This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
Spectacular, deep, enormous, living world. And I just wanted to explore it, take on epic quests, carve out a legacy as an adventurer.
But then I took an arrow in the knee.
Seriously though: an awesome game. I spent 85+ hours playing it before I got to the end of the main quest line, and there’s still a lot I’d like to go back and do, so it’s one of the best value video games I’ve played in a long while. Go get it.
Well, that was a farce.
tl;dr: [skip to the end] I’m closing my Facebook account. I’ve got some suggestions at the bottom of this post about how you might like to keep in touch with me in future, if you previously liked to do so via Facebook.
The Backstory
A little over three weeks ago, I was banned from Facebook for having a fake name. This surprised me, because I was using my real name – it’s an unusual name, but it’s mine. I was interested to discover that Claire, who shares my name, hadn’t been similarly banned, so it seems that this wasn’t part of some “sweep” for people with one-letter names, but instead was probably the result of somebody (some stranger, I’d like to hope) clicking the “Report this as a fake name” link on my profile.
There are many, many things about this that are alarming, but the biggest is the “block first; ask questions later” attitude. I wasn’t once emailed to warn me that I would be banned. Hell: I wasn’t even emailed to tell me that I had been banned. It took until I tried to log in before I found out at all.
The Problem
I don’t make much use of Facebook, really. I cross-post my blog posts there, and I keep Pidgin signed in to Facebook Chat in case anybody’s looking for me. Oh, and I stalk people from my past, but that’s just about the only thing I do on it that everybody does on it. I don’t really wallpost, I avoid internal messages (replying to them, where possible, by email), and I certainly don’t play fucking FarmVille.
So what’s the problem? It’s not like I’d be missing anything if I barely use it anyway? The problem is that my account was still there, it’s just that I didn’t have access to it.
That meant that people still invited me to things and sent me messages. My friends are smart enough to know that I won’t see anything they write on their wall, but they assume that if they update the information of a party they’ve Facebook-invited me to that I’ll get it. For example, I was recently at a fabulous party at Gareth and Penny‘s which they organised mostly via Facebook. They’d be forgiven for assuming that when they sent a message to “the guests” – a list that included me – that I would get that message: but no – it fell silently away into Facebook’s black hole.
The Farce(book?)
Following this discovery, here’s how I spent the next three weeks:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for verifying your identity. Note that we permanently deleted your attached ID from our servers.
After investigating this further, it looks like we suspended your account by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.
Thanks,
Aoife
User Operations
The Resolution
So now, I’m back on Facebook, and I’ve learned something: having a Facebook account that you can’t log in to is worse than not having a Facebook account at all. If I didn’t have one at all, at least people would know that they couldn’t contact me that way. In my situation, Facebook were effectively lying to my friends: telling them “Yeah, sure: we’ll pass on your message to Dan!” and then not doing so. It’s a little bit like digital identity theft, and it’s at least a little alarming.
I’ve learned something else, too: Facebook can’t be trusted to handle this kind of situation properly. Anybody could end up in my situation. Those of you with unusual (real) names, or unusual-looking pseudonyms, or who use fake names on Facebook (and I know that there are at least a dozen of you on my friends list)… or just those of you whose name looks a little bit off to a Facebook employee… you’re all at risk of this kind of lockout.
Me? I was a little pissed off, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But I know people who use Facebook’s “single sign-on” authentication systems to log in to other services. I know people who do some or all of their business through Facebook. Increasingly, I’ve seen people store their telephone or email address books primarily on Facebook. What do you do when you lose access to this and can’t get it back? When there’s nowhere to appeal?
And that’s how I came to my third lesson: I can’t rely on Facebook not to make this kind of fuck-up again. No explanation was given as to how their “mistake” was made, so I can’t trust that whatever human or automated system was at fault won’t just do the same damn dumb thing tomorrow to me or to somebody I know. And personally, I don’t like Facebook to seize control of my account and to pretend to be me. I come full circle to my first realisation – that it would be better not to have a Facebook account at all than to have one that I can’t access – and realise that because that’s liable to happen again at any time, that I shouldn’t have a Facebook account.
So, I’m ditching Facebook.
None of this pansy “deactivation” shit, either – do you know what that actually does, by the way? It just hides your wall and stops new people from friending you: it still keeps all of your information, because it’s basically a scam to try to keep your data while making you think you’ve left. No, I’m talking about the real “permanent deletion” deal.
I’m going to hang around for a few days to make sure I’ve harvested everybody’s email addresses and pushing this post to my wall and whatnot, and then I’m gone.
If you’re among those folks who aren’t sure how to function outside of Facebook, but still want to keep in touch with me, here’s what you need to know:
Ironically, the only Facebook accounts I’ll have now are the once which do have fake names. Funny how they’re the ones that never seem to get banned.
As I previously indicated, I’ve recently found myself with a little free videogaming time, and I thought I’d share some of the things that have occupied my time, over the course of two blog posts:
Skyrim
Well; here’s the big one. This game eats time for breakfast. It’s like World Of Warcraft for people who don’t have friends. No, wait…
Seriously, though, Bethesda have really kicked arse with this one. I only played a little of the earlier games in the series, because they didn’t “click” with me (although I thoroughly enjoyed the entire Fallout series), but Skyrim goes a whole extra mile. The game world feels truly epic and “living”: you don’t have to squint more than a little to get the illusion that the whole world would carry on without you, with people eating and sleeping and going to work and gossiping about all the dragon attacks. The plot is solid, the engine is beautiful, and there’s so much content that it’s simply impossible to feel that you’re taking it all in at once.
It’s not perfect. It’s been designed with console controls in mind, and it shows (the user interface for skills upgrades is clunky as hell, even when I tried it on my XBox controller). The AI still does some damn stupid things (not standing-and-talking-to-walls stupid, but still bad enough that your so-called “friends” will get in your way, fire area-effect weapons at enemies you’re meleeing with, and so on). Dragons are glitchy (the first time I beat an Elder Dragon it was mostly only because it landed in a river and got its head stuck underwater, like it was seeing how long it could hold it’s breath while I gradually sliced its tail into salami).
But it’s still a huge and beautiful game that’s paid for itself in the 55+ hours of entertainment it’s provided so far. Recommended.
Update: between first drafting and actually publishing this list, I’ve finished the main questline of Skyrim, which was fun. 85 hours and counting.
Modern Warfare 3
I should confess, first, that I’m a Call Of Duty fanboy. Not one of the these modern CoD fanboys, who rack up kills in multiplayer matchups orchestrated by ability-ranking machines in server farms, shouting “noob” as they teabag one another’s corpses. I mean I’m a purist CoD fanboy. When I got my copy of the first Call Of Duty game, broadband was just beginning to take off, and games with both single-player and multiplayer aspects still had to sell themselves on the strength of the single-player aspects, because most of their users would only ever play it that way.
And the Call of Duty series has always had something that’s been rare in action-heavy first-person shooters: a plot. A good plot. A plot that you can actually get behind and care about. Okay, so we all know how the World War II ones end (spoiler: the allies win), and if you’ve seen Enemy At The Gates then you also know how every single Russian mission goes, too, but they’ve still got a fun story and they work hard to get you emotionally-invested. The first time I finished Call of Duty 2, I cried. And then I started over and shot another thousand Nazis, like I was some form of human tank.
Modern Warfare was fantastic, bringing the franchise (complete with Captain Price) right into the era of nuclear threats and international terrorism. Modern Warfare 2 built on this and took it even further, somehow having a final boss fight that surpassed even the excellence of its predecessor (“boss fights” being notoriously difficult to do well in first-person shooters inspired by the real world). Modern Warfare 3… well…
It was okay. As a fanboy, I loved the fact that they finally closed the story arc started by the two previous MW games (and did so in a beautiful way: I maintain that Yuri is my favourite character, simply because of the way his story is woven into the arc). The chemical weapon attacks weren’t quite so impressive as the nuclear bomb in MW2, and the final fight wasn’t quite as good as the previous ones, but they’re all “good enough”. The big disappointment was the length of the campaign. The game finished downloading and unlocked at 11pm, and by 4am I was tucked up in bed, having finished it in a single sitting. “Was that it?” I asked.
Recommendation: play it if you’re a fan and want to see how the story ends, or else wait until it’s on sale and play it then.
Part Two will come when I find time, along with some games that you’re less-likely to have come across already.
This self-post was originally posted to /r/self. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
I have an unusual name: I’m pretty sure I’m the only person with my name in the world. It’s not the quirkiest name in the world – I have two names, the first one is pretty common, the second one is unusual but isn’t a swearword or “Elephanthead” or something, it’s all in the Latin alphabet, etc. – but it is a little strange.
Three weeks ago, Facebook blocked me from logging in. I wouldn’t have noticed except that my phone failed to log in to Facebook Chat, and told me that I needed to log in on facebook.com first. When I logged in, I was shown a form that stated that “Facebook is a community where people use their real names,” and that I had to “Supply my real name, as it appears on government-issued ID.” So I did.
Then it asked me to upload a photo of said ID, so I did.
After a week, Facebook emailed me to remind me of their real names policy and asked me to tell them my real name and to send them proof, as before. So I did so. This time I sent not only my driving license but also my passport.
Another week goes by, and they email me again with exactly the same text. I email back, asking if they actually read my last email at all. This time I provided photos of my passport, driving license, and carefully-censored pictures of my bank card, work ID, college ID, medical insurance card, etc.
Another few days go by, and they send me the exact same email again, asking for the same information yet again. I’ve tried to contact them by email and through their help system to ask how long this is going to take, and whether a human being is ever going to actually read my emails, but haven’t heard anything back.
I wouldn’t care, if I could at least delete my account: but I can’t, because I can’t log in to do so. They’re holding my data captive. My account still “looks” like it’s fine, so my friends try to contact me, invite me to things, etc., and I never hear about it. It’s a good job that I don’t use Facebook to log in to anything (that I’m aware of), or else I probably wouldn’t be able to use that too.
What do I do, Reddit? Is there some trick to actually getting Facebook to listen to you, or at least some way to delete your account without being permitted to log in to it?
tl;dr I’m banned from Facebook for using a fake name, but I’m not using a fake name. They’ve asked me to prove it, and I have (three weeks ago), but they just keep replying to ask me to prove it again.
Edit (screenshots): the screen I first saw when trying to log in after submitting their form, the screen I now see when trying to log in, and an example of an email I’ve received from them (I’ve got several of these, now, each signed off with a different name).
This checkin to GL73T5N0 The ox-stream caching series - Wytham Stream reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with fleeblewidget, pacifist_049, and misterjta (the latter of which spotted it in no time at all despite the low light). TFTC: it’s been a while since I’ve been out on the hunt!
This link was originally posted to /r/funny. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://i.imgur.com/TBzQX.png
A strange package appeared outside of the door to my office, some time this morning, wrapped as a gift and accompanied by a card.
It turns out to have been my colleagues at the Bodleian Shop, whose newly-relaunched e-commerce site I was drafted into at the last minute to iron out a few technical hitches in time for them to start making online sales before the Christmas rush. There were a few somewhat-stressful moments as technical folk from disparate providers worked together to link-up all of the parts of the site (warehouse and stock level systems, order and payment processing, content management, and of course the web front end), but it all came together in the end… and I think a lot of lessons were learned from the experience.
So that was a very sweet surprise. I knew that they’d appreciated my “hopping department” in order to firefight the various problems that came up during their deployment, but it was still really awesome to get an alcoholic, chocolatey thank-you and a cute card signed by their team, to boot.
The last few months, and especially the last few weeks, have been incredibly hectic. The giveaway, I suppose, should have been how little I’ve blogged recently: it’s a dead giveaway that I’m really busy when I’m able to neglect writing about how busy I am. I’m not complaining, of course, just apologising to the Internet at large.
Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by Three Rings. We launched Milestone: Iridium, the latest new version of the helpline management software, at the weekend, after an extended testing period and a long-extended development cycle. There’s a metric fuckton of new features in this release, including the massive Rota Autopopulation feature, which uses some incredibly complicated mathematics and fine-tuneable weighting preferences to find the best people for each shift, with minimal human interaction. Oh, and we got a new server. And launched a documentation website. I’ve no doubt that this is our biggest release to-date.
It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. It still boggles my mind every time I look at the statistics, and see that we’re now helping over ten thousand volunteers. When I started, we were supporting about ten. Sometimes it scares me. Mostly it thrills me. It’s a great project to be involved with, even when it does consume all of my free time for weeks on end.
This evening, I found myself momentarily at a loose end. I felt like there were things I ought be be doing, urgently, but there weren’t. There’s a backlog of personal email to catch up on, and a stack of little jobs to be doing, but there’s nothing critical.
It took a few minutes to reassure myself that I really had nothing that needed doing immediately. Then I poured myself a glass of wine, popped my feet up, and played some video games. My Steam catalogue has gotten bloated, full of games that I’ve bought over the last few months to play “when I get the time”. Time to cut that list down.
Apparently I’m too cool for Facebook.
Okay, that’s not what that message actually says, but that’s how I chose to read it. It turns out that my name isn’t real. I went through their forms to tell them that “no, really, this is my name”. They also asked me “what I use Facebook for”, to which I – of course – answered “chatting to friends and stalking exes, same as everybody else – why, what do YOU use Facebook for?” But when I submitted the form, it just ran me back around in a circle back to where I started.
Also: Facebook! Is that exposed HTML code in your message? Dear me.
I’d be less frustrated if I didn’t just send them a copy of my driving license earlier this year, in order to prove that my name was really my name. I guess that the media claims that Facebook keeps all of your information indefinitely aren’t true, and in actual fact they have the memory of a proverbial goldfish.
I’d be more frustrated if I actually used Facebook for anything more than pushing blog posts out to people who prefer to see them on Facebook, and occasionally chatting to people, thanks to the wonderful pidgin-facebookchat plugin.
So on average, I suppose, I’m pretty indifferent. That’s the Facebook way.
This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiIHQBlPKvE
This link was originally posted to /r/Minecraft. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?msg=Minecraft+1.0&month=11&day=18&year=2011&hour=13&min=45&sec=00&p0=137
This link was originally posted to /r/technology. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: https://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9637000/9637033.stm
More and more people are facing calls from companies claiming falsely that their computer is infected by a virus.
Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones had one such call and outlines how the scam works and how to avoid it.
This link was originally posted to /r/funny. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.wix.com/hilaryjc/guide-to-reddit
This link was originally posted to /r/WTF. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-15668364
Passengers who saw a wheel fall off a plane as it took off did not immediately inform the crew, a report has said.
The accident happened in March on a Flybe flight from Exeter to Newcastle.
The captain returned to Exeter and used the emergency brake and “significant amounts of right rudder” to safely land the plane. No-one was injured.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report said the wheel’s outer bearing had seized.
A mayday alert was sent to air traffic controllers and after circling the airport for more than an hour, the 39 passengers on board the Bombardier Q400 were “evenly distributed” in the brace position as the captain attempted to land the plane.
…
On Tuesday last week, Ruth and I went to Etiquette, an unusual (and at least a little experimental) theatrical experience at the Oxford Playhouse. I say “theatrical experience”, because while there were certainly elements to the evening that could be considered to be reminiscent of more-conventional theatre, it was far more like not going to see a play than it was like doing so.
The event takes place in a café. And I mean that literally… I’m not just setting the scene; although many of the scenes also take place in a café. This is actually a cafe, with a handful of other participants, sat in pairs at their respective tables, and a majority of people who are just everyday folks out for a drink or a sandwich.
We were shown to our table and invited to sit. On the table were a collection of objects – glasses of water, a pipette, stage blood, two plastic figurines (one man, one woman), a ball of white tack, some chalk, a book, some notepaper, some blank cards… and a pair of MP3 players with headphones. We were instructed to put on the headphones. Simultaneously, the MP3 players were started.
From there on, we followed the instructions given over the earpieces. My role was that of an older man, a self-described philosopher. Ruth played a prostitute, which lead to at least a little embarrassment on her part when she was required to say, “I am a prostitute,” in a crowded café. It’s easy to feel acutely self-conscious when you’re relaying what you’re told in a pair of headphones out loud. You know that feeling that you get when you realise that you’re singing along to the music you’re listening to, in public? It’s a little bit like that, but instead of music, you’re spouting out-of-context nonsense.
It’s not just dialogue, though; it’s also stage direction, motivation, and prompts to inspire emotion. Some of the story is told in a very abstract way: early on, Ruth’s and my characters had agreed to meet in a house on a hill, near a tree. Ruth laid her hand out on the table, on which she had, under previous instruction, drawn a square and a dot on the heel of her palm. I was told to examine the shape of the “landscape” of her hand, and try drip water from my pipette, from as high as I could reach, onto it. Simultaneously, her character – already in the house (the square) – was told that it had begun to rain, and she heard the sound of a storm beginning through her headphones.
Throughout the course of the event, we each took on a variety of roles: as characters in our own play, as directors of a “play” performed on our table using the props we had to hand, as the audience to both of the above, and even as parts of the scenery.
The story itself… was okay. It felt like it was lacking something. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly took advantage of the space and technology it required, but it was perhaps trying to say a little bit too much in a little bit too short a time. But the medium? That whole “scripted, but you don’t get to read ahead”, headphones-acting? That’s kind-of cool and exciting. I’ve got the urge to try to write something similar myself (perhaps for a cast of five or six). Although first, I’ve got a murder mystery to finish writing!
Update, 5 November 2019: the Playhouse’s link has gone down, but information about the piece is available at the producers’ website.
