Ok. I may have goofed on the first book in The Tripods series earlier, but these are actually pretty fun reads. It’s not the deepest work of science fiction but it’s exciting and I like that the main character is flawed and prone to mistakes.
Looks like I am ending the year on a YA fiction kick. Prey is the story of a young boy (aren’t they all) who takes a job as a cattle herder for a mysterious wizardish guy. Yes, it’s mostly a thrilling tale of cattle herding. There are hints of magic and all that fantasy stuff but this is mostly about a kid who wants to show that he can do this job like a man, a manny, man man. You know what, it’s rather entertaining for what it is.
I think this is a reboot. Was there actually a plot in the original Doom? Whatever the case, this version of Doom is a vast improvement on the previous game in the series.
This is a return to the pure shooter style of early FPS games. There are a few cut scenes and all that, but who cares. The killer feature here is the ability to pull off gory finishing moves in order to gain health and ammo. And you are not just running backwards. The level design is impressive. They are bright a spacious with lots of verticality and room to move. And you will have to keep moving as the onslaught of demons is relentless.
OCD gamers can scour levels for secrets and challenges. I was just content blasting away.
This was an entertaining mess. I thought The Force Awakens was great, but it is so sad that whatever potential that was set up in that was so totally squandered by the sequels. This one is just a relentless sequence of “things happening” without any consideration for character development or logic.
Young adult fiction about giant three legged machines that transform children into mindless teenagers when they turn thirteen. So basically not much different than real life.
I have resisted migrating this site to Drupal 8 for years. Every time I looked into it there was some killer feature that D8 couldn’t do. The times I attempted testing out the process it was always a complete disaster. Well, time is running out on Drupal 7. The old system is slated for end-of-life in 2020 and it’s now or never for the “upgrade.”
In this post I am going to recap my experience in migrating a fairly simple Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8. Hopefully, someone facing the same issues as me will come across this post and will find something helpful.
Long story short, the migration process sucks bad. If you don’t have a little experience with directly manipulating a database or troubleshooting software in general, don’t even attempt it.
I am not a command-line guy. This was going to be a drush-free migration.The whole push in Web development towards command-line apps for everything has been one of the worst things to happen to the Internet. It is virtually impossible for a beginner to just jump in and start creating content. Developers have made huge strides in interface usability and yet the tools to create those interfaces are nightmares of horrible UI design puzzle-boxes that exist mostly as job security for entrenched Web devs. Thank Shatner for the few out there like Prepros.io who are at least trying to make new technologies user friendly.
The first hurdle for me was finding a decent local development environment that could handle Drupal 8. My old standby, Xampp, has become garbage in recent versions with no 64-bit support and no interface improvements. I found Wampserver64 and it has turned out to be fantastic. Most importantly, it allows me to run two different local domains, which is required as the migration process works by sucking an old site into a new one rather than overwriting an exiting Drupal 7 install.
After setting up a clean Drupal 8 install with all the migration modules installed I set about creating a plan of attack. Oh, as an aside, whatever you do, do not install the Migration Example modules. It will fill your new site with a bunch of garbage content and fields that don’t get removed when you uninstall the module. My first order of business was to determine which I my D7 modules had D8 versions. A spreadsheet and lots of notes proved helpful. I tried to limit only the most integral modules and skip any ones that are just cosmetic. A lot of popular modules have been added into the core, but in many case they are watered down versions (Menu Block stands out as particularly bad).
At that point I clicked all the buttons, watched and waited. It looked like most of the content came over but there are big problems with text-filters. If they don’t match with the new D8 filters, the content won’t render. That is really dumb. I had to log in too phpMyAdmin to manually change values. The next big problem was that my post were peppered with strange characters. This had to do with my Sql server not having correct character encoding. This article explains the fix you should do before migrating (I had to search and replace for hours because I failed to do this). Basically, add the following to mysql.ini:
[client]
default-character-set = utf8mb4
[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4
[mysqld]
character_set_server=utf8mb4
collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ciThe next big problem were comments. Only the most recent comments were rendering and I couldn’t see any difference between those and the bad ones. There appeared to be two tables for comments in the database: comment_field_data and comment__comment_body. Turns out if the langcode column doesn’t match between these two tables, the comments don’t render. More stupidity. Had to manually add “en” to the fields. Thankfully this site doesn’t have that many comments.
The next step was setting up the local.settings.php to disable caching and render theming helper code. A couple YouTube videos explained this pretty well, although I still am having to flush the cache to see changes half the time.
Views is a fantastic module. It’s the reason we all use Drupal in the first place. So, why the holy hell aren’t views migrated by default?! So freaking annoying! I had to recreate about 15 custom views manually in order to get many of the site features back. Don’t delete that Drupal 7 site yet. You will definitely need it for reference.
I then started installing and enabling various modules. Like I said earlier, things are different here in Drupal 8. Menu_Block is missing features, Menu_Position is just plain broken (a fix is in the works), Redirect is flaky and throws errors.
Everything to do with CKEditor is horrible. TinyMCE was orders of magnitude better. More robust, more advanced features, better looking, better integration with Drupal… sigh. I have a feeling I am going to be using code view a lot with CKEditor.
If there is one area where Drupal 8 is leaps and bounds better than D7 it’s the new Twig-based theming system. The syntax is far less cryptic. A simple {{ content.field_myfield }} renders a field. Perfect. My theme is far simpler than before, yet looks pretty good. Lots of fancy CSS layout tricks here that probably fail in Internet Explorer.
So, after about two weeks of poking at it, I finally launched the site on December 19th. Within about 30 minutes I got my first spam comment. I do miss Mollum. I’ve tracked down a few anti-spam modules, but it’s going to be tough. I gave up on comments on the Nonagon.us site long ago and this may be a losing battle. Out of my cold dead hands Russian bot farms!
And here we are, a couple days in and things seem to me working okay. I’m sure I will need to upload fixes very soon. There are always sections of the site I miss. And when my first round of analytic come in I may need to start hunting down broken links. In the meantime, click around and enjoy. (And buy my art!)
Well, I have finally made the jump to the newest version of Drupal. We are now running Drupal 8 and, man, was it a pain in the butt to migrate the old site. I will forever recommend WordPress over Drupal to anyone who doesn’t want to pull their hair out every time a new patch is released.
Still, there is a lot to like about the new system. I will soon post the gory details of my migration experience, but, in the meantime, let’s hope this works and that I am not swamped with comment spam.
GNOG is a cute little puzzle game in which you are left to click and poke around without any instructions and without knowing what your goal is. This is a little frustrating at first, but once you realize that you are trying to open up the big cartoon heads, things start to make sense. Or as much sense as opening up floating heads makes.
There are some common tactics: right-click to flip the box, figure out how to pop the back open, then things get weird after that. The main draw here is the surreal art and soothing music. It’s not that hard and it really just feels like a point and click adventure with no story. The game does get some negative marks for crashing on the end puzzle (with no way to get there without starting over) and for not working if you have Citrix receiver installed on your PC. Talk about weird.
Excellent Japanese zombie movie that isn’t quite what it seems. Avoid spoilers and just watch this. The title refers to the fact that the movie is built around one continuous take of a movie crew filming a zombie movie. Of course, eventually there are real zombies and we know the rest, right? Maybe not. The level of detail here is astounding.
Ruiner rages with a riot of red. So much red. It’s like an entire game based on a Photoshop filter applied to the R channel. I went in to this thinking it was going to be your standard twin-stick shooter like Nex Mechina and I was excited. No, this is one of those aim with the mouse, steer with wasd games. That control scheme always seems a little bit off and, when you’re in an isometric view, the aim never quite matches with your perspective. On top of this there are several special moves bound to other buttons. The most important of which is a chainable dash move. This is very awkward when you need to use you mouse both for aiming and positioning your dashes.
About two levels in to the game I was getting flashbacks to Until I Have You, which has similar cyberpunk aesthetics, but also has a game ruining control scheme. I gave that game a bad review on Steam describing it as being like controlling a game with a theremin. The developer then contacted me wanting me to elaborate. Awkward. That’s just about as weird as when Sweetwater Music calls you in regards to your online purchase of strings and a few guitar picks. There’s customer service and then there’s just leave me alone so I can never leave my desk and buy things on the Internet and rant anonymously in the middle of the night.
By that third level Ruiner had become so frustratingly hard that I was considering giving up. Then, in a moment of inspiration, I realized, “Hey, there’s an easy mode!” Upon switching down the challenge the game actually became fun. The whole point of the story is that your some cyber-modified human with unstoppable kill-powers. When you die every few minutes, you lose a bit of that key plot point. With the tempo is slowed down, I was able to wrap my reflexes around the janky controls and actually start to feel like I wasn’t just clicking randomly. Maybe the game could have used a more gradual difficulty curve to make normal mode actually playable to an old geezer like me. I recommend it. It’s short, über stylish, and spazzy fun.
