The Bibliography page here at the Alexandrian — listing the more than two hundred books, articles, and reviews I’ve had published — has been updated and integrated into the WordPress site!

(That only took about four years longer than it should have…)

The layout of the new page is not as pretty as the old bibliography, but it’s far more accessible now and the buy links actually work properly. You can check it out here, or below the fold.
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A hodgepodge of updates about the site that you may find useful.

LISTS OF COOL STUFF

Many, many moons ago I updated the Alexandrian to WordPress. One of the things that got lost during that transition were the old index pages (like this one for RPG-related content). I was hoping to rebuild them quickly, but it turned out to be time-consuming and WordPress wasn’t friendly towards the formatting and… well, it didn’t happen.

It still hasn’t happened. But I have added a couple of indices that you may find useful: Gamemastery 101 (featuring links to the various adventure design essays, the Art of Running articles, open game table stuff, and Random GM Tips) and RPG Scenarios (including original scenarios and remixes for D&D, Gamma World, Orkworld, and Eclipse Phase). Links to these can also be found in the sidebar on the right.

I do try to make robust use of tagging and categories. Hopefully those, combined with the search function, will help you find other stuff quickly. But the primary utility of the indices is to make it easy for new readers to find the “big” stuff quickly, so hopefully I’ll find time to do more of these in the near-ish future.

TWITTER

I’ve added a Twitter feed to the right sidebar. If you’re also a twitterer, I would like to encourage you to do the thing where you stalk me online (or follow me or whatever). I don’t know if I’ll be saying anything as interesting as “the piercer is now the juvenile form of the roper”:

But if you find the things I say here vaguely interesting, you might find the things I say on Twitter vaguely amusing.

SUNDAY SHAKESPEARE

A few years back I ran a theater company called the American Shakespeare Repertory. Our primary project was the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare and while running that project I wrote a number of (hopefully elucidating) essays and posted them to ASR’s website. In the near-ish future, I’ll be shutting down ASR’s old website, so I’ll be transferring this old Shakespeare-related content here to the Alexandrian in the form of “Shakespeare Sundays” over the next several months.

Spam on this site has gotten out of control over the past few months. I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to the Alexandrian lately and, unfortunately, most of that time gets chewed up just trying to stay on top of the spam.

So I’m increasing the moderation filters on the site: This means that your comments are much more likely to hit the moderation queue and will require manual approval before they get posted. Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully it will make this place look a little bit less like a Russian garbage dump.

As of right now, I have issued refunds to all of the backers who have sent me an e-mail confirming their Paypal address.

If you are a backer who has not received a refund, it’s because you either haven’t sent me an e-mail or I haven’t received it. If it’s the former, please contact me ASAP at legendsandlabyrinths@gmail.com. If it’s the latter, please leave a comment here and we’ll figure it out (since there seems to be something wrong with our e-mail connection).

(There are three refunds currently pending through Paypal, but everyone associated with those should have received an explanatory e-mail from me and know who they are.)

This has taken a little bit longer than I had hoped. I’m afraid my health issues have been prodigiously slowing down my productivity: I talked about the MRSA infection I had on my face a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, just as I was starting to feel better I ended up having a massive allergic reaction to the third set of antibiotics they put me on. I was briefly hospitalized when my doctor became concerned that all of the skin on my body might blister and fall off. (Holy shit!) That turned out to be not the case, but I did spend a good chunk of the last week having 90% of my body covered in a painful rash and looking as if I had Maori facial tattoos designed by Jackson Pollock.

All things considered, I don’t recommend it.

In any case, after three full weeks of being ill I seem to finally be on the mend. (But I am vigorously pounding divots into my wooden desk as I say that.) I’m afraid fresh content may be a little thinner on the ground here at the Alexandrian during the month of August than I had hoped, but we’ll see how it goes. At the very least, I’m hoping to put the finishing touches on both The Art of Pacing and the Film Banging series.

Comments have been opened yet again. So obviously the WordPress bug that’s periodically turning off comments on all the posts on the site has still not been resolved. If ya see the comments closed at any point in the future, please feel free to drop me an e-mail and let me know.

On the back end, although Akismet has been doing a generally great job keeping spam off the actual site, the Alexandrian has been getting hammered by spammers. (500+ spam comments per day.) So it’s clear that the math problem anti-spam thing has been completely cracked. On the basis of nothing except my gut, I suspect that all this spam may be triggering the bug.

So I need a new solution for preventing the spam from getting posted in the first place. Therefore, the math problems are gone and we’re going to be trying out a Turing Test check box. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

What I’m hoping to avoid is a CAPTCHA system. I find them to be both annoying and a bit of an eyesore. But I’ve got to do something to shoo away all these Russian Viagra dealers. (I blame myself for the essays I wrote about my translation of The Seagull. Apparently if you put Cyrillic text on your website you’re basically laying out a welcome mat for Russian spammers.)