Late Night Fiction

After sending chesse111 a comment about how I know he stole my work and how I’d please like him to remove it, I revisited the site today to see if I, perhaps, had a response. Turns out he deleted the comment I left and then “muted” me (which, I take it, is the same as blocking someone). I looked into it a bit more and flagged both The BUTTONS and Kill the Fireflies as “inappropriate” (which could mean “stolen” as well, I’m finding).

I won’t go into how stupid it is that he would do that. But we’ll see if it really does get removed; I’m hoping the moderators over there pick up on it soon enough.

Internet internet, People

After a recent check to my Mochibot account, I realized that The BUTTONS was getting some hits from a site that wasn’t FlashStuf, Newgrounds, or some proxy site. I checked out the link and it showed me that another site was hosting my game, but after some Googling discovered the page it was (and is) on. It turns out someone submitted the game to the website Kongregate, and is taking full credit for creating the game.

While I don’t have much of a problem with people hosting my work on their site, it is completely different to blatantly claim ownership of the game, and post a comment like this in response to some criticisms of the game on that site:

chesse111 Jun. 01, 2008

i put a lot of work in to this game plase dont critisise me

This is just ridiculous. I can’t even explain to you how much this blew my mind that someone would be so dumb as to upload my work as their own, obviously thinking I wouldn’t find out, and then complain when people started criticizing them about my work! It just makes you ask what the hell was going through this person’s mind.

I know this isn’t new to some people but this is my first encounter with this kind of thing and jesus, it makes me glad that all my work isn’t that popular. I just couldn’t take the stupidity of some of these people. For those who don’t know, I was the sole creator of The BUTTONS and clearly indicate that in the credits on the game, and by submitting/displaying it on three sites (two of which are my own): FlashStuf, Chicken-Cheese.com, and Newgrounds.

Note to people who want to steal my work next time: I (and many others) use Mochibot in my flash, which is a service that allows me to track who hosts my work and how many views it gets, etc. If you see that I’m putting Mochibot in my credits, that means I am tracking that game or movie. In fact, you can even see the stats on The BUTTONS for yourself. Please, please don’t be such a dumbass next time!

But in all seriousness, chesse111, you should’ve contacted me, and suggested that I submit my game(s) to Kongregate myself. It’s a simple courtesy to the creator and the work he did. If you enjoy my games so much, let ME know and I can take the action to submit it to more sites or even let you host it as my work on your site (assuming you had one). The internet isn’t some place you can walk in and simply take what you please. There are people like myself who put time and energy into creating content like these games so that others can enjoy them, only asking that they receive the credit they deserve in return. It’s just nonsense to think you’d claim the game as your own and steal it when I don’t even make any money off it. This isn’t music you’d normally pay for. This is free entertainment. Don’t claim my (or anyone else’s) work as you own because it’s simply idiotic. However, I hope we can resolve this and it won’t happen again. I didn’t mention specifically, but Kill the Fireflies is mine as well.

Internet Flash, internet, People

I finally got Flash working on my computer again. I had been out of commission there for a while now, so I quickly fixed that with my creating a new high scores system on FlashStuf, and integrating that into my classic game, The BUTTONS.

And as this is usually the case when other people watch The Slippery Slide of Death, I’ve been inspired to create another one. So look out soon for episode 7 of the Slippery Slide!

Projects Flash, Slippery Slide of Death

Update: Method 2 no longer works, however Method 1 still does.
Update (10-2-08): None of these work anymore. Well, we had a good run.

As with many others, I prefer the old Facebook and think they need to leave us the option to choose which version we like. So, this is how you go back to the old Facebook.

Method 1

1. Add the Developer application.
2. Follow this link: http://apps.new.facebook.com/?fbnew_opt_out=1.
3. That should do it! But if not, try the next method.

Method 2 (so far un-tested)

1. Download and install Firefox (if you don’t already have it).
2. Install the User Agent Switch Add-On and restart Firefox when prompted.
3. When Firefox has restarted, go to Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options…
4. Go to User Agents
5. Click Add… and enter the following information
   • Description: MSIE 5.5 (Win 2000)
   • User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0 )
   • App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer
   • App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)
6. Click OK on both windows to save your changes
7. Whenever you go to Facebook now, you should be able to go to Tools > User Agent Switcher > MSIE 5.5 (Win 2000) and view the old Facebook!

I’ll update this as news develops, it stops working, etc.

Internet facebook

Two days ago, I was fiddling around with the FlashStuf database when I made one wrong change that cut off the last half of every news article. It also turned out that I did the last backup of my database in May, leaving 15 articles severed even after I restored what I did. I was hoping I could get a backup from the previous day sent to me without having to make a call to tech support (the horror stories were enough to make it my last resort, especially someone having to wait 5 days just to get the wrong database backup).

Nevertheless, I ended up calling them at 6 PM and requesting to have a backup from the previous day sent to me. I told them which database and from what day, and since they could use “as much information as possible,” I told them I’d like the backup from 6 PM the day before.

Now I wasn’t expecting much. I could live with 15 or so broken articles and eventually copy over the text when the Wayback Machine got to it 6 months down the road. At the end of my conversation with tech support, the guy even told me “we’ll try to get that to you soon,” and made damn sure I got the idea. But to my pleasant surprise, I received an email today with the location of my backup (uploaded to the root of my server), which had all the previous articles in-tact.

So maybe they’re not all bad. Again, as with most people, I had never had a problem with 1&1 because I never had to deal with their tech support. And the one time I had to, they were responsive and got done what I needed to be done. Maybe it was a fluke and I was just lucky to have someone who knew what they were doing on the line, but either way they’re keeping my business. And when I can get that good of support for $4/month, well I think I’m getting a pretty damn good deal.

Internet database, web hosting