Terminally Incoherent

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months, you probably heard that World of Warcraft: Cataclysm launched yesterday at 3am. It has been hyped up for months, advertised on TV and much discussed on the internet. I knew it was going to be a big deal but… I didn’t expect their servers to buckle under the load.

You see Blizzard was slowly phasing in the new content for weeks now. Last several patches introduced the new rules, nerfs and upgrades as well as re-shaped the familiar areas of the world. A large portion of the brand new content was already in game, for everyone to explore. The only things that would get unlocked at 3am were the brand new zones for level 80-85 players, the two new races and few dozen new skills. One of which would allow you to use your flying mounts in vanilla WoW world (up until now, flying was only allowed in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones which were on different continents/planes of existence from the main game world). This was exciting but I sort of figured that my medium population server would be just fine on the launch day.

What happened yesterday was actually kinda silly. When the content got unlocked at 3am Blizzard forced everyone to log out and log back in. As you can imagine the synchronized log out and log back in maneuver conducted by a five million players effectively bitch slapped their activation servers into oblivion. For all intents and purposes this was a massive scale DDOS. So for about 20-30 minutes most people could not get into the game.

When I finally got in, I saw this:

Crowd around the flight trainer

Yes, this is a large group of people crowding around the flight trainer. Can you spot the NPC trainer in that mob? Neither could I. Neither could anyone really. Everyone seemed to want to get this new flight skill, but no one was willing to step away from the trainer. There was lot’s of yelling, lot’s of name calling as well as laughter. I was mostly laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. I mean, if enough people would just step back, or go do something else for a few minutes, this gigantic traffic jam would dissipate within minutes. But, this is the internet so no such luck…

Another angle

And yes, I was part of the problem. As soon as I logged in, I made a bee line for the trainer, and after taking few screenshots I squeezed myself into the middle of that crowd. Fortunately for me, I grew up playing old school point and click adventure games. I did enough pixel hunting in my younger years to know exactly how to approach this problem. It was all about careful maneuvering, adjusting the camera angle and then just aiming your cursor in the exact spot at the exact time. It took me several minutes but I managed to get my mount:

Weeeee!

Of course seeing me mount up, and rise above the mob prompted several people to question my sexuality using the yell feature, but I guess that was to be expected. All in all, the whole experience was quite amusing.

What is not amusing is that my server suddenly went from medium population to “you must wait at least 20 minutes in a queue before logging in” population:

I took this screenshot after about 15 minutes of waiting

It’s almost like everyone and their mom reactivated their WoW accounts and came to my server. A server I picked specifically because I did not want to wait in queues. Sigh… Hopefully in a week or two, all the new players who just came to check things out will leave and I won’t have to plan 20 minutes ahead to log into the game.

Did any of you go back into the game to see what the new expansion is going to be all about? How do you like it so far?

Over the weekend, I finally sat down and updated my blog theme. I have been using Kubrick (the old default WordPress theme) ever since I got this domain and migrated my blog from Blogger. So it’s been over 4 years without a theme change. Actually, that’s a lie – I did change the header image back in 2008 but that hardly counts. The funny thing is, I always intended to clean things up some more – only I never actually got around to it.

If Valve has openings, I think I would totally fit into their corporate culture. I already operate on their time, and I love all their games. I’m a shoe in!

While I was tinkering with the design, I discovered something rather interesting. Well, interesting to me at least. Chances are I might be the last WordPress user in the world to discover this, but I will tell you anyway. Did you know that you can actually preview how your blog will look in a new theme without actually activating it? All you need to do is to add the following to any URL:

/?preview=1&template=themedir&stylesheet=themedir&

Where templatedir is the name of the directory in /wp-content/themes/. You can then click on any link, move around and see how everything looks. For example, here is how my blog used to look under the old theme.

The nice thing about this little feature is the fact that it allows you to mess around with the theme on your live installation without actually affecting how the site looks for visitors. There is just no need to install a test blog, you just use the preview URL and do your thing.

The changes are not just superficial. I finally fixed my tags/categories mess, which was driving me crazy for like 2 years now. You see, when I moved to wordpress, categories was a new thing to me. I started using them the way you use tags these days. I would assign multiple categories to each post, and create new ones for just about anything. So in the past you could have seen a post filed under “programming, software engineering, web design, web 2.0, php, scripting, lamp, mysql”. I ended up with like a quintillion categories on the sidebar, and since I had so many of them, there was really no consistency to how I was using them. When WordPress finally got a tag feature few years ago, I realized I could make things much, much neater and easier if I consolidated a lot of my categories, or converted them to tags.

The way I now understand the category/tag distinction is that you ought to have a few general categories (like programming, entertainment, humor) that indicate general topics you will be talking about. Tags on the other hand, are for specific, narrow topics that you write about frequently. So for example if I was writing a post about doing something in Java I would file it under the programming category and tag it with Java.

This is precisely what I did. I sat there, merged all my categories, converted them to tags (and vice versa) and deleted just about anything that had fewer than 3 posts under it. Right now I have 15 categories (all of which have close to, or over a hundred posts) and few dozen tags and I’m pretty content with this setup. I could probably consolidate few more categories, but this will do for now.

Part of this effort was just me trying to have a better organization, but there was something else that also motivated me. You see, I sort of want to have custom headers for each category. So if you are reading about programming there would be some code there, if you are reading a movie review there would be something movie related, and so on. This could only work if I had a manageable number of categories and would refrain from filing posts under multiple ones. So this is sort of where I’m heading.

Anyways, how do you like the new design? Do you like the category-based-header idea? Does anything seem broken after the theme update? Let me know in the comments.

When you watch the trailer for Ink, you may get the impression that this is yet another “SyFy presents” low budget, low brow SF flick. This impression would be dead wrong. While Ink is low budget, it is nowhere near low brow. The psychological depth, the oneiric setting, and the contemplative structure of the narration ensures that SyFy channel would not touch it with a ten foot pole. It is way to smart for their current tasteless, nerd hating incarnation. The sad truth is that no one wanted to touch this movie to begin with. No big movie studio would pick it up. No TV channel wanted to have anything to do with it. No one seemed to be interested in making it.

Eventually it was financially backed by small independent movie studio called Double Edge Films (warning, shitty web design). The produced it, shown it on few film festivals and tried to directly sell to independent movie theaters in select cities while at the same time distributing it in DVD and BlueRay format it directly from their website. The sales were not going that well, until someone ripped it and an illegal copy hit the torrent circuits. According to Torrent Freak it was the fourth most downloaded movie of the week November of 2009, with over 400 thousand downloads.

The blind pathfinder

The incredible popularity amongst pirates boosted the movies IMBD score bumping it from abysmal tail end to a whooping 16’th place on their movie meter. All this exposure caused massive spike in DVD and merchandise sales, and resulted with the studio striking a deal with Hulu where you can currently view it with brief commercial interruptions. Which proved once again, that piracy can be the best kind of marketing and exposure you can get.

The incubi

As for the movie itself, it is actually very good. It is amazing what the cast and crew have accomplished given their tight budget. The special effects are low key but very well done. For example, I loved the incubi look which while incredibly minimalistic still ended up being undeniably creepy. The final fight sequence which takes place in a hospital and alternates between the real world and nightmarish dreamscape is especially powerful and well put together.

Ink entering the limbo

I really don’t want to talk much about the plot, because giving away any details sort of ruins the fun. Half the fun watching it, is trying to make sense of all the stuff that is happening. And have no fear, it does make sense. At the end, all the loose ends are tied up in a neat little bow and everything comes together just fine. Let me try to give you some idea what is it about though: a big, disfigured scary looking dude plucks a little girls soul right out of her body while he sleeps. He intends to sell it to the incubi – shadowy figures that appear at night and give people nightmares. A group of mysterious Storytellers (whose job is to do the opposite – bring people good dreams) take it upon themselves to track down the kidnapper who hides somewhere in the parallel dreamscape/limbo dimension before the girls body dies in the real world. But it is more than that. In between the choreographed fights, we have introspective story of a neglectful father whose successful career broke apart the family, an imaginative but internally consistent world of incubi/storytellers, a very interesting twist ending and incredible low key special effects and makeup work.

Granted, it is probably not the best movie you will see this year. But it is quite impressive considering it’s history and budget. And it is free to watch on Hulu so really there is no excuse for missing it.