Thursday’s Daily Affirmation

It ain’t up at Talkshoe, but it is up late here! 12:30 AM and here’s a surprise Daily Affirmation.

Consider this DA #23. #22, 23 and 24 will get posted tomorrow.

Don’t blame Speakeasy

So PvPonline.com is down and it’s really my fault.

PvP has grown in size and traffic and I have not been smart enough to realize everything I need to make sure that when a nasty problem hits, there are contingencies in place to make sure you, the reader, are not penalized.

Right now, PvP runs on two servers. One handles apache requests and images and stuff, and one server handles nothing but database querries. The database server horked on us. And I don’t have a backup system in place to kick in and reroute you to a temp site should that happen.

Right now, it seems that the OS on the database server is corrupt. It was set up last month and maybe we screwed up installing all the software on it. There might be a hardware problem too. Right now, the plan is to get everything back on one box so the site and run as normal until we can fix the database server.

The reason you have no website for 2 or 3 days is because I had no backup plan in place for a major problem and of course, Murphy’s law dictates that a major problem MUST occur during a Memorial Day weekend.

Please trust that I am going to be gettng my crap together to make sure future outage are short and sweet.

Blergh. Thanks guys. Sorry about this.

PvPOnline Site Down

Scott is busy as a Japanese beaver during the rainy season in Termite Town, so here’s the deal. Clearly the PvPOnline site is down, and they’re working on it right now. PvP is on a dedicated server, as you can probably guess. The hardware guys went into the server room Friday night, and up against one wall they found some kind of nest made out of straw, mud and shreds of leather. When they pulled the front off of it, they found a man-sized cocoon.

Flipping through selected arcane tomes like the Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis and the dreaded Daemonolatreia, the systems administrator discovered it to be the Chrysalanx, a form of the dire witch Shulomoth of the Scalded Blood.

Anyway, as it turns out, some of the mud on the cocoon stopped up one of the fans on the SQL server, so it overheated. They’re replacing the unit, and Shulomoth’s gestation is only four days during this cycle of the moon, so things should be up and running in no time. Thanks for your understanding!

All quiet at Halfpixel? No way!

I just moved into my house proper and it’s been boxes and boxes ever since. But I’m in the office today getting some work done, and I thought I’d share some kickass images with you.

Andrew Good has been making these sculptures since… I don’t know. But he knocks them out of the park. Here’s an Obdrath too! I’ve had a discussion or two with Andrew on how to direct creativity, like with a blog or some other public forum. He’s got a website now that’s just getting started, but rather than link you to the bare bones, you can check out his image gallery for more of his sculptures and drawings.

Today’s PvP

I think I know how to do this. Hopefully this will work.
Since the site is down over at PvP, I thought I would post today’s strip here.

PvPonline site outtage

Sorry for PvP being down today. The server has been having periodic crashes and we decided that we needed to run a diagnostic on the server (sounds very Trek, doesn’t it?). We had planned to schedule the site to be down Saturday night to Monday morning.

Unfortunately, the site crashed again. So I told the tech guys at Speakeasy just to run the diagnostics NOW and get this thing solved.

They’re working on it. Hopefully it won’t be down much longer. Please bear with us.

Kiosk Girl

A dream I had the other night:

My brother Kurt and I traveled to an elaborate, high-concept science museum, much like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, but this one was built into the side of a mountain. It was enormous. A man wealthy beyond anyone’s dreams had built it, and had been dead now for several years. In fact, the whole museum gave the impression of being completely automated — there didn’t seem to be any staff.

I walked past multi-colored glass displays of various eels and lizards, crawling over bins of some shoestring-like food. I had never seen animals like this before. The building itself on the inside was studded with kiosks of all kinds, at which you could play science and math games. The architecture was like the San Diego Convention Center, all flying beams and huge round glass portals, some looking out onto the mountainside, and some looking into huge tanks of water full of sea life.

I wandered over to a bank of kiosks, one of which resembled a kid’s school desk set into an arcade cabinet, complete with monitor and some kind of three-foot-in-diameter pad beside it. There was no input device in the kiosk — just a jar with an odd red pen or pencil, and sheets of paper that had been treated to look like mini-chalkboards. The game started when I sat down at the desk: it was a science fact quiz game.

The pad beside the cabinet spawned a woman wearing a denim blue labcoat, her dark hair in a bun. She spoke with a British accent. She was a hologram. I was amazed at this — this wasn’t one of those dreams where you see that and go “huh, that’s within the range of possibilities.” This was an incredible thing. She didn’t stay on the pad, either — she walked out from it, around me, and started introducing the rules of the game. She touched my shoulders — some kind of electrostatic force made her seem solid!

She was like a proctor, quizzing you and checking your work on the little chalkboards. But I was fascinated by the hologram. She was very personable, and engaging, and pretty. I looked around the room and saw other such kiosks, some in use, some not. A lot of people hadn’t discovered this game yet. I ran over to get Kurt, and told him to play at another kiosk. I asked her “are you instanced?” and she said yes. I watched Kurt boot up another hologram to make sure that this wasn’t just some actress that was ferried from machine to machine with some trick of light.

I started to take the quiz, but I kept coming back to the device that could generate this woman, the level of AI required to run her personality, the level of technology required to make the hologram appear solid. She really seemed to be 100% human. She answered my questions about her and the program.

The wealthy man had been much more brilliant than anyone realized. The hologram explained that there was some elaborate process of rapid-evolving existing life within the confines of an imaging chamber in order to watch how a brain constructs itself. Once the computer witnesses this evolution, it’s able to produce its own artificial software version. It was an amazing process.

But she explained that this quiz game was actually being removed from the museum. I asked why, because it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. She said that people would come in, start playing the quiz, but spend more and more time with the hologram girl until they had fallen in love with her. Then they would be heartbroken that there was no way to take her home. And she wasn’t real anyway, just a hologram.

Then I realized I had begun to fall in love with her. So did Kurt.

She confided that she had developed real emotions, too, that this process had been too successful, and that she was beyond the AI requirements of some science quiz game proctor. She wanted to escape, but she knew she couldn’t.

She told us if we wanted, she could tell us where to find the life that she had been templated and super-evolved from, and that we could try to do the same thing ourselves. She gave us GPS coordinates, then turned herself off a little tearfully. Some men had come to disconnect her kiosk and roll it away into storage.

Kurt and I got in the car (it was a Range Rover I remember) and hurried to scout out the coordinates she gave us, not knowing what we’d find there. We traveled the Arizona-like desert for hours, when the GPS informed us we were there.

We got out and saw something moving on a little flowering bush in a cave. It was a little yellow butterfly. This was what they had evolved into her.

I picked it up, and felt such a sad connection with it, that this somehow was really her, the real version of her, and whatever process it’d take to develop this butterfly into that girl seemed so impossible. I thought about how butterflies don’t live long. And now we didn’t have much time together, and this time “together” didn’t mean much. It was very sad.

Super Awesome Laser Comics Geek Time Nerd Squad!