures tactical game that is set in the Iron Kingdoms. It has been doing really quite well, spawning a stand-alone expansion game called HORDES that shares the setting, timeline, and several major characters. This past year Infernal Contraption was released, a card game based on the Iron Kingdoms take on goblins and the Iron Kingdoms concept of mechanika. This one’s a more complete departure: Kaiju. That’s right, giant rubber monsters, teams of super-men, the Tokyo Tower being destroyed over and over again…

I’m not quite sure what to make of this descent into matters so clearly weeaboo.

Monsterpocalypse Preview

Cruising through Infosthetics the other day, I ran into The Whole Internet. This is a map of all 4,294,967,29 IPv4 addresses, broken down by owner, using a rather smooth image-scaling program that makes it quite navigable. Picked out in red are all the IP addresses listed in the Spamhaus XBL, in my opinion one of the more reputable blocklist clearing houses around.

My one criticism of this interface, of course, is that there’s no clear mechanism for centering on a particular IP other than manually clicking around until you find something close.

November is National Novel Writing Month, a magical time when a young man’s thoughts turn to cranking out about 1,667 words per calendar day. The mission is simple: starting November 1st, write a 50,000 word work of fiction, finishing before December 1st. The reward is simple: the intrinsic value of having done so.

Aside from the word count and the time frame, there are no rules to get all bent out of shape over. It doesn’t have to be a great literary work. It doesn’t have to be edited. It doesn’t have to be shown to strangers or even friends. It doesn’t even have to be any good. It just has to be at least 50,000 words written in November.

Personally, I’ve got a very rough idea of the characters, settings, and stories I’d like to pound out, though I haven’t done anything formal like writing up an outline. I expect to never show the output of my 2007 NaNoWriMo effort to anybody but the automated word-counter, but who knows?

Hat tip to Logtar, whose recent post reminded me about all this.

Brothers and sisters! Friends and neighbors! Squiggs and Nobs! Lend me your ear, for the Goblin Defense Fund needs you. Yes, you, the guy sitting in his underwear browsing the web with a bowl of Cheetos and a bottle of Michelob that was looking for Tenjo Tenge prons. As Wizards of the Coast goes into its final months of preparation and polish in anticipation of the May 2008 release of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, we have have an opportunity to set right the wrongs of the past 33 years. No more denigration of the noble Goblin. No more casting of aspersions at the Goblin moral fiber. No more elf-loving propagandist slurs against our little green buddies.

Sign the petition. Comment on the developer blogs. Take up the banner in any RPG-related forum you may participate in. We can make a difference, folks!

*Hat tip to Wolfgang Baur, whose livejournal page brought this movement to my attention. I must note, however, that Mr. Baur participated in the creation of a scandalously bigoted, anti-Goblin adventure called Pathfinder, published by Paizo Press.

Matt Read‘s lovely WordPress plugin that allows an admin to specify how many results are shown in a category archive, search, or index page had served me well for a while, but is presently not supported by its creator.

As a courtesy to the folks at Anime なの, I have listed this site only using the RSS feed for the Cartoons category; the other content here doesn’t have anything to do with the core theme of that aggregation site. I noticed earlier today that my most recent article regarding Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei didn’t show up on the なの, and started investigating. Turns out the RSS feeds for each of my categories was no longer being generated properly.

WordPress database error: [Table 'wp_burrowowl.wp_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID FROM wp_categories WHERE category_nicename = 'cartoons'

I had previously noticed that an odd error was showing up on my category pages, but since those get very little traffic (which is saying a lot for a low-traffic site like this), so I had put repairing the error at the back of my to-do list. The broken RSS feeds, on the other hand, struck me as far more interesting and hence a touch more urgent. A quick search on the web for the text of the error revealed a number of other sites afflicted by the same problem, and another search on the WordPress Forums got me just what I needed, somebody else with this issue and a work-around.

Turns out that in addition to messing up my Similar Terms plugin, which utterly broke my site, a more subtle issue had cropped up in WordPress 2.3 that changed the relationship between individual posts and the category system. This one’s a little more complicated than a simple find-replace in a text editor, so for the time being we’ll have to live with only getting 3 articles per screen, whether it’s the front page, a category archive, or search results.

Time to roll up my sleeves and dive into some more PHP, I guess.

Update:
With a little help from the Version 2.3 New Taxonomy page, I think I’ve got a real fix going. On lines 252 and 265 of Custom Query String 2.7, the now-defunct “categories” table is accessed. Switch the table to “terms” instead. There is no more “category_nicename” nor “cat_ID” these days, so replace the former with “slug” and the latter with “term_id.” The RSS feeds appear to work properly now, and both search results and category archives show more articles than the front page, as intended.