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.

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.