Category: Admin

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.

Halfway mark to GOTY

You know, I’ve been keeping this data current, so I might as well post about it.

Currently, there are 19 video games that are eligible for the inevitable Top X Video Games Beaten in 2018 article (I don’t know how many spots I’m going to have this year). That number would be reduced to a paltry five if I only included games released in 2018.

Of those, I feel like three have guaranteed spots, and only one is an actual 2018 game.

The rest are six maybes, four that I’m kinda meh on, and six that are definite nos.

The moral of the story is that I’ve clearly been playing too many games that I don’t really like this year. I may have to do a reassessment of the list with a more forgiving heart. Keeping in mind that I immediately cut 32 of the 54 games eligible for 2017’s list, so the ratio of definite nos to total games is still a lot better this year (32% in 2018, 59% in 2017).

Did You Know: Ryan is a Lazybones

Here’s an interesting tidbit: I have 18 posts listed as drafts. Not that I think anyone cares, just a weird little thing I figured I’d take note of. Now let’s break them down!

There are a whopping nine articles that I have left incomplete to some degree. Some are so very close to done, and others are like two paragraphs in. A couple I’ve been working on slowly because they are massive. One I took all the pictures for but never started writing. These may or may not ever be completed.

Three articles have been fully written, and are ready to post. Except that I need to get screenshots/pictures for them before they can go live. One even has all the pictures and I just need to make a fancy banner for it. Another has been constantly put off because I can’t post screenshots from the Switch directly to WordPress like I could with the WiiU.

One blog post was half-written out and then I realized how completely incoherent it was, so I decided to burn it down and start over. I have not followed through on the starting over part.

There is one blog post there that seems to be complete, and I think maybe that I just accidentally left it as a draft instead of hitting the Publish button.

Three articles/blog posts are there, half written, but have been sitting incomplete so long that they have become irrelevant it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to post them now. I might finish and post them anyway, but I may also just let them languish as half-finished drafts forever.

Finally, there is one post, fully written and complete, which will remain a draft forever. Because it’s a piece of writing that means a lot to me and I want to keep, but I don’t feel like I should be sharing it with anyone. It’s not anything interesting or embarrassing, either, so don’t waste your time hacking your way in to get at it.

And that’s that. Personally, I thought there would be more finished articles that just need pictures. I know I’m really bad about procrastinating on those pictures.

Wherein I showed some effort

Guess what! I went and slapped a few more of those old non-WordPress articles into WordPress! Now there are more things here to read! Hooray! Exclamation points!

GameCube Demo Disc – Honestly, I wish there were more of these. I’m very much at the point in my life where hidden gems of that era interest me greatly.

Birthday Article 2003 – The first of… several. Certainly could be classified as a relic of another era, as I will never again get enough things for my birthday to write an article about.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! – Read this and get excited for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch! Or at least, wish that Nintendo would bring back the two-person karts. I liked that gimmick a lot.

Holiday Viva Puffs – I had actually moved this one over back in December, but forgot to make a big stick about it. Whoops!

With these up, all articles from 2003 and 2006 onward are available on the WordPress site. Of course, they all still exist in their gaudy web 1.0 glory on the archive site. So feel free to check that out if you’re tired of the unified white-and-blue theme. Some of them have ugly background jpgs!

Overthinking

Should I make a Switch category? I kinda want to make a Switch category. What do you think?

Nah, I don’t think I’m gonna do that. It wouldn’t be fair to all the other consoles that don’t have their own category. And I’m way too lazy to go back and tag all the archived posts accordingly.

This post probably should have been a Tweet, if I were the type to Twitter.

Watch your follow-through

‘Member last week when I said that I transferred an old article from the Angelfire TE to WordPress TE? ‘Member how I made you guess what it was? If you didn’t care enough to figure it out, here is the answer:

TMNT2: Battle Nexus (GBA)

This is important, because something related is just around the corner. You may want to read up now, to make sure that you’re ready.

Also I got wrapped up in the moment and transferred a couple more “gems” over to the current site. I won’t mess around with you this time. Here are the links:

Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

The Three-Foot Six-Pak (Part One)

If you haven’t read these before, one is kinda like mehhh, and the other one is a beloved TE classic. Try to guess which is which!