Misc — Tardis.dk Remakes

YouTube injustice.

March 24, 2011 By Sokurah

I can’t believe it – my YouTube account has been suspended. And why, I hear you ask?

Because I marked some spam as spam (I guess, YouTube isn’t answering my mails).

See, I like this singer – Lenka, and she has this new video out. I made a comment on how cute the video was and how much better this version of the song is – compared to the first version that was released. Pretty harmless stuff…but that’s me – harmless.

A day or so later I had a mail because someone has commented on my post, so I went back to see the comment. That was this joker – TheDoodypants. He seems to be unstable – on a good day – and seems to be nothing but an abusive spammer and the kind of person you’d prefer never to have to deal with. Look at the picture below for some of his replies to the music video. I can’t believe the things he called me – and because I was annoyed I marked about 10 of his replies as spam, but unfortunately my post is now gone because my account is suspended because of it.

I’ve tried writing to YouTube but they don’t answer. All they have to do is take a look at my commenting history and see that I’m not a spammer, I don’t call people names or abuse them, so how can it be that the spamming clown is still there, but my account has been closed…just because I marked some spam? …I mean, I’ve read their Terms of Service several times and as far as I can see I haven’t done a thing wrong – I should theoretically be allowed to mark as much spam as I want – as long as it IS spam.

If this is not the reason they’ve closed my account they could at least tell my why. But not a word. Despite several inquries. This makes YouTube hypocrites. I believe they’ve closed my account unjustified and now they won’t answer me…probably because they know I’m right but won’t acknowledge it.

So, now what? Sure, I can just make a new account, but why should I? I want my uploads back – about 12 videos of my own games, and the biggest loss is probably my favourites (probably not more than 20 so I could find them again), but I don’t like terrorism and this – it’s abuse of power – and I would prefer to have them acknowledge they’ve made a mistake…or at least have the balls to talk to me so we can get past it.

Please Tweet this, post it whereever you can, and help me get a reply from YouTube…and if possible – have my account re-opened. I’m not leaving this be. It’s a matter of principle.

TheDoodypants is the real spammer here - not me.

Filed Under: Misc, Rant Tagged With: Hypocrites, YouTube

Happy New Year 2010/11

December 31, 2010 By Sokurah

Wow, that was another year…how time flies. I’m not even kidding – just a few days ago I remembered something I’d done recently, but when I thought about it I realised it was more than a year ago. How I long for those days when I was young(er), time crawled and I didn’t have a care in the world. *sigh*

Perhaps one of the reasons time flies by so fast is because I spend so much by my computer programming. Not every project worked on becomes a released game, and other projects are just …erm – delayed, but luckily for my own sake I do manage to finish something once in a while. This year has been enormously stressing because I’ve worked on so many different projects and 9 months into 2010 I still hadn’t finished anything. Kinda makes you wonder what the h*ll you’re doing with your time.

Luckily, by the end of October I had Binary Land ready, followed by The Night Before Christmas just before Christmas and finally Star Castle right before New Year, so having finally been able to release 3 games in 2010 has helped my mood quite a lot, and I hope some of you will find some of what I’ve made entertaining.

Star Castle wasn’t made entirely after The Night Before Christmas btw. I started programming it on December 25th last year and it has been sitting almost finished on my harddrive for about 11 months, so ‘all I had to do was finish it’, so just because something is put on hold doesn’t mean it’s been abandoned. That is also the reason I hope to be able to complete 3 of my work-in-progress projects sometime over the next …err… 6 months. And these are much larger projects than the 3 from 2010.

In other words: Things are looking up and I hope to have a great new year, programming-wise. But I hope to live a little more in 2011 too, and make an effort to be a little happier, because time goes by really fast and before you know of it you’re old (or heading there – fast).

On a less serious note, I made a blog post a while back about spam. I hate it – I really do, and I wouldn’t mind kicking the shit out of the people behind it. At work about 85% of all incoming e-mail is spam – that’s how bad it is. Luckily we have a pretty good filter solution so we don’t think too much about it on a daily basis. Personally, I did get a lot of spam-comments on this blog too, and I tried to combat it by blocking certain IP addresses, but I’m pretty sure that’s what led to some strange behaviour where certain people, who weren’t spammers, couldn’t acccess the site at all, but now that I’m not filtering IP addresses it’s working again. Yes, I know Akismet catches practically all spam comments, but I’d still spend time reviewing them and that annoyed the crap out of me.

However, I don’t get any more spam. The solution was simple, although annoying – I changed the comment system on the blog so anyone who wants to comment has to sign up first. Probably why I haven’t had any comments for months. Oh, well. But it’s not so bad – if anyone want to drop me a comment on a game – be it feedback, requests, or something else, you’re welcome to send me an e-mail. It’s on the About Me page, as well as in all of my ‘readme’ files.

I think that’s it for now. I hope you’ll all have a great New Year, with lots of games made by those of you who likes doing that, and lots of new games for those of you who likes that.

Be safe. See you on the other side.

Almost ready... 😉

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: Happy New Year

Bought a new computer and now people are making fun of me.

April 28, 2010 By Sokurah

I’ve always been a PC person (unless you’re thinking of ‘politically correct’ – in which case I’m doing my best to be politically incorrect) and so I haven’t wasted any opportunities to tell the Mac OSX people what I’m think of their inferior platform choice. It’s the ZX Spectrum vs. C64 discussion all over again. 😀

Well, about a week ago I bought myself a nice and shiny 15″ MacBook Pro – the new core i7 model, and now everyone I know with Mac’s are making fun of me. Hehe, I guess I walked in to that one. 😀

So, why have a done it? A glutton for punishment?…very likely, but no. A while back I installed OSX on my HP laptop but it only works mostly fine – the USB ports doesn’t work and that’s a bit annoying – especially since the plan is to get into developing software for the iPhone and what good is a dev enviroment if I can’t get my software onto the phone easily, right?

…so I decided to buy a real Mac. Hopefully that means less hassle. 🙂

I won’t be switching completely to OSX though. The PC and Windows will still be my primary enviroment so the Mac will be mostly for compiling OSX and iPhone projects (when I get to that).

Hopefully I will also (finally) get around to making OSX versions of my games. I successfully compiled and played Omega Race 2009 on the Mac a few days ago but that also only works mostly fine. There’s a strange bug that affects the background picture, and my code for online scores doesn’t work on OSX and I’d like to sort that out before doing “re-releases”.

Let’s see what happens, and when…

Filed Under: Misc, News Tagged With: OSX

Happy new year 2009/2010

December 31, 2009 By Sokurah

The New Year is nearly upon us and I just wanted to write a little something about the past year before the booze goes in and the brains go out. This will be a more traditional New Year for me than last year where I was in Cambodia, but this year I’m not travelling and will celebrate with friends at home.

Development wise, the past year has been very productive for me. Three games developed in 2009 and another two pretty advanced (but slightly stalled) WIP’s in development – Psycho Pigs UXB & Horace in the Mystic Woods – means I haven’t been wasting too much time. If I’m cheeky and include December of last year I can add another three games to that list – Zektor, Space Fury & Dingo, although to be fair they were made in the three months before December. Still, that’s six games in about 16 months – that’s basically half my entire output. Busy, busy, busy.

I was even approached for an interview by Retro Gamer Magazine which resulted in an interview in their July 2009 issue as a ‘Homebrew Hero‘. The cool thing about that is that, not only have I been subscribing to the magazine for 5 ears, but also because I was now featured in a column when a lot of other people I admire have appeared.

Programming wise I hope 2010 won’t be as busy. My plan is to finish the 3 WIP’s I have started (the third being X-Quest 2) and hopefully not be too distracted by new projects along the way.

I hope you all had a great Christmas and it that you’ll enter the New Year safely and surrounded by friends or family…and that your hangover will only last a very short time.

Stay safe…and come back soon.

/Soks.

…and because it’s all about remaking I’ll just re-post the same picture I used two years ago. 🙂