Monthly Archives: April 2009

Remaking Hellraiser?

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So there may be a Hellraiser remake on the horizon. You’d think that I’d be upset about this, seeing as it was one of my very favorite horror movies growing up, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

If they keep Doug Bradley as Pinhead, I’ll be over the moon, but his own comments seem to make this unlikely. On the other hand, he’s been happy enough to appear in every sequel made, and while some were lovely some… were not.

My biggest beef with the movie has always (even before I read the original story) been the casting of Clare Higgins as Julia. The character’s appeal made more sense when I read the story and understood that she was supposed to be phenomenally beautiful… but Higgens didn’t bring that across. When I was young I thought that it was just some grown up thing I didn’t get but looking at it now…. I still don’t get it. (Higgens wasn’t unattractive, but she always struck me as more of a high strung wasp matron than anything else.) So re-casting that role is a plus for me.

The up side (if it happens) is that a whole new generation will discover the franchise. That’s cool. The down side… fans getting pissy. I figure, even if they do a remake and it sucks, I’ll still have the original.

*That* was the problem?!

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So, I’ve been thinking that I might want to add commenting back into the CS main site. (I go back and forth on this at least once a year.) If nothing else, it will force me to get a little more fluent in theme editing, right? (Also cementing my loathing for the Kubrick theme, but that’s neither here nor there.)

So I spend a few days in bloody, rip-apart theme-land. I get a beta theme that has 90% of the look/feel I want and (theoretically) 95% of the commenting functionality I want. So I take the site off line, load it up, and poke around. And comments don’t work.

In fact, comments don’t work on the main site at all, no matter what theme I pop in. (PPF though, worked just fine.) Much hair is pulled out. WordPress is uninstalled and then re-installed. (If you saw anything funky last night, this would be why. Also, PPF has not yet been brought back online, but I’m a little lazy and I’m pretty sure no-one’s paying attention to that section but me anyway.)

Re-installing wordpress is a pain in the ass. My server has a 2MB upload limit and how big is my data archive? 2.14 MB. File is manually split into 2 pieces and imports just fine. Plugins are re-installed. The gallery is re-created. (Mostly. Still some tweaks that need to be tweaked.) Two hours and some cursing later and I still can’t send though a test comment. I begin to wonder of there’s some data corruption somewhere, or if I’m just cursed.

Trying to troubleshoot or find help in the wordpress codex/forums, BTW, sucks. I’d heard this around and about, but hadn’t yet experienced it in it’s full glory. It REALLY sucks. I was on the verge of hitting B&N tonight and hoping I could find something relevant to my actual problem, when I ran across a post for a problem similar to but not exactly the same as what I was seeing. The solution for that problem was to CHMOD the .htaccess file so that wordpress could write changes to it.

My .htaccess file was already CHMOD’ed correctly, but I had made custom changes to it over time. So (while crossing fingers and making a backup just in case) I delete the copy from the server and let wordpress generate it’s own copy. And suddenly, comments work. Hoorah.

If only I’d figured this out before I went and made all that extra work for myself.