Doing My Part

It seems like spam is unavoidable and inescapable on the internet, and those who perpetuate just don't seem to understand that nobody likes them and that they'll die alone.  I've been receiving spam comments on this very blog from some SEO/whatnot company, who has taken the extra step to impersonate Blogger in the process of spamming.  I'm not going to link their shit because they don't deserve the attention, but I did investigate them, whois their domain, and submit an abuse report to their registrar.  I realize it's a total long shot with a minimal chance of success, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

"Why not just report them to Google?"  I've done exactly that.  Unfortunately, the report process for "impersonating a business" actually requires you to be a representative of said business.  I had to report them for some other reason and just mention in the comment box that Blogger itself was being impersonated.  Being that Google is a giant faceless corporation that doesn't pay any attention to anyone if they don't have bags of money to throw around, I don't expect anything to come of it.

The domain registrar, while being the long shot I've already admitted that it is, is still a much more likely avenue of success.  Below is the message I sent them via their abuse report page:

This company is spamming my blog on Google's Blogger service, and likely many other blogs as well.  Thankfully, I have comment moderation enabled and none of their spam comments are actually visible (because I've been manually marking all of them as spam).  They are impersonating Blogger in the process of doing this, and Google gives me no avenue to report them for it.  I realize this is a long shot, but I simply seek to strike back against them in any way I can.

Their profile on Blogger (the link "My Web Page" links to <domain redacted>, I used an internet whois service to find your site): <link redacted>

Even though the comments were never published, I get email notifications of comments on my blog that contain the full text of each comment, and can forward any number of them to you if necessary.  This has been going on since June 2016, basically since they registered their account on Blogger.

We'll see what happens.  If you're actually reading this and want a follow-up, I'll probably just edit this post.  There may not be a follow-up, though, it depends entirely upon the domain registrar's response, if I even get one.

I have Super Mario Maker now

Since this month contained my birthday, it apparently means I get a 30% "Just For You" discount on one of a few select titles on the Wii U/3DS eShop.  It was either going to be New Super Mario Bros U + New Super Luigi U (a two game bundle!), or Super Mario Maker.  As you could infer from the title of this post, I went with Super Mario Maker.  I had about $10 left over from the $50 eShop card I got for Christmas last year, so I only had to part with a little over $30.  I've wanted Super Mario Maker for a long time anyway, whereas I only have a general level of interest in NSMBU/NSLU, so the choice was clear.

I haven't done much in it other than the accelerated method of unlocking the course elements.  What is that, you ask?  Well, I feel like it's already pretty well documented, but since you're here:

1. Go into the editor, place things.  I hate having "New!" indicators on things, so I placed everything I had available.
2. Make a large square of blocks, and copy/paste it a bunch.
3. Eventually the game will tell you that you'll get the next batch of unlocks tomorrow.  That takes too long, so keep pasting things.
4. The game will give in after a few more pastes and give you the next set of stuff now.
5. Change level styles and game styles as you unlock them.  Or at least, that's what I did, I dunno how essential it is.  Play around with things while you're there, you might as well.
6. Repeat until it says you have everything.
7. If it won't let you paste any more, use the rocket to erase everything and start over.

Also, you may have seen in videos that different people have different cursors for placing stuff in the editor.  The default is the hand with the stylus, but it can be changed.  Nothing ever says how, so you just have to mess around pressing buttons until you figure out that pressing the analog sticks in will cycle through the available cursors (and change whether they're right handed or left handed).

Finding levels to play is the next step.  Fortunately for me, I've watched a bunch of Mario Maker videos, so I know of a bunch of good creators going in.  Unfortunately, Nintendo doesn't make it easy to follow a creator.  You have to get one of their levels, either by entering the course ID on your Wii U, or through the bookmark website, then you can find their profile in-game and follow them.  Nintendo's idea of a search is "enter the 16-character hexadecimal unique identifier for the level that you already know you want to play".  No, sorry, that isn't a search.  Let me type in a creator's name and find them that way.  Let me follow a creator from the bookmark website.  Let me search for a level by name.  Fortunately, the community has stepped up and created makersofmario.com, which makes finding levels a bit easier.

The bookmark website is otherwise really nice.  You can bookmark levels on your computer, and then they show up in your bookmark list in-game.  This makes it a lot easier to use their bookmark system, because entering course IDs on the gamepad touchscreen is far less preferable to being able to use a mouse and keyboard to navigate a website.

Playing levels is only half the game, though.  What about making them?  Well, I do have a few ideas.  I'm not going to say anything about them now, since I haven't really played around with what's available to see how possible everything is.  It won't be worth doing an entire blog post about each level I make, so the way to find my stuff will be to follow me on either Miiverse or Twitter.

Wii Fit U, six months in

Just like last month where I lost 14 pounds, I got the complement of 16 this month in order to get that extra ten pounds.  I'm now 80 pounds down, and have 20 to go until I reach my Scientifically Determined Ideal Weight™, which is of course what I will weigh if I can get my BMI to 22.00.

Anyway, descriptions of things and general complaining and whatnot after the break.

FUCK

FUCK

Crossword Puzzle Rant Part 2: Supported With Evidence

So a while ago I had a post that came out of nowhere about crossword puzzles.  I offered plenty of hypothetical examples in that rant to support my arguments, but I didn't offer anything taken from actual crossword puzzles.

Now, because not all crossword puzzles contain every element that I ranted about, some will naturally be missing, but hopefully, you'll see what I mean, perhaps a bit more clearly.  My example crossword is one you can easily locate and work on yourself, since it was a Google Doodle.  Fair warning, if you want to do the crossword and don't want answers given to you, you may wish to do the crossword before continuing to read this post.  Jump break here, just to be nice.

Oh Hi There

So, Twitter's had these things called Twitter Cards for a while now.  You've probably already seen them in action.  When you post a link to a website, there will be a box with information about the link as opposed to just a plain link.  That's the Twitter Card, and it's dead simple to implement.

It's all in your page's <meta /> tags.  I'm not going to go in-depth describing how to do it here, because Twitter's got a whole section of their developer site for that.  There's a bit of finagling to get it working on Blogger since you have to edit your template, and if you want to customize them at all you'll end up having to learn Blogger's template language.  Thankfully, it's XML-based, so it's not completely terrible.

Blogger's template language isn't without its shortcomings, though.  The vast majority of the data you might want to work with is only available to specific page widgets.  For instance, on the Twitter Card for my blog's archive pages (click a year or month header in the archive section to get one such page), I wanted the title to just be my blog title, and the description to say something like "Post archive for $MONTH $YEAR".  While there's a way to get the date of the archive, it's only available within the archive widget itself, and not available to the whole page, even when the page is an archive page.  I had to settle for leaving the archive's date in the title and just putting "Post Archive" in the description.

Also, their template language completely barfs all over the place if you have the nerve to try and prepend a string to a data variable.  Appending works beautifully, but prepending causes the whole thing to fail.

Now, in any other language, I'd just go "oh, well, the page title contains the archive's date, I can just test for page type, and if it's an archive page, use string functions to pull the archive's date out of the title and stick it in the description instead!", but we don't get anything nearly as fancy as that here.  I'm basically stuck with what I've got until their template system gets more powerful.

Theoretically I could submit feedback about this, but the trouble with that is, this is Google we're dealing with.  I'm not going to get a response.  In all reality, I'll be completely ignored.  They're not going to implement some random suggestion that one guy would find useful; they'll only implement what they come up with because then it's "cool".

Anyway, when I link my new posts on Twitter, they'll now have Twitter Cards instead of just being plain links.  This change doesn't seem to apply retroactively, so don't go looking through my old tweets for it.

Wii Fit U, five months in

Still going strong.  I'm down by 64 pounds at this point.  It looks like I'm plateauing, but I'm not really.  I'm having fewer random weight gains, and to go along with it, the weight losses are also getting smaller.  However, I'm still losing about the same amount per month.  So, there's still confidence.  The plateau will come eventually, don't get me wrong, but hopefully not for another month or two.

My pre-MAGFest goal is 80 pounds down, which is more than achievable at my current rate of weight loss.  Honestly, I might be able to get closer to 90 if things work out right, which would be amazing since the magical 22 BMI that Wii Fit U says is ideal is pretty much exactly 100 pounds down for me.  Let's do things differently and stick the picture of my last month's graph up here instead of down at the bottom!

And now, how about a jump break!  Look at me!  It's almost like I'm a real blogger!