Yep. Ugh. Crawlers...

Apparently, beemp3.com managed to find a folder I'd hidden away on my site for personal MP3 uploads, ignore my robots.txt rules, and put up links to all the music I have uploaded all across Rivenwolf.net. Can you say "UNHAPPY?" I sure can. How it found the folder in question, I'll never know. Maybe it just guessed... It seems shady enough to do something like that. Shame on my for having the folder indexed for easy access, because that allowed it to link to all the files I had uploaded. Bah!

So, in response to that, I'm not even going to bother flagging them all. What I did, though, was change all my links (so at least beemp3 is linking to dead things now), remove all my indexes (a major inconvenience, but I can't afford to leave them), and rewrite my hotlink prevention rules. Because of that, there may be some nasty side-effects with RSS feeds when I post links to stuff I have hosted. I provided a rule for Google Reader, since it seems to break things by being a referrer. I think most readers, though, treat things as a direct connection (at least the offline readers do), so there shouldn't be too much of  a problem.

If there is, though, let me know?

Well, apparently, what was intended to stay in the committee for an extended period has already been leaked to the community at large, so I have to hack together a quick explanation before the rumors start flying and things are attributed to people that simply aren't true. (Come on, I live in a small town. I know exactly how news turns into gossip!)

I don't know how many people actually read this blog, though. Especially since I haven't said anything for ages. Hopefully that'll change now that I've repaired my RSS feeds and moved to a faster server and have actually started saying things again. That said, feel free to circulate this post far and wide so people who are interested actually get an explanation. An explanation for what, you ask? Well, my resignation from the Mysterium Committee, of course, as the title so clearly insinuates!

Here follows a very much modified (for the public) version of my resignation letter:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my part in the Mysterium Committee. I first considered joining when I was asked by a friend of mine to help them, and my final reason for joining was because I thought it would be fun and that it would be a nice way to do something good for the community. Unfortunately, due to recent events, I no longer find my participation to be fun.

The committee felt tense when I first joined, but I attributed that to some key teams being in disarray with Mysterium 2009 being so close at hand. People were spread too thin and I hoped that with my joining, things would lighten up and make things more fun for everyone, but now that Mysterium 2009 is over, I sense the mood hasn’t lightened even without hard deadlines.

So the reason I joined the committee? I thought it would be fun and I thought my help would be wanted. At first, it was, but now it seems like it isn’t. All of my reasons for joining the committee are gone, for a variety of reasons, and I have no other reason to stay. In light of that, I formally resign all of my positions (Web Development, Communications and Location) on the Mysterium Committee, effective immediately.

To those of you who I’ve discussed this with off and on, I’m sorry for finally doing this to you, but I’ve thought about this for weeks, and with college starting so soon, I really can’t afford to spend all this energy on Mysterium. If things were different, I would find a commitment like this to be a relaxing diversion from the academic grind, but as things are, it would only distract me and adversely affect my grades.

If you want more information, well... You're out of luck. I'll leave it entirely in the hands of the committee as to whether or not they want to leak the details of my departure. If they do say anything, feel free to ask me what the heck happened and I'll give you my side of the story. But until then, nada! To say it's not important? Eh... I won't say that. I think it is important, but the rest of the committee doesn't, and since I'm not part of the committee anymore, I don't think it's in anyone's best interest for me to go running around spouting internal information.

Let's just say that for a variety of reasons, my participation on the committee has become more stressful than I would like from a position that is entirely volunteer. I would prefer to spend that type of energy on something like a job or a political blog or something with a little more at stake for me personally than where the next location for Mysterium is or when the next communication is going to be distributed to the forum. I'm spending too much energy doing some very simple things.

So there you are... Now all you need to remember is that my @mysterium.net contact information is no longer valid and I have no idea who will handle incoming messages addressed to Communications, so just be aware that if you contact me from this point on, you will be talking to someone else if they don't deactivate all my accounts. I must add, though, that all forum accounts are my own personal accounts, so private messages and such will still work as intended. (I will remove my Mysterium signature in the future, but there are still some posts out there that people are actively reading, so I'll leave that up for a bit.)

(Otherwise known as Edrick-speak for "Hi, guys!")

After much, much, much, much, much pressure on TW to get his new servers working properly, and a few days of the two of us fooling around with reconfiguring his network, I finally have a site that's actually responsive! Woo! Guess what that means? More posts! There's been a lot that's happened since my last post, so I suppose I'll write up a little something every day until I get caught up.

Some quick points on what I've been seeing and doing, though, that I will hopefully follow up with complete posts:

• Feedburner was purchased by Google, who took the opportunity to wreck the service.
• I did, in fact, purchase an iPhone 3GS and have been loving it in spite of its Apple-ness.
• I've become far more active on Facebook and Twitter, if there are people who care about that.
• I've joined the Mysterium Committee in the areas of Web Development, Communications and Location.
• Someone got angry and went around blocking all YouTube videos of Kumikyoku.
• I've been on a Star Trek marathon, nearing completion of TNG and readying TOS.
• My WoW guild has been falling apart for reasons nobody wants to explain.
• I'm ramping up for another semester of university that starts on September 8th.
• I saw District 9 today and hereby order you to watch it at all costs.

And I'm sure there's more to discuss once I get my creative juices flowing once more. But until then, I would encourage everyone to see if you can break the site. I've updated lots of things, reconfigured lots of other things, and had to change the feed back to my standard WordPress RSS address because the Feedburner service has been completely destroyed by a Google that doesn't seem to care that there are tons of people who are unable to get access to their Feedburner dashboards after the merger. (Seriously, how long has it been? I still can't get access to mine. I don't care anymore. I'll find a feed manager later, but it'll never be Google.)