Sam & Max season 2

To continue my nonstop plugging of Telltale Games, they just announced the second season of their Sam & Max game! According to the article, they've taken a lot of player feedback into consideration for the new season, so they can fix any flaws that were in the first season.

Now, if only they would get working on part three of BONE...

Argh

I've been trying to do this "inline styling" or "stylesheet" or whatever stuff for a while and none of it is working!

I've also come to the conclusion that all I've really learned in this class is that I hate all of the programs we've had to use and I never want to use them again. :(

Forgot to mention

I never was able to connect to Pitt's Internet, because it kept trying to uninstall my virus scanner. That... is weird. I guess it wouldn't be a problem if I already had Symantic, but I have Avast, and it works better (in my opinion).

Fun Stuff in Pittsburgh

Yesterday I checked out the Carnegie Museum for my "exploratorium" time. It was my first trip there, and it was really cool. I saw the hall of architecture, the gemstone exhibit, the Egyptian exhibit, the Native American exhibit, and a small part of the art museum. I'll have to check out the rest when I come back in October.

And speaking of things I need to see the rest of, I saw some of the Nationality Rooms today, too. I'm extremely jealous of the students who get to take classes in some of them. I'd love to have a class in the Indian room!

Here we are in Pittsburgh

I'm in Pittsburgh! I used to have tons of family in Bethel (they all moved to Missouri a year ago), so we came to visit all the time, but I've rarely been to the city itself.

That's all for now.

EB Siege: Attack of the Internet!

Starmen.net is a huge EarthBound fansite with an even bigger community. They're actually pretty well known even by big name video game websites and journalists because they have done some spectacular things to raise awareness about the game and the series it comes from. EarthBound is actually the second game in a trilogy known as MOTHER in Japan. The first game was going to be released in the United States, but was canned at the last minute. MOTHER 2, EarthBound, was released here, but it sold rather poorly. Despite this, it garnered a pretty large fanbase, mostly thanks to Starmen.net. They had organized several petitions to help garner awareness for the series, each one gathering more signatures than the last. Their last petition was simply a "hey, we're fans of the series, and there's a lot of us" kind of thing, and racked up an amazing 30,000+ individual signatures. It was around this time that a compilation of the first two games was released in Japan on the Game Boy Advance, called MOTHER 1+2. Unfortunately, despite the gigantic petition that caught the attention of some of Nintendo's big names, the compilation has yet to be released outside of Japan.

A year and a half ago, the final game in the series was released in Japan. And after about six months of waiting anxiously for an announcement of a US release, fans and members of Starmen.net recieved news straight from Nintendo that they had no plans to release it here.

Insert uproar here.

A few months ago, the webmaster and staff of the site started putting together a project called EB Siege: an organized attempt to let Nintendo of America know that there is a fanbase for the series out there, and they didn't want to be ignored. The idea behind it was that it would be more active than an online petition. There are several components to the siege:

Do-It-Yourself Devotion: Not actually part of the Siege, this was started almost immediately after receiving the news that Nintendo had no plans to localize MOTHER 3. It's a fan translation patch of the game that will allow people to play the game with English text. It's still in progress, and the team working on it has said that they will immediately stop if they hear ANYTHING from Nintendo regarding an official release.

Propoganda: The first part, started months in advance, was pretty much fanartists producing art that would get everyone else pumped for the rest of the project.

Envelope Art: Nintendo Power, the official magazine of Nintendo of America, regularly features envelopes decorated with fan art in every issue. Starmen.net has done "NP Sieges" before in the past, where people would mail in envelopes decorated with EarthBound-related art, but this one was going to be just one part of a bigger project.

PK* Call'n: People call up Nintendo's customer service line and ask the representatives about the MOTHER series. This was also tried in the past, but only for one week. This one is planned to be non-stop until Nintendo of America makes an official statement.

(*"PK" is a term from the Japanese version of the games that are the names of the psychic power attacks characters can use, aka "PK Fire" and "PK Beam")

PK Mail'n: Kind of like the Call-in. People can print out cards with fan art printed on them, write a letter, and mail them to Nintendo Power and Nintendo of America.

Wii Are Starmen: Community members with Wii consoles recently formed this group, and immediately realized it could be used for the Siege. They use the "Everybody Votes" Wii Channel and submit questions about the MOTHER series (such as "Do you want MOTHER 3, the sequel to SNES classic EarthBound, released in America?"), and trade EarthBound-themed Miis (kind of like Sims, only funnier-looking) with other users.

Donations: In order to raise money for the most crucial part of the siege, the webmaster asked for donations from anyone interested. A certain amount would net you a keychain of the starmen.net logo. Originally, the goal was $2,500, but it was surpassed in less than a day. By the end of the fundraiser, they had raised almost $7,500 in donations.

The EarthBound Anthology: The most crucial part of the siege. A 250+ page book chock full of fan art, fan music CDs, fan movie DVDs, and a detailed history of the MOTHER series and its future in the United States. This was sent to several video game news sites and journalists just in time for Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest video game news event of the year. The purpose? To get reporters to ask Nintendo about the MOTHER series. Copies of the book were also sent to Nintendo of America, and there are plans to translate it into Japanese and send it to Nintendo's headquarters in Japan and the creator of the series.

The biggest reason they organized all of this was because they have news from a journalist that EarthBound is scheduled to be released on the Wii's Virtual Console very soon, and its sales may very well be the determining factor in whether or not MOTHER, MOTHER 1+2, and MOTHER 3 will ever be released outside of Japan. The best way to ensure that was to spread the word- let Nintendo know there is a large fanbase, and let other people know about the series.

Despite how militant it may all seem, the staff of Starmen.net actively discourages rabid militarism and other things that may reflect negatively on the site and their efforts, for example:
-They actively discourage trolling and spamming on Nintendo.com's message boards, as well as spamming any Nintendo-related e-mails
-They encourage people to use the Call'n not to represent Starmen.net, but to voice their own opinions regarding the series. As well as to ask any other Nintendo-related questions they wanted to ask. :)
-...At the same time, they discourage being anything but super-polite to the representatives taking calls.
-Everything is 100% voluntary. For example, the Anthology book was kept a secret during the donation drive, and several people expressed concern about where the money was going. The webmaster immediately responded by saying that they shouldn't feel pressured to donate if they had any doubts. They want the whole thing to be really from the hearts of the fans, and not just them pushing people to do it.

Are the folks at Starmen.net crazy? Well, probably. But this is really an extension of how consumers are using new technology to make their voices heard by the big corporations. Petitions and other grassroots efforts helped get television shows (such as Family Guy) back on the air, and the prevalence of peer-to-peer networks ushered in new ways of selling and distributing media. If EB Siege works, it might change the way big video game companies listen to their fans, and get some really cool games released here in the process. :)

Koha books

Koha keeps giving me an error when I try to use it, so to copy what a few people have already mentioned on the discussion board, here's a list of books I'm going to import if it ever lets me:

Already uploaded:
1. The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec
Mary Ellen Miller
ISBN: 0-500-20392X

2. The gods and symbols of ancient Mexico and the Maya : an illustrated dictionary of Mesoamerican religion
Mary Ellen Miller
ISBN: 0-500-050686

3. Maya Art and Architecture
Mary Ellen Miller
ISBN: -500-20327-X

Still need to upload
4. Popol vuh : the Mayan book of the dawn of life
Translated by Dennis Tedlock
ISBN: 0684818450

5. The Maya
Michael Coe
9780500285053

6. Myths of pre-Columbian America
Donald A. Mackenzie
ISBN: 0486293793

7. Aztec and Maya myths
Karl Taube
ISBN: 029278130X

8. The Ancient Maya
Suzanne Lieurance
0766051978

9. The Maya Indians
Victoria Sherrow
ISBN: 0791016668

10. The Aztecs
Jane Shuter
ISBN: 158810589X

11. Technology in the time of the Aztecs
Nina Morgan
ISBN: 0817248781

12. A commentary on the Dresden Codex : a Maya hieroglyphic book
J. Eric S. Thompson
ISBN: 0871690934

13. Remarkable remains of the ancient peoples of Guatemala
Jacques VanKirk and Parney Bassett-VanKirk
ISBN: 0806128666

14. A lexicon for Maya architecture
H. Stanley Loten and David M. Pendergast
ISBN: 0888543085

15. The hungry woman : myths and legends of the Aztecs
Edited by John Bierhorst
ISBN: 0688027660

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Website!

Finally, something that worked (and something I finished on time)! Here is my website.

Zoomclouds

Can I just say I really hate Zoomclouds?

EDIT: Oh what a surprise, the code doesn't work.

Double edit: I gave up and used Superglu instead.

Catch-up

So I thought that since I was off work today I would take the time to play catch-up and do the LIS 2600 assignments I was supposed to do when I was busy scrambling around to work on the last paper for LIS 2000. I really had attempted the Zoomclouds and Scopus things before, but going to Zoomclouds continues to net me some weird Spanish site, and I couldn't export anything from Scopus because it kept timing out. I try both again today and surprise surprise, I'm still not getting to Zoomclouds and Scopus is still timing out. Lovely. I'll have my Second Life write-up finished soon.

I'm not really learning much from all of these assignments other than these programs/websites don't work very well.

Google Co-op search

I'm pretty sure this is late, but oh well. Here's a search engine I made for ancient central and south American culture and folklore!

Fun With Mesoamerican Mythology

I can't get the code it gives you to work for whatever reason. Ah, technology.

Edit to add: Here's a link to my Bloglines folder.

Blogline's script thing doesn't want to work, either.