If you haven’t noticed, Blizzard has been revealing a series of teaser images over the past few days. This appears to be related to their possibly accidentally leaked, upcoming game announcement.

UPDATE: IT’S DIABLO 3!!!!!

Speculation on what the announcement will be as ranged from World of Starcraft, to World of Warcraft 2, or a completely new franchise. Over the past week, it’s looking nearly guaranteed that Blizzard will be announcing Diablo 3.

Supporting this theory, there are four recent, possible clues that all seem to nail this being Diablo 3.

First, a couple personal contributions: First, as many have noted, each teaser image has had a unique filename – so far, they have been named “cold“, “cavern“, “tundra” and ““icy”.

Note that each of these words so far have been used to name areas in Diablo 2:

Act 1: The Cold Plains
Act 3: Spider Cavern, Act 5: Drifter Cavern
Act 5: Frozen Tundra
Act 5: Icy Cellar

Second, note that the latest teaser image shows what appears to be two gleaming eyes. (Over the past few days, the ice has been cracking and revealing more and more details.) We tried overlaying the Diablo 2 box art (before/after results below), and the eyes matched up perfectly with the box art:

A near perfect match, or wishful thinking?

(Special thanks to my friend Adam Betts for photoshopping the overlay graphic.)

The third clue, from World of Warcraft blog WoWInsider, points towards interesting behavior in Blizzard’s Battle.net forums. Apparently, this same behavior led to (correct) speculation of upcoming game World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King last year. This time, the same type of glitches seem to confirm Diablo 3 forums are in the works.

Finally, there is confirmation from my favorite Diablo 2 fansite, Diabloii.net, that inside industry sources have confirmed that Blizzard will announce Diablo 3 on Saturday at the Paris Worldwide Invitational.

With multiple clues pointing towards Diablo, I have my fingers crossed. Diablo 2 consumed a year or two of my life, but I am so ready to step back in again. Once an addict, always an addict.

Think the upcoming game announcement is going to be Diablo 3? Digg it!

Exam Week at Dartmouth

It’s that time of year, and the house library has pretty much become a home. Peopple have been sleeping, eating, studying, and taking study breaks over the past few days. The result: natural chaos, as only college students can create. Taken with the old iPhone, so excuse the quality. Continue reading…

Guess what? Things are stirring again. Actually, they’ve been stirring for a while, but I’ve had to keep quiet about most of them. I’m planning some huge updates to the site though in the upcoming week or two.

For any MDA fans out there, if you missed it, we’re running a developer competition now to select the right developers for Season 2. And if you’re a developer, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

MacThemes 2… is out! Huge props to Ricky, Johnny and Dave for pulling it off, and kudos to David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design for the great design refresh. The front page is now active again with a reallly excited news staff, so while I’m taking things pretty hands off, I’ll be looking forward to reading all the new content.

MacHeist? Well… it’s over, I guess. But it’s a long break between now and the next one. Maybe we’ll think of something to fill that hiatus up.

There’s other stuff coming up, and I’ll be making efforts soon to get some more discussion going between me and you guys. But for now, the blog is definitely continuing in hibernation. (I have over 10,000 comments in moderation, mostly spam. I don’t even know where to begin.) Stick with the twitter feed for updates.

As I wrote a while ago, I had been having hosting troubles for this blog. Those days are now past, as last night, My Dream App web programmer Scott Meinzer helped me move the site over to a blazingly fast dedicated server, hosted by 1&1. (Major kudos to Scott. His internet was acting up so he actually drove over to his workplace to use their wifi in the car. I can’t thank him enough.) I know, I know, some of you warned me about 1&1′s service in the previous blog post, but no worries… I’ve had nothing but good service running a dedicated box with them for MDA.

What does that mean? Well, my site should now be completely Digg proof, and should run significantly faster. It’s like a fresh install of OS X! I’m loving the snappiness.

And, probably of more interest to you guys, is I have not one, but three previews coming up for cool new apps (and a cool new update). The first should be up today or tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Ah, and a final note… I’ve been resisting posting about my ongoing project on this blog, with the misguided motivation of separating personal stuff from work, or something. But then I realized two things. First, it’s cool stuff, so why not? Second, we’ve been giving away free apps, and I should’ve let you guys know! So. For a limited time, while Round 2 of voting just ended, along with the chance for voters to walk away with a free copy of the excellent Mori.

That’s it for now… lots of stuff coming soon.

Well, this one’s been stewing for a while, and it’s nearly ready for mass consumption. But not quite yet. There’s a bunch of cool people involved, and I’m hoping to see a lot of you guys involved as well once it starts rolling. Let’s see if you guys can guess what I’ve been up to! More as it develops, back to packing for WWDC!

All right. In a way, I really don’t want to post about this, as the subject of this post is ultimately an undeserving attention whore and I’m shoveling some more attention towards him. But in the end, the man deserves to be exposed for what he is, so I’m going to go ahead with this. If you’re not inclined to read rants, I’ll summarize it here. Bryan Lund is a hack.

Now, a little background on this man. From what I understand, Bryan switched to the Mac in 2000, and soon began a Mac software company called RadicalBreeze, featuring flagship disc burning application DiscBlaze. RadicalBreeze has made a name for itself by pumping out a ton of half-assed RealBasic apps. Like, a huge amount of them. Literally over a dozen one-trick pony’s that are, in general, really ugly ponies with disabilities that smell sort of funny. You can go check these apps out for yourself. (A note, the newest version of DiscBlaze is surprisingly decent, but that’s because Bryan paid a friend of mine to write it.) Continue reading…

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the blog was in the throws of some rather major hosting disasters, partially due to DreamHost‘s service. Imagine my surprise when these problems continued AFTER the data center was back up, and the Slashdotting was over. So I sent them an email, and here’s what I got:

“Sorry for the problems. Your site should be working now. It would appear someone had throttled your website, likely because it was getting so much traffic to kill the server. They should have written you about it though, arg. The load on the server is staying the same after turning the throttle off, so you should be ok. Should you be throttled again, you can ask to be moved to another server which will keep you from getting throttled. Gage is a machine with fewer people on it, but only 2GB of memory. Let me know if you have further problems or questions.

Justin”

So, the reason the blog’s been completely patchy for days and days now is because Dreamhost was throttling it’s bandwidth, without even, you know, telling the customer. Well, at least it’s back up now as I transition into a new dedicated host, and thanks to Justin for a suitably apologetic and courteous email. That was appreciated. (Oh, and PS, thanks to all the readers who suggested hosting solutions in the previous post. That was very helpful for me, and will be helpful to others.)

All right, so as you guys may’ve noticed, my blog was down for a good 24 hour period through most of yesterday. A real pity considering the amount of traffic that was coming over trying to pull up the site. (And REALLY frustrating. I think fellow webmasters will know what I’m talking about, and for the rest of you, imagine having sent out a party invitation to your house to tens of thousands of people then having to leave the entire day with the house dark and locked up.) So what happened? Continue reading…