Can't get much better then this

Well, I just launched comicvine . It's a user submitted encycopedia for comic books with some fun social network tricks thrown in. It was built along with Ethan Lance in under 3 months.

There's not much to say other then go check it out and let me know what you think. The user submission stuff is pretty off the wall and hopefully people will dig it. It was definitely the most fun site to actually build.

Guilty pleasures... I love The Sounds on a Friday night with a couple beers in hand. The lyrics are probably the silliest you've heard since a Cardigans album (I love them too), but wow are these some catchy albums.

Random music thought:

Is it me, or are you not listening to much Belle and Sebastian anymore either? I can't sit through the last two albums of theirs.

Heh, I haven't done a GameSpot post in a long time, but felt like rambling about one of my favorite games of all time: Icewind Dale 2.

It's funny you know, I have this amazing gaming PC at home (my work machine on the other hand is a Mac) and despite it being able to put my xbox 360 to shame I find myself regularly loading up a 2D based RPG released almost 4 years ago by a legendary, though now defunct studio. What has me playing Icewind Dale 2 instead of Oblivion (which is a great game that I still haven't finished)? Party-based gameplay, best of genre strategic combat and the most varied character creation of any game ever released. Years later I still can sit for hours thinking up clever names and picking portrais for my sad band of pixelated hereos.

I remember seeing Greg give it an 8.3 all those years ago and completely agreeing with the score. It was a great game, but there was virtually no story and even then its Infinity Engine graphics were below par for the time. Neverwinter Nights was released around the same time and IWD2 was seen by the press as this last gasp funeral for people that just couldn't let go of games like Baldur's Gate. NWN and Bioware were supposedly taking us to the future of RPG gaming that would bring the genre to the mainstream. Little did we know that it would be another old-time stuido, Bethesda, that would usher us into that new era with Morrowind and Bioware would start making neutered Star Wars games.

Since 2002 I have played Morrowind twice, NWN and it's expansions once and Icewind Dale II six times. I have played virtually every single-player PC RPG released in the past 4 years and found that nothing comes close to IWD2's depth or fun factor. Somehow this old "8.3" game has provided enough replayability for me to load it up year after year and take a party of 4 to 6 characters (with silly names like "Kelgar", "Dash" and "Vicor") across a bloodied tundra of 40 hours of non-stop fighting.

At this point I've figured out why I love IWD2 so much and why I've continue to come back to it. The game is both very hard and very fair at the same time. Unlike most hard games you don't feel like the game is cheating you or unfairly assisting its monsters in some way. When you lose in IWD2, you lose because you made a mistake or you weren't thinking about how to attack a situation. This is true regardless of your party's composition, and because of that it is always fun to play. Of the six times I've played it through, I've had a completely different party that needed to utilize different strategies to get through the same difficult scenarios. I've died dozens of times on the famous "bridge fight", a battle that finds you flanked on both sides, running out of spells midway through the fight and relying on some clever positioning to keep all your characters alive.

The best way that I can describe the variety of combat to someone who is used to RPGs, but may not have played IWD2 per se is that in IWD2 your most powerful spells have nothing to do with damage. Although there are a lot of RPGs out there that give you lots of spells most of them end up being worthless; you end up just spamming the high damage spell trying to kill a single character. Not so in IWD2, your most powerful spells are things like sleep, color spray, grease and ray of enfeablement. While you'll use that fireball at some point, it's only after you've neutralized your enemy that you'll even bother to attack them.

Why is this strategy (which is super fun and stressful) so common in IWD2 but not other games of its type? Simply because in this game its not uncommon to fight over a dozen enemies at a time. If you tried to just attack them you'd be overwhelmed. Unlike Oblivion you can't just run around the arena with your shield up casting fireballs at those 2-3 powerful guys, there's no where to run in this game, the enemies are coming at you in large numbers and there's nothing you can do about it but lay down some debuff spells, hold that holds half of them off and then concentrate your damage at what is now a pretty fair fight.

The tension and skill you find that comes out of these types of battles is intense, and because your party is always so different with each new game, your way of combatting the situation will always change.

It's a hell of a ride and one I will likely return to again next year. If you aren't afraid of a challenge and don't mind looking at a bunch of sprites I highly recommend you check it out. That 8.3 might have been true for its time, but like a good wine, Icewind Dale 2 has aged quite well.

Finally caught the finales for both Big Love and the Sopranos. I'd have to say the Big Love one was the winner, with the last episode of the Sopranos being almost a snooze fest.

Slowly getting into the juicy pickup in Babylon 5 near the end of the 2nd season. Let's see, what else is up...

1. I'm really excited for Season 3 of deadwood.
2. I'm enjoying the new season of Huff.
3. Ethan and I are saying "pretty, pretty, pretty good" Larry David style at least once a day at the office. Maybe twice.

Started watching the new Sopranos season finally. Thank goodness for on demand. I'm only 3 or 4 episodes in but definitely digging the vibe this year.

I'm deep into Season 2 of Babylon. Thank god, the first season is painful.

boompa.com

On march 3rd Ethan Lance (also a former TV.comer) and I got an internet connection working in our brand new Berkeley office. Just 2 months later our first site is out the door, boompa.com . The build involved probably my most intense work schedule to date, with me sleeping at the office 3 nights out of six day weeks. Ethan did something similiar, except with a pregnant wife!

In any case, the site itself is a car, motorcycle, scooter, atv, plane...whatever has a gas pedal and gos community. If you like tweaking your rides, you'll prolly dig it, though we've got a long way to go and will need a lot of community involvement to succeed. It takes some ideas I've always wanted to attack (how to build a better message board/commenting system, how to make user submission easy, how to build an entire site out of community content, then how to provide that content free back to the userbase) and throws some new technology on top of it to make things elegent and fun.

Now that's not saying that it's anywhere near complete. As a 1.0 release it's missing some of the bells and whistles from previous sites I've run, and definitely a lot from sites that have had time to mature and find their voice, but it's a good foundation to start with. And hell, if we can build an entire website from scratch in 2 months, just imagine what we can do in one month to improve it! Or hell, what will the next site have in store?

I'm proud of it not only as a website, but as a case study for how to build for the web fast, lean and hopefully scalable. With companies spending millions of dollars to launch products with a similar core featureset, it's pretty cool we can replicate that kind of proffessionalism with two guys and a budget of a few thousand. Of course, a lot of this is hot air from someone proud of their work, only time will tell if people will actually use the damn thing. A nice site is one thing, but a nice site with traffic is another. Heh, and a nice site with traffic that can pay the bills is yet another.

Either way, it was worth the rush and was fun to get back to my roots and design/code again. Let me know what you think while the site still has that new car smell. Signup is pretty painless. Enjoy.

My boompa profile and blog is here. I'll prolly go back to strictly TV posts here.

First off, go see the movie "Brick", which is out in theaters at the moment. A great flipside noir.

And now for the reason I'm popping up to blog on TV.com at 330am when I can't sleep...

For some reason, two nights ago whilst drunk I purchased all 5 seasons of babylon 5 on Amazon. Now, while I definitely consider the series flawed in some respects, I had to pick it up now that the price isn't so crazy.

The core reason for the purchase though was that Smushmeg has me watching Farscape, which I'm having a real hard time enjoying. Don't get me wrong, the special effects are top notch, but the series has a corniness/cliche factor of 9 and it's wearing thin now that I'm into season 3. It's kinda like dude where's my car in space... or make that New Zealand.

Maybe I'm just a Stuffy Stufferson, but the show lacks any real heart. You've got this "living" ship, that doesn't really live or react to much. It just has this mushroom headed koopa trooper who tells you what its feeling, and only when the plotline needs it. The characters that live within the ship are hardly original, you've got your kirk, your klingon, your ferrengi, your telepath and your scary looking bad guy, because remember folks, if the bad guys look scary, that means they're evil. Worse yet I'm guessing the series was doing horrible attracting viewers so every episode they externalize their personal missions over and over. "Do you know that I haven't seen my son in 3 cycles"? Yes Dago the Klingon, because you've told me every episode.

In any case, struggling through Farscape made me realize just how good Babylon 5 was and how much I missed it. Sure it had some hit and miss acting (don't get me started on season 1 or Garabaldi) and has dated effects, but the G'Kar / Londo pairing totally tilts the show and in my mind is the best hot / cold duo in Sci-Fi. You heard that right Bones / Spock fans. You found pure shakespeare in G'Kar and the whole serial based "novela" storyline just makes for the kind of TV we're just now (10 years later) getting spoiled by with Lost and HBO. Plus the show has the type of epic sacrifice and tragedy that fans of George R.R. Martin would enjoy. Again, it's not perfect, and is far from my favorite show (see Scuba Wars), but if you haven't checked it out and can get past early 90s low budget special effects I highly recommend it.

As you can tell I'm looking forward to returning to the series, even if I have zero time to watch it these days. Between a girlfriend with little tolerance for sci-fi (luckily we share a love of HBO) and a reminiscent 80 hour work week (I'm working on a new site) I don't know when I'll get to watch it.

I'll admit to one thing though, it'll prolly be before I finish Farscape.

PS: a belated huzah! to the TV team for speeding up the site and polishing the chrome. It's looking both dandy and familiar.

Shout outs to the TV.com community, nice to see the same faces popping in and out of the boards. Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been busy lately working on a new site.

Allo duders. As fate would have it I've caught a nasty virus and started the new year horribly sick. It's definitely been weird not making the trip to work each morning, but I'm starting work on my new projects and getting really excited about starting with a clean slate.

Here's the breakdown of my media habits over the break:

Syriana: *** stars

Pretty good hyperlink flick and I enjoyed it much more then traffic, the directors other movie. It loses a star for having a very all over the place plot, which is pretty unavoidable in hyperlink movies, but this one seemed overly vacant.

Munich: *** stars

Speilberg movies are always good even when they are bad. This one loses a star for being a little too hammy in it's message. While I agree with what its agendas I think it was a little too straightforward. Loved seeing Caesar from Rome in in another part though.

Battlestar Galatica Season 2: **

Picked up the DVD set over break and made my way through it. Seemed extremely short and not as tight as the first season. The ending felt thrown on at the last minute and everything just seemed to move too fast.

Serenity: ****

The film version of Firefly hits all the right marks and is quality entertainment. If you are the guy who thought the new star wars movies lacked a cool han solo character, you should check this one out. I really hope the dvd sales help allow for a sequel.

Hello all-

This will come as a surprise to most of you... but I've decided to leave CNET at the end of this year. Now before the speculation from the TV.com detractors (read: banned users) begins let me first say this decision was completely voluntary on my part.

I've enjoyed my time here and feel I've accomplished a lot both with this site and the other GnE sites I've had the pleasure of working on (MP3.com and GameSpot). The reasoning for my departure then isn't that I don't love these sites, the fabulous people that work on them or the users that frequent them -- it's just that I'm simply exhausted.

In the past two years I've been the lead on a half dozen projects here and tended to stay in the office a little too long and a little too often. At the end of the year you always tend to look forward to the next one and for me that meant questioning whether I could deal with that kind of schedule and not completely crack under the strain. The honest answer to that question was that I can't and need to take some time off and then try something new that would be completely my own.

What does this mean for you guys? Very little. MissRibs will take over as the "official" voice for the staff here at TV.com and give you the skinny on what is new and happening with the site. Believe me, there's A LOT that's gonna happen with the site coming up and you guys are gonna be pumped. Stuff that I'll now get watch on the sidelines as I'll be moving into the easier role of becoming a simple TV.com user/fan and this blog (which I'll most likley continue to update) will likely turn into commentary about the TV industry and my personal feelings on shows and dvds. Who knows, maybe I'll try to grab some editorships!

Without getting too sentimental I'd like to say I've enjoyed working with everyone in the TV.com community trying to build a cool site. As I partly mentioned in my last post I'm very proud of what we've done here, the way TV.com has grown since launch and the unique user submission model it employs. I'm sure it'll continue to grow and solidify its position as the best TV site on the Internet, which is also why it's very, very hard to leave.

As to me? I'll be taking some time off, likely moving out of San Francisco to someplace more quiet, and starting work on a more personal project. On the off chance anyone needs to contact me or hell, wants to offer me a job, you can reach me at dave . snider (at) gmail . com

Thanks for everything.

/snider out

Funny that during all the bad press about Wikipedia the past couple weeks there seems to be a storm brewing over the TV.com article they have up there. Let me first start by saying I LOVE wikipedia. Much like this site I love its idealism and thoughts on communial agregation of content: the simple fact that two minds are often better then one. I love that although articles may start similar to the one that exists about TV.com there -- in the end they end up more or less objective. I think they've gotten a bad rap from the press.

That said, there's some pretty funny statements being made about us over there right now. The best one has CNET being likened to Enron. Wikipedia to its credit has the article flagged as containing "original research or unverified claims" and needs to be "cleaned up". Funny, apparently WIkipedia came to the same conclusions as I and the volunteer moderators here did about some users. Maybe the warning should read: "content provided by previously banned users". Which is fine I guess, I'm all for everyone having opinions. Obviously to be objective you've got to be critical. At the same time though part of me just wants to have a really comprehensive guide about the TV.com on Wikipedia (the GameFAQs one is pretty decent for example). The kind I haven't had time for to do right here.

To that regard I actually thought about jumping on the site and adding my own comments but then I thought about the premise of sites like wikipedia. The information they build is always told by that of the objective observer, not the originator or creator of the concept. This is true of all documented media. For example, you don't see documentaries shot by the people in them, but by some guy who has nothing to do with what is happening in front of the camera. Another example, TV.com's content is derived not from TV studios, but by TV fans. In a similar vein, the boards here are for the most part controlled by volunteers like Gislef and Villafan, not the staff. I'm very proud of that, more then anything else on this site.

Under that theory it should be the TV.com community and not the staff that has the final say on what the site really IS and becomes. How have we done, what did we do wrong, were we right in banning some people, and most importantly did the modifications to the submission system improve upon the groundwork at the already fabulous TVTome?

Obviously I'm biased and can't answer any of those questions but would instead point at things like an increase in site traffic and the fact that most of the stuff in the queue now is for shows and people that honestly, most of us have never heard of. To me, that means we're beginning to swing closer and closer to the end goal of being comprehensive. It means we're on to something here.

So the site is bigger, does that mean it's better? I could see a case against that as well. I don't like Britney Spears for example, so popular isn't always good. I do like Radiohead though and damned if they didn't have a number 1 album at one point. It's a subjective call. I know one thing, I respect the hell out of John for building TV Tome. I'm sure it was much easier building TV.com off his site, them him building TV Tome from scratch. I've had to do that before too, and it's not as easy as people make it out to be.

I think opening up submission to more users was a good thing. I think opening up reviews to everyone was a good thing and I think moderating content for guides in their early stages is a good thing. Then again, I designed this damned thing with a couple others here, so what are statements like that good for? What do you think?

Remember too that the article being built at Wikipedia isn't all wrong. It has a couple key criticisms that are valid and I can agree with from a user perspective (lots of ads), but can't from a business perspective (we need ads to keep the site free). I think it also tends to focus on the TV Tome transition more then TV.com the actual site and what it is now. For example, wouldn't this be a great place to put that unoffical FAQ? I bet you could build a pretty good one there about levels, submission waiting times from a user perspective, the "quotes and colons" debate...etc. Hell, wouldn't it be nice to just see a list of some of the larger community celebrities around here and what they are known for? Or hey, how about the tendencies of the staff, like... TV.com staff members are in love with Arrested Development and write about it whenever they can (we do). Where's the section for "most requested improvements" to the site? That kinda stuff would actually help not you guys, but us out.

What's my point? I dunno, I guess it's that I love the Internet and what sites like Wikipedia and TV.com are trying to do: build comprehensive resources for topics (in our case TV) simply by building tools for people instead of designing content by "professionals". I hope the Internet as a whole evolves further upon this concept as I'd love to get my future news not from CNN, but from some really good bloggers who avoid the company line and can make a living indepently. That said I'd still like everything to be objective and it takes more discipline to do that as an individual then it is as a community. It's the reason dictatorships never work.

In any case, it sure is fun to watch how that page will end up. I can tell you that personally it is very flattering for the people that work here to see other users trying to document our work.

/rant off

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In site news we're thinking about doing a auto-edit of all quote content on the site to standardize the formatting so that we don't clog up the submission queue with very small edits. Oh and by the way, the queue is getting a lot smaller lately. Congrats to missribs and crew for doing such a good job.

Well, I see we've got our first 51, with debstitch taking top honors. As promised, level 51 gets the "shattered" emblem in honor of shatterdaymorn, our first level 50 who, due to a very obscure bug, caused the site to crash for a day a few months back. We set level 51 to what we thought was "ridiculously high" and had intended to role back the scoring when we had time to do all the artwork and such. Little did we know that "ridiculously high" meant "oh, just a few months". In any case, congrats to the small 50+ group that's cropping up recently.

Since we're coming up on the end of the year lemme note that a lot of people here are taking vacations and will not be around during the holiday season. As you'd imagine this will mean that submissions for shows without an editor will probably take a little longer then normal, especially between christmas to new years. Don't worry, we're just as addicted as you are and will still be fixing issues as they pop up.

CPs are back. Bleh, we messed up last week and didn't notice it because of the break. The good thing is this latest incident is making me realize we need to initiate some daily QA on the site other then the "let's just check the boards" style we've employed lately.

Anyways... on to the next bug. Can I please get some more feedback on the "blank submission" bug? What day did this start happening, is it still happening, what show/episode is it, are you seeing any information...etc. We think it's that the info is there, but that it's not replicating to a couple servers. For example, if you refresh a couple times, will they show up eventually.

Last but not least G.A.M.E, CNET's big concert/game show is happening on Friday. You can get tickets on the site, it's in San Francisco. If anyone is going or wants to go, I'll be there along with a bunch of the editors and developers so if you ever wanted to request features or tell us how much the site sucks, you can attack me there. I won't have much to do there, so it'd be cool to talk with some of you guys about the site.

Also, if you are in town and happen to be a TV.com editor, I'll hook you up with free passes, just send me a PM with your email addy. Our way of saying thanks for helping build the most comprehensive TV site on the web.

Smushmeg is on the contributor points problem. Sorry, the holiday break kinda threw us off our routine. It should be resolved soon.

On another note, TV.com is doing better then ever these days in traffic, which is due, in a large part, to all our users. So congrats.

Well, the spellcheck popup now works for most user submission forms. It could use a little love on the UI side, but it's there and available to use. You just heard the data team here through a party btw. One of their bigger griefs is dealing with spelling mistakes on submissions.

We've also added a bunch of tools to our backend to help us match TV data up to our TV.com data so you should gradually see more matches, which means better personalized results over the next few weeks.

Also, let me bring this up. Recently there have been several reports of various users "gaming" the system to increase their point scores and level. We will and continue to monitor and investigate such reports on a daily basis. If any user has a history of such submissions (say, changing an "and" to an "&" for no reason) you will be forcably retired, or more likely, banned from submission alltoghether.

That said, I've seen tons of posts from editors who get overtaken by other users and are thrilled someone is taking over their guide and contributing to the overall wellness of the site. For those guys, we truly appreciate having you use our site and understand that the editor system isn't about having control, but about trying to build, with many others, the best TV site on the net.

Sorry about the downtime we experienced yesterday. We've been doing tweaks to our backend and had a couple hiccups. Everything should be stable now.

Sorry for the delay, submissions are now back online. Bet you guys got scared when your level went to zero

Muhahaha!

We'll be shutting down user submission around 3pm PST for some scheduled maintenance to our servers. It won't be down long and should be back by the end of the afternoon.

In other news we have a spell checker on the way for submissions and some other goodies. We also launched a features tab to the top nav to highlight some of our meatier content now that we're getting more content like the Buffy DVD exclusive. Check it out.

Also, did anyone catch last week's Rome? I *heart* that show and love the way it's going here at the end of the season.

First off, users who get spotlighted on the front door now recieve a PM letting them know the scoop. We've also changed those tools a bit to make them easier to change up.

As you've probably noticed we've been retiring editors a bit more now that we're getting a little more settled in with the submission load. We will be adding some clarification as to why and when we do this sort of thing in the official FAQ. Also, I'm hoping we can get the FAQ moved off the boards to someplace a little more official and polish it up with some screenshots and possibly videos.

For those who care, the wedding went great. It was for a buddy of mine that used to work on TV.com and was in the bahamas of all places. Met some cool new people and overall had a fantastic time. A good mix of drunken crazyness and fun wedding stuff.