lucidfox

#6

This segment is brought to you by Mozilla Firefox, pretty guardian of compatibility.

(Respect open standards!)

It's fun to be a Wookiee-Cast narrator. It's like being paid to make stuff up, except you don't get paid. It's fun to be a wiki admin. This may explain why certain individuals start their own wikis due to creative differences, you're probably guessing who is meant to be ashamed by this, don't you. A message to all contributors of these spinoff wikis: If you're not ashamed, be ashamed. Copying articles that are the hard work of poor Wookieepedians is stealing. Every time you copy an article, it disappears on Wookieepedia, and we have to spend precious bytes on making more. Do you know how much these things cost? I don't know, maybe in America, or more specifically North America, or even more specifically the United States, traffic is unlimited, but here in Siberia, it's either five cents per megabyte or one megabyte per day. This means each Wookiee-Cast episode makes me a dollar poorer, and that not to mention all the traffic that goes down the drain after I screw up the site layout again and reload the cache, and then reload it once again after reverting! So, you wiki pirates are stealing my money! I'd sue you, but I think it would be better to put copy protection on all Wookieepedia articles. How we'll be supposed to actually read them is another question.

Just kidding, of course, I'm not the Recording Industry Ass. of America, but you should still respect our license. Which is your license as well, by the way. Just copy our Wikipedia template and edit it to say the article is taken from Wookieepedia, then slap it on the talk page. That's all we need - attribution. And that's the most we can legally require. That concerns you too, TFN with your Force-Casts, just acknowledge you're copying from us, and that will be enough. I know some Wookieepedians would like full control over what they submit, but you did see the fine print, right? "If you don't want your submissions to be mercilessly edited by others, then leave". If you post something on Wookieepedia, or Wikipedia for that matter, it is presumed you fully acknowledge that a random man in Africa could potentially profit from your efforts and receive the millions of dollars you never did, while all you get is a feeling of satisfaction and some handy light side points.

So, TFN and the spin-offers, feel free to rob us if you like, but don't try to pass our stuff as yours. Because you have to give us attribution. And remember - anything you take from us, we or anyone else can legally take from you in turn. I hope you find spare time to read the license, for your sake. Wikia's four lawyers are not so forgiving as I am...

[transition]

Anyway. Damn you Fourdot for releasing Episode Seven ahead of schedule! It's Sunday. I would have had it ready by Monday, I swear. Next time, please warn me beforehand. So I guess I'll have double-sized Komedy Stylings to account for the lost last week, or maybe not, we'll see.

As I said, it's fun to be a wiki admin. Imperialles summed it best: "There's a misconception among users that adminsip means a ton of responisbility and work. It's actually just a set of new buttons."

That's how I view adminship, anyway. I screw things up, people complain, I revert, and we discuss the changes. That's how it works in theory anyway, usually I don't revert and the site stays forever screwed up. I know nothing bad will happen to me, so I always ask people to blame me for everything. Maybe that unlimited supply of support, so to speak, is because I almost never block anyone. Quinlanfan doesn't count, it's not my fault, blame Ataru for that idea. He's like totally guilty, I'm telling you, never mind that he regreted it.

And it's even funnier to be an IRC operator because we don't have any democracy there at all, or even attempts to pretend there is a democracy. After all, Chancellor Palpatine loved democracy, so it should be evil by definition. There is no best way to demonstrate your POWAH than when a 10-year-old enters the channel and starts speaking AOLer and leet, and then I have every moral right to scream: "POWAH! Unlimited powah!!!" and it's all like...

[s1_transform]

And I guess we'll stop here. All this magic is brought to us by Servolomie Channing, better known as ChanServ - if you still haven't noticed, I like personifications, especially of things nobody would ever think of personifying in the first place. It all initially began as a parody on all these Jedi Exile whiners, so we now go: "ChanServ is female! Get over it!"

One could say that we kick people too often, but it's complete rubbish. “Kick” is such an ugly word, and also politically incorrect. What if the operator has no legs, or the intruder has no body part that can be relatively painlessly kicked? So we don’t kick people any more, we request removal. That’s it, they leave voluntarily. Almost. With the software’s help. Like the Imperial officer who saw Kyle and died.

Back to the site... s. Fellow Wookieepedians, you have one thing to remember: if you don't know how it's done, don't do it. We already have so many crappy search icons rejected, and you're probably guessing why. Because they're crappy. We have standards to uphold. Don't use templates if you don't know how they work. Don't pretend you know HTML. If you don't know the difference between HTML and XHTML, you don't know HTML, period. Same applies if you don't know the difference between proper HTML and the horrible mess of tags that vain MySpace kids call HTML. Don't blindly copy our CSS and JavaScript to other wikis if you don't know how they work. And finally, don't submit quotes to the QDB if you don't know how tagging works. Because if you type "jaina solo", with a space, in the tags field, it won't become one tag called "jaina solo". It will become two tags, one called "jaina", the other called "solo". And don't add redundant tags. By redundancy, I mean the unnecessary use of either needless, tautological, pleonastic or superfluous text, by which one repeats, in duplication, the same, identical, aforesaid things over and over again, beyond what would be needed or required to explain, or make comprehensible, the intended or signified meaning of that which one wishes to convey. As Oscar Wilde once said on Uncyclopedia, "I simply hate, detest, loathe, despise, and abhor redundancy".

While we're at it, here's some news flash about the QDB. If you still haven't noticed, I've added Google ads to it, and sometimes they're truly amusing to read. "Buy or sell SWG accounts". Is this even allowed? Don't click that one, it will probably get your account banned. Or how about this, on the supersecret admin-only forbidden quote approval page: "Don't approve or disapprove this ad, it's for testing adsense". Oh really? And why the heck should I care about Hurricane Katrina victims, won't you bother to tell me, Google? Other than that, I heavily endorse their products and services, I use Gmail and Google Talk and recommend others to do the same. Google totally didn't pay me for this completely voluntary promotion of its services.

As it was said in the beginning: respect open standards. Part of my self-imposed responsibility on Wookieepedia is maintaining uniform look in all major browsers and systems, with or without JavaScript, because if a webmaster assumes that all visitors use Windows and Internet Explorer and have JavaScript and Flash enabled, said webmaster must be disintegrated on the grounds that they're too stupid to live.

[sad BGM]

And now, to the Expanded Universe! Coming soon: Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice! Tonight Mara Jade dyes... her hair!

[sad BGM cut]

Seriously, what's with all this talk about who dies in Sacrifice? Who the frell cares? The TFN forums had more fun when most threads were about Jacen being the most talented Jedi ever. Now it's all about: "Who dies in Sacrifice? How do we call whoever dies in Sacrifice? Who is Darth Krayt? I have proof that Jacen Solo is not Darth Krayt! Look, here's another Darth Krayt theory!" I, for one, don't care who Darth Krayt is. As V said, "who is but the form, following the function of what. And what I am, is a man in a mask." We don't need to know Darth Krayt's identity to enjoy Legacy. Why should he even be one of the established characters, especially given Dark Horse's tendency to replace established characters with their own look-alikes. Case in point: the male Exile rip-off in KOTOR. I believe his initials are Z. C.

I also wanted to talk about Saxton, I will try and filter my speech to remain PG-13. ............................................ So here's what I have to say. Others already said most of it on IRC. It's sufficient to say that I won't take any of Saxton's theories seriously until he recognizes the big yellow letters in the beginning of every movie as absolute canon. Otherwise, it's all double-standards. It doesn't mean Star Wars is fantasy, it may have been fantasy back in 1977, but not in 2007, thanks to people like Zahn, Stover, and the Dark Horse writers. Lucas, on the other hand, is a senile old man who must be banned from any Star Wars decision making to avoid further ruining his own creation.

Thank you for suffering with me, because believe me, I have suffered. See you next week.