Category: Admin

Looking back, and then forward a little

The article format seems like kind of a stupid concession to the reason I started this dumb website, but the fact remains that I still feel compelled to segregate some of the more focused things I write. Even though there are many blog posts which could easily qualify to be articles. I think what really defines articles at this point is that they are big long posts that are generally not about video games. That said, I have written five this year! That’s the best output I’ve had since like… 2006. Yeesh. I go back and read those, and mostly I just remember the nice part of being single and unemployed – having as much time as you want to blow on completely stupid things.

But being employed has the dual benefits of providing income and a sense of purpose, and I don’t think I’d even be able to function anymore outside of a significant romantic relationship. That said, I do want to continue the recent trend of writing at least one thing that I can file under “articles” each month. Only problem is, I don’t have any good topics for the next three months. October and November are total blank slates, and a “24 Xs of Materialism” thing might be a last resort, because I’m not buying things left and right anymore. On the other hand, I have been working on a January feature for months now.

That feature, of course, is going to be “The Top X (10 or 12) Video Games I’ve Played in 2012” or something along those lines. I haven’t decided yet, but the idea is that in an attempt to pull emphasis away from my ever-increasing backlog, I’m going to instead celebrate a handful of the games I started and finished during this calendar year. I know it’s violating my new tendency to stay away from video games for articles, but it’s low-hanging fruit that I must pluck! I’ll go back to movies and candy come February.

Going back to my original intent for this post, however, I need some ideas for the rest of the year. October is quickly approaching and the accompanying article will have to be Halloween-themed, obviously. I’m thinking of just taking $10 to a dollar store and seeing if I can find enough interesting junk to justify spending three hours taking pictures of and writing about it. November is an absolute mystery to me at this point, but I’m leaning toward a project documentation, as opposed to a product review. You may experience another cooking fiasco. December… I hope to recreate the magic of the Holiday Viva Puffs review, albeit with a different minty-flavoured holiday treat. Or perhaps I’ll turn a gingerbread house kit into some sort of horrible gingerbread phallus. Actually, you know, I really like that one. I’m going to go start up a draft of that right now.

The last thing I need to do is get all the Facebook integration set up here. It’s annoying to try to post things on both the blog and Facebook, so I generally don’t do it. I don’t really want to work the social media route, but that seems to be the best way to reach out over the internet these days. Maybe I’ll even have to create a Twitter account. And find a good WordPress plugin to post stories on those sites. The only one I’ve tried using breaks my layout quite handily, so if anyone knows a good one that doesn’t conflict with the Weaver theme, please let me know.

So laaazy

You know, I’ve had a new movie review sitting around for over a month now, but I have no idea how long it will be until I post it. It was originally supposed to go live in July. And it’s pretty much done, too! The bulk of the writing is done; I still have to go back over it to do a little spellchecking and other fine-tuning, but the words are essentially done. The thing that I’m stuck at it getting some screengrabs.

Normally, that’s the part I’d do first. I’d watch a movie/show, and then go back and take a few shots of important part, and then write the article around those. This time I did all the writing first, and the way that I wrote it calls for a lot of images. And not just the basic screengrabs either! No, I worked myself into a corner full of photoshops and collages. I suppose I could go over the article and edit the parts that call out images I don’t want to take/create, but at that point I’m cheating the reader of a fuller experience. Oh, what a world.

It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s just that taking screenshots o a movie is dull and tedious. Making sure I printscreen jsut the right moments, making sure everything is sized and named properly… It’s boring.

This is sort of similar to the reason why my Monster Hunter Let’s Play is stalling. Playing Monster Hunter is one of my favourite pastimes, and talking about Monster Hunter comes in at a close second, so in that case I’m mostly blaming Camtasia. With sprite-based games, I can set it to record and then just have at it as long as I need, then stop when I feel like the session is done and do a little chopping to make everything nice and neat before I produce it. Monster Hunter, being a PS2 game, I guess eats a ton of memory while being recorded. If I go over about 15 minutes of footage, it stops recording sound and just replaces my narration and the game’s audio with a horrible extra-loud static track. So I have to time myself to make sure I don’t record too long, find a suitable spot to pause, and then wait while to video is processed, then wait twice as long while the video is saved to a file. The processing/saving part eats up all my PC’s resources too, so I can’t do anything else with it while I wait. Then I have to do the usual editing, which is not terrible, but annoying after all the other hoops I’ve had to jump through to get that far. Especially if I screwed up the timing and have to fix the sound problems. And then, then I have to hope that while it was paused for Camtasia to do all its things, that my PS2 emulator hasn’t crashed. That’s happened twice now, and it’s even worse than when the audio breaks, because not just footage is lost, but actual game progress. This was the worst project I’ve ever started.

But that movie review? It’ll be done… maybe this weekend. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my Friday night.

Let’s not play Megaman X

Having just moved into a new house,  I don’t have any internet set up yet. It’s something I hope to have rectified within the week, but for now my blogging ability its quite limited. I am also unable to upload videos to YouTube, so there will be no Let’s Play Megaman X today, children. I know how you’re all just so into it, but you’ll have to wait a week.

Here I go a-counting

Oh my goodness you guys, accounting.

So I do that now. Professionally. Semi-professionally. Training to be able to work in the field with an air of professionalism. It is my position title. It’s repetitive, and tedious, and really, really not at all exciting. I love it. I’m the kind of person who can while away hours days grinding experience in old-school RPGs, so this really is a good fit for me.

I only recently realized a possible subconscious reason I’ve been so gung-ho to get into accounting. And I am taking that knowledge to the grave. Let’s say it’s an “unfinished business” kind of thing.

And that’s awesome and all but there’s nothing really interesting to say about my days at work: I plug in some numbers and then plug in some more numbers. Rinse and repeat. Once in a while I stop to pay some bills, which results in more number-pluggage. Anything I do think would be type-worthy information is Top Secret. I suppose it’s notable that riding the bus to and fro again has been considerably more pleasant than I’d expected, aside from occasional bouts with light motion sickness. I’m a little disappointed that it’s been a dry well for StreetPasses so far. But I’ve only been bussing for a week, so maybe everyone who rides with their 3DS was on vacation over the last week.

In other news, I’m doing something completely crazy: I’m writing an article. Yeah, you know, those silly things this website used to be built on? Maybe you don’t know. It’s not a thing I really do much anymore. Anywho, it’s a classic-style article. I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that it is not about video games. SHOCKER! The only problem left is that I seem to have completely forgotten how to write at length about silly things that are not projected onto my television/computer screen. This could be a terrible idea.

Spamwich

I knew that having a blog that supported comments was going to invite spam, I just never expected it to be like this. Up until last weekend, it was pretty benign: a few trying to post ads, a few muttering nonsense. Harmelss little things that popped up once in a while.

I woke up on Tuesday morning to find 37 new messages in my inbox. Surely they couldn’t all be Amazon ads. Over the last three days I’ve been hammered with over 100 spam comments. And they’re all the same thing: all “people” with legit looking information and a silly message about how much they like my site. Only most of the messages are in broken English, and often they’ll say “what a great read that was” on a post that’s just an image. Also, the website of evey one of them ended with a 2K. While I knew they were all fake, that would have been the tip-off for someone less in-the-know.

So I’ve rigged my system so that you have to sign up to comment. I know that will dissuade real random visitors from commenting, but it must be done. It takes a long time to trash all those alert emails. I’ll try to find a better way, but for now that’s the best compromise I have between legions of spambots and disabling comments completely.

It makes me wonder though, what is the point of this kind of spam? There are no penis enlargement ads. Maybe the sites they claim to be from contain malicous things, but who clicks on those anyway? It’s pointless aside from wasting my time. Unless of course wasting my time is the point. In which case: well played, spammers. Well played.

You want an update? You can’t handle an update!

So I’ve been powering through my archives whenever I can find a few spare minutes, and now the entirety of 2003’s news posts have been carried over. There’s an exception for a single post that was one sentence stating that I’d uploaded a new article, but that’s the only omission. Course, I still have to finish with aught-three’s article and Chat Radios and whatever else, but I’m getting there!

Holy crap this is a news post from 2003. Let’s talk about something other than blog stuff.

I’m going to be spending the bulk of this weekend (seven hours a day) in marriage preparation class. I have no idea what to expect, and no idea how many other couples are going to be joining us. I like to imagine that it’s going to be all fun partnership-building activities, but I feel like it’s probably going to be considerably more boring. I actually know someone whose sister took the same (or a similar) course, but keep forgetting to ask about it. At the very worst, it’s two free breakfasts and lunches.

We also got our engagement photos back… sort of. They’re in an online album on our photographer’s website, but we’re still waiting on the disc. They turned out pretty fantastic, and I’m glad to report that I don’t look nearly as fat in them as I feel. Hooray! If you want to hit them up, go to the website half of BlairJPhotography.com and click on the “clients” tab. I’m not sure if sharing the password with the whole internet is OK’d on our contract (Why wouldn’t it be? Because photographers have lots of retarded rules about what you can do with the pictures they take), so just shoot me an email if you’d like to se them. They’re pretty great!

Consequence

Two weekends ago, I sat down and I started archiving news posts from previous versions of TE. I was excited about WordPress and how it would make everything I’ve written look all neat and samey. Back in the day I thought it was neat to make every article stand out visually (for better or for worse…), but at this point I feel like the streamlined look is where it’s at.

I miss the creativity and colour of the old ways, but let’s face it: that made it look like it was done by a twelve-year-old, and I was totally sixteen when I started. Huge difference there.

Anyway, I’m looking through my archives for 2003 alone, and dreading how long it’s going to take to stick all that garbage in here. I know I could cut out the hundreds of stupid little posts saying that I fixed a typo or that I was maybe considering thinking about typing an article, but this is supposed to be a definitive work. And to that extent, I feel it must be complete.

And so bitch about the amount of work it’s going to take, I shall.

I suppose when I started, I was just thinking about how sparse 2008-2010 were as far as bloggeties go. It may have cooled off even earlier, I don’t really remember. I just know that I consistently felt bad that I was neglecting my $70-a-year webspace.

It’s just… when I look at all of those tiny posts that really don’t have anything to say, I wonder why. I considered posting all the updates of a month (for the Page of Death years) in a single post, but decided against it because “how bad could it be?” Once I get past the point where the updates are a single sentence, it probably won’t feel quite as much like a waste of time. That gets halfway into 2004 though, so I’ve got about a year and a half of tiny, worthless posts to re-post.

On the other hand, I feel like I’m really going to enjoy the bulk of the rest of it. Maybe my writing isn’t great, but at least I’ll get that wonderful nostalgic feeling. I fairly consistenly rummaging through old posts for old links or other stuff, so I’m kinda looking forward to going through it all again. It’s really the perfect excuse to read my entire archive without it feeling like a huge waste of time.

And yeah, that’s about all I need to complain about for today. Yeah, this post is mostly as useless as all those one-sentence ones I’m complaining about, but if a personal blog isn’t for whining about stupid things, what is it for?

On photos and blogging about them

I guess I’ve been photoblogging more than usual lately. Kind of offsets that couple of weeks there where I just put up solid walls of text with nary an image to accompany them. Kind of.

Truth be told, I just have a buttload (a term I’ve been using way too often lately) of random images sitting on my desktop and phone that I needed to do something with. So there are more to come! I spent almost no time at my home last week, and I don’t know how much I’ll be there in the days to come, but there will be another onslaught of photobloggery sometime in the future.

I’m also trying to get Stephanie set up on here so that she can join in the fun. I sold her on the photoblogging idea, given that she just loves to take pictures. So that’s going to happen too. Get ready for the picturepocalypse.

Three things I like that start with “P”

1. Pepsi

2. Pita Pit

3. Posting bloggety stuff in advance through WordPress. The last week of blogging? All written and posted on the 21st. I almost want to go back to 2002 and stab past me in the face for not figuring out how to use this. Or, at least, past me whenever it was that I bought webspace. I don’t think Angelfire would have supported WordPress back then. I’m not even interested enough to find out if they do now.

My pop is about to brain

It took all damn day, but I’ve archived every single word I blogged this year here on the WordPress powered site. When I first approached the task, I figured it would be a piece of cake. Now that I know what I’m doing, using WordPress makes blogging life so easy! Turns out I had a rather impressive buttload of stuff to move over though…

By the end of the year, I intend to get everything loaded up on here, creating what will be the definitive version of my website. I probably should encase it in carbonite and hang it on a wall or something at that point so I don’t go and ruin it.

Also, over the last couple days, I accidentally started a Minecraft Let’s Play. Yeah, I don’t know how it happened either, but It’s there, and I feel like I have to see it through. Here’s the little art project that set the whole thing in motion:

I started a new world in the game, because I do that when there’s a major update (hey, did you know there was a huge update on Friday?), and I was plopped on an island in the middle of nowhere. You’ll get more details when I start making the LP posts. Oh, and don’t worry, it’s a screenshot LP. I only dream of being interesting enough to do video LPs.