I surrender...

Okay. Yes. Thankyou everyone for mentioning it :)

I surrender, yield, and generally give in. Congratulations :)

Today, Dwell On It is now on Wordpress, on its own domain, partially thanks to the awesome folks at DreamHost.

Every post and comment should be there.

I did spend a couple hours rapidly learning style-sheets, PHP and wordpress getting everything installed, configured and migrated. I will probably tune-up the look a little over the next while.

If all has gone well, your RSS feeds will already be feeding from the new blog feed, thanks to a bit of technomagical wizardry. I hope. Sure, it bites a bit to lose the search-rankings and all of that, but you've all managed to convince me that this is the right way to go.

If you've come in late and you're looking at the blogspot.com site wondering where the posts are, you need to be looking here instead. With luck, though, you are already looking at the new site.

(and wouldn't you know that all the links would get screwed up while passing them around among people and tools? -- All fixed now)

Populous, the origin of

"We couldn't sell it to anyone" -- Bullfrog's famous 1989 game, Populous was a huge hit, but it was a serendipitous one. A tiny business making a game without a clear target idea, Bullfrog hit on success with a combination of luck and plain-old hard work.

"Our royalty cheques were due to be paid one quarter in arrears, and we didn’t expect to get any ... The next cheque was for a quarter of a million. I thought it was a mistake at the time. I actually called EA to tell them."

Edge Online has the fascinating tale of how this hit game came about.

A public service announcement

For the record, I'm Tateru Nino. I'm a professional writer and I write about all sorts of stuff, including Second Life and Linden Lab.

Now, here's the important bit: No, I don't run Second Life. No, I don't run Linden Lab either. Nor do I work for them. No, I am not the right person to talk to insofar as demanding that I change a Second Life policy, or fixing a Second Life bug.

No, I can't unban your account. No, I can't ban someone else's account for you, even -- and I want to make this absolutely clear -- even if he touched your dolly.

Astonishingly, I also can't fix any billing issues you have or cancel your account or open a new one for you, or sell you an island ... so please stop sending me your names, addresses, credit-card information, and Second Life user names and passwords.

Seriously, people. Don't send me that stuff. Please stop sending me that stuff. The only thing I can do with that would be to steal your identity and run up your credit-card bill -- and I'm not going to do that. (Actually, come to think of it, that would be plenty of info to report your card as stolen, but I'm not going to do that either)

The people you want to talk to are called Linden Lab, and you can contact them via their support page (there's telephone numbers there too).

That this post even becomes necessary gives you some idea how far out of hand it has been.

Second Life data update

Good news:

Second Life total signups is back on the air. The feed lit up again on 4 May. The weekly signup chart will come back online as soon as there's enough data. The figure presently reads 15,348,641. Pre-purge that was 16,753,668. How many accounts were purged is unknown, but shouldn't be hard to estimate with some reasonable accuracy.

Not so good news:

Linden Lab is only providing updated concurrency data twice per hour. Once at 5 minutes past the hour, and again five minutes after that (ten minutes past the hour). Then nothing for another 45 minutes. That means the 30-minute deltas are pretty useless. There's not enough data to chew on.

Technology is awesome.

Anyway, right now you'll see a lot fewer red sections in the charts. There have been a few internal structural changes as well, but they likely won't affect chart viewers in any significant way (except to save you a little bandwidth).

Meet the editor

Yesterday, I got the chance to meet up AFK with my editor from The Metaverse Journal, Lowell Cremorne. Lowell was in town for a day for a conference. It was scary, fun, and awesome. There was also lasagne!