I love it when I receive books in the mail. I have an Amazon Wish list setup so that people who use TDO Mini Forms can show their appreciation and send me a book. So a book shaped parcel in the post doesn’t surprise me. I fill up with a sense of glee and excitement about what someone send me (the last time it was this excellent Dinosaur popup book). So when I found the parcel in the doorway as I got home, I wasn’t surprised.

It was only later, when I realised it wasn’t from Amazon, I got a bit perplexed. The package was from Leisure Games who sell roleplaying games. I had to take a moment, because I was quite proud of myself that I had not used my credit card in months and had cleared any debt left on it. For a moment I got a little worried, did someone go a little bit further than just my Amazon Wish List? I opened it and it was a copy of Noumenon, a game I was planning to get. A roleplaying game about some really weird, Philip K. Dick kind of stuff. For a brief moment it was quite disconcerting. But once I saw the receipt I realised that it was part of an order I had made last year, and were only now sending me a copy.

Certainly it was a fitting way to start Noumenon. I really like it. A strange game where players play Sarcophagi, humanoid-insects that were once human but no longer remember who they were. They wake up in the Silhouette Rouge, guided by the voice of Logos (the voice of the Universe). The Silhouette Rouge is a house with a fixed number of rooms. Some of the rooms are described by a short story, a little abstract and strange. Some are precise. I found myself swallowing this surreal metaphorical setting with joy. However it’s not a book I’d let my young daughter flick through: insects, blood, monsters and metaphors do not, a batgirl, make.

The system is elegant and, from my reading, appears delightful. I love when games keep in theme and break from the traditional approach. Instead of dice, you use dominoes, which have their own mythos about them. I love how they are used encourages the player group to work together.

It’s not specifically horror, a genre I like but am not enthused by. I can’t picture long-term stories and games based on horror themes. Great for short once-off, creepy stuff. Noumenon has horror, but it’s not specifically about horror except as a mechanism for change. I keep thinking of Don’t Rest Your Head, which is explicitly a horror game but one also set in a mad abstract world. Don’t Rest Your Head drives the players and their characters into madness. Noumenon allows the characters to explore and journey through the horrors like a dream that flows from nightmare to dream to eventual waking. A difference of taste.

My only problem really is I don’t think I could get my group to play it. They’d just look at me, with those, “you’re not serious are you?” faces. But then sometimes they surprise me. And surprises are good, like mysterious books in the post.

Last night, I didn’t sleep well. The recent changeable weather has given me a rather nasty chesty cough. My eyes are sore, I’m tired and flushed the whole time. The kids and my wife are all suffering too and there is nothing besides cough syrups and rest for it (and as parents you’re never really allowed to rest).

I couldn’t get to sleep right. I kept replaying stuff from the day in my head. Nothing critical. But I woke early this morning and I was re-playing code through my head. Running through functions, testing various inputs, visualising outputs. At the same time, interjected with scenes and thoughts about worries. It wasn’t just odd but exhausting, like my head couldn’t handle it. I felt miserable and I couldn’t get out of bed when the alarm clock went. Normally, no matter what my state, I get out of bed on time. I may still be half asleep, but I get out of bed and start into the motions. This time I couldn’t. Pushed the clock away. Let everyone sleep.

What is fascinating though, is that I found a security leak in my code from that weird dream. I tested it this morning, confirmed my suspicions and I patched it in an hour or so.

Feeling better now with the sun beaming brightly. It’s still wind and cold-ish. But the dose of sunlight has really done my head well.

Update #1: It’s not my day. In my rush to get v0.12.1 out, I copied in some broken code to SVN. Nothing critical, just prevents TDOMF from running. v0.12.2 fixes this.

I’ve discovered a security risk in v0.12 of TDO Mini Forms if you use Custom Fields and the “Append to Post” format option. This was introduced during the implementation of the Form Hacker. I’ve already prepared a fix (v0.12.1 v0.12.2) for this and it is now on Wordpress.org (but it may take a few minutes before you can download it).

I strongly advise anyone using v0.12 to upgrade as soon as possible. If you can’t currently upgrade, please consider downgrading to the v0.11.1 or disabling the plugin until you can upgrade to v0.12.1 v0.12.2.

I do not know if anyone has been exploited by this hole, however I would also recommend carefully checking the HTML of submissions done with v0.12 for any PHP tags that might have slipped in the post content or custom fields.

I apologise for this and hope no-one is inconvenienced by it.

My four year old daughter, Alice, is going through a “Batgirl” phase. Normally she’s big into her Dora, Princess and more recently Barbies. But she’s always had a thing about cars and trains (her oldest cousin was also big into them) and also dinosaurs, which is just as cool.

The Bat Girl thing, I think comes from her male peers in her school talking about Superman and Batman and also more than occasionally we’d sit and watch cartoons together, such as Avatar: the Last Airbender (Alice thought she was the female waterbender), Ben 10 (Ben is actually Alice’s cousin) and obviously Batman. There was an evening when we were talking about Batman, Robin and Batgirl and I looked up Batgirl on Wikipedia to find her real name. Now we have a little game she plays sometimes where she says “Hi Commissioner Gordon” and I reply with “Hi Barbara Gordon”. (If you didn’t know, the most common incarnation of Batgirl is as Commissioner Gordon’s daughter). We’ve even had to buy her a graphic novel (of the cartoon of course), and I’ve read from it every night for the last few weeks. I’ve got my hands on season 3 of “The Batman” cartoon that features the arrival of Batgirl. She now knows most of the major Batman super-villains. I’ve even done some images for her, ones that she can colour herself (the colour example is actually mine, not hers…).

The thing is, before I had kids, I never really liked Robin, Batgirl or any of the other “sidekick” characters. They always detracted from, what I thought Batman was all about. It’s perhaps unsurprising now that as an parent, I appreciate the kid friendly nature of sidekicks. Alice sees Batman as a family: Batman as father, Catwoman as mother (?), Robin as brother and Batgirl as sister (herself). (I don’t know where Alfred fits into it!)

I’ve just released TDO Mini Forms v0.12 (get it in all the usual places). You should soon be able to automatically update it in your Wordpress install. Loads of new features; initial release of Form Hacker, AJAX forms, Categories Widget now supports Checkboxes and Radio buttons, new template tags and more bug fixes. You can see the full changelog after the “more” link.

I’ve had to disable the form import/export for this release as it was not playing nice with Form Hacker. The tdomfinfo() is also adversely affected by Form Hacker. Apologises for this, will fix as soon as I can.

Whats next now is to finish off bits and pieces to do with Form Hacker and probably spend time doing bug fixes. For me, at least, the next big feature is Post Editing. I’ve long ignored it, but I have to tackle it soon before I start on all the other little things that need to be done. Up until recently, every time I started to think about Post Editing, I would get carried away with trying to imagine some sort of generic framework where I could add modules to submit/edit anything in WP. But I’ve restrained myself and plan to attempt to add Form Editing (with an option for delete) without trying to reinvent tdo-mini-forms. Also, I don’t see the point of doing more than Post edit/submit/delete.

Enjoy v0.12!

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