Baby Steps v2

The first post I ever made on this blog was called Baby Steps and expressed a hope that I would post regularly. Well I was generally good about that, but it's been nearly a year since my last post and I ought to explain why.

I already told you that there was a death in my family. Well, that was my dad. That took a while to process and as I was about to get back in the saddle, my mum followed him. After that, I wasn't in the mood to post about anything.

The motivation to return was a recent triple post of blog entries on the UESP blog, with new stuff from Lonely and Desperate, Snowmane and Minor Edits.

ME is one of the few good editors left on UESP and his (far too short) post sums up my reaction to Skyrim + DLC perfectly. My one word summary of my experiences with Skyrim would have to be "And.....?" It was a genuinely great game, and the DLC, which was mediocre at best, didn't take it anywhere new. I have to assume ESO is taking up all available effort now, which is a shame because all MMOs are shit. Yes, they are. All shit. If you disagree, you're wrong. Fuck off.

Snowmane's post is mainly a load of wind and piss, but the main point seems to be that he quite likes Morrowind. Well... congratulations on getting to that point. The rest of his post seems to be congratulating one of the newer editors on the attempt to replicate The Great Deceiver and the Great Dane's misguided project to list every Oblivion NPC's shoe size for Morrowind. Jeancey (the instigator of this massive info splurge) obviously wasn't around for the discussions about the original Morrowind Redesign Project (I was) and didn't know that such cruft was deliberately avoided. The result is that Morrowind articles are being cluttered with useless shit in the same way that Oblivion articles were a couple of years ago.

The last post is a typically ignorant and incoherent screed from Lonely and Desperate. In a post with less than a thousand words that's so boring it reads more like it has 50,000 he bemoans problems with the way some files are named on UESP and then criticises Bethesda for being inconsistent in the way they name their stuff in-game. It seems L&D has discovered some names that don't fit with his OCD and that this disturbs him. I contacted the person who came up with the standards and asked his opinion of L&D's post:

Q: Have you seen AKB's UESP blog post about naming conventions?

A: "Yes I saw that. I think he's missed the point. The reason I created those naming conventions was that people were uploading images they liked and it wasn't clear what they were for. We were also uploading stuff in any size or shape that suited us. Most of my first edits consisted of uploading really bad, oddly sized images of NPCs. We'd also been really lazy about using picture of NPCs or locations for quests, and it was time to get serious about creating proper images for them. The naming convention made it obvious where an image was being used in the wrong place. We could fix it more easily."

Q: You made thousands of images. What do you think of recent image uploads?

A: There are some really good ones. Roger has done a great job of capturing Morrowind ingredient images (and a few NPC image I had missed - http://uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-npc-Honthjolf.jpg) but some of his exteriors suck (what's the difference between http://uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-place-St._Olms_Canal_South-Three.jpg and http://uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-place-St._Olms_Canal_South-Two.jpg), but a lot of other images are awful. http://uesp.net/wiki/File:SR-npc-Mjoll_the_Lioness_04.jpg is dark and dank, http://uesp.net/wiki/File:SR-npc-Brelyna_Maryon_04.jpg is too close and too coloured, and so on.

Q: Are you coming back to UESP?

A: No. Daveh's made his bed and he can lie in it.

Yes, that was rpeh. No, I'm still not him. Deal with it.

Well that's a good first post. I've done some research, responded to some stuff and set up some possible topics of discussion. There's lots of things to talk about and I'll try to post some more soon.

I'll end by pointing out that Daveh's decision to use YOUR work to pay HIS bills hasn't led to any improvement in the site. Told you so.

Normal Service Will Resume

Sorry I've been quiet lately. There was a death in my family and I was off for some time, and I haven't been in the mood to blog since then. I hope you can understand.

Particular apologies go to the people I contacted right before this happened. I'll get back to you soon.

Let me be Clear

Some of you seem to think this blog is a democracy and that I should always publish every one of your comments, respond to all of your questions and do anything you ask of me. I want to disabuse you of this idea.

This is my blog. I'll publish what I want, when I want to.

Clear?

I removed several comments from the last post and then turned moderation on and left several others unpublished because they were boring rubbish.

The only vaguely interesting one tried to draw a parallel between my post that Ratwar may be Elliot and the speculation linking me and rpeh. Nice try but the comparison is invalid. Two posts in three years, one of which was only made because I got an email about it, doesn't compare to the mass of ignorant drivel I get in the comments from time to time. The vicious = thick thing was only ever a joke and is mentioned infrequently enough to stay fresh. Read the previous posts and comments on here to see that all the theories about me have been blown apart not once but several times.

As I said in the comments here, come up with something original. I'm not going to allow you to post any more of the same bland crap. If you don't like it, close the tab. I really couldn't care less.

September

I have something of a rarity for you today, dear readers, as I'm not going to attack UESP, its policies, its users or anything else to do with the site. Well... okay, I suppose Bethesda Softworks Inc are a bit connected but it's still a bit of a change.

My reason for this post is Hearthfire, a mod so soporific and shit that even UESP's team of panting sycophants can't write anything enthusiastic about it. Oops - I'm not supposed to be attacking UESP today. So let's say "Well done Legoless for writing a post without letting on that the entire Elder Scrolls community has collectively shouted 'What the FUCK?' at their monitors having seen the latest shit-awful garbage that Bethesda has vomited up."

There is no fucking way I'm linking to the announcement trailer, so any of you that haven't already watched it can see it off the UESP notice above. So you have some chance of catching your jaw before it falls off, I'll spoil the trailer by saying the new mod is about buying a plot of land, designing and decorating your own home, moving your spouse there and then adopting children. No this isn't your friendly Uncle Tiber pissing about. That is what the new mod is about.

Seriously.

Let's pause for a moment and reflect on the TES series. Not the games in it - the series itself. TES stands for "The Elder Scrolls" and if it's "about" anything it's "about" those tiny frozen fragments of reality called the Elder Scrolls. They let you see into the past, change the past, change the present and generally fuck with the entire fabric of space and time. In the latest incarnation of the series, we have dragons, vampires, werewolves and zombies draugr as enemies, along with swords, sorcery and stealth.

So let me ask the towering intellects at Bethesda this:

What the FUCK are you doing releasing a fucking SIMS mod?

Seriously?

Backtrack once again. This time we're going back to Morrowind. And no, I'm not one of those tedious fucks that populate message boards moaning that Morrowind was great and everything since then has been worse. No, I'm going back there because that's when DLC started.

For Morrowind, Bethesda released several free DLCs and they were largely examples rather than genuine new content, although the free Helm of Tohan mod was pretty good. The real effort went into Tribunal and Bloodmoon, which weren't free and which added so much stuff that UESP required a whole new namespace for each of them. In Tribunal - and there are about to be spoilers - it turned out that one of the three "living gods" of Morrowind had gone mad, killing one of the others, and was plotting to kill the third. The story involved competing factions, new enemies and you ended up fighting a fucking god! Bloodmoon wasn't quite as dramatic but gave us a whole new island with new monsters, and you ended up fighting a fucking daedric prince! (sort of)

With Oblivion, although there was the awful Horse Armor mod we had the excellent Knights of the Nine, which was almost big enough for its own namespace but gave a superb buildup towards the final showdown with a ... hmm... not sure how to describe it, but it was pretty cool. Then there was Shivering Isles, which was equally awesome and led again to a fight with a daedric prince. The other DLC wasn't brilliant but gave good homes to members of the four basic classes, and added a few interesting items.

With Skyrim we get Dawnguard, which has a pretty good storyline and some interesting characters, but which was summed up by one correspondent of mine as "meh". And now we have Hearthfire.

For a start, it's supposed to be a clever double name, what with Hearthfire corresponding to September in our calendar (dullards who just got the title of this blog post really need to learn more) and also referring in a sad, sappy way to hearth and home. Then we get the blatant lie. It is NOT going to let you design your own home. You'll get to pick and choose between some pre-built stuff because that's the way Bethesda's modding system works.

But the worst thing. The very worst thing is that this piece of shit is going to cost hundreds of Microsoft points on XBox and related amounts of cash elsewhere... and you're all going to fucking buy it because you're all fanbois of the worst kind.

Once you're able to "design" and "build" your own house, I suggest you download the My Little Pony mod because that's what you deserve.

A Year Too Late

If I really cared any more I could get depressed at the poor standard of admin on UESP these days. A good example is this post from TheRealLurlock expressing concern at the block settings he's been using on IPs. In a nutshell, Lurlock tells us that he doesn't know what he's doing and it's taken him months to say anything. Yeah, that's the kind of admin a site needs.

There's a reply from Lonely and Desperate saying the same thing, although the diff for that one is lost thanks to Daveh being incompetent. Lastly we have Whining Little Bitch doing his usual trick of replacing actual thought by copying stuff from Wikipedia. He suggests limiting the length of blocks to a year or less.

I thought this sounded a bit familiar and remembered this discussion started by rpeh on 1 May 2011. It seems I've got a better memory than Lonely and Desperate because he took part in the discussion but obviously doesn't remember anything. Rpeh's reason for starting the discussion was exactly what it's taken the other dullards 15 months to realise: that just because someone vandalises a page from a given IP address, it isn't always going to belong to a vandal.

The original proposals didn't go anywhere because LaD is an idiot and some other user I'd forgotten was also an idiot, and has done the square root of fuck all in recent times. While rpeh's suggestion to unblock every single indefinitely blocked IP address was a stupid suggestion that would have led to days of pure spam, the basic idea of not perma-blocking any IPs in the future was a good one. It's a shame it took so long for the others to get there.

Once... Twice... Three times a loser

Well the third attempt at upgrading the wiki ended not simply in failure, but destruction. This time, Daveh the Incompetent managed to wipe out half a day's worth of edits in addition to being unable to upgrade the software.

At this point you have to ask: do you really want this guy in charge of the site, paid or otherwise? If you're going to plaster the site with adverts and spend the money on getting someone to maintain the site, how about hiring someone who can do the job?

Before someone makes the inevitable claim that I'm fluffing for Nephele, rpeh or someone else, I mean someone from outside the site. There is a world beyond UESP, after all.

Gold Medal for being rubbish

Once again Daveh tries and fails to upgrade UESP's MediaWiki software. This is an obvious and transparant attempt to get support for his idea that he should be appointed editor-in-chief for life. Judging by the responses to the last thread, you sheep are happy to let him milk you for all you're worth.