Category: Admin

When autumn attacks

So you may have noticed that there’s something different about this here blog. New glasses? A haircut? Nope! I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to the Weaver II theme, which is fairly close to the old theme, Weaver.

Well, I suppose the sequel should look kinda similar.

Anyway, I’ve also gone and painted the site in autumny leaf colours. Which was my original intent when I logged in today. The theme change just kind of happened as a side effect. I’m not sure about some of the specific colour choices, but I love the overall fall motif. If you can point out a change or two that might enhance it further, please don’t hesitate to leave a suggestion in the comments. I’m still tweaking things here and there, so it’s not like you’d be raining on my parade or anything.

While I was all mucking about with the visual options, I also managed to fart out a little article. I still need to proof it, and it should be up on Wednesday at the latest. Spoilers: it’s a short album review, so don’t get too excited.

A fishy situation

I’ve been trying to focus on writing articles lately, and I think it’s been working out well enough. I published five of the things in just under a month, and I don’t feel like quality even took a hit for the increased pace. Not that I’d set the quality bar very high to begin with.

That said, I think that the article blitz is over. There are still a few in the works, in various states of completion, but I don’t have any sort of set time frame for finishing and launching them. I’ll probably write a thing about Picross e2 next week, since that’ll likely be what I do this weekend. Will there be enough material for a whole second article? Who knows? Not I.

Anyway, the reason I logged into WordPress is mostly to put into words my bewilderment at my own incompetence. What incompetence, you ask? My total inability to fish in Animal Crossing: New Leaf with the sound turned off. Weird, I know. As someone who has endlessly talked up how much time he spends fishing in that game, it’s striking to me how bad I am at it without the audio cue.

If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, here’s how it works: You equip a fishing rod, walk up to the water, and press the A button to cast. If there’s a fish swimming around (represented by a black shadow), it may notice your lure and start nibbling at it. It’ll swim up to the lure up to five times, making little “tick” sound effects, each time with a random chance of actually biting. When a fish does bite, your bobber is pulled underwater and a big “bloop” sound effect plays. Depending on the rarity of the fish, you have about second or less to press the A button again to land the fish.

Sounds really easy, but you’ve gotta have a pretty good reflex, especially with the rarer fish. The problem, it seems, is that while I can generally land fish pretty well while the sound is turned on, I just can’t do it without the audio cue. I was playing on the bus this morning while listening to Retronauts and couldn’t catch a fish to save my life. Compounding the issue were the facts that it was early in the morning and raining, which are both conditions that rarer fish will appear under. So not only was I unable to catch anything more than a few worthless barbel steed, but I was most likely missing out on some rare catches too (rare fish usually sell for lots of cash).

Oh well. It’s mostly just interesting (to me) that I respond faster to aural than visual cues. I would never have thought this, because my hearing isn’t exactly great to begin with. And that ends my little ramble for today.

This is giving in

Hey I totally haven’t even thought to mention that I’m now on the Twitter. Yep. I still think it’s pretty stupid, but I’ve officially joined the legion of twits.

Please follow me @TheRyanDS

It’s mostly a way to push articles and anything I upload to YouTube, but I do occasionally tweet some unique stuff. Nothing really worth seeing, but just stupid thoughts that I feel an unusual need to share. I suppose that’s pretty much the point though, so I guess I’m right at home there.

Paragraph formatting and such

It’s that time again! That time when I just talk about what’s going on here behind the scenes.

The most important thing I want to note is that I’ve decided to make my upcoming works more visible. To that end, I’ve added the titles of four upcoming articles to the articles list. For one, you have some idea what’s coming up, and when you should be checking back (though every day is still a solid plan). Secondly, and more importantly, it’s a small way to push me to finish things that have been in the works for a while. I’ve had the New Surprise Bag Article about 90% done since February now, and it’s something I should really get around to.

The next thing I want to note is that I’ve filled in a few more of the blacked-out spots on the article list. I think we might finally be at the point where there are more articles that you can actually read than ones that are dummied out. And that’s a big milestone! It’s taken way too long to get even this far, and I’m hoping that I’ll have the entire archive up and readable by the end of the summer.

None of the articles I updated today are especially good, but you might want to check a couple of them out. Rocky Snow Ice Pops is actually really terrible. But the Mate1.com article is up here now, and to this day I still get e-mails from people who’ve read it and felt like they need to tell me how great it is and what a big scam Mate1 is. And I appreciate every one of those e-mails! But now people can just comment on the post itself so that’ll be sad. I like e-mails from strangers who think the things I write are funny.

Lastly, I just went through a few of the already-WordPress’d articles and made sure that the title banners were there. Some of them weren’t! Like the one for Steambot Chronicles. And I worked pretty hard on most of those things, so they deserve to live on.

I guess that’s about it then. Stay tuned for some more posts of nothing but embedded YouTube videos!

Behind them scenes

Currently I’m working on two articles. One, I’ve already spoiled on the Articles page, is what I’m tentatively calling the 2013 Surprise Bag Article. Will it actually be the only one this year? Who knows? 2014 Ryan knows. Anyway I’ve been working on that one since February, so who even knows if it’ll go live before 2013 is over. The second is a thing about a game I’m playing. It’s sort of a review, but not really. I don’t know the best way to describe it. It’s a thing. And it’s happening. I’ve just gotta stick some pictures in thurr.

What does that have to do with anything? Well, working on new articles always makes me think about how there are so many old articles that have yet to be worked into the WordPress machine, so I fixed up a few and stuck ’em in the ol’ bloggin’ software. You can now read the WP versions of:

Note to noobs: These are all of a 2004/05 vintage. Meaning they’re crappy, but at least they’re from a time where I was trying to be funny, rather than the thing I do these days where it’s just me trying to sound smart about vidja games.

There are possibly more on the way soon, provided I can’t find anything better to do with my free time than dredge up old things I wrote that I’m kind of embarrassed of.

Closer to whole

I am so excruciatingly tired of writing right now, that I just want to… not write more. I think I’ve earned that right to, after that big ol’ article from yesterday and the two half-articles that preceded it. It was a lot of work, especially doing up all those damnable trophy images. I swear to God I’m never putting that much effort into anything again.

What you didn’t notice is that I’ve been doing some work under the hood as well, and I’m proud to say that I’ve finally got the WordPress edition of TE updated to the point where every single blog post I’ve ever written is here to read. Even crappy little throwaway ones announcing that I made a negligible update to the site. Not every image in there still exists and some of the links are long since stale, but you can still read every word I committed to ones and zeroes.

That said, I still have a long trek ahead of me to get all the articles reformatted and up on here. Mostly it’s a matter of pulling the images off of the Angelfire site and making sure all the image tags point to the right place. It’s not hard work, but it’s more time-consuming than it should be. I have gotten a few more up since the last time I went on an article-updating spree, and now you can read the WP versions of Makin’ Pancakes!, Gamecube Hulk, The Bargain Shop Adventure and many more without having to sift through all the many outdated versions of my website. I’m currently very nostalgic for the Fargo ’09 photo gallery, though I can’t pinpoint why that one specifically is getting me all hot and bothered. A few of the images near the end seem to have vanished, but they’re just product shots so it’s not a big deal. I’m sure they’ll turn up eventually.

Chat Radio, the CD Archive, and some other random bits are still a long ways off. Don’t expect them anytime soon, but keep sending your prayers. If I learned anything from Earthbound, it’s that praying is your ticket to victory.

I mooch like a pro

You may have noticed that this here web-log has got a new banner. Maybe you didn’t? I don’t know, it’s not a big deal. But it does.

I’m mentioning this because I did not make this banner. In fact, I outsourced it! Sort of. See, there’s this person, goes by the name Guild on Talking Time, who’d made a thread offering free logo designs for businesses. Likely in hopes of drumming up real business. I happened to see said thread, and decided to bite, because why not? It’d save me the trouble of making a less MS Paint-lookin’ banner on my own. And let’s be honest, I probably wasn’t going to do that anytime soon.

Apparently it’s not done done yet, but I think it looks pretty done. There’s some more less noticable stuff still in the pipeline, like playing with transparencies and the gradient, but my project is understandably not at the top of the priority list. And that’s fine, because I’m pretty happy with what I’ve already got.

That’s pretty much the whole of what I’ve got to post today. Just givin’ credit where credit is due. I do that about once a decade.

NaNoFailMo

So there’s a very slim chance that you’ve noticed that I haven’t blogged at all in the month of November. 90% of that is because I have nothing to blog about. Most days I go home from work, have dinner with my wife, and then play Skyrim or Pokémon White 2 until sleeping time. It’s a simple existence, and one that I wouldn’t give up, but it doesn’t lend itself too well to writing.

The other thing that’s keeping me from blogging is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, if you need it spelled out. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s a “contest” that challenges everyone who signs up to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I signed up on a whim this year, and currently… well, here’s a printscreen of my statistics page.

Yup, we’re just about halfway through the month and I’ve barely even started. I only even have any words at all because yesterday I decided to slap some words down on a page so that at least I could say I tried.

The truth of it all is that I don’t have anything to write about. I had a story idea before I started, but the more I think about it, the stupider it seems and the more I hate it. Anything else I even try to get off the ground ends up being derivative and boring. I don’t really want to write a novel, I just liked toying with the idea that I could.

So how does this tie into blogging? Mostly because every time I open WordPress I feel the guilty pangs, reminding me that if I’m writing, it should be my novel. Then I decide I don’t want to do that and navigate far, far away from WordPress.

That said, maybe things will pick up in December.

A post full of thoughts in no logical order

Wow, its been a while since my last post. Not a record by far, but almost two weeks is a long time in the current TE era. I’ve been pretty good about slapping something up every few days for some time now, even if it’s just a dumb photo that I found entertaining for a few fleeting moments.

In an effort to start getting though my gigantic backlog of books – Wait what? Books? Yes books. I have a lot of them, but I haven’t read most of them. Anyway, I’ve decided I want to read more, so this week I’ve been making an honest effort to always have a book with me on the bus. Whether I’ll keep going once I’ve finished my current book, I don’t know, but here’s hoping!

The lack of blogging around these parts can be attributed mostly entirely to Pokémon White 2. Obviously. I blame Game Freak for working in a rather extensive achievement system. For every objective you clear, you’re presented with a medal, and when you get so many medals, you get a rank up. It’s not actually deeper than Xbox achievements or PS3 trophies, but the fact that the game makes such a big deal out of the medals makes them that much more appealing to collect. Too bad some of the requirements are completely ludicrous. Check out the list here.

I’ve been working on a big new post over the last little while. I think it’s going to end up being this month’s article, if just to fill the hole. Unfortunately, it is about video games. But it’s a little different in that it’s something of a history lesson with a little review packaged in for those interested. I don’t know. It’s not something I care about enough to link to on my Facebook page or anything, but it’ll have to do.

I’ve been reading Monster Planet this week, the last of a trilogy whose first two parts I’ve already talked about at length. I said that I thought Island and Nation would make great movies, because both of them are pretty briskly-paced and feature a fairly original take on the zombie genre. However, Planet takes it up to eleven and goes into full-blown crazypants video game territory. Now, instead of the occasional smart zombie who can control the mindless masses of undead, there is a whole cadre of liches, each with a unique magic power. It’s gotten kinda ridiculous, but I’m already two-and-a-third books deep, might as well git ‘r done. Full write-up coming soon!

Speaking of spooky things and video games, I’ve begun playing Silent Hill 2 again to half-assedly get into the spirit of Halloween. I thought I was going to do it right this time, playing alone in the dark, but I messed that up. Since I’m playing the HD Collection edition, my experience is being totally controlled by achievements, and as such my current playthrough has been paired with some extensive map-making and step-by-step instructions on how to get through the game as quickly as possible. At the very least, by the time I’m done with it, I’ll have become a master of the game.

I borrowed my brother’s copy of Cubivore to round out my October gaming palette. While the camera is awful and the overall experience is a little shallower than I’d hoped, I think it’s good enough to slake my thirst for Tokyo Jungle. For now.

Have you watched the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon yet? It’s fairly good! Not quite as good as the new TMNT comic series, but it’s definitely worth watching. I will admit that I’m a little disappointed that its demographic skews considerably younger than the 2003 TMNT series. I blame Nickelodeon. Though I suppose the best way to revive a franchise is to make sure it’s what all the li’l kids want for Christmas. A world where Turtles are plastered on every damn thing again would be a world I’d love to live in.

Xbox Minecraft got a big update recently, which is enticing. The price didn’t get cut though, so I’m still not buyin’ it.

I’m bad at getting into the Halloween spirit. I haven’t watched a single cheesy 80’s slasher flick yet. I feel like I’m failing pretty hardcore as a nerd. The Wife is forcing me to take her to Paranormal Activity 4 this weekend though, so I guess that’s at least one “scary” movie for the season. I just have trouble committing myself to 90-120 minutes of uninterrupted watching.

I don’t have nearly as much trouble watching TV or Let’s Play videos. Over the last two weeks I have watched both seasons of Better Off Ted, most of Arrested Development‘s second season, and Brickroad’s Metal Gear LP. Ted is… well, it’s okay. I enjoyed it as much as I did because it co-stars Portia de Rossi and Andrea Anders, both of whom I find very funny. The list of actresses (or even actors, it’s not a sexist thing) I really like is pretty short, but those two are definitely on it. It should be obvious that I much prefer comediennes to “serious” actresses. I also love the way de Rossi pronounces the word “anything.”

I don’t think there’s anything else relevant I can say so that I can add another tag to this post.

Oh, wait! New Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate trailer? Oh Hells yes!