Start with the assumption that you, dear reader, are nothing but a mere lost soul in a great ocean of successful people and that the only light at the end of any tunnel is the crack under the door from your basement where you live to your parents’ house. Feeling trodden down yet? No, OK, I didn’t mean it quite that way. Lots of people are talking about things nobody cares about, not even their friends. For instance how this twitter search actually comes up with results – not only that, results keep being discharged by the collective rectum of the internet.
The point I’m trying to get across is that you are nothing. Nobody cares about you. The internet is full of drivel as it is, and nobody wants to talk to you unless they:

1. Want to feel better about themselves by smearing you
2. Want to have sex with you
3. Feel they have an overwhelming duty that they must carry out by talking to you

Wanting to avoid 1, and probably 2 (or just not being the object of number 2) there’s still number 3. There’s always a plan B… or C.

You may ask yourself, how come I don’t have such frequent debates with (most) people around me in the same way I do with the internet personalities that surround me? Could they all be internet superheroes? Of course not – the answer is simple: You can’t punch people on the internet.

I suppose protection from physical harm is what leads to these cans of worms be readily available for quick opening. So considering the alternatives, it’s a no-brainer. All gain for no risk and no cost, other than your reputation, sanity and oh look – a slippery slope. It’s the get rich quick scheme of attention (negative and otherwise), which leads me to my first lesson, maybe inspired by Colbert’s tips for a healthy marriage:

1. A smart poster knows how to post with at least some tact

But you know that one guy who religiously defends something, who stubbornly shoves it down your throat and feeds it to you on every damn occasion they get. Sometimes more gracefully than other times.

I, too, know a few people like that. First, an immigrant co-worker who (somewhat ironically) hates Arabs and finds annoying ways to say it sometimes and brings in a wide array of manners to express his right-wing views. Second, my cousin who is a staunch communist and would never miss an opportunity to tell us over family dinner how the government caused the recession on purpose, that phone manufacturers insert flaws into their devices on purpose. They’ll get… very emotional when anything opposes their extreme views. They don’t have that “poster tact” and won’t hesitate to get into a very heated discussion with you to defend their ideas.

Those exist in all walks of life, on the ‘nets as well. So, here, have another tip:

2. A smart poster knows to pick their battles

And what about when you have to? A sense of duty exists in us all, and I wouldn’t bother denying it personally (neither should you). We all have a soft spot in us when somebody mentions that one thing that ticks us off:

3. A smart poster has a second account/handle/username they can use to be everything I said they shouldn’t be without any risk

I guess the internet is a place full of cruel ironies.

I figured I have a lot of material I don’t really use in the form of tweets. 1,832 of them.

When I started writing this blog post I wanted to gather a bunch of tweets and just call it The Best of Dushkin or something. Then I started looking at what those tweets actually contained.

Common themes include:

1. Being generally PO’d with the state of public transport/commuting:
   

   The automatic announcer that’s supposed to make up for the shortcomings of the Israeli train schedules didn’t go off and I missed a train.

1. Boring work related things that nobody who isn’t in my particular position would ever in their right mind understand or want to understand:
   

   The guy who did the friday shift didn’t trace right.

2. Playing (boring) games:
   

   I played some plants vs zombies. It was cool actually.

I began to wonder if that’s the future of my communication with the outside world will be conducted in 140 characters or less and be about terribly simple things like playing Plants vs. Zombies (update: it’s a good game).

So perhaps it won’t replace it completely, but I wonder just how many of these tweets could have been expanded upon and become fully fledged blog posts. Not that a blog post is much of a step up from a tweet, let’s face it.

So I promise I’ll write more meaningful things, more often.

MMOGs have been around since, arguably, the MUD. MUDs, for those of you out of the loop, look something like this:

Bathroom
The stench here is overwhelming. Your nostrils are quite
literally on fire. That said, you wish you had never
stepped into the room to begin with.
You see a slime in the room.
> look slime
The slime seems to whirl about in a most uncanny way.
> go west

This is an approximation, of course. I don’t think any MUD truly plays that way. That exact way, anyway. But the idea was there. We all connect to one world and all do something together. Whether it was to chat, RP or share our furry fantasies (they have MUDs for that too. Frightening.)

So let’s go back to the beginning of MMOGs. The first “real” MMOG would be Ultima Online. It introduced the world to graphics. Not only to graphics, but to interesting combat. It felt more like a game and less like “you see a slime”.

That was still not quite the “outbreak” of MMOGs yet if you will. It took one thing before MMOGs could truly burst out and become what they are today: a change of the consumer’s idea of a game.

Suppose you went to the store. The year is 1994 and you’re an average “gamer”. Suddenly, Ultima Online catches your eye. Unlike other games, there are two thoughts that will certainly go through your mind at the time:

• “I need to be connected to the internet to play this” which at the time would mean you had to connect via dial-up.
• “I need to pay a monthly fee to play this” which at the time was unheard of.

For the first, we just had to wait until DSL became common. As for the latter, once we had the precedent, the rest was much easier. Then, we had to have a change of approach, that of the players’ towards the industry. It took some years of this before the MMOG market became what it is:

A MASSIVE FREE FOR ALL! MMOGs are springing left and right and some of them suck so incredibly hard. It sometimes feels like the Atari – with titles springing up left and right and they all suck about the same. Perhaps I’ll educate you, developers, and enlighten you about the things that really make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

We like ongoing plots

If I wanted a static world, I would have played Final Fantasy. No, really. People who play MMORPGs don’t play them to just have the same static world the entire time so they can grind the shit out of it. People get tired, oh so very tired, from doing that. Fact of the matter is, that content is sometimes not rolled out as often as we want it to be rolled out. Or alternatively, that it’s not presented in the proper manner.

Some players appreciate exploration. I would in fact go as far as to say that most players like it, just some seek it far more actively than others. We get a little disappointed when the only way to find out about the plot is by reading it on your site, rather than seeing it for ourselves.

Why do so few MMOGs have actual game masters and employees progressing the storyline? I would gladly take up such a job, and I wonder why companies don’t around ten of those per game server for the purpose of spicing up the world, even a tiny bit?

We like player-driven content sometimes too

Going back to the idea of the sandbox. The all too familiar theme park analogy which we sometimes take too far. I’ll assume that you already know of it by now. Myspace did not become a hit (rather, plague) solely by merit of social networking – no, it got there because idiots could flood their pages with shiny GIFs and piss poor HTML. Facebook is popular because you can add these backwards viral applications to your profile and write about your most private things on your friends’ walls. Expression became key on the internet. From an extension of the television (providing content) it morphed into an extension of our local neighborhood and circle of friends.

That’s why MMOG developers have got to get their game together and offer us customizability. Not just changing colors, I’m thinking shape the world we’re in. Build buildings, capture cities, and then – customizing them.

EVE goes halfway there. Yes, you can build space stations in places of space you own, and yes you can change the course of things. But still, it’s not as though one can jump into a new area of space and see marvels of construction put up by fellow players. Not so. Player owned structures are generally hidden way out there.

Different regions of the world play differently

There is actually a fairly large MMOG industry in the Far East. Nothing against these guys, but their games really, really don’t appeal to a western audience.

Let’s take Aion for example. Initial reactions were that it looked pretty, you could fly in it and whatnot. For a while it was hyped. 7 hour-long queues started. But then, a few months in, the novelty fades and it starts getting reviews along the lines of:

“I want to reiterate how bland PvE is from [level] 1-25. [..] Most quests are either kill 10 rats, collect 10 rat tails, or deliver ten rat tails. Considering how boring and unrewarding the quests are, it’s just more efficient to find an even-con spawn of squishies and let your eyes glaze over (i.e., grind).”

- Brooke Pilley, A retrospective of Aion’s first month (part 2)

Yes, a grind MMO with pretty animes and wings (zomg). I don’t think it’s unexpected. It’s nothing new, but the real question is why NCSoft (who put out other, better games) didn’t learn the lesson already. Edit: I almost feel as though I want to take that back. I was going by City of Heroes, which as it seems was developed by Cryptic who later sold the IP to NCsoft.

Or for that matter, why didn’t anybody learn their lesson? Now go kill 10 rats and leave a comment.

Dushkin.org was inaccessible to me: it was 404ing the whole time – probably my ISP’s cache to blame. None of my friends had a single problem, and the same was true for CGI proxies. I rang my ISP that day and they had clearly stated, “we have a problem.”

Fine. They have a problem. And fine, they cache my pages. And that cache is having problems, fine. It’s not the first problem I’ve had, and I’m honestly quite tired. Sick and tired.

The email though, read as follows:

Password Lost and Changed for user: dushkin

Password changed?

I had someone take a look at the site. Someone with… internet tubes that aren’t broken. At first I thought he was bullshitting me, “why is there a guy with a gun there?” But, no, he wasn’t lying, as I soon found out via a CGI-proxy.

In this picture: shitty javascript, real player and horrible English

Naturally, I freaked out. What else could I do? Of course I’d freak out, I assumed I protected myself against these things. But then again, wordpress is not flawless. It was to be expected.

I mentioned this one had something to do with Spice Girls? Well, I wasn’t lying, I’m serious. This stuff is a blast from the past. Some serious hardcore 90s trash. Take a look at some of the HTML: (Modified slightly for better lolz)

<META content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0" name=GENERATOR>

<BODY oncontextmenu="return false" onselectstart="return false">

Holy shit. “Disabling” right clicking? FrontPage? All this page needs now is real player. Wait a second…

<embed name="video" pluginspage="http://www.real.com/player/" src="http://some.url.rm" hidden="true" type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin" maintainaspect="false" controls="ControlPanel,StatusBar" nojava="true" autostart="true" loop="true" height="62" width="165">

The only thing this page was lacking was a Spice Girl photo. And LASERS.

I reverted the database, changed my password and made changes to .htaccess among other things to ensure nobody gets in.

I don’t know whether the guy who did it was being even remotely serious. Namely because of the logs showing pretty clearly an IP in Egypt originating in Cairo:

41.232.6.15 – - [03/Jul/2009:13:43:26 -0500] “GET /visuals/?action=image&image=December%208.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 14458 “http://www.dushkin.org/visuals/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

The same IP is the one that changed my theme (which no longer has write access) in case you were wondering why I’m pasting this snippet.

Hey, at least he took the time to appreciate my gallery. I guess it’s something? I guess our Dr.MoZo at least appreciates art.

The second thing I have with regards to him is an email address on Yahoo, which was how he resetted the password by some unknown feat: mazika_aboezat@yahoo.com

Come on, that HTML is like sooo last decade.

So I will start by presenting the history of content and news. Not that I’ve seen them first hand, but think about the days before television. You got your “content” (entertainment, news, music, whatever) by listening to the radio and by reading newspapers. Other than that, there was buying LP records.

There were and still are people whose sole job was to go places to report news. So a newspaper or a radio station would hire these reporters to get news that otherwise they simply could not get.

Television wasn’t much different. It certainly added another dimension, namely a moving picture. That did not do much to change the format until the 1990s (as I recall) when camcorders gained popularity and ordinary folks would send in their UFO sightings or hurricane footage. Even then, let’s face it, the format is about the same – but it was a beginning of a sort.

Back to the present, the year is 2009. We have the Internet. I have a blog on a .org address on the internet where I post what I think, what I make and what I want to show. There is not much in that respect that differentiates me from online news agencies other than the type of content. As in, this is mostly opinions, theirs is mostly reporting.

So think of it this way, we all have our own column, our own galleries and if we wanted to our own channel or radio station.

It’s really that simple. It costs practically nothing – and often costs nothing at all. It’s available and in the year 2009 it’s also familiar.

This is not news to anyone, and neither is the statement that content is adopting a more free for all approach and not the traditional approach, in which there is a creator and viewers, and they are not separate in any way. There is no stage in our new world anymore.

And so with this shift to peer-created content, our old approach to journalism will inevitably change. And it is already now as we see already.

Let’s consider the very popular slashdot. Their content is and has always been for as far as I recall something along a very simple format. It contains a quote of a short synopsis if you will, which contain then contains a link or two to the actual content. Under that, a short opinion or question or something for debate added by I’m assuming the slashdot posters.

Slashdot posters don’t need to go anywhere to get their content because the content is already there.. The content is provided already, all I need to do is repackage it, put it on a site, citing the source and linking back and there I have it. A news site with no journalists. Just aggregated content.

The journalists become bloggers, photographers, or anyone with content online. They’re just linking to it and adding their own little bits here and there.

Not everybody’s happy, but this is just where the Internet has been going and still is. For now. It is unstoppable once it became available. Get ready to change your understanding of “news” very soon.

Why are we so willing to feed the internet content machine? I have that coming up in a post some time in the future.

There is Wine, which works for some things, though admittedly, not always that great. There’s virtualization, which it seems matured greatly in recent years.

But I ask myself, why don’t I actually use Windows? Surely, you can get used to anything, and there are certain aspects of it that are tolerable, but maybe I needed a reminder. So I installed a copy on a virtual machine, booted it and off I went.

Retro’s not too bad
I really hated the new XP look after a while, much in the same way that I hate the vista look. But somehow I’ve grown to really like the old standard look. Why? I don’t know, maybe it’s familiar. Maybe it’s more to do with the fact that it’s easier on the eye. Or maybe it’s just to do with the fact that IT’S SIMPLY UGLY. And so I stuck with the old look on purpose.

Good old ugly look

That’s not a big deal, is it? I can deal with that.

Annoyance kicks in
I CAN’T BELIEVE I JUST PRESSED THAT BUTTON. It’s the windows key. I was doing something in full screen on the virtual machine and Command-tabbed out of it only to realize that the I PRESSED THE WINDOWS KEY.

The first problem with windows is that they don’t give you the tools to fight their own stupidity. So you have to get external tools to do the job.

I hate this key

Fine, I install it, much better now. I’m happy at least. I don’t have that thing getting me out of full screen now at least.

Idiotic software designs
Installing programs is usually done via wizards in Windows. Due to the lack of a complete unified installer, programmers rely on things like:

• InstallShield
• NullSoft’s NSIS
• Various self extractors and such
• Praying.

Apple solved the problem already. Programs are packages, you put them in your applications folder or wherever you like. For the uninitiated, this is what it looks like:

See the funky icon that reads DOSBox?

The file named DOSBox is an actual application. It contains everything you need. All you have to do is drag it to your favorite folder (/Applications is usually it). That’s ALL you have to do.

Hell, even on Linux installation processes are usually summed up as ‘apt-get install emacs‘ or ‘emerge emacs‘ or at worst as extracting a tarball and typing in ‘./configure && make && make install‘, where as on Windows installation processes are all different and horrible in their own unique ways.

I’m going to make a point and try to install audio drivers. No big deal, just audio drivers for a very simple card. So I downloaded a .exe file from the vendor’s website, I launch it and get a screen. “Reading package contents”. The Bar fills up completely and there it is extracting files. Then it appears that wasn’t the ACTUAL installer, and it needs to start another InstallShield installer inside it.

This process takes quite some time, though. But, hey, look! Something’s happening! It’s taking up all of my screen space to do stuff, yay!

I was gonna use that screen space!

So I had my screen space ninja’d by an installer which was launched BY an installer. I think I must be trippin’ serious balls here because this is what I see:

There's more of you?

Another installer. Another progress bar.

But this is what really ticks me off about software for Windows. They are intrusive as hell. This is merely a sound driver by same I think Taiwanese company. They somehow thought it’s a good idea to add this useless program to my startup called “SOUNDMAN.EXE” which does practically nothing.

No matter what sound card I was using under Linux, I always, with no exception, used the same tools to control it. Alsamixer. And though some hardware will rightly need extra utilities to deal with them (such as the wacom tablet I had), those utilities don’t run on start up.

In other words, they don’t bother you unless you use them.

Mac OS includes every single printer driver out there, and that’s cool because they’ve all been tested and approved by Apple so you don’t need their Printer Monitor X 2™ to use their printer, but Apple’s own printer monitor, which fits uniformly into your OS X desktop.

The CEO says I’m speshul
Some companies think it’s a good idea to make their software look different. That is to say, throw everything the OS developers have done out the window and substitute it with their own stuff. You guessed it: they never fit into the overall design. For instance, software that I like a lot:

I'm so special and I stand out so much!

Why can’t we all learn a lesson from software windows software and avoid that stupidity?

Update: Check out this atrocity.

Sure, this is a 2 Mb/s connection, but that shouldn’t mean my shit should be capped at 5 KB/s. Yes, 5.

My ISP is by the way, 012 “Kavey Zahav”. A tech support rep officially told me that they don’t cap connections. However, they do. The way she wanted to me to check it was (strangely enough) to point me to their own help site which contains a test file. Over HTTP. Over port 80. On their server. Sorry, what? I told her it makes no sense. Her response: “must be the hardware.”

I got sick of tech support’s stupidity at that point, but they haven’t heard the last of me.

Here’s what I checked so far:

• SSH to a certain remote machine on default port. Uploads at ~20 KB/s, downloads at about 10 KB/s.
• Uploaded a file to dushkin.org. Downloaded via HTTP yields reasonable speeds. FTP however is capped at about 15-20 KB/s or so.
• BitTorrent is crawling, enough said.

Exhibit 1:

4 KB/s

6 KB/s

I’ll be talking to tech support tomorrow yet again.

And another thing. Non-israeli websites seem to run significantly slower. For instance, a comparison between the download speed of downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server:

Downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server

As opposed to the exact same file being downloaded from an Israeli server

:

Clearly no issues

Needless to say, it came only as an EXE.

I spoke to a tech support rep on the phone who said he doesn’t support Mac and that my router is apparently not a router but a modem even though the interwebs disagrees. It’s time for some RL haxx.

And so I casually ask, “by the way, what’s the password for 10.0.0.138?”

“Just type in Admin password Admin.”

Yes, it’s that easy. Admin/Admin is the default password for the Aztech.

The next tech support rep said something along the lines of “I’M SORRY YOU HAVE A MODEM NOT A ROUTER I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW TO MAKE IT INTO A ROUTER BECAUSE THIS CALL IS RECORDED AND IT’S AGAINST THE POLICIES YOU WILL HAVE TO COMMIT TO US FOR 2 YEARS TO GET IT”. I hung up, though I should have just shot him in the face with my laser vision because he was an asshole. That laser vision sure is useful.

The next tech rep I called when I wanted to find out what my password was and also figure out the VPI/VCI values. He told me “kk sry i don’t speak mac lol go talk to these guys” and gave me another phone number. It had nothing to do with Mac, but sure, have it your way, silly tech support.

Tech support went something like “how do i shot web”. The values themselves I found on Bezeq’s website (!!) in another guide for a different router with an incredibly similar GUI. These are the settings I’ve used as they appear in the device’s interface after you click Quick Start:

TL;DR: 10.0.0.138. Username Admin, password Admin, click Quick Start, put above info spare the username and password which are meant to be your own.

Enjoy.

This is of course, for a multitude of reasons, I’ll try to describe them, hopefully it will start making sense.

1. The more people out there the more likely you are to offend one of them.

This is very true and very real. If you’re talking to just one person, you’re not likely to offend them, as you’re talking to just one person. Talk to ten people, and the chances of you offending one of them is greater, as we introduce diversity. Introduce more diversity and more people, we become more and more politically correct out of necessity as we increase the scale.

2. Replying is as easy as typing an address to begin with.

“lol u suk im offended” takes less keystrokes than blogging about it, typing up an article or heaven knows what. Thus, feedback is immediate, and quite often stupid.

Anyway, my point is, it takes skill and understanding to get it right. The key to being diplomatic? Agree with everyone. Don’t express opinions unless you’re asked for one, and then just say you accept everything, but this is “just you.”

We all have ideas, we’re all radical in our own way (yes we are), the only question is how well we know to express it. This is especially important in a tiny little community, e.g. forums.

My suggestion: less is more. Nobody likes you if you have an opinion about everything, even if you’re right and say what they all think is true, you’ll always see more opposition than support – not because that’s the way it is, just because that’s the way of nature – social nature.I’ll quit internet forums at some point, just not now, just hold on there.