Archive for July, 2009
Closing of the domain http://www.tcgc4u.de
Posted by soulwarrior in News on 30 July 2009
I’m no longer using the domain http://www.tcgc4u.de, so I thought I might as well just close it. This will save me some money that I can use to do more useful stuff. I want to apologize for all people who’ll send me or anyone else with an @tcgc4u.de e-mail account an e-mail in the near future as it will most likely bounce. Please try your luck with some of my other e-mail addresses, there are enough of them.
soulwarrior [at] soulwarrior [dot] net works great!
Suppe für den soul – Tempo
Posted by soulwarrior in releases on 28 July 2009
Only one day late, I can link you to my weekly column on Warcraft-TCG.de. Well, I would have posted this earlier, however, due to the move of all my files to a different server, the encoding was pretty much screwed up and the site looked like shit (at least the German version).
But enough of that, the good folks at all-inkl.com resolved the issue very fast. Thank god for their support! My weekly column is also talking about speed or tempo – you’ve all been in a situation where you acted too fast and had to pay the price for it afterwards. Funny that tempo plays such an important role in a strategic game where you should have – in theory – all the time in the world. So let’s dig a little deeper into this topic.
Temporary unavailabilty
Posted by soulwarrior in News on 26 July 2009
Due to a change regarding the webspace provider that hosts my site, it will be temporary unavailable for roughly 4 – 6 hours. The change is scheduled to start at 2 am tomorrow or the day after, so most of you shouldn’t be affected (unless you’re accessing the site at very weird times…).
I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Suppe für den soul – Allez les bleus
Posted by soulwarrior in releases on 22 July 2009
Well, I’m a little behind with the updates this week (just after a week where I was very pleased with the site updates)… so you might have already read my weekly column, but stil I want to point you to it.
The topic of the week is the comeback of the Alliance – the Horde has dominated the Metagame for more than a year, so it was about time the blue guys stroke back. They did and it seems like they’re stronger than ever. Read why in Suppe für den soul – Allez les bleus.
Old vs. New
Posted by soulwarrior in Blog on 17 July 2009
Wherever I look, I can’t help but get the impression that people are obsessed with making everything “new”. I talked about change before, but the topic still uses its nasty tentacles to hold me tight and occupy my mind. Usually, I’m all for change. I love making things better, but I always thought there’s a difference between “better” and “newer”.
Take music for example – for years, literally no one cared for Michael Jackson. Ironically, he managed to be the topic of the month by leaving earth (for better or worse). Still, despite the fact that he’s much more present than he’s been in the last 5 years (combined), new artists are getting hyped all over the place. Lady Gaga has frequently been called the “most successful female pop star of our days”. Well, 6 months earlier pretty much no one knew about her. Or let’s say 9.
A year ago, Katy Perry was called “the new Madonna”. I didn’t really hear much from Katy Perry since then to be honest (to be fair, I haven’t really heard much more from Madonna…). Maybe new artists are getting hyped over the top only so their fall is so much more ugly (see Amy Winehouse) and will in turn allow for more “top stories” that can be printed in shitty magazines.
15 years ago, the standards were pretty different. I assume you’ve heard of the band Nirvana. Some went as far as saying that ‘Music history will from now on always be divided into the “Pre Nirvana era” and the “After Nirvana era”‘. While I agree that Nirvana has certainly had a big influence and could be described as the band that was able to catch the zeitgeist of a whole generation, the same can be said about Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Madonna and Michael Jackson. But I’m digressing, sorry, my actual point is that I’m surprised that there are more Foo Fighters fans on Facebook than there are Nirvana fans. I like both bands, but I think Nirvana has been a lot more influential than the Foo Fighters and I doubt that the Foo Fighters will ever release an album that can create a buzz as big as Nevermind or even come close.
Did people forget about Nirvana just because they’re no longer existing? The answer seems to be quite obvious, but still I’m fascinated about it. Further, even the most played song of the 90s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hasn’t been number 1 in the US, the UK, Germany or any other country that’s somehow important in the music world. Nowadays, a young artist needs to come up with “Pokerface”, a single that tops the charts in 3 countries and they’re already the “most successful female pop star of our days”.
Don’t get me wrong, I too listen to Lady Gaga’s songs. However, why did the perspective change so dramatically? There were times when it was more important to top the charts and still you were seen as more influential, more successful or in a word: more important than any other artist. Nowadays, people only care for numbers.
This trend is not only present in the music industry (although it’s quite easy to come up with a million examples when looking at this field), you can see people getting crazy over change in every other field too. One of the more interesting stories of the week was the name change of Chicago’s Sears Tower. The “iconic building” will change its name as part of a deal with a British investor and officially be called the “Willis Tower”. Americans are getting crazy over it as they state the Sears Tower belongs to Chicago and there’s “a long history” involved. “A long history” according to American standards are 30 years (read a little more here). Good to know.
It’s nice to see that not everyone thinks “newer = better” (and that there are certain people who have ridiculous standards when it comes to the meaning of the word “historic”.
Kartefakt 94 in stores now!
Posted by soulwarrior in releases on 16 July 2009
This week, Kartefakt 94 will make its way to the stores. As always, the magazine is full of interesting articles about the fascinating world of Trading Card Games.
Despite a tournament report about the Darkmoon Faire Turin together with a deck feature, you can also learn what the buzz about the new Desecrator deck is all about. However, there’s more to the magazine than articles about the World of Warcraft TCG. So grab a copy and learn about resource advantage in Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Regionals for the Huntik TCG or the new rules for Magic.
Good times
Posted by soulwarrior in Blog on 15 July 2009
Today, Matthias forwarded me some age-old pictures from the Pharao-Tour 2004. Man!!! Those were the days!
I really have to share these with you – it has been the first bigger Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG tournament in Germany and it was the first time I was involved. We saw roughly 180 players showing up and we expected something like 70. At the following tournaments, we had to beef up our team as we were overwhelmed with as much as 500 players showing up!
Suppe für den soul – Bluffs
Posted by soulwarrior in releases on 13 July 2009
I love the psychological aspects of the games I play! Few players ever think of what happens in their minds while they’re playing. Sometimes they lose the game because of some idea they put in their head – that the opponent has a hand full of solutions, that there’s no way they’re gonna win this game anyway and so on.
Sometimes you don’t get that idea all by yourself, but it’s rather your opponent who puts it there. These so called Bluffs can be made work for you. I tried to explain them a little deeper in this week’s article.
Never change a running system!
Posted by soulwarrior in Blog on 11 July 2009
“Never change a running system” – to be honest, I have never been much of a fan of this slogan. It’s not that easy to please me and even if I am quite satisfied, I always look for improvements. Sometimes, this can result in lots of problems. I tend to forget that, which is (ironically) the reason why I’m writing this blog post – it’s much harder to forget about stuff you wrote about (at least that’s true for me).
So WordPress is this ever-changing content management system that makes it quite easy to come up with a cool blog (as you can see). However, it seems to be an even bigger fan of upgrades than me, so whenever there’s a new version out, the admin control panel (this is where I write posts like this one and spend my free time) annoys me to death by showing the “WordPress X.X is out – upgrade now!” message on top of EVERY container in which I can do things like writing posts, edit pages, changing the look and feel of the page and so on. You can guess what happened, I downloaded the latest WordPress version. And while I was at it, I thought I could also download the new version of my theme (that would be the Fusion theme – powered by digitalnature).
As it turned out, that was one of the worse ideas I had today… First of all, my Search button (that would be the cool thing on the right with the picture of a magnifying-glass) disappeared. Even worse, my categories seemed to be gone for good. While the Search button might not be that important (although I think it’s a cool feature and I LOVE cool features, I’m just a big geek), I couldn’t really get over the loss of my categories. A few minutes later, I realized my various Widgets weren’t collapsible anymore (try it out, if you click on “Twitter”, it will hide the Twitter messages! I bet you never tried that before. Isn’t that freaking awesome?!). Or, to sum this paragraph up in a sentence: My site looked like shit.
As I’m one of the laziest people around when it comes to backups, I naturally did NOT save my old files. Be warned! Don’t do that yourself! Use infinite backups for whatever you’re doing with your PC… Well anyways, there was no real turning back, so I had to invest some more time and try to figure out what went wrong. I want to spare you the story of my search for a “known issues” part on the homepage of digitalnature (as there is no such part and therefore it would be quite redundant to mention that in the first place) or my epic quest for a dowloadable version of an earlier version of the Fusion theme. So well, in the end I figured I should just remove some of my Widgets (- ahh… Widgets… I tend to use that term all the time without ever explaining it. Well, a Widget is a little container in the sidebar. So I use a “Search Widget”, a “Category Widget”, a “Twitter Widget” and so on – now you know what that is) and see if that would help. And then I realized that the new Fusion theme considers the Search and the Categories as OPTIONAL Widgets. Meaning: They are not implemented if you use the standard settings.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” was my initial response… but well, dragging these two Widgets in my sidebar again worked great and my site looked almost as cool as it used to be. Figuring out that the Widgets are now using the class tag “title” instead of “widgettitle” put my “Hackadelic Widget Voodoo” (yes, that’s actually the name of this Plug-In) Plug-In back in place and now the Widgets are also collapsible again (come on! Click them again! You know you want to!)!
Why I’m writing all this? Well, first of all, if you’re a WordPress user and you stumble over similar problems, this might be helpful! Secondly, I couldn’t stand the idea of having lost 60 minutes of my life without getting anything back from them. So I figured I could as well write about the loss so I got some more content on my page. Last but not least, I could show everyone that “embrace change” is NOT always the way to go (which reminds me of this great comic story “Secret Invasion” that I read the day before yesterday – go check it out, it’s awesome!)!
Phat update!
Posted by soulwarrior in site updates on 11 July 2009
It was about time to update some of the work pages (as I didn’t mention BattleForge.com there although my current job is to take care of that site), so I finally did that today. I changed the title of the page about the websites I’m active on from “Websites” to “Community Management” as… well, that’s what I’m doing there and I heard that’s much better from a Search Engine’s point of view (you might ask: Who the hell cares for a Search Engine’s point of view?! – well, blame yourself as you’re also most likely one of these guys who originally got aware of this site via Google!).
After providing this site with a do-over, I had to realize that the other work pages could need some updates, too. So well, I fixed them as well (some of the tags were really buggy and even though you won’t see a change it will be less messy from… a Search Engine’s point of view – OK, enough with the fucking Search Engines already!). On a related note: Huntik-TCG.de got banished from my favorite sites and BattleForge.com took the spot.
I found 3 typos in my texts which could be considered a (sad) record, but I’m actually more shocked about the fact that no one ever made me aware of them. Dear readers, I’m a perfectionist and if I would have known that there are such silly mistakes on my web presence, I wouldn’t sleep. So in case you find any more mistakes, just let me know. I’ll be thankful, believe me!
Well, that’s pretty much it for the time being. Check out the pages again and learn some more about my new job. Ah, and I didn’t explain the term “BluePoster” so in case this doesn’t ring a bell, write a comment (yes, this is actually a cheap and diabolic trick to engage my readers in a conversation! I don’t mind making use of such measures!)!
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