A while back, a bunch of Nexus War players sent me a bunch of food from Omaha steaks.

It was delicious.

And someone else is doing it again:



The note says:

IN AD 2009 BEEF WAS BEGINNING. WHAT HAPPEN? SOMEBODY SET US UP THE COW WE GET FIRE WHAT? MAIN BURNER TURN ON *MOOOO* IT'S YOU!! *MOOO* WHAT YOU SAY!! *MOOO* CAPTAIN!! TAKE OFF EVERY SKILLET YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DOING MOVE SKILLET FOR GREAT STEAK

which is a reference to Zero Wing, for you meme-stupid out there.

Today, via UPS, arrived a package for me in the mail. It was a large, styrofoam cooler sent from Omaha Steaks. It was a gift from one of the factions (clans/guilds) in my game.

It had the following message:

ATTENTION DEAREST JORM. CHAOS CHAOS CHAOS WISHES TO FEED YOU WELL. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS AS A TOKEN OF OUR APPRECIATION FOR THE GREAT GAME YOU HAVE CREATED AND MAINTAINED.

It was further signed but I'll leave that to be anonymous.

Inside the package was twenty pounds of food, consisting of the following:

1 Box of Gourmet Hamburgers
24 Ounces of Beef Lasagna
1 Box of Bacon-Wrapped Steaks
1 Box of Stuffed, Baked Potatoes
1 Box of Potato Wedges
1 Box of Green Beans
1 Box of Pub-Style Battered Cod Fillets
1 Jar of Lemon Dill Tartar Sauce
and a whole pound of Tiramisu Cake.

I gave everyone in the game an extra amount of free play time.

ITEM!
I love that it is almost November and the sun is still very bright and the weather is still very warm. Hot, even, lately: it is hitting the 80s up on the hill. So, even though it's a week from lazy chicks dressing up as 'sexy' nurses day, I still have a very deep tan from sitting and working in the sun all day.

I was musing the other day that I want to bring sun worship back into vogue. Let's resurrect the cult of Apollo. Then tague chided me, pointing out that I live in the Temple of Wind and Fog. And really, he's right: it is foggy about 70% of the year and is always windy up here (it just happens that my porch is in the lee of the building, so the wind isn't over punishing).

ITEM!
The I am a Real American project is continuing apace. There are currently a mere 24 videos posted, but there are several hundred people joined up to the Facebook group. There's even a LiveJournal community at imarealamerican.

(If you want to participate, instructions and more info is here.)

ITEM!
My game, Nexus War, is apparantly mentioned in this month's issue of Playboy Magazine. At least I have been told; I have not seen the issue in question but I suppose I shall have to trek out and obtain a copy to add to my collection of press (good and bad).

I've never bought an issue of Playboy in my life. When I was in my teens, it was a prurient thing, something furtive. Difficult to obtain. Later, there was a phase where the idea of possessing pornography of any kind (even soft core) was somehow socially unacceptable. Still later (or now), when I don't care about such things, I don't find myself attracted to the photoshopped, hyper-polished, unrealistic women. It's theater.

ITEM!
At this point, I am unsure which event would crush my soul more: a McCain victory in the presidential election, or the passing of California Proposition 8.

I have found that over the past couple of days the idea of embedding discrimination in our state's constitution is twinging on my Sense of Justice something fierce. I get more and more angry when I read about some of the scare tactics being used by pro-8 assholes and it make me want to burn things.

At the same, however, there is a huge ground swell of "no" support, which includes some awesome and well made videos and this helps to restore my faith in mankind.

ITEM!
I'm perhaps 4 or 5 hours into Saints Row 2 now. While playing Grand Theft Auto IV, you may have asked yourself, as as I did, "where did the fun parts go?" Well, I have an answer for you: the fun parts escaped to Saints Row 2.

I'll have a more complete review later, once I've got a chunk of percentage points racked up.

ITEM!
It is a bit of a tradition that every few weeks I join my friends Maynard and Ming in sampling one of the city's "burger joints". Somehow, what started as ex-alumni from Lazslo getting together for food became a quest to find the "best hamburger in the city."

This week we went to Beep's Burgers, which was ghetto fabulous and awesome.
( Here Are the Current Standings )
Afterwards we went back to my place and played a bunch of Guitar Hero III in co-op mode (I have two guitar controllers). Ming had never played it before and loved it, though carpel tunnel quickly caught up to her. I had never actually played in co-op mode and loved it; I guess this is what all the kids are raving about with regards to Rock Band.

ITEM!
My teeth suck. They've always sucked, for various reasons.

For the past couple years, this has been because I grind them at night (a stress reaction). Because of this, there is this totally awesome gap between two of my rear molars. Crap gets stuck in there lots. This creates cavities. Cavities, when one doesn't go to the dentist for a while, become, you know, bad, which means I have to get a root canal done on Monday.

Good times, good times.

ITEM!
Stan's death has had an interesting side-effect in my life. While he was one of my mentors, he was not my only mentor. I was overcome earlier with a feeling that I needed to tell my other mentors how much they had affected my life.

So I sent out a couple mails. And I recieved responses! So I am now in contact again with people who mean a lot to me. And that is good.

Here is the text I sent to Peter, my printmaking professor:
( Cut for space )
He responded to me with enthusiasm. I hope that I will be able to continue conversification with him in the future.

So, now that Nexus Wars' Straylight version has landed, and things have started to calm down, I have decided to begin thinking about the next level of optimizations and so forth.

This means, really, the use of Hibernate. And since I don't feel it is wise to just "drop in" a radical change in datasource management to a hundred-thousand-line codebase, I'm starting a new, small, toy project (a "to-do" list web-app that I can use through the iPhone).

( Nerd Wankery and Bitching )

Anyways. At least it's not Perl.

So, today is (and has been, since Wednesday) the launch day for Nexus War Version 2.0.

This was fraught with any number of complications:

1) While in the middle of the database migration script, my internet route to the game server died. Everyone else could see it; just not me. That was fun.

2) Turns out that the staging environment was NOT an identical copy of the production environment. Namely, production runs on 8080 and for some reason staging was set to 8081.

3) About 5 minutes after it went live, freakin apache went tits up due to a MaxClients problem. That was awesome, too.

The database, however, migrated cleanly. And the server is now running smoothly. I've caught a couple jsp issues and fixed them in situ. There are other weird things that are bugging me (like having log4j cranked way too high) but otherwise she's sailing pretty smooth.

It's gotten more traffic in the past hour than I think it had in the previous day. Srsly, crazy crazy.

Right now, I'm stressing because previous releases had been fraught with all manner of migration problems or serious "WTF WASN'T THIS CAUGHT IN TESTING" bugs. But nothing like that right now. Right now, I'm sitting, watching all the logs scroll by, seeing the activity.

This is fun:

15:41:36,776 [ INFO ] GreatDragon :: KILLED TARGET: Geht [87589]
15:44:52,243 [ INFO ] GreatDragon :: KILLED TARGET: Shadya [123790]
16:00:44,140 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Degoth Demos [106213]
16:01:24,346 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Heart is not an element [126454]
16:01:49,609 [ INFO ] GreatDragon :: KILLED TARGET: PeDantic [124068]
16:02:09,707 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Astatine [124879]
16:06:30,753 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Avatar of Grenth [126110]
16:07:00,712 [ INFO ] IronJuggernaut :: KILLED TARGET: Cossane [123211]
16:07:50,833 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Orochi [19830]
16:08:21,221 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: the erratic weather [100649]
16:09:06,264 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Avatar of Abaddon [126109]
16:10:41,539 [ INFO ] GreatDragon :: KILLED TARGET: Herr Doktor Robert Von Wicked [126523]
16:14:57,718 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Neuromancer [122856]
16:15:52,804 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Vladimir Rotchenco [126774]
16:18:28,613 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Yakumo [126236]
16:19:38,760 [ INFO ] GreatDragon :: KILLED TARGET: Fujiwara no Mokou [104495]
16:21:15,690 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: a Self-harming Emo [96988]
16:21:30,760 [ INFO ] GiantTroll :: KILLED TARGET: a gigantic bunny [83256]
16:25:36,421 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Justine Joli [126392]
16:28:01,933 [ INFO ] GiantTroll :: KILLED TARGET: sebaceous gland eater [126756]
16:28:37,552 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: a courier [126616]
16:29:32,827 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Martin Pale [121057]
16:30:07,768 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Munkir [126906]
16:35:30,924 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Eric Blair [113199]
16:36:55,119 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Reino [112231]
16:37:25,582 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Schrau [27966]
16:39:01,394 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Chang [126369]
16:41:16,987 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Kill me I'm Evil [121505]
16:45:42,583 [ INFO ] DemiLich :: KILLED TARGET: Cold Raven [128082]


My friend Scott is a bad-ass painter. He is the painter I wanted to be.

He made a crap ton of bad ass paintings for me to use in Nexus War version 2.0 (launching soon at an intertron near you!).

I used to spend every Independence Day at his place, before he moved to Austin. I miss those gatherings.

IT BLENDS.

It is one thing to have code working with a database that's only about 10 megabytes in size and has roughly 1500 characters and a whole 'nother mess of worms to deal with a database that's over 370 megabytes in size and has roughly 18,000 characters.

But the initial migration tests have gone smoothly (well. I ran out of HeapSpace at one point.)

Here's something neat:

Nexus War version 1.4 (the current live version) takes FOREVER to start up.

INFO: Server startup in 1320377 ms

That's a 22 minute start up time.

Straylight, the new version that I've been working on, with the same dataset:

INFO: Server startup in 123123 ms

2.05 minutes.

That's an. . . uhm, 11,000% increase in startup performance.

Plus, the pattern freak in me enjoys that it's 123, 123. Harh.

I'm on cerveza numero nueve right now, and on hour number eleven straight working on Straylight. I'm totally fried.

However, there remain only two - TWO - help documents to write. Two! And one is going to be cut (I'm about 90% certain at this point). So, I'm really about 1,000 words from being code complete.

That doesn't mean "bugless." Just that all planned features have been implemented and "work" in the development environment. There are only four bugs in the hopper right now, two of which are trivial but irritating (and low priority) and the other two are unable to be duplicated and likely the result of data errors introduced during a build upgrade (e.g., character corrupted in a way that won't happen in the Real World).

So really we're down to some numbers tweaking and a bit of "bake" time. And then I can finally get this beast off my plate and get on with life.

I should be hungry. But I'm not.

Development on the next iteration of Nexus War continues. I closed down the last build with only seven (7!) bugs in the hopper and woke up this morning to twenty-four new ones.

That's all engine stuff, too - there is such a huge amount of "core content" left to write that I'm spinning. Oh, the heavy lifting has been done, but game players - especially MMO players - like the "little details." And that, honestly, is what takes time. Making sure that I'm being *moderately* original when I create something, or (worse) that I'm not contradicting some minor snippet I wrote in an off-hand, long-forgotten bit of lore.

(Seriously. I'd get five hundred emails or posts about something like that. "I read this book in game and it said that so-and-so was a werewolf while this one line here in this old scroll calls him a vampire..." These people can suspend disbelief enough to play a game where angels and demons kill each other on a Caribbean island but don't get that Daddy Falls Asleep While Writing sometimes).

However, there is also a school of thought that says players love inconsistency - simply because they will enjoy spending hours trying to reconcile said inconsistencies.

So, from now on, I am going to adopt that perspective.

I have to head out for a wake/memorial service this afternoon. There is a request not to wear black clothing, but my wardrobe is either a) black or b) brightly colored blues, browns, and mustards.

The tattoo has healed completely. I'm still keeping it out of the sun somewhat, which is harder than one thinks given my penchant for sitting in the sun and delight at crisping to a tobacco brown.

Lots of people I know get big tattoos and then suffer in agony for two weeks worth of heavy itching and thick-ass scabs. However, I've come to the conclusion that I'm the fucking Wolverine, as I heal up in about 2 days, maybe 3, with little-to-no itching. I think it's a side effect of my hyper metabolism that lets me draw sustenance from such edibles as bricks and leather and prevents me from gaining fat even if my diet consists only of noodles, cheese, cake, and beer.

My dreams have been. . . disturbing. Aside from the "zombies murdered my parents and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" nightmare I had the other day, they've been invariably bad.

Last night, I dreamed that I was back in art school, which was taking place in this submerged hideout, and the teachers were all plotting to take over the world by infecting people with some sort of mutative virus from an alien planet. I was working against them in secret, with my brother, but they had infected him. At one point, I was punished by the leader for failing to perform my villainy to the best of my abilities (I was stonewalling), and they smeared me with this goop that caused my hair to fall out in patches, though some was left in places.

I complained about it - "At least let me shave my head; I have this meeting to go to" and he said, "Don't worry about your appearance; people don't care much about how burn victims look" and then he set me on fire.

Good times.

Something wonky happened with my IMAP server and I've not been able to figure out what. It crapped a load of donkey poop into all sorts of index files - at least me and my dad were affected - which totally made Thunderbird behave super wonky. Showing mail that wasn't there, hiding mail that was, etc. Further, this seems to have totally reset it's "junk memory" so I now have a shit-ton of spam showing in my inbox all the time and it's only got close to a 30% success rate (where before it was up to about 90% or so).

I'm completely idle with my clients. This usually doesn't bode well.

I've been learning all sorts of Johnny Cash tracks along with some other old-school folk stuff. Tuesday, Mike and I spent about half an hour writing an arrangement for Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which was a lot of fun. It's a sappy little song but I enjoy playing it. I like playing religious folk music, even though it's not my faith: there's just something about it that works for me.

Of course, I have the "Stormbringer" of guitars, so it tries to corrupt even the most harmless ditty into something metal. I'd read in a review about the Omen 6 that it was a "metal" guitar, and I didn't really understand what the guy was saying at the time, but now I do. It likes to add crunch to everything.

Work on Steam Front is slow. My issues are that I'm at a couple nexus points in the code base, and solving the problems posed there are non-trivial (or they are trivial to solve in the short term but will not be a viable solution in the long term). Since I'm a born procrastinator, I punt on those things and try to find other stuff to work on. . . and then hit another blocker. It doesn't help that this is, at best, a quarter time deal.

( Coding Nerdity )

My copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass showed up yesterday afternoon and I was able to spend some time playing it last night.

( Game Nerdity )

I didn't even know there were such things as "perfect numbers" and I suppose that the reason I didn't know that is because, well, I slept in math class during school and never really cared that much about it.

Even today, the most math I deal with is shit like this:


int xd = getX() - a.getX();
int yd = getY() - a.getY();
int d = (int) Math.ceil(Math.sqrt((xd * xd) + (yd * yd)));


(Which is a calculation I use in one of my game engines to determine distance between two points on a map.)

So, you know. Casting.

Sometimes I feel intellectually challenged. Then I remember that I can name all the presidents and I don't feel so bad. Plus, I'm a hillbilly.

So, hey.

I went out this evening to see shdwspn at Zeitgeist. He is in town for a few short days from New York (not New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York of Doctor Who fame, but the first, er, second York). I don't think I'd actually seen him in probably five years. It was good; I had a good time. gnat23 gave me a ride, which I suppose is a little weird showing up with your ex-wife, but getting me out of the house sometimes is a chore.

Saw several people I haven't spoken to in years and met some cool new folks that I liked but may or may not ever see again (I hope otherwise, but this is the really-real world). I am going to try to recruit weezyl into the Militant Order of Barhah, as she seems to be into the entire "undead ravaging the countryside" thing

(More soldiers! More unlife for the Great Barhah! Barhah Akbar! MAHB! MAHB! MAHB!)

Speaking of, the MOB has been on a tear lately and my little horde is not-so little anymore. I have about a hundred little hungry zombies to feed a day now, and we're eating suburbs in Urban Dead like a lawnmower chews up weeds.

Nexus War continues apace. I have a few bugs here and there, but nothing horribly vile. Will probably produce a bug patch in the next few days.

For some reason, half of the mp3s for my copy of Paranoid are corrupt. Which sucks, because I'm trying to learn Electric Funeral, and that's one of them gone kaput.

What else.

Oh. I have a big stack of books that I've finished reading and will probably write about in the near future, but I'm wanting to finish the current series I'm in beforehand. I had never actually read the entire Elric saga before. Growing up, I read a Hawkmoon novel and I have a tattered copy of Stormbringer, but you can't really start with those.

For some reason, they seem to have stopped selling Elric books. You can't really find them on Amazon. And I had been holding out to buy a good set. However, I found on ebay a complete collection of a nice set of hardbacks that was produced in the 80s, and I picked them up for a song (like, ten bux). And now I'm halfway through the second book (or the 6th book, depending on how one counts).

Holy crap. How could I have not read this before? Seriously. Excellent stuff. Excellent writing.

And Moorcock is still alive which is even better.

Anyways. I'm reading a hell of lot - 400+ pages of stuff a day, usually.

I realized this evening that I am somewhat. . . hostile to the idea of actually working in an office now. I seriously, absolutely, in no way want to do that again. Ever.

Well. I've known that for some time. But I realized why tonight, and the reason is actually Inktomi. I totally got burnt out on the entire corporate scene there. I didn't really like that job. It wasn't a challenge, and I couldn't do anything creative: I seriously had a meeting ala Fight Club where the only comment I got on a project I did was "Can I get this in a light blue?" (which was why Inktomi's IT intranet system was secretly called the "Cornflower Blue" project).

I couldn't quit, because, well, it was 2001/2002, and jobs were rare. Gnat wasn't working, either, so we had the one income. It sucked.

Then, I got laid off, took a break, and then went to work for Elemental, which was awesome, because I felt like I could actually make a difference and apply myself. But at some point, the corporate mindset took over and bad decisions were made, and that sort of . . . cemented my hatred for the badge wearing.

This may be a problem. I need to work through it.

Events of last night have made me realize that I hate chewing gum. It seems stupid - that I would just realize something like that - and ultimately trivial - but lately I have started thinking a great deal about the things that I actually like and dislike (as opposed to what are habitual or expected by society).

Last night we were eating at Tower Burger and someone had placed a wad of gum under the table. Of course, it got ground into my pants - a rather nice pair of brown denim that I like a lot. This caused a click in my skull, and I realized that I have never liked gum: I always thought it was disgusting and a pointless exercise for jaw muscles. Popping, snapping, blowing bubbles - so classless.

I'd chew gum as a kid. But thinking about it now, I never really liked doing so; it was something everyone else did and liked doing, so obviously I should as well. And yeah: sugar. But really, once the taste was gone, chewing was as enjoyable to me as mowing the lawn.

I expect that blowing bubbles out of a couple chunks of Hubba Bubba was a fun for some people, but the times that it popped and got stuck to my face (ick) placed a damper over any long-term enjoyment.

In other news, I have been irrationally (or perhaps, rationally) angry the past two days or so. It has been a long time since I've simmered like this. While I was a rage-fueled curmudgeon not even ten years ago, time has cooled those fires and for the most part I have felt happy and composed for the better part of a decade.

Anger is something that has been very rare; I may get irritated at something but that quickly passes. I rant a lot, but not because I'm angry (or even because I'm irritated), but because a rant in passing about someone's ill-informed choices in parking (or chewing gum) is funnier than a comment about how wonderful I think the yellow sunlight reflects off a tree. There is easy humor in negativity; not so much in joy (though not much to be found in my chewing gum rant).

The fact of the matter is that, inside, I take far, far more joy out of the world than I let on. I just don't express it. This is because of perception - I am not happy chatty-cathy and I expect I would irritate everyone around me if I expressed every positive emotion I felt. Many times, my vocabulary doesn't seem fit for the task of describing the things I observe.

And also, most importantly, I think, I don't mention these feelings and observations because they are mine. Private joys. It is arguable that they would lose value were they to be shared, but it feels, sometimes, that the act of describing them somehow sullies the experience - solidifies it; catalogs it.

Every day, I wake up early, hoping that it is sunny outside. I get up early because the sun moves across my deck between eight a.m. and noon. It is, perhaps, my greatest joy to sit outside in the sun and work. I sit facing outward, so that I can see the azure sky, and the golden-green trees, and the light embellishing the adobe-orange exterior of my building. I have ended up tanning to a leathery brown because of this.

But lately it's been foggy and rainy in the morning. I am frustrated that I cannot sit in the sun in the mornings.

I am frustrated that the apartment is slowly filling up with half-packed boxes and symbols of my wife's impending move to her apartment. Mattresses. Television sets. Microwaves. Lamps.

I am frustrated that I cannot seem to focus on work at all. I have a lot to do - stuff I'm getting paid for. Even if I can manage to focus on it, there are roadblocks. And that's frustrating.

I take a great deal of joy out of learning and playing the guitar. But, this, too, is frustrating much of the time: I am an old dog, and this is a new trick. The bones in my hands have had twenty years to ossify so teaching them to stretch through movable-form panatonic scales is a difficult and painful process.

I am a couple months behind in updating Nexus War. There was an update that I had to rollback because it contained a horrible, database-destroying bug. It took two months of active testing to locate it and quash it. I've been losing players constantly because I couldn't solve this thing - and now that it is solved, other elements are preventing the build from going live. The reactions from the playerbase are frustrating, but no where near as frustrating as the punishment I'm putting myself through about it.

I know that in two week's time, she will be gone, and I my cat, Simon, will be alone in the house. And I know that he will be okay for a day or two, and then start to warble and get anxious because neither she nor Mosfet (the other cat) are here. He'll be confused - it's happened before, when she took trips to see her mother. And it will be frustrating because I won't be able to communicate to him that she's gone and not coming back.

I am working on a new game, and it is a lot of fun to do. I take a lot of joy and pride in writing things correctly and, after Nexus War, I know a lot better how to do things the right way. But it's very slow going, and the process of content creation is going to be a hellish chore. The fact that I cannot simply pour my mind onto a disk and be done with it is intensely frustrating.

In two week's time, I will go to bed alone and wake up alone. I will eat dinner alone, and I will watch television alone, and I will play Geometry Wars alone. The silence in the house will be the loudest thing I can imagine. That is when the real pain will begin. And I think this is where the anger comes from: I am angry that I will have to endure this. I am angry about a lot of things, but mostly I'm angry because I'm afraid and I'm not used to that.

I'm thirty-five years old.

Dear God, what am I going to do?

I am Lord and Master of a couple gaming forums. And by "Lord and Master" I mean, "account ID number 1, root access on the machine, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." I am also Lord and Master of a couple wiki instances. Again, account ID 1, root access, yadda-yadda.

I have a staff for each of them. They do good work. But again, I am obviously account ID 1.

A while back (a month or two) some dude decided to vandalize a couple pages on the Nexus War wiki. It was obviously malicious - the kind where you replace the entire page with "UR A FAG!!!" and "UNBAN ME OR IT CONTINUES!". Apparently I had banned this cat from the game itself due to what's called "Multi-Account Abuse" - too many user accounts, not enough monies. So I'm guessing that he thought this would be a good way to convince me that he was an upstanding citizen.

I considered his plea carefully and then permabanned him from the wiki.

So, today, I get proof that evolution has failed. On the NW forums, I got a private message from him with the subject of "Ban". I don't normally "cross-ban" - I like to leave avenues open for people to contact me. So I figured that he was going to apologize and ask to be let back in. Oh no.

The whole text of the message: "Your (sic) a fag".

Administration Panel -> Ban Control -> [Enter User Name] -> [Enter IP Address] -> Save

So, I now apparantly have a wikipedia entry for the game.

This has been stressful. The player base doubles about every 5 days and all sorts of interesting scaling proplems have cropped up because of it. However, I am now super-well versed in java optimization techniques (even if they haven't been applied to more than 20% of the codebase) and know more about tomcat and database configurations than I ever wanted to.

Also, mysql tuning docs just plain suck.

For the past six months I've been head-down writing an online, browser-based MMORPG (similar in basic principle to Urban Dead, but, you know, a bit bigger in scope, scale, complexity, and ambition).

It had been in high-alpha phase testing for several months with a couple hundred players, but on Sunday I declared "open beta" and was immediately "goon rushed" (e.g., someone posted it to "Something Awful" and said it was cool, and I saw the playerbase quadrupal overnight). So that's been stressful: I have to keep a sharp eye on the bandwidth meter at Rackspace or else I'm el-fuckt-o.

The game appears to be pretty popular, and people are having fun. Anyways:

The game, http://www.nexuswar.com/.

The forums, http://forums.nexuswar.com/.

The wiki and help guide, http://wiki.nexuswar.com/.