A Halloween meme stolen from Merrie…

1. What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?

I would have to say either A Nightmare on Elm Street or Buio Omega.

2. What was your favorite Halloween Costume from childhood?

Dad made this really neat cardboard Rubik’s Cube costume for me one year. :-)

3. If you had an unlimited budget, what would your Fantasy Costume be for this Halloween?

Hmmm… that’s a tough one. I would probably say Raiden from Mortal Kombat Conquest, or Agent Smith from The Matrix.

4. When was the last time you went Trick or Treating?

Way back in elementary school.

5. What’s your favorite Halloween Candy?

For the most part, if you name it I’ll like it. :-)

6. Tell us about a scary nightmare you had.

Imagine entering a high school, where it appears a school carnival is happening. You get in line for one amusement… and as you watch, the people ahead of you step in front of a school locker all laughing and having a good time… then, still laughing, they pull on the locker door which is still jammed shut. They pull, and pull… and they finally get the door open…

… at which point a huge vacuum-like force sucks all of them inside in less than a second, and the door slams shut.

Then the next group steps forward, doing the same thing, with the same results… and try as I might, I try to get out of line, but I get forced in front of the locker door…

No, I don’t remember what happened next.

7. What is your Supernatural Fear?

The Cthulhu-type supernatural gods in the shadows… those horrors of insanity which Must Not Be.

8. What is your Creepy-Crawly Fear?

Bugs. Especially flying bugs.

9. Tell us about a time when you saw a ghost, or heard something go bump in the night.

One time when I was a kid, I went to bed after having an argument with Dad. He had tucked me in, we argued about something, and as I turned and went to sleep he turned the light out and wished me good night. After a bit, I turned, and saw a shadowy figure standing there. I screamed…

Turned out when Dad said good night and turned out the light, he didn’t leave the room after all and wanted to give me a scare. Thanks, Dad.

10. Would you ever stay in a real Haunted House overnight?

Depends on how much you’re paying me.

11. Are you a traditionalist (just a face) Jack O’Lantern Carver, or do you get really creative with your pumpkins?

If I carved them, I’d likely be a traditionalist.

12. How much do you decorate your home for Halloween?

Mom sometimes puts a couple of wind sock ghosts out and spiders with cobwebs. As for me, I just put a movie on and/or have spooky music playing.

13. What do you want on your Tombstone?

Pepperoni and extra cheese. (Sorry, bad joke.)

The site’s three main plugins…

While at the party yesterday, I managed to impress a number of people when I showed that I could post to the site blog via email (at the time, using my Cingular 8125 cell phone), and also via the fact that posts on my site immediately crosspost over onto my LiveJournal. They were asking what plugins I used, and rather than contact them individually I decided to post what they were here. :-)

  • Postie: This is the plugin I use for posting via email. Email posting requires a separate email address for the actual emails to be sent to, and possibly access to the server’s crontab. It’s actually quite a neat plugin, and has worked fairly well for me in the past.
  • LiveJournal Crossposter: This is actually the second LiveJournal crosspost tool I’ve used. The first one, Live+Press, was neat but didn’t work with Postie and had issues with WordPress 2.x. Formatting issues were also not uncommon. This one is a lot more basic, and doesn’t support the Current Mood/Music tags, but works almost flawlessly and has had no issues whatsoever.
  • Auto Shutoff Comments: I actually found this one at Sean’s request; considering how much spam comes in through the older posts (which are almost all blocked these days by Akismet), Sean just felt that it was best to close off their comments forms. After a while, I decided he was right and implemented it on my own site. It doesn’t work for trackbacks, but then Akismet’s good about catching those as well.

While those three plugins aren’t essential for the site, they definitely make my life easier (as well as make it easier for my LJ friends). I highly recommend giving them a try, if you think they might be useful for you. :-)

Ending the weekend at the pub…

Well, I suppose I should apologize for the size of the pic of Henry in the previous post. That post (and this post, for that matter) was posted via email using a WordPress plugin called Postie, and I had forgotten to configure it to resize attached images. Ah, well…

Right now I’m at Baker St. Pub, having a Shiner and waiting on the dinner we ordered. We actually went out to Sam’s to see if they had a leather blazer in my size. My old blazer had been ripped badly in an accident last year, and I wanted to replace it. Unfortunately, neither Sam’s nor Costco had them in. Ah, well… There’s always other stores.

Last night was pretty fun; like the previous post said, I went to a “hillbilly Haloween” party Becky and Brian were throwing. Although, it was depressing how easy it was to make my costume. I wore blue jeans, a white undershirt, and a baseball cap Dad let me borrow. Then, as a bit of inspiration, I removed the sleeves from my blue denim jacket (which were attached via zippers), and wore that too. At the end of the night, I had to also feel depressed about the fact that despite our costumes and joking, reality was likely worse. It also felt weird being the only single one there, other than Henry. Still, it was a lot of fun, and it was great being able to see everyone again.

Anyway, looks like the food’s coming, so I’ll wrap this up now. More later, perhaps…

It was going to happen eventually…

http://www.mortalkombatonline.com/content/News/read.cds?article=917

GameSpot is reporting that anti-video game attorney Jack Thompson has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Midway Games concerning what he considers to be the unauthorized use of his likeness in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. However, if you don’t recall seeing Thompson in MK: Armageddon, you’re not missing something; Thompson is not in the game, and what Thompson is apparently reacting to is seeing a kreated fighter modeled after him.

Is it a bad thing that I’m hoping in a way that he might decide to troll us either on the forums or via email to one of the staff directly? :-)

Six-word short stories…

http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.

Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his (“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”), but the rest are concise masterpieces.

I have to admit, several of them made me laugh out loud, including Alan Moore’s, Charles Stross’s, and Steven Meretzky’s. Give them a read… they’re rather amusing and quite well done. :-)

KNEEL BEFORE… Fedora Core 6?

Okay, so, Fedora Core 6 was released today. I might try it out on a virtual box at some point. However, the thing that caught my eye was the announcement message.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-October/msg00008.html

This is the announcement of Zod. Zod permits you to call him “Fedora Core 6”.

Tremble, Earthlings, for Zod is released from the confines of testing. Zod intends to hammer the servers of the world … starting TODAY! For those who chose the world-domination-acceptance package in your last installation, you need do nothing — Zod is beaming itself to your computers already. If your keyboard begins to get hot, back away … very … slowly …

For the rest of you minions who failed to do Zod’s bidding previously, this is your ONE AND ONLY CHANCE to redeem yourself. Go quickly! Download the torrent NOW. Obtain the ISO immediately. Zod’s minions know to back up their /home directory and to begin immediate installation of the GREATEST version of Fedora Core EVER.

Massive downloading of Zod is known to melt servers worldwide, so Zod commands all who are able to use bittorrent.

Now if only all software publishers had that kind of a sense of humour… heh. :-)

Unproductive weekends and all that rot…

Well, like the subject line says, I can’t say it was an entirely productive weekend. I got some stuff done, but not anything of real note. For example, my biggest accomplishment yesterday was getting my car cleaned out. My toll road tag needed replacing, so while I did that I cleaned a bunch of garbage out of my car’s backseat, glove compartment, and armrest area. Unfortunately, I’ve not quite disposed of it yet; it’s sitting in a box on my bed right now, but before I head on to bed tonight I’ll get it taken care of. Now my car can actually carry four people… though, truth be told, the fact that I drive a coupe means that the two in back would get awfully squished, even if there is a third door on the passenger side for the back seat.

I also upgraded my online gallery to the latest version of the Gallery software, as a recent PHP upgrade on this server had futzed up some of the formatting. I’ve noticed that for some reason my gallery is showing up on image searches for Mortal Kombat: Armageddon; it’s kind of amusing, really, considering the fact that the only Mortal Kombat pics I have are in my E3 galleries.

I also FINALLY got around to watching Constantine last night. My verdict? It’s not very faithful to the source material (if it was, Sean Bean would be playing John Constantine and not Keanu Reeves), but for what it was I rather enjoyed it. It might even find a place on my DVD shelf at some point. In addition, I managed to catch the first episode of Torchwood tonight; for those who don’t know, Torchwood is a somewhat more mature spinoff of Doctor Who. My verdict? I’m definitely sticking around for this one. It’s certainly strong enough to stand on its own, with only a couple of passing references to the original series.

Anyway… time for me to get some of this garbage from my car sorted out. Fun fun…

Well, it’s that time of the year again…

Yep, Fight Night got announced last night.

MK: Armageddon Fight Night Event

For those people who don’t know, Fight Night is the celebrity chat event Mortal Kombat Online has been holding about once a year or so. This time we’ll have the development team for Mortal Kombat: Armageddon on hand. It’s usually a rather hectic and trying time for me, as trying to arrange a chat with something like 800-1000 guests is never a fun time. I’ll have to get the server operators to help out again, plus make sure ye olde MKBot is ready this time. I think I’m ready for it, but it’s never an easy time. It doesn’t help that I can’t take my two-week sabbatical after Fight Night this year, seeing as I’m now the main guy in charge.

Speaking of which… I officially took the title of Webmaster for the site yesterday, and had to remove Scott Howell’s name from the Community FAQ and Staff pages. I’m still kind of overwhelmed about taking his place as webmaster. I just hope I can cut it as well as he did in his time here. Oh, well… we’ll see what happens.

Oh, and as for the art above? That was the work of The-Switcher. Damn nice work, I must say… :-)