From Wil’s blog:
Happytimes! Reader Steven says:
Come back tonight at midnight and use this link:
http://shirt.woot.com/Friends.aspx?k=8110
It’ll be $15 instead of $10… and it will be that way until it falls below the top 20 of the 27 currently printed shirts.
So, if you want some of the Dicey Goodness, you can still get it – just not for the awesome $10 price.
Wil Wheaton designed a cool shirt featuring various gaming dice in the model of an atom, and it’s up on was up for sale on shirt.woot! I was going to advertise the shirt here (like my site has any influence power at all, hah!) and encourage people to buy it . . . but it sold out. By 9:01 a.m. Central. Glad I bought mine late last night/early a.m. this morning.
So, I’ve met Wil Wheaton twice. The first time was at a Creation Star Trek convention in Midland, Texas, where he was a guest the guest and signed autographs. The con pretty much sucked a bit, a little because it was when Creation was first starting to take over and monopolize Star Trek cons, and mostly because it was in Midland.
The second time was at True Dungeon in GenCon SoCal the first year I was involved with True Dungeon. Wil ran through the dungeon with a group of his friends, and he was one of the best and most amusing Bards I saw that con. Less than halfway through the dungeon, Wil started having a really bad urge to pee. This resulted in some of the more amusing improv Bard Songs I’ve heard in all the time I’ve been involved with True Dungeon. I don’t remember the exact details, but one room with a giant spider he was singing something like “kill kill, kill the stupid spider” and worked in something about how he had to pee.
I was coming off shift just as Wil’s group started their dungeon run, and radio chatter started to the effect of, “OMG WIL WHEATON IS IN THE DUNGEON!” I was tired, and had honestly gotten a teensy bit jaded by seeing some of the Gaming Scene Bigwigs come through True Dungeon (we’d had Michael Stackpole run through the dungeon, a bunch of WOTC folks, including Ed Greenwood, the Hickmans, etc.) – I was like, “oh, that’s cool. I hope he enjoys it.” The radio chatter went on, with DMs and Blue Hands talking about how awesome a Bard he was. So, I wearily trudged back to spy on his group from behind the black curtains. One of our female DMs started begging to switch with a DM for the Spider Room (she ran it on the opposite shift). After it was ok’d, she then stated, flat out, “I’m going to kill Wesley!”
She did, of course. She was unfair, and had the giant spider repeatedly attack Wil’s Bard character. He was kind of justificably irritated by her picking on him like that – but he handled it with more grace than I would have then. I think he was more relieved to be able to get to a bathroom than mad.
I hope to see Wil at True Dungeon again. He was a lot of fun, he seemed to enjoy it, and we’ve made a lot of improvements with the experience.
Mini-Raving: SC.org’s Irresponsible Prank
I’ve posted a Mini-Raving (on the Ravings of a Zealot page, just click on the “Ravings” menu button) on my take on Starcraft.org’s little April Fools prank, why I think it’s irresponsible, and the respect I’ve lost for them. This one is markedly different from my other Ravings, as I feel they simply went too far with this, and chose something that created some real problems from it (I bet Blizzard Tech Support is just THRILLED with the ORG about now).
UF: Yeah, I Was Right
Looks like I was right (or at least two-thirds right anyway). User Friendly’s notice that the site was closed down due to pending litigation was in fact an April Fools prank. The normal site is up now with a new strip for the day in place. I do so love being right, and I give Iliad his kudoes for staging such a good joke, with all the prior setup on it.
Quarterly Statistics
I ran my web log statistics analyzer today for everything from the beginning of the year. I really wanted the 1st quarter stats but chose the wrong option and didn’t realize until it had all run (and it takes forever to do everything, so I’m just suffering with the slight errors that including today will introduce). For those of you who are interested, yggdrasil.net scored 38089 pageviews (impressions) since the beginning of the year, with 24501 user sessions (uniques). The site has had, thus far this year, an average of 418 impressions per day, and an average of 269 uniques a day. Those numbers are roughly half what I really desire.
An even 10% of all site visitors are international visitors, but there’s 8.05% percent of visitors which are tagged as “unknown” and some of those are likely international as well. AOL still leads in user sessions, but cable modem users (home.com) have pulled ahead in hits and percentage of hits. RoadRunner and MediaOne are also in the top of the pack, with 7th and 5th place spots respectively (UUNet is in the #1 spot, but I don’t know if that’s accurate, or if it’s because UUNet is my local gateway for my primary ISP). The top referrers 5 external to the site are Infoceptor, The StatBox, Tech-Base, SC Legacy, and SimpleCraft (in that order). What’s amusing though is the next-placed referral URL is listed as “c:/WINDOWS/Desktop/starcraft/list.htm” – apparently someone has their bookmarks on their desktop and my site has a proud spot in it.
On the Browser and OS wars front, MS Internet Explorer has 53.93% of all hits, with 36.61% for Netscape. 91.41% of all Netscape users are using version 4 or 4.5, whereas 86.88% of Internet Explorer users are using IE4, and 10.96% are already using IE5. The numbers for the Quarter don’t reflect it, but the graphs for March alone show IE4 in a decline and IE5 taking over. Windows95 shows up with 42.13% of systems used to view the site, Windows98 with 36.2% (98 has been gaining steadily the last few months), NT with 6.55%, and Linux with only 0.58%. There’s a mysterious “other” listing though with 12.9% of the platforms. I wonder what that entails (as I don’t have detailed information on that without digging through the raw logs, which is never fun).
Weird Links Of The Day
I thought long and hard about pulling some sort of April Fools prank with yggdrasil.net, but decided that I’d just cover the more intreresting ones other people are doing, and post other weird stuff, like the two links (unless of course I think up something really brilliant later today, then I’ll probably do it anyway) I have today. The first is The Church of the Gerbil. This site might appeal to all those weirdoes who went nuts over that Hamster Dance page. Speaking of the Hamster Dance, another site that someone mailed me about (I apologize, I forgot your name and don’t have the e-mail any longer.) that I’ve been holding off on posting until the time was “right” (read as: when I bloody well remembered it) is The Penguin Dance. As I just now checked the web site, I noticed that the “pengwins” have been removed (they are now Ex-Penguins!). Doh! Should have posted on it earlier, I guess. Anyway, it had dancing penguins to an annoying little music clip, much like the Hamster Dance.
NVIDIA and 3dfx to Merge
Yes, I know, it’s an April Fools prank. It’s the best one I’ve seen yet today, though. Check out the (entirely fake) press release for all the details. The release itself could be pretty credible looking if it weren’t for the “NV4199” project name.
User Friendly: Down, or April Fools Prank?
I went to check out User Friendly today, and was greeted with a notice they have that the site/strip is discontinued indefinately, pending litigation against Iliad. Now, I don’t know what to think of this. My first impulse is that this is an April Fools prank that Iliad is playing. My second impulse is that maybe it’s not, and maybe it’s real, and the timing is just really ironic. I consider that a possibility because I was reading on some other sites yesterday (Geek Life maybe, I don’t recall exactly where) about an e-mail and followup registered letter from a certain Evil Empire corporation threatening legal action due to “defamatory” humor in the comic strip. My third impulse is that this is all an April Fools prank, but an elaborate one with cooperation of other sites and extensive pre-April 1st setup to make it more believable and carry the whole thing off. I don’t know what to think, but I certainly do NOT want UF to go away.