Hey so September’s been a pretty quiet month vis-a-vis blogging.
Here’s an update: I moved over an old article from the Angelfire site. Which one? Stay tuned, as you’ll find out in three days!
Will I do any others? Ehh, maybe. I’d like to clean up the stragglers, but I don’t see myself being so motivated as to actually follow through.
(This is very much a 2003-style post.)
Do you like listicles? Because apparently I do. I promise that I won’t do as many of these stupid things this year. Cross my heart.
Okay so remember a couple years ago when I did lists of the top albums and artists that I’d listened to the year before? Well I’m doing it again. Only just with albums this time because it’s so redundant to do both. It works like so:
I pull up my Last.fm page and check the top albums for the last 365 days. Keep in mind that this is only considering tracks that were actually scrobbled. So anything I listened to via the Scrobbler app on my phone or Winamp on my PC. CDs obviously don’t count (not that use those too often), and neither do tracks that were played with Media Player Classic, because I don’t have the Last.fm plugin for that, if there even is one.
So no, the list isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s the best metric that we have. Enjoy.
Apparently WordPress automatically turns text emoticons into smilies? I had no idea. Maybe it’s just the theme? I don’t think I’ve ever actually used one in a blog post before yesterday.
Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I went to work yesterday as usual, even though I was feeling a little snippy (not that anyone noticed). And I spent the evening with my family, so it’s not like I was stewing in my misery all alone. I’ve been fairly good in general, it was just the one big day that brought me down.
Well, you always could. There’s a comments section below each post. But only spammers have used the feature over the last… woah, it’s been exactly two years since the last legitimate comment. Spooky.
Anyhow, I’ve put a link to the long-abandoned Torrential Coozy Forums on the left bar there. I beg you, please sign up and be my internet friend? Or not, whatever. It’s your choice. We actually just had a new member sign up in December, so technically the forums are more active than the blog comments! What even are you waiting for?
Here’s a special bonus even: sign up and I’ll write a big long blog post on the topic of your choosing. It’ll probably be boring as all heck if it’s not something I’m interested in, but I’ll do it!
(A more interesting alternative may be to join Talking Time, where I post quite often and there are a bunch of cool people.)
Posting is probably going to slow down/come to a complete stop for a while.
That’s what I’d usually say, except for I’ve got a bunch of pre-written posts lined up for the next couple weeks. Thank goodness for WordPress!
So yeah, business as usual. Some things you read may be out-of-date though, as I wrote the bulk of October’s posts in September.
I love WordPress and all, because it really facilitates managing this blog. Every post is sorted and categorized and easily searchable. Updating takes only as long as I need to write and do a quick once-over for typos (though maybe I should be doing two…) because I don’t have to worry about doing any of that HTML business anymore. It’s wonderfully easy.
Maybe even too easy.
See, I’ve noticed a trend in my blogging lately, and it’s not a good one. WordPress gives me the ability to write up a post and set a date for it to go live. So I just pop it in there and forget about it. Only, sometimes I schedule a post that I’m not quite done with. I intend to go back to it, but occasionally forget and then it shows up incomplete, and that’s just plain bad.
Only twice has an entry gone live with the body text unfinished, and I’m trying really hard to remember to set them as drafts when I’m not done writing. The problem there is that I have a rather massive amount of drafts piling up that I’ve all but abandoned. The sad truth is that these will likely never see the light of day.
The more common thing I do is write up the entirety a post and then leave any image-related work to a later date because while I do generally like the fruits of my labor, making banners and finding suitable images can be a pain in the butt. I could just as easily stop posting images along with the stuff I write, but I like to at least have something there to add a splash of colour and be more visually appealing than just black words on a white background.
All that said, I guess my point is just that I want to say sorry if you’ve been experiencing posts that are clearly still under construction. I’ll try to be less lazy from now on.
You know, maybe that post title is a little too harsh. I don’t really do filler these days, so it’s not like I need to poke fun at it the way I used to back when basically every post was filler.
As for the subject at hand, I wanted to take a moment to check in and talk about how the Year of Nintendo 64 is going. It’s largely a personal project, so it’s not like I’m taking notes and sharing this stuff with everyone I know. I’m not even committed to writing a full article about every game I play. That said, I still want to sort of chart a course for the rest of the year here, as a reminder to keep me on task, if nothing else.
I spent January rounding up a few new games that I’ll be mixing into the lineup of games that I already own. Truth be told, I didn’t actually own enough “beatable” 64 games to get me through the year, so making some acquisitions was a must. I reserve the right to change this at any time, but here’s the breakdown of what I’ll be playing each month:
As you can see, I’ve come up slightly short. I do have a few other games that I could pop in there, but they’re either so short (Pokémon Snap) or I’ve played them recently enough (Banjo-Tooie) that I don’t feel like they’re a good fit for the project. They may still get some play, but they won’t be the main games. What really differentiates them? Nothing, I guess. My goal is one a month, I suppose that doesn’t mean I couldn’t play two in a month.
You know what? Nuts to it. I’mma pop some quarterly titles in there, because it’s an excuse to make another list. I know that the first quarter is almost up, but I just completed Super Mario 64 DS, and I’m willing to count that. Maybe I’ll play the original again anyway.
There we go. Now if only I had social media’d this thing it might be more than me just concocting a weird excuse to play old games. I guess it’s still not too late, but I mean, we’re already in March. The hype phase is over. Whatever. My compulsion is to put words on a page, not to try to force people to read those words.
I hope you like Dark Souls, because I sure do. Also I’ve already written out enough weekly “journal entries” to get us through the month, so you’re going to be reading about it at least for the rest of the year. It’s funny, because I didn’t really like it at first, but now I’m totally enthralled with it and it’s pretty much on my mind all the time. Kind of like what happened with Shadow of the Colossus, only Dark Souls is not a game I can just casually clear in a weekend.
So that’s happening. I’ve also had an article ready to post for like a full month now, but I keep neglecting to do a banner for it so it continues wallow in Draft status.
Also I’ll be doing a Top X Video Games 2013 type of feature soon (probably in January), because I know those are what people come here for.
That’s all. Just a status update today. I have nothing else to say.
I learned the hard way this morning, that my body will no longer tolerate me eating like a young man. Back in the day, I used to pack away as much of whatever I wanted, and all would be good. I might get full after a while, but hey, full is good.
Last night, I ate two polish sausage hot dogs, half a thing of fries, a few peanut butter cookies, and a big ol’ root beer. This sounds like a standard meal for me, and I figured it would be as much. But this morning I woke up with the absolute worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also I was still burping out the smell of hot dogs. It was a horrible, disgusting morning.
I look back now, and shudder to think of the disaster I averted by opting to not get that third hot dog.
All this to say… there’s not a lot going on. Who would have thought that my entire schtick was buying silly crap and then writing about it? Turns out that I don’t actually do anything interesting, I just used to make the “most” of my disposable income. I’m sitting here, racking my brain for something I’m interested enough to write about at length, but I’m at a total loss. So stories about hot dog burps are the best you’re gonna get right now.
I suppose I could start playing Fallout: New Vegas and regale you with tall tales about my further adventures in post-apocalyptic America, but there are just so many other games I’d rather be playing right now (and honestly I think I’d rather go back to Skyrim before starting New Vegas). Also, I feel like I’m falling back into the habit of only writing about video games, and I really want to pull back away from that. Yes, video games are pretty much all I do, but I’d sure like to be able to at least pretend for a while that I have other interests.
I was poking around the site today, just lookin’ at stuff, and noticed that the Features page is full of content, but there aren’t any actual links to that content. So I went and made all the Steve Articles and GameFAQs submissions available to read. and I do recommend that you check out those Steve Articles. They’re pretty surreal, and a nice reminder of an age long ago when other people would occasionally contribute to the site.
I was going to go ahead and link all the Chat Radios, but they’re stuck in some really ugly pages. I’m not too sure if I want to leave them as-is or go through the trouble of converting them into a nicer template. If you want to read them as they are, just follow this link. They’re also recommended reads, as they’re pretty funny.
As for the CD Archive? Well, I refuse to give up on it, but I’m certainly not going to bother updating it anytime soon. I haven’t linked in the pages that exist yet, but I guess I could go do that now. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.
That’s it for today. Just admin stuff. Tomorrow I’ll make a post about video games! But I’ll warn you now, it’s gonna be more of a diary entry for me than anything else.
