(39 deegrees today. I’m melting! Melting! What a world! What a world!)
Once again Valentine’s rapidly approaches like a bird of doom (cue descending scale of doom -DA Da daaaaaa!!!). But I’m not too concerned.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to let the dreaded 14th get to me too much this year. I have better things to do than get depressed over a stupid date on the calander. Or at least better things to get depressed about *g*. I still intend to be in a foul mood on Friday, but it’ll be one of general grumpiness and ill-temper rather than bleak despair and bitterness. You can have fun with grumpiness – glaring and muttering darkly at people from beneath your eyebrows, or growling softly at anyone who aks you to do anything even slightly inconvenient, that sort of thing. To be honest I’m almost looking forwards to it. I even bought some new black shirts 🙂
Probably explaining this upbeat (for me 🙂 mood at least partially is the fact that Katie has invited me to her birthday bash on the following Sunday. It’s the first time anyone’s invited me to anything in ages (well, since Rebecca’s party in August), so it’s cheered me up somewhat.
(Well actually it’s not entirely true that I haven’t been invited to anything recently. In fact I regularly get invited to various Starwon events, but that’s because the company is co-located with them so hardly counts. The most recent was “New Year Drinks” last Monday. I didn’t go because a) I don’t drink, b) I only found out about it on Monday morning and, c) the invite included not only me but my “partner” which is a concept so hilariously asumptive that it makes me want to kick something 🙂
Anyway while feeling bored the other day I decided on the spur of the moment to do a vanity search on Google. You know, where you type in your own name? I’ve already done plenty on my real name (for a while there the number one link actually was about me, which was pretty cool :), and on “wyrmworld” which produced a few sites linking to mine, but I suddenly had the great idea to search on my user name, “dpwyrm”. The results? Well, to shove in another obligatory Stargate reference, chel nak!
I cannot express how immensely gratifying it is discover that people you’ve never met are not only using one’s creations, but holding entire message board conversations about them. It seriously rocks. True, the creation in question is only my fairly dodgy Camarilla test, and the people involved are only Vampire: The Masquerade fans, but hey, an audience is an audience, and for a week or so some months back I WAS THEIR GOD!!!!!!!
Ahem. OK, I’m sane again now. Goes right to my head it does *g*. Anyway a whole bunch of people on a whole bunch of Vampire message boards1 were doing my test and discussing the results. Which was highly gratifying. What’s also remarkable is that although a number of people disagreed with what the test told them (“I’m a Ventrue! Not a Toreador! A Ventrue!!” sheeze, get a life!2) I could not find a single person complaining about it being inaccurate or skewed. Which given that I based it on the free, downloadble PDF version of the game3, which contains some very simplified concepts, seems to imply that I did pretty well with it.
One of the things that helps, I guess, is that the code behind it4 isn’t just a simple teen magazine type of thing where a choice from column A gives you 1 point towards one result, column B towards another and so on. Each choice affects any or all of the possible results, positively or negatively. For instance if you say that you avoid social gatherings whenever possible, it won’t only give you points towards clan Nosferatu (who couldn’t get in to any respectable social gathering even if they wanted to), but take them away from clan Toreador (who would rather face final death than miss a party – depending on who’s attending of course). Then there’s some fancy number crunching going on to calculate the final outcome. I even made it use appropriate terminology for the result, so if your highest score in any category is 15%, it won’t tell you that you are that category, it’ll say you “might be” that category. People seemed to appreciate that little touch from what I could gather.
So, anyway I’m pretty chuffed. I’ve though about updating the program to include the other clans, but given that most internet users5 don’t go around wallowing in gore, communing with snakes, assasinating people for their blood or even worse things6, I don’t think there’s much point. Only inmates of high security mental hospitals would actually be getting the extra results. I’ll stick with the path of humanity for now I think 🙂
Anyway, I’m going to go and put counters all through my site. I know who’s linking to my homepage, but if I get this kind of rush from people using a stupid little test then I want to track down all my deep links damnit! 🙂
1 Well OK, about three. But come on, allow me my moment in the sun will you? 🙂
2 This from the guy who spent hours programming the test mind you 🙂
3 I now own a copy of the full game. Sheeze! I should get a life! 🙂
4 Pretty much the same code as the Stargate Date-o-Matic, although that’s an earlier version and seems to have a few idiosyncracies. I must go back and have a look at upgrading it.
5 Most internet users 🙂
6 I’m not even going to mention clan Giovanni!
