Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Welcome hackers, outage, foundation funddrive
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-01-30 15:13:55 [Permalink]
Hello and welcome, everyone from Hacker News and all the other websites that have been banging on about my enormous CoC since last Thursday.

As a brief explainer to Improbable Island and its current state, imagine you're throwing a party, and it's the best party ever, and you started it in your twenties and now you're 41 and you've had to create extensions on your house to hold All These People, and one day you look behind yourself and remember that you ripped the floor up to create another swimming pool and then got distracted because somebody asked you for a balcony. Suddenly an extra couple of thousand people show up from out of nowhere and start falling through the holes, and the various possums and raccoons that inhabit this particular floor of your house go "What holes?" because they've been there for so long that nobody notices them anymore. Welcome. If you come up out of the lobby and poke around a bit, you might find some places that look like they've at least had a new coat of paint and a minor dusting since computers had a TURBO button.

Yes, do come in, I know this pipe is gushing right now, I thought it'd be quiet for a month or so, just ignore it, I'll have it patched up in a jiffy. You've joined the party just after we've completed a server migration which involved skipping three major PHP versions like a gazelle leaping gracefully over the Grand Canyon and making a perfect ten-point landing only to smash face-first into a schoolbus full of porridge. I hope you love it here, at least once I've tidied up a bit. Welcome, and I'm sorry.

We had a minor server outage Friday night/Saturday morning, and it's my fault, because when my mate texted me to say "Wow you made the front page of Hacker News, hope your box doesn't melt!" and my box had not yet melted, I just couldn't resist replying with my best Posh Horsey Laugh, "Ahwahwahwa, euxgh dahling, hai've been optimizing the absolute bollocks off this game since it ran on spinning rust, Improbable Island hasn't even noticed a little blip like Hacker News, ahohohoho." Sure enough, that very night, around 3am, after serving twenty times our usual traffic for over 24 hours without so much as a sneeze, a whole different server belonging to some other bastard blew its PSU and popped the rack fuse, and down we went like a sack of spuds. Nobody will ever believe me, and that's fine. I guess.

Speaking of stuff falling down unexpectedly, I need some foundation repairs and they're gonna be bloody expensive. It's a long, long story, and you might have seen me talking about it a little at a time in Banter, gently probing around the edges of the subject like your tongue might squirm at a cavity you're trying to ignore, but the short of it is that I live in a house on a hill, the hill is trying its hardest not to be a hill anymore, we gotta jack up the whole front of the house, nine grand kthx.

I got the quote in mid-December after noticing a big crack where I put up my Christmas tree; it's taken me this long to just, like... parse the idea of nine thousand fucking dollars and what to even do about that. Previous fundraisers have been stuff like, oh I need some new tyres, I bet if I ask a few thousand people on the Island I can have that sorted out in a day, or we wanna pay for a whole year of hosting up front because that'll save us a few hundred quid, stuff that seemed big at the time but they're dwarfed in the shadow of this nine fucking thousand dollars.

So I've gotta think of something big and impressive to promise you lot in exchange for this fund drive, but it's gotta be bigger and more impressive than anything I've ever done, and I've gotta think of it while trying not to think about the whole front of my house falling off. So I haven't thought of anything yet, so I guess I'll start the Actual Fund Drive in February with some kind of bonus Monthly Memento or something, consider this advance warning.

Have fun!

~CMJ

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