Does it really accomplish anything to turn on your hazard lights when you stop your car in a no-parking zone for loading and unloading? It seems like it would have all the legal force of crossing your fingers on the witness stand.
Death Knell for BlogExplosion? – UPDATED
I’m not sure how long BlogExplosion has been around, but I joined back in 2004, so it’s been a while. The idea is pretty simple: bloggers want people to read their sites. So, convince them to read other people’s blogs. It’s built around a system that lets you surf from member site to member site, earning credits for each visit that will bring other people to your site. There are also various games that either generate credits for you or get you to visit member’s sites.
It’s an effective way to get traffic. I’m not so sure it’s an effective way to get readers, but I’ve kept up a modest participation because it doesn’t take much effort. And who knows, maybe some of those people will stick around longer than 30 seconds.
About a year ago, the site was in trouble. There weren’t enough volunteers to approve all the new blogs being submitted (spammers love this sort of place!), and spammers took over the forums. A concerted effort by members managed to get a new admin assigned. The admin cleaned up the forum spam, fixed some site problems, granted approval access to more volunteers, and things started to improve for a while…
Well, things haven’t been that great lately. The lone admin has been gone since October. New blogs are again backlogged, and spammers are returning to the forums. The owners seem to have vanished into the ether. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed traffic from the site has been way down. Burning through credits takes a lot longer than it used to, and not only does it take three times as long to cycle through the “Blog Rocket,” but I get about half as many visits from it as I used to.
Today, I logged in to shuffle things around, and started getting PHP and database errors. Some pages would load, but without data. No blogs available to surf, none on the blog rocket, my credits and banners are gone, etc. The forums are still working, and the few people still around are lamenting the same problems.
Since there’s no administrator, and the owners are MIA, I’d guess that no one’s around to fix it. (Unless it’s purely a hosting issue, in which case they’ll be fine.)
It may be time to let go, and watch BlogExplosion drift off into that great server farm in the sky.
UPDATE (Feb 24): It looks like BlogExplosion is not dead yet. The errors are gone, site functionality seems to be mostly back to normal, and — most amazing — an admin posted on the forums. (Though from the comments, I half-suspect it’s a sysadmin from the hosting company, rather than BlogExplosion themselves.) Needless to say, I won’t be holding my breath for a resolution, but who knows? The site could pull through.
Whatever Happened to B5: Crusade?
Ever since J. Michael Straczynski started selling his Babylon 5 script book series, I’ve been hoping we’d get a book with the scripts from the spinoff Crusade. Especially the scripts that were finished, but never produced, and would have set up the real story. That whole thing about finding a cure for the Drakh plague before it wiped out Earth? JMS strongly hinted at the time that it wasn’t going to be the main arc, but rather the mission that got the Excalibur out there and exploring, at which point they’d get caught up in the main story.
Two of the scripts were made available briefly on an e-reader site, using a Java applet that was specifically designed to make it as hard as possible to copy and paste anything (and incidentally made it a serious pain to, y’know, read it, which may be why the site is long gone). As I recall, they included a project to reverse-engineer Shadow technology, and the first hints that the Technomages used Shadow tech (before Jeanne Cavelos’ novels fleshed out that connection in detail.)
Anyway, we’re still waiting for the Crusade scripts, but here’s the next best thing: Crusade: Behind the Scenes [edit: dead link].
Characters, story, world-building, production issues and design, executive meddling, interviews with the cast and crew, photos, etc.
There’s a note at the end of the write-up:
CRUSADE: Behind the Scenes does NOT contain any of the show’s scripts. It is a compilation of interviews and images. The Crusade scripts, including those that were never filmed, will appear in J. Michael Straczynski’s forthcoming 3-volume series, “CRUSADE: What the Hell Happened”
Sadly, given the title, I suspect the script books are a joke. But who knows? Stranger things have happened with B5.
Cryptic Store
Remember that mall mystery from a while back? There was a storefront under construction at the Irvine Spectrum with an “Opening Soon” sign, but no indication of just what store might be moving in. They opened in December, and I keep forgetting to post a follow-up.
As you can see, all is revealed:
…or maybe not.
Unless, of course, you recognize the logos for Hurley International (middle), Converse (right) and…what’s that on the left? With the Nike swoosh on top and the…skateboard? Sunglasses? Something on the bottom?
It’s kind of a throwback to the old medieval-style signs that showed an image instead of a name: the Prancing Pony, for instance (to pull an example from LOTR). Only instead of recognizable images, they’re symbols. Pictograms, if you will, only decipherable if you’re familiar with the symbols already, and they’ve actually thrown an obstacle in the way by muddling the most-recognized logo (Nike).
It seems odd to deliberately use a sign that would make a store hard to name (never mind figuring out what they sell), but I imagine that their target audience is quite familiar with the logos and wouldn’t have any trouble finding the store.
Taco Nobel
I was hoping to get a shot with the lit “TACO” clearly visible and darkened “BELL” fading into the background (closer to how it looked to the naked eye), but my phone doesn’t exactly provide much control over exposure. Still, you can get an idea of how it looked.
Tile Will Call
I wasn’t aware that the term “will call” was used outside the theater industry, but a quick search on the term indicates that yes, it’s used in other industries to refer to a place where buyers can pick up merchandise.
According to Wikipedia, the term’s origin is in the usage, “I will call on you,” in the sense of physically visiting someone.
For Hanging Dedicates
Found on a collapsible coat rack:
Hanging Dedicates? Wow, I knew Asha’man training was tough, but I thought General Cauthon was the only one who had to go through that…