Archives

Posts in this blog’s archives (see the pulldown over there —> ) prior to 12/2001 were originally part of the nigh-on-legendary Lum the Mad website. It was a blog before blogs were blogs. Oldschool! They used to be at a seperate site, but advances in blog technology probably already pioneered by the porn industry allows them to coexist peacefully with my newer, kinder, gentler blog entries.

Ironically, the posts made during the lumthemad.net years (early 1999 to summer 2001) are now outnumbered by the meandering blogging I’ve done here at brokentoys.org since (late 2001 to the present day). Damn, I feel old now.

The following attempts to answer some of the questions posed by this random collection of years-old rantings about MMOs you probably don’t play any more.

What is this place?

This is the collected archives of my online writings over the past decade or so. (OK, I really feel old now.) The great majority are MMO related. I used to run a site called “The Rantings of Lum the Mad” which yelled a lot about MMOs. When I took a job with an MMO company I stopped yelling. Now I have a blog at http://www.brokentoys.org/ which has somewhat softer yelling. In pastel hues.

Who are you?

I’m Scott Jennings. I write a lot. Some would say not enough, others would say too much. You can find out more here.

Gosh, these archives are a mess.

I’m sorry, you must phrase your response in the form of a question.

OK, smartass, why are these archives in such a mess?

A number of reasons. One, and most important, I’m really busy and really lazy (the two states constantly war within myself, which results in lots of interesting gastrointestinal ailments). Two, when dorking with the lumthemad.net engine in 2000 I managed to wipe out every posting date for about 5000 posts. This is why you see “December 2000” followed by “December 1999”. Assume everything listed under “December 1999” is, well, earlier. You can search of course and I expect our noble overlords at Google will have everything nicely indexed in about ten minutes of my posting this.

So, is EVERYTHING from lumthemad.net here?

No. First off, the first six months or so that the site was up, it used the incredibly keen data storage technique of “editing an HTML file”. Eventually I realized that I was creating a whole lot of HTML files and moved to blog software. As this was before everyone and his dog had a blog (and before the word itself was invented) this was not an easy process and I finally wrote my own out of sheer frustration. Of course for the site you’re reading now? I hit the “Install a WordPress Blog” on my web dashboard. Time changes everything. But anyway, to go back on topic, I entered the first few months into the blog database but, as with most things MMO-related, I in short order got bored and stopped. So there’s about a six month or so gap. Also, “special features” like game reviews that had their own directories are gone. You might be able to find some using web.archive.org, or not.

Hey, most of the links in these articles don’t work. Why not?

Congratulations on discovering that the Internet does not remain static over a period of years.

Can I have a cookie?

Sure, knock yourself out.