Latest Posts

Is It Zafe?

Gaming, Stuff on the Net

The name makes me want to gently rest my face in the palm of my hand. Really? “Zafehouse”? But then I went on to read the features, look at the screenshots and watch the video. Annoying name aside, I’m in.

In the Zafehouse: Diaries you control the fates of people picked to live in a house during the zombie apocalypse to see what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Real World: Zombie Apocalypse! Hmm.. I just thought of a worse name than Zafehouse. Anyway, you start with your people, and you assign them tasks, and then they do them. A turn is an hour, and how successful they are depends on their own skill and their relationships with the rest of the people. When you finish, you get a nice AAR of the whole ordeal to share with your friends.

It’s available for sale now, but I’m on holiday lockdown – no buying anything for myself until the new year. I look forward to being able to give this a try, even more so if they manage to get approved for Steam, because I love having all my games in Steam.

In the meantime, seeing this reminds me that I have that pack of screenshots from Rebuild lying around that I need to do the writing for…

And now…

Site News

… we interrupt this silence with a bit of posting.

So, the server on which my website resides is having hardware troubles. It is being fixed, and in the meantime the are running and loading backups or some such… all I know is that I get a big notice in my control panel that says they are doing stuff and apologize for the inconvenience. Thus, I have avoided trying to post things in fear that something will go wrong and they’ll revert to a backup that is missing the latest stuff.

Until they get it all sorted, I’ll go back to hiding.

See you soon…

Shakefire Ramblings

Reviews, Stuff on the Net
Shakefire.com

Shakefire.comHere is another list of reviews I’ve written for Shakefire.

Enjoy!

They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara

Stuff on the Net

In my new resolve to post more often, I’m going to attempt to also revive my old habit of posting zombie related things on Wednesdays. So, for this, the first of the All New Same As It Ever Was Zombie Wednesday, watch this music video.

I just love No More Kings. There are one of the very few bands who, in my opinion, have no bad songs.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Random Thoughts
Vote

VoteI’m not really telling you to commit voter fraud. Very little voter fraud is actually committed by the voters – although Republicans would have you believe that all voter fraud can be eliminated by requiring proper identification at the polls. No, most fraud, if there is any, occurs in the counting and tabulating. Boxes of mail-in votes lost or “forgotten”, counting being handled by clearly partisan people, early votes being “invalidated” and the voters not notified or not allowed to re-vote, and so on. Voters don’t really commit fraud, political parties and corporate entities do… you know, the things that don’t actually vote, and thus don’t need an ID.

Beyond the malarkey of voter ID, you should, if at all possible, vote. There is no reason not to.

Don’t like either of the major party candidates? Then consider voting 3rd party to vote “against” the major parties. Sure, those 3rd parties aren’t likely to win, but every vote they can get helps them become more established and maybe next time, in 2016, they’ll actually get invited to the debates unlike this year’s lockout. Even if you don’t agree with the 3rd parties, vote for one against the major parties since you don’t like them either. Right now, the current goal is for one of both of the biggest 3rd Parties, Libertarian and Green, to get 5% of the popular vote. At 5%, a party qualifies for public money in the next election. And if you ignore all the pitfalls of campaign finance, qualifying for public funding is a major step is being accepted as legitimate, or being actually seen by more people, of getting on more ballots, of getting media attention, of changing the way our system works (or doesn’t work). A vote for a 3rd Party isn’t a wasted vote.

No matter how you decide to cast it, vote.

It’s your right. Exercise it.

Fixing Commons Hacks

Random Thoughts

Just when you think you are safe, you realize that the shared server you have all your web stuff on gives people who also share the server a little more access than you’d like, meaning that you are really only as safe as they are.

With things like WordPress and other CMS, there are files that need to remain writeable, if not for use then for automated updates. It’s these files that are vulnerable to getting edited and slipping malware, site redirects and other problems onto your website.

Well, if you have telnet access to your account, and you should. Here are a couple commands you can use to see if you’ve been hacked and which files you need to clean to fix it. Additionally, you can change the security on these files so that they are not writeable, but you’ll have to remember that and go change them back before taking advantage of some automated updates.

First up, check your PHP files for bad stuff:

grep -lr –include=*.php –exclude-dir=logs “eval(base64_decode” .

Next, do the same thing to your HTML files:

grep -lr –include=*.ht* –exclude-dir=logs “<script>s=” .

In both cases, you’ll get back a list of file names that have matched the patterns (i.e. contain “eval(base64_decode” or “<script>s=”). You should download those files, edit them to remove the hacked code, and upload them. It’s possible, though unlikely, that you may get hits on valid uses of these patterns. So be sure you know what you are doing.

Basically, what each of these is doing is either redirecting your visitors to somewhere else, or pulling code in to be displayed on your website. Of course, the most common files to get hit with these are index.php and index.htm/index.html. If you are infected and visit your own site in Chrome (I don’t know about other browsers) and you haven’t disabled the feature, Chrome will warn you that the page is doing something that might be malicious and ask if you want to proceed anyway. That’s a sure sign that you need to do some cleaning.

Anyway, that’s a quick way to clean your website or two problems. If you don’t modify the file permissions, you should probably run these weekly just to be safe and catch problems as quick as you can.

I’m gonna miss you, October.

Random Thoughts, Site News
I don’t know who Adrian Snell is, but I may have to buy this album just to support such cool cover art.

I logged into the site this morning, to the WordPress dashboard, and saw the graph of my site stats.

For nearly an entire month, the traffic here was triple or more where it usually peaks. Of course, that was due to putting up a post every day about a horror movie with a Halloween tag on them. The biggest draws being the posts about vampires. The Nosferatu post alone doubled the traffic in a day.

On Halloween itself, the traffic dropped to half what it had been. And then yesterday was back to regular levels, where I suspect it will stay until December, when I might go on a Christmas movie reviewing spree.

However, those lofty heights of getting nearly 400 hits per day has strengthened my resolve in one way – I need to post more, and consistently. I may not succeed in daily postings, but I’m going to try very hard to keep October’s posting momentum through November.

At the very least, coming to post here every day this month will give me an opportunity to say things like – Day 1 of NaNoWriMo and I got 2,236 words. Probably my best start ever.

Anyway… post at ya later!

SHOCKtober 2012: Post Mortem

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I completed the 31 movies in 31 days of Final Girl‘s SHOCKtober event.

It was an interesting experiment, to watch that many movies in that short a time and write about each one. However, it is unlikely I will ever participate again.

There isn’t anything wrong with the concept itself, of doing a movie a day for the whole month, but there is a serious flaw in letting someone else pick the movies. There was a lot of terrible shit in this list, movies that I think I would have preferred never to have seen. Not all of them for the reasons I gave for the final film, Martyrs. Some were just because they were old and boring.

Plus, too many foreign films. There is nothing inherently wrong with foreign films, but reading subtitles means that you have to pay very close attention to the movie, even if it is boring. You can’t browse the Internets and return focus to the film when something exciting happens. Nope, you have to sit there staring at the screen and read the whole damn thing. I don’t mind foreign films, but I have to prepare myself for them, get other stuff done and clear the two hours of time where I can focus on just the movie. I feel like doing that roughly once a month. This selection had 13 films with subtitles. There were 15 foreign films, but the copy of Planet of the Vampires I watched was dubbed as was Tenebre (I had a subtitled copy but the subtitles wouldn’t work on my player).

If I ever attempt anything like this again, I’ll be picking the list myself.

On the other hand, being forced to write every day was good. And I plan to carry it into this month as I participate in NaNoWriMo. In fact, since I wrote this post in advance, there is a decent chance that I’m already writing. I hope so anyway.

Until next time…

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 31: Martyrs (2008)

Random Thoughts, Reviews

Martyrs.

Fuck you.

That really should be the entirety of my review. But I don’t want to be so glib. It might encourage people to see this horrific piece of crap.

Basically, you should only watch this if you like love ultra-graphic gore and sadistic torture. If you don’t like love those things, then you should avoid this movie at all costs.

So, this girl, Lucie, escapes from somewhere that she was clearly being kept and tortured. She gets away and gets put in an orphanage where she befriends Anna. Anna learns that Lucie claims to be tormented by a ghoulish monster. Flash forward fifteen years where Lucie busts in on a family eating breakfast and murders them all with a double barrel shotgun. She calls Anna, tells her she killed the people who tortured her as a child and Anna comes to help dispose of the bodies. Lucie keeps being attacked by the ghoul, but, once Anna is there, realizes it is all in her head, is just guilt over the girl she left behind when she escaped, and slits her own throat. All of this is shown in very graphic detail.

Anyway, Anna discovers a secret basement and a tortured girl, who looks a lot like the ghoul Lucie was fighting. Anna frees her and tries to help her.

It was at this point that I first turned the movie off and uttered the phrase, “Fuck you.” The tortured girl, when left alone for a few moments, is found cutting herself with a giant knife, just hacking away at her own wrist. Eventually, when I calmed down, I watched the rest of the movie.

People show up, kill the tortured girl and take Anna prisoner. The people explain that they are torturing girls to learn the secrets of the afterlife. Anna gets tortured. A lot. Time passes, the movie keeps fading in and out and she reappears each time more tortured. Eventually she’s told that she’s almost complete. Then they flay her alive. Flay. At this point Anna reaches some sort of enlightenment and experiences the afterlife. Not a near death experience – she’s in this euphoria state for over two hours. Then she tells the leader lady something, it’s whispered – we don’t get to hear it. The crazy cult people gather to hear the words of Anna, and while they wait the old lady tells another member to “keep doubting” and then shoots herself in the head. A nice title card tells us that “martyr” is Greek for “witness”.

All that torture. All that disgusting shit. All of it, and I get “keep doubting”?

Seriously, Martyrs, fuck you.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants - Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames