Category: General

From Greendale.tk to WickedMessenger.net: A Domain Migration Story

About a week ago, I noticed something troubling—my old domain, greendale.tk, was no longer reachable. After a moment of confusion, it dawned on me: the registration renewal was up. The domain had been extended back in December 2023, and I’d completely lost track of time.

Here’s where it gets weird: you can still log into Freenom and see your domain listed there, but they’ve stopped sending renewal notices. The domains just… fade away into the digital ether.

Naturally, I did some digging and discovered that Freenom has been embroiled in legal troubles. They were sued and are facing serious financial difficulties—articles like this one and this one here paint a pretty clear picture. Their website still exists, but they’re no longer renewing or handing out domains. Somehow, I’d completely missed this news.

The silver lining? I still had wickedmessenger.net sitting unused in my portfolio. So I rolled up my sleeves and migrated the site—running some MySQL queries on the database, updating my information with Google, and adding the new domain to their search engine.

Not that I’m drowning in traffic these days. A few old LOST reviews still get the occasional visitor, and honestly, the golden days of blogging are long behind us. But this site remains something I treasure: a living archive documenting nearly 20 years of thoughts, interests, and moments in time.

So here’s to new beginnings: greendale.tk is dead—long live wickedmessenger.net!

Gaming 2019

The year started off a bit slow for me gaming wise. I think I was a bit burned out by it and mainly watched Netflix series, I rewatched Friends if I remember well. Then in Febuary the Civ VI expansion Gathering Storm came out. After watching a few marbozir videos, I decided to get it and it made me finally ejoy Civ VI. I had tried a few runs before, but never really grabbed me, it didn’t seem like a complete game. In my opinion Gathering Storm made it complete.

YouTube player

In may Total War: Three Kingdoms came out, it was nice, but I found the campaigns / games dragging on a little too long. Also sometimes you got into a stallmate of some kind and the game didn’t really go anywhere. It was cool to see a strategy game in the top 10 most played games for a few days or weeks though. And it is a very good game regardless of my gripes.

Anno 1800

Around the same time, by the end of April, one of my favourites for this year came out, the citybuilder / logistics game Anno 1800 by Ubisoft. I had a lot of fun with this game. The campaign was relatively short, though the story was decent. The sandbox mode is where it’s at. I usually disable the pirates too, since I don’t think the combat aspect is very good. It was more annoying than anything else to find your ships in ruins, because you overlooked a pirate attack.

Screenshot of a town in Anno 1800

The DLCs that came after the release, were nice as well, especially the first one Sunken Treasures. It gives you a very large new island in a new region to build on, and a vessel with a diving bell you can use to search for treasure. The second dlc, Botanica was a little underwhelming, bit short of content. The third one, the passage, was pretty big with a new region and a new story. Though I have to admit I haven’t played it much since I have the feeling I have pretty much seen and done most that the game has to offer. I have about 70hrs into it now. The first part of the game is the most fun part to me. Once you have eletricity and people that need it, you need to redesign your cities in order to be able to use the trains and move the oil to your power plant, which is pretty much a pain. All in all a great game and one of the best of the year for me.

Continue reading Gaming 2019

SQUAD: To the mun and back

A very interesting article appeared on polygon.com about Kerbal Space Program. It’s not your regular article about the game, but more about how it came to be, and a history of Squad, the company that has created this masterpiece. And how one man’s dream came to be. Originally it wasn’t even supposed to make any money, it started as just a side project. I didn’t even know Squad is originally a marketing company (and apparently still is !).

You can find it at http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/1/27/5338438/kerbal-space-program

Lost 5×08 – LaFleur

lost-5x08b

This week’s episode of Lost was very enjoyable. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing mind numbing, just a nice story ! As Ryan of the transmission put it:

Tonight we get an episode that not only spans three years, but jumps back and forth relentlessly. It played games with our expectations, and it gave us even more new characters. But somehow it worked. It had heart. It had velocity.

To be honest I don’t have much to add to that, there aren’t that many questions or answers in this one. We just got to see how our islanders became a member of Dharma around 1974, and then spend 3 years waiting for Jack and the others to come back. I wonder how and when they will get back to ‘our time’ or Locke’s time again though, I assume we will learn in the latter parts of this season ? We get a two week break now, but no major cliffhanger this time. Definately looking forward to the rest of the season !

lost-5x08d

Links:

The Transmission

TV Squad

lost-5x08alost-5x08c

WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 has been released ! I upgraded my blogs to 2.5 and it seems to work fine. The admin part of wordpress has been overhauled, and the dashboard is now actually more useful. Although it takes some getting used to. The 4 most important functions (write, manage, design, comments) are more prominent and are displayed on the left, settings and plugings, users are on the right in a smaller font on the right. Only thing I dont like is the new write post page, the category selection is now below the write area, don’t really see why that was changed, though it’s not a big deal. At least it looks better.

I also think that wordpress 2.5 feels somewhat snappier, when loading pages etc. and on one blog (my warcraft one) a php out of memory that sometimes occured, has disappeared, so that’s good ;).

All in all a very nice upgrade I think. If you haven’t done so you might want to consider upgrading your wordpress installation as well !

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

Comparison between 2.3 and 2.5