Recently in Administrative Snarking Category

This is not a good night for me to actually post a post of substance, but I want to keep my weekday posting moving, so here I am.

So feel free to comment with random comments!

In the background -- I'm doing the Star Trek Online Open Beta. For the record, and I'm glad to finally be able to say this... I've been in Closed Beta for Star Trek Online since early October.

Oh my God I love this game. I have been obsessed with this game for months and I haven't been able to say a damn thing about it.

Expect burbling.

Many of you may have noticed that commenting is back, and now supports multiple options for your signin convenience.

(I didn't want to say anything the other night. If I become openly positive about something, there is usually a disaster. Usually, positivity just causes RSS to break, but it had already broken that day.)

Your options are based on OpenID, a decentralized system supported by many services you might already use every day. Check to see if you already have some form of social networking account which supports OpenID, and if it'd be a good fit for you. You might not need to create a new account anywhere just to comment here!

Movable Type makes some shortcuts available when prompting you to sign in; I chose a few likely to apply to the people who comment here, and which I had the means to test at that moment. I'll increase those shortcuts as best I can over time.

(I deliberately left Google Accounts out of the list of shortcut choices. On testing, the identifying information in my reply was, at best, opaque. If that improves, I'll turn the shortcut on.)

Maintenance will continue as time and circumstances permit. I'm hoping to tackle the archives this weekend.

This is just a note to indicate that with the new year comes new underbody enhancements that will lead to more extensive upgrades and enhancements for this, our Websnarkian home. Now, I'd go into some depth about it all... but I haven't really got a clue about it.

There are advantages to marrying a woman who's more technically savvy and far better versed in both website development and content management systems than you are. My wife, for those who I haven't said it to recently, is awesome in every conceivable way.

There is... change on the horizon, but that's still where it is for the moment. In the meantime, you might run into some interesting issues along the way. Please have patience. Were this 1997, we would put up an animated gif of a road sign where stick figures were digging a trench. As it is not, we have spared you this. Progress, bitches.

Here is the Deal(tm).

I am having a wonderful time writing the "State of..." essays, and I'm not dropping the project. Unfortunately, I've been having major sleeplessness issues of late, to the point where my doctor has prescribed chemicals that cause luminescent butterflies to render me largely unconscious during those times. They remind me of Gossamer from this webcomic I once knew....

...anyway....

While my brain chemicals sort themselves out and I get back on track, writing simply isn't. I don't have the brain for it. I've been pushing myself to get back into gear -- I actually just wrote and posted a couple of Superguy episodes to push my head back into writing space. For whatever reason, I've always been able to write Superguy when my brain is starved for rest and oxygen.

With luck, by the end of the weekend I'll have my sea legs under me again, and will be back to "Stating of," and possibly even Justice Wing and/or Myth writing.

And is it weird that my brain is turning a new RPG idea over my head... one that would require me to have a conversation with, in no particular order, Chad Underkoffler, Shaenon Garrity, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Jeffrey Channing Wells, Darren Gav Bleuel, Howard Tayler, David Willis, Andy Weir, Bruce Baugh, Randy "Action" Milholland and Gary Olson? Or is it just sad and hopeless? I don't know -- my brain is soft and sleep deprived.

(No, the project is not "Credenza: The Role Playing Game.")

Regardless, that is the Deal(tm). In the meantime, please enjoy some jazz.

Hey gang. You might note that the ad block on the side (which had been four square ad blocks) has vanished, replaced by a single sidebar ad. The four buttons on the bottom of posts have also gone away, at least for now.

This is in the area of experiments. I'm curious what kind of change this will bring to the daily ad revenues. We may go back, we may stick with this. We'll see.

In the meantime, if you have a skyscraper sized ad, right now it's pretty cheap to put it up over there. If that's what you're into.

On the other hand, I finally had Geek Girl porn advertising on the site, and you know I've been waiting for the day I could say that. Ah well, one must make sacrifices in this world.