Y’know what’s annoying about life online?
To many people are after a quick buck. For those who have been around on MT2, will know of the story of John Slater, who did anything for easy money, he’s probably changed by now and started to earn his money, but that doesn’t erase his past of producing shitty PDD and LBO merchandise just for a bit of money.
Then there’s the story of Stephen who produced site after site filled with shitty content, some of which was stolen, or drawn exclusively by Leif, and filled with errors so that he can get some ad revenues at the expense of Google. He even resorted selling one of his sites for cash.
And finally there’s probably the biggest culprit of all. vbgamer45 on SM.org who either releases shitty mods which violate god knows how many guidelines, have no design to them and has code that’s a total mess. What’s worse though is that he’s a fucking CUSTOMISER for the team. (how he got on the team I’ll never know as he doesn’t really do anything inside the team).
He releases these mods that are low quality, filled with bugs, coding errors and guideline violations, and then he has the gall to charge upwards of $100 a pop for them when there are better alternatives that are free.
Worse still, when several authors left the community in January, he either bought the rights to various mods, from those authors, or made inferior clones, and then made pro versions of all of them. Citing that keeping them around would benefit the community. (Which I don’t have a problem with, but charging said community? No sale) Nor does he test the mods he releases, which is just calling for trouble.
These money grubbers who are looking for nothing other than a quick buck make me sick. Being in a community like these should be about having fun and helping people or discussing your favourite things in pop culture, not making money.
-Gary M. Gadsdon
Sorry, I’ve been playing FINAL FANTASY XIII recently and got back to Gran Pulse. Anyway, we all know what happened way back in January on SM.org right? Where the managers booted everyone out of the team boards and forced them to sign some retarded agreement to get back in right?
No? Well, the gist of it after that is many team members at the time, refused to sign it and left, forming SMF-Friends.org. Most of the dust has settled, and things are starting to restore to normal. But some problems remain.
Each person has their own restrictions on why they wouldn’t return to the team, for me, it’s because of two people, namely Cathy and SlammedDime.
In Cathy’s case it’s because she intentionally tried to hold me back in becoming a lead of my appropriate team should I have been seen as a worthy applicant. And her flat out lies. She once said that she didn’t hate me, when in fact, it’s quite clear that she did.
In SlammedDime’s case is because he’s a major douchebag. Simply put. The guy doesn’t know how to manage his team, or is too stuck-up to learn to seek help. He’s probably caused more customisers to leave than anyone else. He can’t manage his team either since they seem to just sit on their asses twiddling their thumbs. I admit, I may not have done much but at least I did *something*
What’s more retarded, that just a few days ago, Cathy requested that all instances of her name be switched to Amacythe for some reason, despite the fact that her name has been listed in every SMF Forum, as well as the official SM documentation. I’m still trying to comprehend any logic changing the database served.
SMF is great software, but when will these people let go of their pride and do what’s truly best for the software as a whole and step away, and move onto something else that wont negatively effect the fates of tens of thousands of websites, as their stepping down will actually bring back dozens of people and help make SMF progress so much faster!
What’s more important, your pride or SMF’s future?
Good news.
I passed my uni course. Well. It’s not official yet, but all my grades are above the pass mark, which I would think to anybody is a clear indicator to passing would you not agree? 
Also I managed to get my student loan application approved for the second year of uni. I was worried about it as other members of the course I was on, have has theirs denied, the gummymint is trying to save moneys or some shit, which is the most retarded thing I ever heard as they are putting a lot of student’s careers in danger.
Well… Almost. I have a couple more modular exams to take care of online, which I can do in a couple of days, there’s only three of them, and a “final exam” which I’m not really sure what entails, and it’d be held in the lecturers office of all places with all six students on the course present (that’s right, there was just six of us)
Currently, I’ve been told that I have at least passed, but that was a while back and in one unit of the course, I am unable to fail as I scored 80% on it, and that has a 50% weight against the entire unit, and the pass mark is 40% so, you can do the rather obvious maths.
With that, I can start to concentrate on the new site that I’ve been building for the past year, to replace TCB, as well as the Simpsons Fantasy fan game.
Well, I’ve made a new update to my blog for the first time in more than a year. There has to be something special right? Well, no. Not right now. I have too much on my plate, mostly to do with uni. Maybe in the next couple of weeks. For now there’s nothing new. I do plan on redoing the portfolio, particularly of my SMF themes, and have actual demos of them live on this site.
Speaking of which, the site has now moved to a more personal address, a full domain name, since TCB was having problems connecting for some people I decided to move and I might as well claim a free domain name with it. So the address is now http://garygadsdon.com!
Well, a while back I decided to have another stab at applying for Uni. Same field as I did two years ago, being in Web Development. I picked two courses with the same Uni, so if they say no to one, I might be screwed.
My primary choice is an Honours Degree in “Internet Engineering and Web Management” which covers the likes of PHP, MySQL and Javascript. The usual. The second is a more limited HND. For my primary choice, I’d have to move out, since though it’s more local than some places, it’s not local enough for me to commute daily.
As an advantage, applying as a “Mature Student” academic scores mean less then they would if I had just left college. So my work at Simple Machines should be of interest.
I finished my Personal Statement yesterday, and I also received the statement from my Reference, so the final step of the application is to pay £17 (Which is kinda stupid) I should be able to do that come Tuesday, leaving two days before the 15th January deadline.
Here’s hoping I guess.
January 10th,2009
Education |
No Comments
Well, the long awaited Dissidia Final Fantasy has finally been released in Japan on the PSP, and a lot of people seem to be playing around with it with test battles.
I’m psyched for this game when it crosses shores to America around June (my prediction) as I’ll be importing it.
For those who don’t know what Dissidia is, it’s a Fighting Action RPG game by Square Enix to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Final Fantasy series. It features 22 Characters from the core twelve games. A hero and a Villain from 1 through 10, a hero from 11 and a villain from 12. With the 11 and 12 characters being unlockable.
The heroes are: Warrior of Light (1), Firion (2), Onion Knight (3), Cecil (4), Bartz (5), Terra (6), Cloud (7), Squall (8), Zidane (9), Tidus (10) and Shantotto (11).
The Villains are: Garland (1), Emperor Palamecia (2), Cloud of Darkness (3), Golbez (4), Exdeath (5), Kefka (6), Sephiroth (7), Ultimecia (8), Kuja (9), Jecht (10, Judge Gabranth (12)
The story is your classic save the world deal featuring a classic Final Fantasy cliché, the crystals!
Initially, I’ve been planning on playing as Tidus from Final Fantasy X first, but seeing some gameplay videos on Youtube, I get the feeling that I might go with Zidane from Final Fantasy IX. I dunno who to go for now, but it wont be the Warrior of Light that’s for sure.
When I get the game in my hands, that’s when I’ll post a proper review.
December 18th,2008
Video Games |
2 Comments
As people have noticed, well, at least if you have a Playstation 3, Playstation Home is out. At least in it’s Beta phase.
The current amount of items is rather crappy, and the content is rather limited, but hey, it’s a start. I’ve joined up, despite not thinking much of it. A lot of the unique content is either unlockable via a Hong Kong PSN account which you would then need to keep or you have to pay REAL cash for it, if you had a virtual currency that you could earn via various methods or converted from real money that would be different. No way am I paying money for a virtual cowboy hat, actually, I wouldn’t pay money for a REAL cowboy hat
Though the content is rather lacking people can be creative, in creating Running Man Dance Trains, mostly on the EU server, this one was started by me and Joe Leslie, who also uploaded it! Not to mention starting Riots in front of the Home gates to save Woolworths, among other things.
On the US server, Nikki and I had a game of bowling and for three frames the first balls I shot were gutter balls, from the fourth, I was pulling back with a lot of Spares and Strikes and managed to win the game 131 to 101. In your face Nikki!
All in all, there’s alot to do in Home for Final.
December 16th,2008
Video Games |
1 Comment
Some people don’t know how to do this, so I figure I’d give it a shot. Much like Mods for SMF, Themes can have their own settings exclusive to that theme, many themes do this in order to include Mod support for the more common mods like Arcades, Galleries and other links in the template_menu(). Better still, adding settings requires no database changes as everything goes into the themes table. Isn’t that a nice bonus!
First off, take a study at the Settings.template.php file. This file is the file that houses the settings themselves.
Lets say we want to allow admins to display “Hello World!” to users who are logged in, and toggle it on and off. For this, we can use a simple checkbox.
Start by doing a quick Ctrl+F search for:
function template_settings()
This function will be what stores settings in the Current Theme section of the admin center. Then in the $context['theme_settings'] array add:
array(
‘id’ => ‘hello_world’,
‘label’ => ‘Display Hello World to users?’;
),
The ID is what gets stored in the database when it is turned on or off. Next in your template, lets say index.template.php we can add:
// Is hello world turned on and we’re logged in as well?
if($settings['hello_world'] == 1 && $context['user']['is_logged'])
{
echo’
Hello World’;
}
Setting the $settings['hello_world'] part of the if statement to 1 will make sure that it will show only if it is actually turned on, since with a checkbox there are only two options 1 and 0.
Of course, if you’re going to release a theme on the theme site, we require that you use language strings, but I’ll cover that another time.
November 24th,2008
SMF |
2 Comments
A new episode of the Simpsons aired last night for Season 20. Homer and Lisa Exchange Crosswords. The Synopsis is that Lisa discovers that she has a huge talent for solving Crossword puzzles and she then enters a tournament where Homer makes money betting on the matches, Lisa suffers the ultimate betrayal when Homer bets against her.
The episode was rather mediocre. It basically kept going back to common clichés such as “SKINNER!” from Chalmers and the musical montages that have become quite overused in recent episodes, practically every episode in Season 20 has one, this episode actually has two.
The ending is rather extreme, especially on Lisa’s part where she removes Simpson from her name and adopts Marge’s maiden name, Bouvier, as Homer has done a lot worse stuff to Lisa before, than just making a bet against her, the thing is though, Homer actually won that bet against Lisa, under Lisa’s own judgement of herself from past times she entered a tournament (such as I’m Spelling as Fast as I can or Lisa the Beauty Queen). So Lisa actually brought it on herself.
The ending was kinda rushed and had again, two more pointless guest stars, if you can call them guest stars and showed up for no more than three seconds.
Overall, I’ll give the episode a C, or traditionally, a 3 out of 5.
November 17th,2008
Simpsons |
3 Comments
