You might have heard by now that Stan Lee passed away (which, sadly, is another celebrity death that I care about).

The only time I saw him was at FanExpo Vancouver 2013. Here he is, signing my friend’s Spidey book. “Thank you very much for all the stories” my friend said. “Oh, you’re very welcome” Stan said.

A bit later, all the Marvel cosplayers gathered for Stan, and for a minute he kinda looked like a nerdy version of Hugh Hefner.

Farewell, Stan!

I recently published version 0.8 of Wikked, my plain-text-files/SCM-backed
wiki engine, followed immediately by a quick little patch release. Grab it as
usual with a pip install wikked -U!

Although there are a few interesting new things in this release, the more
important announcement here is the launch of the official website
running itself on Wikked! Head over there now and tell me if anything
looks broken!

Keep reading if you want more information about all this.

New and Improved

There is now a simple way to upload files to your wiki – both as global files
(uploaded to the _files directory) or as page-local files (uploaded next to
the current page’s file). It looks like this and yes there is room for
improvement 🙂

The permission system has been re-written to use a more standard ACL-type model. You can check out the help section on permissions for more information…

…which leads me to the new help pages. You can see them on the official
website, but they come bundled with any Wikked wiki, since they’re part
of the source code. As such, they’re read-only (although you can edit them and
submit a pull request if you spot a mistake!). You can access them from the
“Help” link at the bottom of any wiki page.

Another thing you might have noticed with that link to the help section on
permissions is that Wikked now generates links for each heading on a page.

Last but not least, I re-did the UX of the navigation menu so that it finally
works correctly on both desktop and mobile browsers.

The Official Wiki

The other big new thing is the official Wikked wiki, which runs on
Wikked (unlike the previous official project page which was just a static page
generated with my other big web project, PieCrust).

Right now it looks a bit like this:

There’s not much to say about this besides “it’s about time”. There’s not even
much on that wiki yet – most of the content comes from the aforementioned new
help pages.

I wonder how long it will take until somebody finds a security hole in Wikked
and adds a dick pic to the home page. Oh well, I’ll worry about that if Wikked
actually gets popular… and even then, if you really want to post dick pics,
you can already do that on the Wikked sandbox wiki or, well, anywhere
on the internet, really.

And that’s it! If you haven’t checked out Wikked yet, give it a go:

1. pip install wikked
2. wk init mywiki
3. cd mywiki && wk runserver

Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, Greg Stafford passed away. He was best known as the founder of Chaosium (one of the greatest role-playing game publishers in history), co-designer of RuneQuest (one of the greatest role-playing games in history), and creator of Glorantha (one of the greatest fantasy universes in history).

Since then, there has been a lot of talk about his life and legacy, but I can mostly recommend Ken and Robin’s Special Podcast Episode, which has several anecdotes about Greg, and the Chaosium Forums’ Condolence Thread, which has quite a few nice pictures, stories, and words on the subject.

Now, the folks at Chaosium recently made a call to play a game in honour of Greg next weekend (November 10th). Although you can frankly play any game and be certain that Greg Stafford had at least some kind of indirect influence over its design and/or its author, it’s obviously even better if you play a game that is more directly linked to him. Sadly, our weekly Friday game night is on a hiatus from our Call of Cthulhu campaign – that would have been our best homage to Greg, short of playing RuneQuest or Pendragon. But what we’re doing is still not too bad, as we just started a 7th Sea one-shot adventure, and John Wick, the game’s author, recently posted a nicely worded blog post about how much influence Greg had on his career (which includes L5R in addition to 7th Sea).

So I guess we’ll be plundering ships and fighting sea monsters for the occasion.

Farewell, Mr. Stafford.