T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
A bit off-topic, but something’s happened to the Wavatars. Even in old threads – from before Shamus’ passing – everybody’s Wavatars are different. I really liked my little red guy with sunglasses, but now he’s gone. Is there anything you can do on your end to revert the change?
When we updated the blog software it appears to have updated the connection to the wavatars function. The update was necessary for ongoing security monitoring. The wavatar icon is auto-generated based on the email provided, and apparently that changed as part of the updates. I ran into that when upgrading a previous blog a couple of years ago. I have not *yet* found a way to specifically force a connection to the old algorythm, but I am looking to see if that can be adjusted in any way. You can visit the wavatar site and put in a preferred or custom avatar, for the record. That is, if you can find an example of your old wavatar, you could actually save it or capture it, then input it as a custom icon to be used.
EDIT: To be clear, yes technically this is through “gravatars” since there really isn’t a “wavatar” plug-in anymore. But somewhere in the update the call request is different now and produces a different result, even if the functionality is the same. The actual wavatar plug-in doesn’t function with modern wordpress, and even before the update there was no “wavatar plugin” being loaded; it’s already *in* the PHP/CSS.
I found my old Wavatar on Archive dot org, and I changed it in my Gravatar profile. It’s fixed now – even in the old threads. But that doesn’t change the fact that everyone else’s Wavatars have been changed. I regularly read old comment threads, and I know most of the regular commenters’ Wavarars by heart, and they help me navigate the threads more easily.
And as dumb as it sounds, I’ve really gotten attached to some of those goofy faces :(
So, I really hope you’ll be able to find a fix for this soon.
I’m glad it worked for you, and I’m letting everyone know, but I understand it’s a frustrating outcome. I don’t currently have a lot of hope this can be rolled back while keeping the updates, but there is a possibility there is some corner I haven’t poked that will have an answer.
I hated my old one anyway. I thought it looked like a racist caricature. This one is good, has a cute toof.
Ah, it’s back. Welcome back!
Got a lot of mileage out of that frame “Aragorn looks stage right, Legolas and Gimli look stage left”.
This one posted on Shamus’ birthday.