Last year it was SEO spam.

This year it might be DVD rippers.

During the last couple of weeks, the Wesnoth.org forums have been constantly hit with a “new” kind of spam involving DVD ripping software, which may also involve some kind of scam as the linked site contains a Buy button, amongst other things. I’m not touching it further; not even with my 5 mt. pole.

You read me right. It’s not new in the literal sense of the word, since I have seen this shit hitting us before, albeit at a much slower rate. If I recall correctly, I have banned no less than 6 accounts in less than two weeks because of the current trend.

Whoever invented it clearly targets a low-IQ demographic, with retarded statements such as the following:

Many DVD users want to enjoy their favorite DVDs on their portable devices

Nobody whom I know would, in their sane minds, watch a friggin’ movie on a device with such low resolution and display size. We’re mainly talking of Apple’s iShit devices, of course. And I’m not going to get into how “illegal” or not it is to break those lovely DRM restrictions.

Since I’m in a lazy mood today, I’ll leave the research of the purpose of this shady “marketing campaign” to my readers and loyal fans.

As I resolved to do last New Year, I’ve been progressing with After the Storm slowly at irregular intervals of time. During these last three days I’ve given it a bit of thought in regards to the future development plans and the road to 1.0.

I have settled for the following milestones:

• 0.3.0 — Ep. I, first act completed (scenarios 1 to 5)
• 0.4.0 — Ep. I, second act completed (scenarios 6 to 9)
• 0.5.0 — Ep. I, third act completed (scenarios 10 and 11)
• 1.0.0 — Ep. II completed

Right now AtS is about to hit the last set of changes needed for the 0.4.0 release. The first part of the ninth scenario is already finished in SVN trunk, and the second part is a work in progress. There are two art issues pending, but I plan to proceed with placeholders for now if it’s needed to have a release before the end of April.

I accidentally stumbled upon this Wesnoth.org forum post this night while searching for suspicious (read: spammy) activity — which gave me the following idea:

<shadowmaster> http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?p=481052#p481052
<shadowmaster> "Inferno8 and I have agreed that we want more publicity and exposure for the campaign, including promotion and review on indie gaming websites. [...]"
<shadowmaster> Espreon:
<shadowmaster> AI0867:
<shadowmaster> I have an awesome idea
<shadowmaster> let's take UtBS, IftU and AtS (and optionally TSL) out of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev
<shadowmaster> let's go big
<shadowmaster> let's create a separate OSS project for them
<shadowmaster> game engine included
<shadowmaster> let's strip Wesnoth of all the shit we don't need and build a better engine
<shadowmaster> for Project Y.
 * Espreon chuckles
<shadowmaster> DEAL? [Y/N]
<shadowmaster> We could even take Aethaeryn 's Thunderstone with us
<shadowmaster> think of it
<shadowmaster> "Project Y: Thunderstonecraft"
<Espreon> Someday Ignacio, someday. We don't have enough minions at the moment.
<shadowmaster> The Battle for Irdya!
    -- ##shadowm, 2011-03-07

I think this is a possibility I never considered before, and a fabulous idea which I should steal, in good old Shadowmaster tradition.

If you want to make this possible, join the IRC channel ##shadowm on chat.freenode.net with your favorite IRC client, or use one of the links below!

• IRC client link
• freenode webchat link

In case you can’t tell, this is a joke.