A few things

I promise there will be actual content in essay form later this week, but I have to kick the week off with some housekeeping. Some of this is bad, and some of it is good (or I hope it’s good).

Bad news first: I’ve been getting pretty regular comment spam on this blog for about a month now, at a rate of about one post every half day or so. I don’t know why anyone’s bothering — most of the posts affected are at least half a year old — but it’s still pretty irritating to click back to the blog every day to delete internet pharmacy ads written in badly formatted bbcode. Blogger doesn’t give me a lot of options for dealing with this, and I’m not in the mood to migrate to some other platform. So as a first step I am turning on moderation for all posts more than 90 days old. The only kind of comment I will refuse is an obvious advertisement, but comments will obviously show up slowly on those posts. My other options are to block anonymous comments, which I definitely will not do, or to use a CAPTCHA, which I find to be annoying and have evidence is only moderately effective. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.

On the good side, my friend Ben Abraham, proprietor of the SLRC blog and organizer of Critical Distance, is going to be visiting GDC. Michael Abbott and David Carlton have already gotten him a pass, but since Ben is in Australia and GDC is in America, there’s a rather expensive plane ticket to deal with. On the right side of the blog you can see a little widget for donating money to help cover the cost of that flight. I’d appreciate it if you could spare a few bucks to give him a hand.

If giving money to Ben doesn’t sound like something you want to do, then I hope you’ll find space in your budget to give a few dollars to Penny Arcade’s annual Child’s Play charity drive. Child’s Play buys toys, books, and games for children’s hospitals throughout the world to help make the lives of children with serious illnesses much less miserable. I spent a lot of time in hospitals myself as a kid, and the only parts of those stays that didn’t suck terribly was the time I got to spend getting my ass kicked by the original Legend of Zelda. You can donate money, plain and simple, or you can choose your local children’s hospital and buy something from their Amazon wish list. There are items on those lists that cost as little as $10 and will make a big improvement in what is usually a horrible experience, so please donate something if you can.