There are too many people to thank to fit in one tweet, so here we go.

Thank you Nick Garner and Stephen Swift for providing color commentary, and extra thanks to Nick for reserving the spot in advance and making sure that the PAX dudes were cool with it. Thank you Joseph Canadas for doing player interviews throughout the match and for bringing in a second copy of Mega Man 2 from home so that we actually had two to use. Thank you Daniel Danger, whom I didn’t even ask for help, but showed up anyway with an HD camcorder and took some amazing footage of the event, and thank you Rob DeVita for also taking video on your camera, not knowing that some dude was wandering around with an HD camcorder. Thank you Casey Malone (whom you might have seen on the Harmonix panel at 10am on Sunday) for both live-tweeting the event and doing pre-game player interviews, which are available here — with me and with John.

A very special thank you to the PAX East Enforcers, particularly the dude with the shaved head and skirt whose name I’m sorry I didn’t get, who not only gave us the go ahead to have the event and bring in our own PA equipment, but also helped us set up the games and surrounding area. You guys embodied the DIY spirit of the gaming community and helped us do something that was both unsanctioned and awesome, and probably bent the rules a little for us.

Thank you, all my friends and coworkers, who showed up to cheer at my victories and gasp at my mistakes.

Thank you John Emhoff for getting wrecked by me at Mega Man 2, and for coming up with the idea to do this in the first place.

And, as always, Thank you for playing!

Looks like collegehumor.com just picked up on it.

Four years too late, guys.

I’ve been using a plugin for Pidgin called pidgin-microblog that allows me to receive twitter updates via a pidgin tab, and post to twitter in that same conversation. It’s pretty sweet. Anyway, recently (possibly since I upgraded to jaunty,) it has been sending me the same messages over and over every 15 seconds or so, to the point where I had to disable the plugin because it was annoying and occasionally crashing pidgin.

The solution was to apt-get purge pidgin-microblog and then reinstall it. The reinstall wasn’t entirely straightforward — I had been using a custom repository in my /etc/apt/sources.list which the upgrade to jaunty automatically commented out for me, which I had to uncomment for the reinstall to work. As an aside, all of my other custom repositories were also commented out from the upgrade (just FYI).

Unlike the RSS feed, which has a 1-2 hour delay, this will give you near-INSTANTANEOUS updates on the deaths of other players. Also unlike the RSS feed, twitter is not state-based, so it could conceivably let you know about bones files. (Expect that functionality in a day or two.)

Update: The feed now lets you know about bones files.

It does not tell you about deaths by quitting, so feel free to continue spamming new wizards/priests to get that spellbook of identify.

UPDATE: I changed the feed link from http://209.6.168.183:81/nethack_rss.xml to http://sadowl.com/nethack_rss.xml, which is now the preferred location, because the other one is impossible to remember. Both still get updated every hour, so if you’ve already added the former to your feed, you don’t need to change anything. Also, Swifty has already noticed this post and joined our server. RSS for the win!

Welcome to BrawlStages.com Forums

In compliance with the COPPA act your account is currently inactive.

At first I thought that for some strange reason my website (BrawlStages.com) had been shut down by The Man for violation of some obscure law. Reading further, I pieced together that I was being forwarded an email from one of the forum’s users that had been sent to him by my website. The forwarded email continued:

Please print this message out and have your parent or guardian sign and date it. Then fax it to:

By this point in the email I was thinking that there was some sort of scam going on. My next move was to google “COPPA act”, which apparently stands for “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act act”, and is a real thing. By this point I’m very confused, because my forum does not enforce COPPA.

As it turns out, yes it does.

The forum I use is a prepackaged thing that I downloaded, and the first question it asks you when you try to sign up for an account on the forum is whether or not you are at least thirteen years old. I had never really paid attention to this question, nor explored what happens if you say you are not thirteen or older. As you can probably guess by now, it gives you a form that you are supposed to have your parents fill out so you can email or fax back to the site admin.

The email continued. (I’ve changed the names and other personal data before posting it here).

—————————— CUT HERE ——————————
Permission to Participate at BrawlStages.com

Username: Ralph23
Password: asdf1234
Email: ralph23@hotmail.com

I HAVE REVIEWED THE INFORMATION PROVIDED BY MY CHILD AND HEREBY GRANT PERMISSION TO BrawlStages.com TO STORE THIS INFORMATION.
I UNDERSTAND THIS INFORMATION CAN BE CHANGED AT ANY TIME BY ENTERING A PASSWORD.
I UNDERSTAND THAT I MAY REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION TO BE REMOVED FROM BrawlStages.com AT ANY TIME.

Parent or Guardian (print your name here): __hank___________________

(sign here): ______________ralph____

Date: ______wed 24 dec 2008_________

—————————— CUT HERE ————–i dont understand this part—————-

Once the administrator has received the above form via fax or regular mail your account will be activated.

Logging into the admin panel on my website, I indeed found this user with an inactive account. I activated it.

But a few things got me about this whole thing.

Firstly, BrawlStages.com has been up and running for almost a year now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten one of these emails. Every other kid who’s signed up in the last nine months has either gotten to the parental content form and decided it wasn’t worth it, or has (smartly) lied and said he’s thirteen. The fact that this kid actually went to the trouble of getting his parents to sign and email me the consent form is kind of amazing.

Secondly, I have no proof that the email actually did come from his parents. I changed the names but left the first-names-only quality and capitalization intact, and it does kind of look like a half-assed forgery. I have to assume that it is genuine, because if the kid was going to go through all the trouble of forging a parental content form, why wouldn’t he just say he was thirteen? Nevertheless, the underlying ineffectiveness of COPPA shines through.

Finally, this whole process has been contradictory to COPPA’s stated intent to protect children. When I told a coworker about this transaction, the first thing he said was “String him along. I have no evidence your parents gave you permission to visit this website. Please have them fax a signed note to….” Even ignoring the fact that I accidentally gave away the kid’s name and email address when I pasted the email to my coworker, it would arguably be a cakewalk to string him along — he’s under thirteen and apparently gullible enough to think I’m going to check into whether all my new forum users are really how old they say they are, neither of which I would have known if he had just lied about his age like the rest of the internet. And then he would have been safe among the faceless crowd, instead of the one 12-year-old who made me activate his account by hand. I’m about a million times more likely to fuck with him now than if he hadn’t sent in that consent form — all he’s done is made himself a target.

Go COPPA.

Why does Ron Paul have no chance of winning? Because of plurality voting. I have blogged about the problems inherent in our voting system before, so I won’t go into any detail here. But, I decided it’s high time to put my money where my mouth is about making some change. I’m extremely cynical about what it takes to enact any kind of change on a public, governmental level, so I’m doing this thing my own way.

– The Proposal –
I am hereby starting a voluntary organization which currently has no name (I am accepting suggestions.) I am, as of now, the first and only member. The only requirements for joining are that you know somebody already in the organization, and that you contribute $1. The $1 entry fee is meant to be so little that it is no barrier to legitimate entry, but enough of a barrier that it will prevent abusive spammers from joining. The requirement that you know somebody who’s already in the organization is to verify that everyone in the organization is at least nominally trustworthy. (Thanks go to Mikix who helped me iron out some of the mechanics in the alpha stages).

There are several purposes to this organization, depending on how big it ends up getting:
1) At a local level, its purpose is to raise awareness, foster communication and debate, and raise a small amount of (largely symbolic) money for the group’s ideal candidate.
2) At a medium level, its purpose is to raise an amount of money that is no longer symbolic.
3) At a national level, its purpose is to replace the plurality voting system with a more progressive one.

At some point prior to the election, this organization will meet, and each member will vote for their ideal candidate(s). The method of voting — and this is crucial — will be one such as condorcet, instant-runoff, or approval. When the votes are counted and the winner is determined, all of the money raised via $1 entry fees will be donated to that candidate. Additionally, members are encouraged (but not required) to cast their actual votes in the general election for this winner. Assuming this organization ever grew to a sufficient size, this system could eventually decide the general election and de facto replace our plurality system with a better one without ever having to pass anything through Congress. Even if nobody actually went through with voting for the organization’s winner, the results of the election would be enough to instill confidence in that candidate, possibly overcoming the paradox of “they can’t win, so I won’t vote for them”.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself, since this organization will probably never get that large. It is also useful at a very small level by getting people together to talk about politics, and to raise awareness for voting methods and for the candidates themselves. This, I think, is well worth the price of $1, and even a $10 donation to a candidate could be a ribbon for them to say it came from such a progressive organization. And besides, the organization can never become big unless it starts out small.

So, now the question is: who’s interested in joining? All it takes is one dollar and a little bit of your time. Eh? Eh?

UPDATES:
2007-05-24 3:32PM — Todd Cesere joined
2007-05-24 3:37PM — Meg Price joined
2007-05-25 11:38AM — Mike Terry joined
2007-05-28 12:38PM — Joe Hebert joined

NOTICES:
Once we hit a membership of 10, I will make a website for us. We will then vote on which voting method to use, and then we can try to come up with a name for the organization.

Is there anyone who knows how to draw well and is willing to make me a quick logo of a sad owl? I’m thinking cartoonish.