yomiko and i both are simply unable to properly fake a smile. i'll leave her on my desktop for awhile to hopefully remind me of this fact, and possibly get me to stop. [05.10.02@07:53]

now that we're off of geometry, i'd like to take a minute [or an hour] here to explain in detail the events leading up to the inevitable death of geometry yesterday afternoon.

we should start this a year ago. e3 2001 was quite large. gamecube stuff, xbox stuff, all kinds of shit. and lucasarts announced jedi outcast. in around 24 hrs the alt.games.jedi-knight crew had planned a site, and got our domain registered. we had no site untill the summer came around, and once we did have a site kicking, we were effectively the only people around. we garnered a rather small group of people who became our forum reg's. we had a surprisingly small amount of idiots, and all was good. we'd pull in a couple hundred hits a week, and we were content.

then things started picking up steam. the end of 2001 came around, and we were doing around a thousand hits weekly. there were screenshots to distribute, a few early movies to show, and a whole lot of gossip.

2002 came and lucasarts started really pushing everything. we were linked on the official jedi-outcast product page, and we were reporting news as it happened. we recieved exclusive screenshots, archived even more screenshots, picked up even more regs for our forums, and got more and more hits. we thought we'd even off, and not cause a problem for everyone else.

but we did. march rolled around and we had trailers to host. the game launched and we got so many hits to the site that we killed the sql database that held the hit data not once but twice. in the same week. we broke the damn thing to the point that the sql database wouldn't work even if i reset it to all empty. it just . . wasn't good. we started transferring so much data that we broke cpanel's bandwidth meter to the point that it remains broken even now. we made this poor server give it's all. sql would go down, and immediately upon being brought back it would immediately get hit with 65 unique connections. before the sql databases for hitcounting died, we were pulling in 7500 unique hits daily, and five figures of pageviews.

then came the downloads. we knew from the start that downloads would kill us. we knew it would be a project that we might have to axe. we knew it was doomed from the start, but we did it anyways. to give you an idea of what kind of download throughput we've done, think of the last week. shitty speeds, everything breaking every other day every other hour. sql was down for an entire day at one point, and sql being down means now downloads. in this, effectively five days worth of time, we served up 15 gigs of data off of TWO FILES. let me say this again. two files. downloaded enough times to equal 15 gigs of data transfer. thats 75% of our total monthly bandwidth in five days.

because of this level of popularity, geometry had to die. a 300mhz celeron system cannot handle this kind of unmetered constant abuse. because of this, we get to strip down the amount of content we can provide. we get to be even more selective when choosing whatwe put up. all because we're too popular. i fucking hate popularity. i hate the ruin it brings. the stress, the fear, the panic. but, i had never really felt successful before. theres something about knowing that i can ask the darkness that lies beyond newspro to do something, and know that within seconds it will be followed through by scores of individuals. it's something i really can't properly explain. despite all the incredibly detrimental aspects of popularity, and despite the fact that i know it's slowly killing me and the services i provide, it feels like i finally have something validating my existance.

so i'd like to take some time to divert the blame. the last two months were not the fault of interserver. the past two months were not the fault of geometry being ass. they were not due to human error. they were due to me and delusions of grandure.

and this is just the beginning of the ride. [05.13.02@04:03]

i just got through reading some stuff i had sitting in /desktop/text archive. it was two years old. i was much happier then. i had things to worry about, but not a whole lot. everyone seemed happier. that, or it was just another example of me repressing the bad, and faking the good. i really don't know which it was, but it seems like we were all a bit more animated. it's truly awful to feel jaded. then again, i'm not sure if it's being jaded, or growing up. i think my problem is i equate the two. being silly is a character trait that i find essential, and looking back at myself and seeing more than now really hurts. [05.25.02@00:53]