I’m Still Here

Hey, so… blogging. It’s a thing I used to do. I know that nobody cares that I haven’t really been writing anything lately, but I have excuses, and they must be made!

First off, January and the first half of February were nuts at work. Things have calmed down now, but for the first 45 days or so of 2024, I was run pretty ragged. Most days left me mentally exhausted, and that really killed my drive to do much in my spare time besides watch other people play video games on YouTube.

Oh, and as an accidental segue, AGDQ happened a few weeks back. I didn’t catch a ton of it, but the Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong 64 runs were amazing. And we can’t forget the Super Mario 64 drum% run. That was mind-boggling.

Then there’s my own YouTube presence, which I’ve been grinding away at, spending huge chunks of my weekends recording and editing videos that nobody will ever watch. To what end? I don’t know, and I’ve been seriously pondering why I even continue to do it. Well, the let’s plays, at least. People seem to appreciate my fast food reviews for whatever reason.

Lastly, I have been hopelessly addicted to Steelrising for the last week. This is a video game you’ve likely never heard of -I know I hadn’t- which is free on PS+ as of this post. I added it to my library, not expecting to ever actually play it, but then I did. And then I couldn’t stop. Even when I’m not playing, I’m thinking about it. Pleasant thoughts, too, which is odd because it’s a soulslike and usually those go hand-in-hand with feelings more along the lines of… intense frustration. I would like to write a full thing about this game at some point, but given my total lack of writing lately, the outlook is not terribly optimistic.

Yeah, so that’s my short list of excuses. They’re not good, but that’s why I’m categorizing them as excuses, specifically. Please note that I have completed writing my 2023 Game of the Year feature, and it’s been done since mid-December. I just haven’t had the drive to put together fancy header images. That’s literally all that’s holding me back from publishing it. Kinda sad. Maybe I’ll get around to it by the time spring rolls around.

Twenty

Oh dang… The first post I ever made was dated December 2, 2022. So that means I’ve been at this for over twenty years now. Kinda bummed that I missed the anniversary!

If this website were anything more than an elaborate diary of the video games I play and the junk food I eat, I’d probably do something special to celebrate. Alas!

Grand Re-Re-Re-Opening

So, my WordPress theme, “Weaver II”, has been woefully outdated for some time now. I don’t much like the idea of installing a new theme and having to tweak everything to get it back to the way I like it, but such is life.

That said, I have (clearly) installed a new theme, and so things are going to look a little wonky around here for a bit. I’m not the most proactive guy around, so no guarantees that things will improve quickly. You’re just going to have to appreciate “Twenty Fifteen”‘s out-of-the-box look for a while.

Two Kay

With these words, I have published 2,000 WordPress posts.

Well, it would be more than 2,000 if you counted all the articles that I haven’t moved over from the Angelfire site yet. And I have 28 partially-written things still sitting in draft form, some of which are actually done and I don’t know why they were never published. But whatever!

I wish I had something more exciting prepared, or, anything prepared. But honestly I didn’t even realize this milestone was coming up. Here’s a link to a random article I wrote in 2004 that I have a strong sentimental attachment to, and I even think it’s actually kind of funny. At least, it made me laugh when I was re-reading it after a couple drinks the other night.

Anyways! Congratulations to me, I guess, for having voided so many of my inconsequential thoughts onto the internet.

Please note that December of this year will mark TE’s 20th anniversary. If I stop writing until 2023, that’s 100 posts per year (8.3333333333 per month). Sounds kind of appealing…

I’ll do something better for 3,000. (No promises.)

A follow-up

Remember a few days ago when I wrote a blog post about how one of my old webistes had gone kablooey and I lost (but not really) a bunch of “TE Classic” content?

Well, I haven’t been able to sleep tonight, so I went and added Part Two of my Disney World series to WordPress.

Now while I did read the whole thing over and fix a few spelling and grammatical errors, I didn’t make any significant content changes. That means that this is still a thing I wrote when I was seventeen, and as such, there may be a little cringe tucked in there.

I also uploaded the old article I wrote about The Hamburger Game. After re-reading this one… let’s just say that it might have been okay to leave it buried. Not my best work for a great many reasons.

Cannot find memory_lane.html

Hey so Angelfire killed off one of my old websites at some point. Not the main one, but the one that was hosting images and pages for a number of old articles, most notably my memoirs of that time my family went to Disney World. Wuh-oh!

Luckily, I have all that old stuff backed up locally, so none of it it lost forever. But it is a grim reminder that I still have a lot of “content” that needs to be brought over from Angelfire to my current site. I’d really like to get around to it, but I’m just never bored at work any more!

Merry Belated Xmas?

I guess I’m a little late on this one. But I have an… excuse. Not really a good reason, because while I was otherwise occupied for all the waking hours of the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of December, I didn’t do jack squat yesterday. I could have mashed together some kind of holiday greeting-type post.

But I didn’t, so now it’s two days past Christmas and I just feel like it’s too late to bother backdating anything. Not that anyone would know. But I would know, and that’s enough. The shame would be too great.

What I can backdate, however, is the long overdue Top Ten Video Games of 2018 article that I fully wrote and never posted earlier this year because of the possibility of website doom. But it’s there now! Another reason I had delayed posting it is because I wanted to do illustrations and never made the time. So I just ended up throwing some doodles in there instead. Maybe the Top Ten of 2019 will fare better! (I doubt it.)

A pointless catch-up

I still have a number of blog posts to catch up on from my almost-year of not blogging. I have a bunch of assorted things written up in Google Docs, and more or less just need to review them and then mash them into WordPress. Should be quick and easy, right? Yes. Yes it should.

But I’m lazy, and can’t be bothered to get it all done in one fell swoop. So today, we only take a few strides towards post-dating all those dated posts. I’ve gone and transferred over a few “liveblogs” of a number of Nintendo Direct presentations from this year. Was it all of them? I don’t know. It’s all of the ones I cared enough to record my thoughts on.

Seeing as these are mostly knee-jerk reactions to new game announcements, it’s kind of a pointless thing to go back and look at for anyone who isn’t me. For me, I find it kind of neat to look back at these lists of games to compare how interested I was in the reveals at the time versus how interested I ended up being in the final products.

I guess what I’m saying here, is that I probably didn’t need to bother highlighting that I’ve added these posts to the archive. But here we are.

Nintendo Direct – Feb 13/19

Nindies Spotlight – Mar 20/19

Nintendo @ E3 2019

Nintendo Direct – Sept 4/19

Thanksgiving Food Coma

I didn’t do as much internet work over the long weekend as I should have. I did exactly the bare minimum, which was to upload a new episode of Ryan’s Pop-Tarts Review. To be fair, it is by far the most effort I’ve ever put into a Pop-Tart video.

Oh, and I also added in all of 2019’s Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up posts. Yes, I’ve been keeping track all this time. I would link to each one individually, but it’s each one from January to September and… who could really be bothered? Let’s be honest, that feature is 100% for me. If you’re really interested, there’s a “search by category” dropdown box on the left-side menu for a reason.

Later this week (probably): Another Spooktober 2019 review (though I do not guarantee a video version), and also I have the urge to write too many words about Monster Hunter World: Iceborne.

Welcome to October

Hey. I’m back. I’m writing blogs again. We could simply pretend like nothing ever happened and there was never an eight-month gap in posting, but for the sake of posterity, here’s the story:

Way, way back in January of 2019, I randomly visited the site of my webhost, TopClassHost. Their website was gone, and in its place was a single page that said (and I’m paraphrasing) “We’re shutting down and your websites will be gone as of March 10. So long, losers.”

So I was faced with a decision: stop blogging, or pay someone else for webspace. It was a tough choice, since TopClass was the cheapest around and I’m too poor to really go with a more ritzy provider. So I did what I usually do when faced with a difficult choice: nothing at all.

Long story short, some time passed and then my good friend Edwin, who knows all about this kind of thing, more or less took it upon himself to make this silly website work again at a reasonable cost. What a pal! I bought him a pizza as a show of appreciation, which may not be a fair trade considering how much time and effort he’s put into this.

Now we’re getting into the Halloween season, but I don’t know if I’ll be posting much in that spirit. I’ve continued to write junk here and there, on the odd chance that this website was ever resuscitated, so I’ll be cleaning up and posting a lot of backdated material for the next who-knows-how-long. Look forward to the 2019 archive slowly filling itself in!

Post Script: WordPress has changed dramatically in the last eight months and I kind of hate it.