Sweet! Thanks, Jerry!
I was able to export the database, but it’s too big to import into a new wiki via myphpadmin and I wasn’t able to import it via command line probably because I’m bad at that. I did send it to mike though, so he’ll probably have it set up this weekend if there aren’t any problems with it.
[quote=“Tex”]But, I’ve started thinking: “What do we do if we can’t get the old site back?” It sounds like a realistic chance and early outlooks on getting a webcrawler to save it is… uh, not good. The experts told me the software is notoriously hard to install – something about a dedicated Linux OS with server software, and it’s considered hard for command line Linux installs. Also, needing a dedicated machine (or maybe a Virtual Box but that gets complicated because of system resources).
I think we should look at something like our archive boards here. I discovered my external drive does have a lot! I have all my megaposts from Neo and a bunch from Proper, a lot of notes and profiles, and then some. I’m gonna start trying to get some of this up. But, we should also expand it – let’s make a go-to place to get feedback, ask people things, and try to tease out as much as possible. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best, basically.[/quote]
Well, I almost think it’s a foregone conclusion that we won’t get the old boards back in a way that we can use them. Last I heard (and, bear with me as I shoot from the hip, there was a flurry of board activity since I last checked in, this may have been touched on already), the database was recovered? or, found, but not yet recovered? Point being, it looks like we might get the content of the old boards back, if not the old boards themselves. Either way, I think even a simple affair like this would do well toward at least giving us the ability to write again.
[quote=“Tex”]But to do more than agree: we could look at the in between Proper and Neo period. Have some people from Proper alive, and maybe hints of things that came in Neo, but with an understanding that it’s a new story – and we may change details of the past (and deviate hard from Neo in the future). It’s a relatively untouched area, and I think it’s familiar but new enough to be fun?
Also: I’m really glad Travis is interested in general. I haven’t talked to him in years.[/quote]
I was actually hoping to write closer in time to when the drop-off in activity happened… at most a decade later? Which would put us into thr 50s WR, possibly 60 WR. The idea would be to keep us close enough in time to story assets that are familiar so that we’re not starting completely new (for those of us who don’t want to start completely new), but have enough of a time lapse that we fill-in that gap with a very loose outline and start with the freedom to maneuver and actually DO things without the burden of our long-range planning.
It’s like a reboot without a reboot (as I keep poinging out to Mike when he uses the comic book universe analogy, a reboot of the universe is NOT always a good thing… I’m looking at you, Clark-Kent-who-thinks-he’s-Matt-Drudge).
[quote=“Tex”]
Yes totally. Mike, how easy is that to put here? Wikia is spyware infested devilry.[/quote]
Hmm. I’d always thought that it was the Sliver code and not the wiki software that made the old Kupop.com vulnerable. Is the old wiki, as it was, infested as well?
Sliver was extremely vulnerable to exploits and kept getting malicious code high quality chinese shoe store code injections, but it sounds like our mediawiki install also had some issues (either just spambots or actual malicious code injection, I don’t know exactly what mike meant.)
I did export the various sliver databases and send them to mike, but I have no idea what he’ll be able to do with them. I don’t think dustin is on board with any of this, so I’m not sure how much mike can expect from him either (he apparently isn’t in the yahoo group, but I told him about this site and I don’t think he’s shown up yet)
Anyway, neo was extremely dark, so I do think it would be fun to write about how the web got to that tipping point. I was also a big proponent of just continuing off from where neo ended, too, since there were a lot of threads that I was interested to see how they would develop, although I know most people weren’t really on board with that whole idea.
I’ve always been a fan of letting Proper go its own way… chaining the story to a future is almost as bad as loading it down with the past. Which isn’t to say we can’t go dark with it; a lot of what was going up toward the end of the old Sliver boards was a little more on the darker side than not.
But that said, I’ve always regretted not being around for Neo, and I was actually enjoying the process of reading through Neo’s old posts (admittedly, I stopped after it became too hard to follow the chronology). One thing I was looking forward to when the Legends board went up was the idea of seeing what might happen with Neo 2, but Legends had the misfortune of being born right around the time the biggest hiatus happened…
Do we think we’re ambitious enough to try a re-start with both a Proper story and a “Neo 2” story starting concurrently? Using the same basic perameters for both (smaller scale, map that grows as we write it, taking-place-a-few-years-after-the-action-stopped?).
Yeah, it did seem like the usual injection of spambots. I tried to clean them out on this iteration of the wiki, and I didn’t see any malicious code in the db itself, so we should be good I think. If we keep it living on my server I’ll probably add a captcha to the signup/login process. (Now currently up and running here).
Sliver is not an option at this point. Our best bet is some homebrew site that is built off of a php framework, and import the posts and user tables there. I’ve had some experience with developing code to avoid malicious script injections, so the next iteration should be a little bit more solid. Plus I’m sure Dustin has a good chunk more experience as well–Sliver was written like 10 years ago over a vacation break.
I’ve kinda grown to see Neo as the dark possible future, sort of like Xmen: Day of Future Past (yes, I do love me them comic book analogies). Its a place to visit if we let our heroes stray from the course, but it isn’t necessarily the final destination.
[quote=“michael”]
I’ve kinda grown to see Neo as the dark possible future, sort of like Xmen: Day of Future Past (yes, I do love me them comic book analogies). Its a place to visit if we our heroes stray from the course, but it isn’t necessarily the final destination.[/quote]
lol… one of the fun ideas Travis and I had was to have a time-travel crossover with Manta and Avarael. It’s an idea I liked so much, I think it’ll have to stay on the list of things I’d like to do if we ever get this revival thing off the ground.
I think the most fun I ever had writing in kupop was when I got to do a fight between avarael and darwin at the big damn peace conference.
Hay guys. Can we get a larger avatar limit around here? This is killing me. 18 KB? C’mon.
Anyways, after finally taking the plunge and visiting the club, I’ve read through this thread. I find myself intrigued but also intimidated.
On the intrigued side, without getting too deep in to my own trials and tribulations, I’ve been going through a dark spot for a few years and have found the one thing I’m starved for is my creative side. It has completely vanished since around the time I closed down my last company and it turns out it was one of the few things that gave me meaningful joy. So I’m hungry to rekindle it, and as far as creative outlets in my life go Kupopolis – not just the story, but the community and the gang I more or less went from middle school to adulthood with when the internet was still a dorky thing – is kind of a cornerstone for me (even if 15% of my words were my whining about how I didn’t like my own stuff).
On the intimidated side… I can’t commit to a continuation/reboot/reimagining of Kupopolis. Not because I’m unable, but mostly because I just don’t want to. Just thinking of the history is overwhelming. I remember being intimidated by unread post counts, by the sheer volume of content and the number of characters and nations and plot twists to keep straight. While everyone in this thread is clearly thinking of something more modest than our old megaposting 1-upmanship, the weight of the history of our stories and characters is already heavy, but on top of that we have the baggage of dimensions based on 20+ year old games, elements we tried to retain from the old AOL board days, etc etc… it’s just too much. I always felt like part of the reason Kupopolis petered out was the weight of its lore, and that in many ways Neo was truly its sendoff. I have zero desire to revisit the world. I might read new stories, but a part of my brain seems to think that would almost be work, like I’d feel obligated to go delving through archives and wikis every time there was a reference to something I didn’t remember.
I don’t really want to discourage anyone from doing these things, as folks here clearly still have new ideas for what they built in the past that they are anxious to explore. But when it comes to getting the band back together, I’d be more interested in a blank slate. One free of dimensions that started off as elaborate SNES RPG fan fiction (or in my case, shameless rip offs of Robert Jordan books). One that was built from scratch with the opportunity for new ideas that aren’t tied to an immense, expansive lore that is basically impenetrable to anyone but us. One that leverages our weird expertise in “interactive stories”, but to do it as full blown adults.
In fact, the idea of a new project with the folks I share that unique I-story experience with is exciting. I can’t say the same for an extension of Kupopolis, no matter what form it takes.
That’s just me though. I want to stress that I do not want to sink a Kupopolis revival project that multiple people are genuinely psyched for just because I am not psyched about it. But to answer the question “what do ya wanna do?”, yeah, my answer would be something new, something with you guys.
On a side note, much of the Kupopolis-dropping-off-the-planetness is my fault, but I apparently had a serious misunderstanding of where I had things actually hosted and what not. That said I probably have more recent back ups of the site and the databases than what Jerry has. Definitely no up-to-the-last-days backups, but something more recent nonetheless. The real question is what damn laptop I have it on.
Hey Dustin! It’s good to see you here.
The girth of our story was always a problem for us. It’s why many, if not most, of our efforts at recruiting people fell short.
By way of offering something of an explanation, if such a thing was needed, for the desire to return to Kupopolis… the places, the people and the history all have sentimental value. Enormous sentimental value. At least for me… I’m sure, on some level, even if it doesn’t translate to a desire to continue participating as a writer, that must be true for you as well.
In many ways, the prolific overflowing of background, history and cast of characters is something of a testament to the work so many people have done over the course of what is, as of this year, a 20 year history. Which in many ways is a thing to marvel at, given our humble beginnings as purveyors of video game fan fiction that you rightly point out.
But I didn’t opt to respond to you to counter or invalidate your sentiment. I’m writing right now to express a sentiment of my own, and to suggest that, as we move forward, maybe we can have our cake and eat it, too?
Years ago – it seems like another lifetime – I drove out to the valley, in the rain, and bought Mike a pizza. Back in those days, everytime I went out to see Mike, I’d end up buying him pizza. I don’t know why, it just always worked out that way. He may have planned it precisely so it worked out that way. I’m not sure. Sometimes he’s craftier than he seems. Anyway, the pizza wasn’t the main point to my going out to hang with him. We spent several hours in his SWANK apartment (I mean, goddamn, that place you were living in back then was a palace, Mike) talking about all things Kupopolis, and discussing ways we could revamp the site. I’m not, and have never been, a tech guy, so basically the only point to my being there was providing the afforementioned pizza and throwing the wet spaghetti of my ideas onto Mike’s wall of what’s-technically-possible and seeing what could stick.
At some point during all the eating of pizza and the throwing of metaphor spaghetti at metaphor walls, we talked about the idea of turning the Kupopolis.com site into a kind of IS hub, where we hosted the Kupopolis boards like always, but also hosted different stories as well, maybe on a rotating basis. It’s sort of something we already did, from time to time, as the old site was capable of switching between Kupopolis Proper, Iron Writer, and the Beloved Legend of Sahl Endeberg (which may have been one of our most beloved spin-off stories ever). But the focus, at least for Mike, was to do something like that again except make it pretty. Because Mike likes making things pretty. Which may be why he objected so strenuously to my throwing spaghetti at his walls. (I didn’t really get the concept of “metaphor” at the time)
All that said, my point: it makes me sad to think that a new project wouldn’t include you, because I’d love to write with you again, and I’d feel guilty if our wanting to write in Kupopolis means it would necessarily exclude you. So, my answer to the question: “what do you wanna do?” is both. I want to have my nostalgia, visit old places and play with old friends, and still find the energy to create new worlds with you.
Do you think this is possible?
[quote=“Dkittels”]In fact, the idea of a new project with the folks I share that unique I-story experience with is exciting. I can’t say the same for an extension of Kupopolis, no matter what form it takes.
That’s just me though. I want to stress that I do not want to sink a Kupopolis revival project that multiple people are genuinely psyched for just because I am not psyched about it. But to answer the question “what do ya wanna do?”, yeah, my answer would be something new, something with you guys.[/quote]
Soooo glad you decided to Join us Dusty!!
What I’d really like to do, is when we start up whatever variant of the new kupopolis idea, we also host a secondary IS. This could be on a different URL and almost have almost no affiliation with kupop, but we keep an open invitation open to anyone from the sister story to come write with us.
And this may sound pretty out from left field for those who haven’t been in close contact with me in a while, but I’d love to do a Mad Max/Fallout post-apocalyptic IS. I’m pretty sure I could get at least a dozen new people to sign up, if not more. I’m sort of a cosplay celebrity for a post apocalyptic festival.
Another IS idea I’ve been craving for is a film noir story. I had this idea for a fictional city in the valley, a rival to Los Angeles, that is ultimately burned down and completely forgotten. Everyone is writing up to this point in time where the overall ending is predetermined, and I think it would be an interesting change to the normal motif.
Stop reading my mind, Mike!
The truth is when I was building Sliver, or more specifically Sliver 2.0, my mind was rampant with the idea of making an I-Story based bulletin board system that could be redistributed as an installation, along with a major central hub that people could just use to make their own stories. Software dedicated to recreating the I-Story experience we grew up with, a chance for people to discover that rad little twist on role playing we thrived on and to share it: It’s a vision I’ve had.
But I don’t have that passion right now. 
I am at a pretty low spot in my life right now, so I definitely can’t commit to ambitious plans to build out an I-Story hub. In a perfect world it’s a concept I’d throw myself in to. But the only thing I can promise to do right now is to try and participate in a story to my liking, not build out the infrastructure and such. If such a story materializes then I’m in, and if the rest of y’all are writing Kupopolis stories on the side I’m rad about it as long as whatever the “new” story is is properly populated.
Some day in the distant future maybe, maybe, I’d be interested in trying to build some kind of Sliver 3.0 that is built to bring infinite I-Stories to the masses. But for right now I’d really only be capable of a clean slate story where I’m not doing the infrastructure.
I’d be quoting here but I’m on my Chromebook at work, and that’s a pain in the ass with this little thing. So we’re just rolling with the bane of academics: poor attribution and paraphrasing!
Hey Dustin! Glad to see you again. I definitely understand your concerns; while the idea of revisiting it is fun for me, I get that for other people, it could be a high level of stress, and you should do what sounds fun. I think a second IS wouldn’t be a bad thing, and I’d be willing to try to balance the two; I don’t think we’re expecting huge outputs on either, and I think that’s realistic with my workload (and, indeed, people may pick one or the other as fits them).
With regards to Matt’s suggestion, that’s also cool with me. 60 WR sounds like a nice, even number. That could also let us bring some Neo-esque stuff in – like, for instance, I think it’d be neat if the United Crystal States just formed or just forms as the story begins.
I would love to see a Neo 2; like Jerry, some of my best stuff was there. However, I think I’d like to wait awhile on writing a Neo 2. My feeling is that I’d like to dip my toes into the classic Kupop first, feel it out, and then go back to that darker universe (and I like Mike’s comparison) when we have more under our belts. We might find new things we want to play with from that story. So, basically, I’d love to do Neo 2 someday, but maybe not now?
Well, one thing that has come up over and over again (and I think we may have flirted with it once or twice during these discussions) is the question of how do we maintain a focus in a revived Kupop? What’s the scale we’re talking about?
In Kupop of old, we had NO LIMITS. Our plotting was both macro and micro. Occasionally we would “slum it” and write about individual characters, but on the whole our stories projected the power and majesty of worlds-spanning empires, miles-long battleships, epic mecha battles between gigantic armies in the deep of space. Over time, so many of us were so focused on the macro-story that micro-stories began to lose out, almost exclusively so.
Institutions vs. People.
I’ve been biting my tongue on any of the specifics of what Travis and I have been kicking around for a Proper reboot for a while, because I had wanted Trav to be the one to start tossing them out there. But, in our planning for a smaller-scaled Kupop sequel, what we’d decided on as “canon” background is one last, big war that ends up fundamentally changing everything. The Grand Army, the Great Powers, everything that we knew of from before as a Big Damn Deal comes out significantly diminished in importance. We’re not talking post-apocalyptic landscape or anything, but what we are talking about is an event that shocks the whole system and presents a good narrative justification to scale everything down and go back to Kupop’s roots: “A soldier, a moogle, and a blonde girl who appears to be the avatar of a goddess enter an Inn…”
… It looks like I’m still going to be mostly biting my tongue until Travis shows up. I think he deserves the honor of letting this particular cat out of its bag.
Well, my devil’s advocate question: If not now, when?
[quote=“Scen”]Well, one thing that has come up over and over again (and I think we may have flirted with it once or twice during these discussions) is the question of how do we maintain a focus in a revived Kupop? What’s the scale we’re talking about?
In Kupop of old, we had NO LIMITS. Our plotting was both macro and micro. Occasionally we would “slum it” and write about individual characters, but on the whole our stories projected the power and majesty of worlds-spanning empires, miles-long battleships, epic mecha battles between gigantic armies in the deep of space. Over time, so many of us were so focused on the macro-story that micro-stories began to lose out, almost exclusively so.
Institutions vs. People.
I’ve been biting my tongue on any of the specifics of what Travis and I have been kicking around for a Proper reboot for a while, because I had wanted Trav to be the one to start tossing them out there. But, in our planning for a smaller-scaled Kupop sequel, what we’d decided on as “canon” background is one last, big war that ends up fundamentally changing everything. The Grand Army, the Great Powers, everything that we knew of from before as a Big Damn Deal comes out significantly diminished in importance. We’re not talking post-apocalyptic landscape or anything, but what we are talking about is an event that shocks the whole system and presents a good narrative justification to scale everything down and go back to Kupop’s roots: “A soldier, a moogle, and a blonde girl who appears to be the avatar of a goddess enter an Inn…”
… It looks like I’m still going to be mostly biting my tongue until Travis shows up. I think he deserves the honor of letting this particular cat out of its bag.[/quote]
BUT BEING PATIENT IS HARD D:
Naw, that makes sense, I can’t wait to hear it. It sounds fun. I think it fits the way the story moved, too – we all became much more focused on character over time. I have an idea with this in a structural sense, but I’ll share it on the other thread.
[quote=“Scen”]Tex wrote:
I would love to see a Neo 2; like Jerry, some of my best stuff was there. However, I think I’d like to wait awhile on writing a Neo 2. My feeling is that I’d like to dip my toes into the classic Kupop first, feel it out, and then go back to that darker universe (and I like Mike’s comparison) when we have more under our belts. We might find new things we want to play with from that story. So, basically, I’d love to do Neo 2 someday, but maybe not now?
Well, my devil’s advocate question: If not now, when?[/quote]
That’s a fair question. My gut says: get Kupop off the ground and give it a year. That said, I would much rather err on the side of inclusivity. If people want Neo right away and it’s critical to feeling involved, let’s put our heads together.
I’ll go ahead and throw a couple of cents into the conversation.
As someone who never quite managed to find their sea legs in Proper, I’m totally sympathetic to Dustin’s point at the sheer overwhelming feeling of Kupop’s history sometimes. The very first story I ever started writing in Kupop was this noir-ish procedural that I remember being paralyzed over starting because I wanted to have a cop but I also wanted to be meticulously conscientious of the fact that I was slotting into an established universe. So I pored over the OmniNet (that’s what it was called, right? Black background, neon green text?) and finally settled on a Tasnica Security Company, thinking it to be the closest analogue Kupop had to a police force at the time. But the anxiety that simple detail caused me because I was nervous about fitting into this awesome shared universe was a near paralyzing thing. (That and Neo’s arrival led me to abandon that story about three chapters in, but I always kind of wanted to go back and finish it because I had it all blocked out already with a twist ending that I’ve still never told anyone so it could totally work. I digress.)
Nowadays? I’d just assume a police force is a given and write the cop in. I’m more comfortable playing in the sandbox.
But I think that weight or paralysis exerts itself in other ways, too. Like Scen said, everybody back when seemed to be writing these macro worlds-spanning empires at war and naturally someone like me coming into it would want to get in on the action. But it’s like playing G.I. Joe as a kid and one person has the Joe HQ playset with a full complement of soldiers, another has the Terrordrome with a Cobra armada, another’s repurposed the aircraft carrier into a third party, and a fourth is leading Destro’s MARS group-- and you feel like you’re standing there with your single action figure, wanting to join the play, but just not knowing how to necessarily in any meaningful way. That dynamic’s a little different in a more character focused story that doesn’t rely on mobilizing inter dimensional fleets. So it’s just something to keep in mind.
I was very fortunate (and forever grateful) when Scen gave me free rein in Gate for Neo, because even though I was kind of off in my own corner for a lot of it, it gave me the big macro stuff to play with and we did get to have some crossover stuff there towards the end.
My preferences these days are for more character focused stuff with a sense of cavalier adventure. I always wanted to do a kind of Ocean’s Eleven style heist story (hell, that could be great fun to collaborate on) or an old-style Agatha Christie murder mystery sort of thing. Something narrowly focused rather than “world-in-peril,” with the stakes contained to the characters.
For all of these reasons-- the idea of a narrowly focused setting (city, town, countryside) that we all get thrown in and go nuts with sounds exciting. In my mind’s eye I keep seeing that AOL page for Hyrulean Adventure with that tiny pixel map showing the village, Turtle Rock Inn, shore, etc. and envisioning something similar where the sheer odds of everyone overlapping with everyone else are increased but the story can just go anywhere. I think Mike’s Giant Robo Tourney back in the day did a great job of making us do this, too.
Whether that setting is post-apocalyptic or not, I could be down with that. Likewise, leave open the possibility of plugging this location and character set into the Web of Worlds at a later date.
I guess what I’m saying is that, while I would be fine with anything to get us writing again, a more limited focus where we play in the sandbox together (ala Robo Tourney) rather than separately just excites me more.
Lots to respond to, but I’ll be concise as possible.
I loved the macro plots and epic stories told, but they were next to impossible to join for a nervous kid not wanting to step on any gigantic toes. I’d probably do a lot better now, but without my own macro story elements, I’d generally just be a tiny cog in the machine, even still. This wouldn’t preclude me from telling a good story, but it does diminish the chances of that story having a noticeable impact in the overall story, aka. that sense of interacting. At that point, it feels like making fan-fic of fan-fic.
As Dustin said, I don’t want to stop anyone else from jumping back into what they created. I know I would want to, if I had ever made anything substantial, let alone spanning a decade in a half. It would be intimidating as hell to try and catch up, but I’d be willing to try.
I do like the idea of a separate story to write with people alongside Kuproper. I also like the idea of a small scale Kupop that’s more character based (at least initially). I guess I’m still sort of up for whatever, but certain options are easier to picture myself getting into fully.
Kupop is the coolest sandbox I’ve ever come across (still), and whatever we do with it, I know it was the writers, not the source or even created material that made it that way, in the end.
Yeah, the more we talk, the more I like the idea of taking a stab at both, along the lines of what M3 and Spoon pointed out! I think we could do it, and I think there’s some exciting opportunities there. It sounds like Travis has an idea for getting Kupop to be more character-driven, too. I’d like to be as friendly as possible for everyone writing, because it’s definitely about the writers.
Also Mike’s post-apocalypse idea and a map that generates… I admit that sounds potentially real cool.