Pack Rat
Date: November 7th, 2001 @ 00:00
I used to be a contributor to a site called “The Rantings of Lum the Mad”, and its successor, “Slownewsday.net”.
As the original site went away, followed by its archives, I was reminded of all the interesting discussions I read and participated in from the old 8-bit BBS days. Then, we didn’t value our archives; having an online storage of archival material was expensive (it meant having a separate expensive external floppy drive for each disk you wanted to host simultaneously - 10 meg hard drives were out of the question, as they cost several thousand dollars), and having thorough records of past threads really wasn’t a priority.
Today, there’s no such excuse. We don’t have to carve the present at the expense of our archives. We can have it both ways. In that interest, I’ve archived my own contributions to that site. Sadly, I only have the right to archive my own work online, so most of the truly great moments are gone. At least we still have Kiki.
Update: It is fittingly ironic that while I was in the very process of creating the LTM-era archive, slownewsday.net collapsed in a spectacular conflagration of egoes, unprofessionalism, and bile due to what appeared to the readers to be a very overplayed disagreement between Mythic, developer of Dark Ages of Camelot, and current and past members of the SND staff. Of course, it’s never that simple, is it? My take on the whole thing is that there were far too many people acting far too unprofessionally who presumably should have known better, on “both” sides of the issue. Somewhere along the way, the developers’ and the site’s obligations to the community seem to have wandered off. Hopefully the Diaspora of Lum the Mad won’t forget this.
I’ve added an archive of the SND logos I created for the launch of SND and those created afterwards (some of the holiday logos and unofficial logos haven’t been seen).
[The logos are also in the continuation for your convenience. All ltm/snd articles I archived are also reflected in the current content management system.]
Logo graphics for Slownewsday.net.
I created these logos slownewsday.net. Most of them were created in advance of the 1 October 2001 launch date, and some of them were created, for various purposes, after. There were a few recurring features. A general format was followed for the series, which specified how the site title, tagline, and quotation should appear. Keeping this consistent made for a more effective logo when the conventions were purposefully dropped.
All of the logos in the main series rotated on the site, and the Halloween logos were swapped in a week in advance of Halloween. The other holiday logos were never seen in rotation. I’ve also included other “unofficial” logos which were, for whatever reason, not kept in site rotation, though were used in posts, forums, or elsewhere.
Elements from classic lumthemadnet.com era were given tribute and parody in this collection as a nod to the community which graciously indulged us in our public changing of the guard; many old dead horses, fiascos, and in-jokes were referenced in order to make all our old guests feel at home in our new lounge. Not every person would ‘get’ every gag, but hopefully most readers would click with most. I found myself having to explain very few of them.
1999 This was the very first SND logo! This was a take on Prince’s name change and, by inference, the change from lumthemad.net to slownewsday.net. |  |
Kiki Kiki (whose picture appears) and Kakori (whose quote appears) have a bit of a history. The short version is that both were tributes of a sort to the Japanese MMOG players, whose play style and communities have their own colorful personalities. In both cases, I was only responsible for the graphics (and the tagline), but the quoted text was written by Ely, who has a deeper insight into the Hokuto player mind than I shall ever obtain. |  |
Elf 1 Having often railed against the idea of including “generic fantasy” elements such as elves in MMOGs, I appreciated the opportunity to parody myself by featuring a Baldur’s Gate elf in a logo… |  |
Elf 2 …so much so, that I decided to rotate two very similar logos. Keebler elves are powergamers. |  |
Coffee The crowd gets restless in the morning. No less so, sadly, than on the final day of slownewsday.net. This is mostly a gag to set up an excuse for not including a year in the tagline. |  |
Vader If you’re going to reference movies, you’re morally required to pay homage to the biggest fanboi flick of all. As with Coffee, it sets up an excuse for a non-standard tagline as well as recontextualizes a classic Return of the Jedi moment in contemporary slang. |  |
Aki I believe it was DanSTC who made a parody graphic of Aki of Final Fantasy: The Spirit Flask in which Dr. Aki was caricatured in the style of Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” comics. Groening’s Akbar and Jeff characters are portrayed in the “101 emotions of Akbar and Jeff”, in which the fezzed duo are showed in identical poses throughout, with the last frame being an exception. It was a perfect satirization of Final Fantasy: The Sleeper Shall Not Awaken in that the character really did have lines which rung with emotional content, but delivered them in what can only charitably be described as “lackluster and deadpan”. She managed to make the comedian Stephen Wright look emotionally turbulent in comparison. |  |
Fanboi This excerpt of a 1957 Norman Rockwell painting is actually a little girl showing her dental work to friends. The utter zealousness of the expression begs the tagline. A smaller icon of this girl was used by Lum to denote articles about particularly unquestioningly loyal fan sites. |  |
Gladiator Cross-referencing the hit Gladiator with the classic comedy Airplane works here. If I get to top it off by using the word “Turkish”, that’s the cherry on the sundae. |  |
Presto 1972 is a birth year I share with Dungeons and Dragons, often decried by fundamentalist Protestants as “spiritual warfare”, along with occultism, listening to angry music, and pissing off your parents. That’s the New Model Version of the D&D Dungeon Master guide being reached for by a more contemporary figure in this “debate” (that’s what you call it when someone’s idiotic argument is couched in religious terms because “uninformed drivel” is politically divisive), Harry “Hell in a Handbasket” Potter. Presto, from the terribly dated 80’s cartoon “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” looks on, slightly alarmed. |  |
Service Anyone who ever played Ultima Online doesn’t need an explanation. Anyone who didn’t wouldn’t believe the explanation. Welcome to customer service as an optional add-in. |  |
Dance Madonna references top a delicate swirl of Riverdance and post-modern disco. Chill. Serves 7. |  |
DAoC I can’t really explain why I thought of candy when I first saw this screenshot. Hopefully it worked, in a weird way. |  |
Fallen The Fallen Age was a game which was cancelled during beta for reasons that still defy credulity. Maybe the slugs went on strike. In any event, this was a tribute, with a little Bill Murray thrown in for good measure. |  |
Lucky Lucky Charms, a proud member of an age-old line of cereals promoted with advertisements referencing theft of said product - a recurring theme in breakfast cereals - has been gracing cereal bowls for almost 40 years. The original only had four marshmallow shapes rather than the spectrum-colored cornucopia in todays boxes. Life must have been hard in those early breakfast frontier days. |  |
r0x Early in Shadowbane development, Wolfpack’s early and ill-advised courting of a website’s campaign involved going into competitors’ games, uttering “SHADOWBANE R0XX0RZ”, and grabbing screenshots. While this accomplished loads of buzz in the community, it also alienated a good bit of it. Delay after delay haven’t helped mend the rift; hopefully the date isn’t too optimistic. |  |
C64 A tribute to the Commodore 64, this logo features the horribly poor choice of colors of the “operating system” which was the king of the mid-80’s 8-bit era. Note the quotes. Whoever thought that light blue on medium blue was the best choice for ease of reading must have been smoking hash; most people I knew tended to change the text to white or the background to black - or both - if they were going to be in the actual OS for very long. |  |
Office SND and LTM before it were known for, among other things, to be a great place to while away slack time in the office. |  |
Cyberspace A classic content-free “net sex” quote offsets self-conscious use of that most horrible of fad words: cyberspace. The internet is powerful; it simultaneously allows collaborative academic research, provides proof that porn is a precious natural resource, and lets 14 year old boys make advances to 45 year old men pretending to be 21 year old women! That, my friends, is progress. |  |
Raw The date, while significant to Japanese relations with the west, is probably pretty obtuse for people who skipped their history classes. Delightfully, so is the quote. Ceryx wrote it. He tells me it’s a sexual slur. Someone else tells me it’s an assertion involving the gender of the Emperor, or something along those lines. I can’t speak Japanese. |  |
Leather If the phrase “Rich Corinthian leather” in Ricardo’s urbane Catalan accent doesn’t mean anything to you, I whole-heartedly encourage you to locate an archive of classic television commercials from the 70’s. In fact, that’s something you should do anyway, right after watching the Wrath of Khan, a study in the joys of overacting. |  |
LotR Tolkien’s best-selling fantasy series is being developed as the decade’s first sure-fire blockbuster movie trilogy. Tolkien had a passion for language, real and invented. The scripts in this logo are both both inspired by his artificial languages. As I don’t speak his Elvish or Dwarvish languages (and there are plenty who do, trust me), the text is just English set in the script’s font. You could decipher them if you want, but you’ll probably be disappointed. |  |
Brick I was originally planning to tie in an Oz “yellow brick road” allusion to a reference about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. I then decided on something simpler and more immediate: comparing the historical Gold Rush to that of Ultima Online’s. I loved the color of the picture, so I knew I’d use it in some way. |  |
Draft Beer-as-commentary, plus an entirely unrelated reference to 404, bane of web users everywhere. Cheers! |  |
Chains Coupled with two nearly unforgivable puns, the “grief linkage” tagline refers to the practice carried out in the articles and forums of LTM and SND, and in IRC channels in which participants in both tend to congregate: using shock-value URLs as a deadly weapon. |  |
Children Acting on behalf of the “children” was always a wonderful catch phrase - a plea for sanity, a request that we not take ourselves so damn seriously. Gaming content wasn’t going to save the world, feed the poor, or make the world a better place for a very special episode of Blossom. |  |
WarGames WarGames had a scene near the beginning of the movie which was hilarious - if you knew why. In it, Matthew Broderick’s character was at his computer, engaging in a technique known as war dialing. This was the practice of setting a computer script to sequentially dial up numbers in a targetted exchange, sequentially or random. In the days before the Internet was a public commodity, and when the local BBS was king, this was part of the hacking repetoire of the era. There was one problem with the movie’s depiction of the process: his modem had an acoustic coupler. This is a modem which has a microphone and a speaker in two cups. The telephone handset is physically placed into those cups. The reason this was used in the movie was to make the point to the viewer that the computer was dialing up numbers over the telephone, as the general public didn’t know what a “modem” was in 1983, and wasn’t terribly familiar with computers. Acoustic modems can’t “hang up” the line and re-dial because they only have access to the telephone handset. I swear to you, in the right circles, this is hilarious. Take my word for it. |  |
Chickens A constant of MMOG marketing is to overhype your product. The old adage about chicken accounting is appropriate. |  |
Fix The quote is a tongue-in-cheek declaration of self-control often heard in the forums of many popular web sites as well as those with actual physical addictions. Parapharmocology. |  |
Goose Aesop’s classic fable gets a 250×100 telling-in-brief. I’m sure there’s some lesson here for videogamers and developers, though what that lesson is escapes me. |  |
Vision Verant’s Overriding Design Goals - fun, context, and customer service aside - was referred to as The Vision. I believe the quote was Abashi’s, which took place in a discussion with Lum. The quote is a masterpiece of unintentional irony. |  |
Beauty American Beauty was a stunning movie which really spoke to me. Kevin Spacey’s portrayal of a man untrapping himself from his own life was fabulous. The ad campaign is referenced in this logo, as is one of the best one-liners in the film. |  |
Adventure “Adventure” was a classic videogame for the Atari 2600 platform. While fairly complex for a 2600 title, it was extremely primitive and dated as soon as 8-bit home computers and the next generation of consoles became widespread. Looking back at it and re-playing it today, it’s simply charming. The “magic dot” was literally that, a prismatic dot that you could find hiding in part of the game, and whose possession was necessary to unlock a “secret room” where the programmer’s name was prominently displayed. This was the first videogame to feature such a deliberate hidden feature. It also flew in the face of Atari’s policy of not crediting individual programmers. |  |
Invaders Space Invaders. What more can I say? |  |
Journey The 1983 videogame “Journey” has the dubious distinction of being the first official branding between a musical act and a videogame. The cheesy drama of this game probably can’t be appreciated by people who’ve only seen it in modern emulators. Its proper setting is an arcade of the middle 80s: a very dark, loud place that your parents were sure were filled with drug pushers. This was a fairly popular game which was a real accomplishment to do well in. Enjoying it in the safety of your own home just loses something. |  |
Integrity Then as now, hand wringing about the “authenticity” of daft pop bands was a constant of the music and media press. The difference between two Germans lip synching to tunes other people wrote and sung and Paula Abdul or Britney Spears lip synching to tunes other people wrote escapes me. Blame it on the rain. |  |
Sheep I originally created these SouthParkian lambs for a banner ad for deVoca’s lumcorp site. I created a a much larger variety of them than I ended up using, so it seemed a shame not to put them to work again later. Don’t let the animated eyes and wiggly tail fool you; these ewes are bloodthirsty killers. |  |
Nethack Nethack is as deep a gaming experience as it is superficially simple looking, but don’t take my word for it. I’ve been ritually abused by people who note that there is no such thing as a “blessed rustproof 2 gray dragon scale mail” because all gray dragon scale mail is inherently rustproof. It’s a bad habit I picked up to add “rustproof” to any wish, even if it wasn’t necessary. Eventually, I started liking the ritual abuse, so I left it in. |  |
Bite Another logo slathered with latter-day irony, it’s useful to note that the action which this logo foreshadowed did, in fact, lead to the small cute puppy getting kicked out of the house. |  |
Gauntlet Gauntlet - when “massively multiplayer” meant precisely four players crowded around one of the best action games to hit the arcade. Note that the warrior is shooting the food. |  |
Load I liked the idea of one of the logos being pared down and broken-looking. Is it an interlaced graphic? An IE graphic error placeholder? Alt text? Yes! |  |
Future The quote is perhaps more appropriate now than ever. No community is complete until it’s used Nostradamus to predict its own downfall. Is meandering French poetry really that dangerous? |  |
Terminal After seeing the C64 logo, and having a few laughs about the era of terminals, this one seemed obvious. deVoca came up with a truly fitting quote, which would under some flavors of Unix bring the OS crashing down in a blaze of glory. |  |
Monsters Frankly, I just couldn’t resist putting these goofy bastards up on one of the logos. The date will make more sense if you consider that they’re hardly the first computer animated characters to appear in movies. |  |
Churchill Churchill once described Russia as a conundrum wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. This quote has been paraphrased and recycled into many lovely variants… |  |
Revolution …and made this next logo an obvious next step. Stalinization meets r33t.org. |  |
Boobies The history of breasts in videogames is a sordid, timeless tale of intrigue, chocolate, and brush fire, or something like that. When the gamers want boobies, who am I to deny them? A pair of boobies (blue footed boobies) in triplicate. |  |
BSoD No explanation required. |  |
Spill LTM’s longest ongoing forum thread was one started by Kash, proclaiming “I HAVE DROPPED MY GLASS OF WATER ON THE FLOOR. I MUST NOW GET A RAG OR MOP AND CLEAN THIS UP…” Why did it become a flamboyant monstrosity spiraling out of control? Nobody knows why. You just can’t explain the Water Thread. |  |
France Good-natured jokes at the expense of the French are a long running tradition in the English speaking world. Viva la France! (The quote reads “Massively multiplayer anglocentric shit”, or something reasonably close to that.) |  |
Clerks The similarity of the customer-hating Randall from Clerks and some of the customer service you see in MMOGs is as apt as it is sad. The title design was a pain to create, and only looks “close enough” rather than “good”, but I thought it worked. |  |
Trek Trekkies, trekkers, trek fans. I figured the Okuda-styled presentation in this logo would amuse someone. The date is actually relevant, if you were wondering. |  |
Ultima When writing what would turn out to be my last solo article on Slownewsday, I decided it was time to create a logo to go with it, that would celebrate the legacy of the Ultima series. I had only put it off because I was uncertain as to what to quote. While the shot and the date refer to Ultima IV, the quote is from Ultima V. |  |
Holiday logos | |
Halloween 1 Spooky and delicious. Or maybe just corny. Either way, I’m happy with it. |  |
Halloween 2 The wonderful scene is from the ad campaign for the recent film Sleepy Hollow, though the date refers to the extremely popular animated Disney version of the same tale. |  |
Halloween 3 What would Halloween be without a logo based on the Halloween series of horror flicks? |  |
Halloween 4 I remember the people who would give apples and other fruit to kids instead of Halloween candy. If that shit doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you’re a braver soul than I am. |  |
Halloween 5 This is a “tribute” to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in which he informs his character’s date that he’s “not like other guys”. This is possibly the understatemnt of the decade. |  |
Chanukah 1 The relevancy of tieing a Chanukah logo to a Dead or Alive song is an exercise for the reader. The date is the Jewish year of the beginning of the celebration of Chanukah. The quote is the four Hebrew characters which appear on the dreidel. |  |
Christmas 1 The AD&D gag in this Christmas logo isn’t terribly well developed. The whole thing nearly smacks of sincerity. |  |
Christmas 2 I’m not exactly sure whats going on here, but as none of the holiday logos other than Halloween ever actually ever appeared in rotation, I suppose it doesn’t much matter. |  |
Valentine 1 “Yikes” is the word that immediately comes to mind in this saccharine take on Amateur Night. |  |
Valentine 2 Creepily sweet. |  |
Easter 1 This touching image of two excited young termites gathering pastel eggs from the abdomen of the hive queen is without a doubt the most disturbing metaphor to appear in the series. It’s a shame that SND didn’t survive to Easter, as I never got to get the proper reaction. |  |
Unofficial logos These logos did not appear in rotation with the official designs. | |
Double Almost immediately upon the official change-over to SND, Mr. Poppinfresh came face to face with the inability to actually, you know, delete posts. I set this gag up for him and threw it into the body of his second posting. |  |
Steak It’s perhaps best to let this excerpt of the #glitchless log speak for itself. |  |
deVoca This logo is dev’s idea, tagline, and quote. I just put it together for him since I had the fonts in question. He was griefing Arcadian del Sol with it. Something about men with hats. |  |
Redmeat This logo is hilarious if you enjoy redmeat. As with the last one, deVoca provided the picture, tagline and quote, and I just assembled it. The only reason this one didn’t get put into rotation is licensing issues. |  |
Moose It’s Spacemoose, master of comedy! Along with licensing issues, I left this one out of official rotation because of licensing issues and the fact that those not familiar with all that is Spacemoose were likely to be alienated by the quotation. |  |
Sloegin Mr. Poppinfresh wanted a logo about sloe gin. You can’t hardly go wrong with that. |  |
Finally, this banner ad I created to sell our banner ad space.
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