I’ve spoken at some length about Essay Week, without actually giving the skinny on what it is or what its goal is for the May session. I figure now’s a pretty good time to get it taken care of. Those of you who were around for the last EW, back in August, might consider yourselves excused, but I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around; the explanation’s a little different this time.
Well, first, to address the question on everyone’s mind: “What right does this jerk have to write these long, ridiculous diatribes and expect us to care?” Funny thing is, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’m not particularly notable and I don’t really aspire to be; if I do become famous, I’d rather be known as a storyteller than as a commentator or discussion-master. Still, every once in a while I get these urges to try to speak my mind in what’s been called “the new marketplace of ideas”. (I’ll get into this more on Monday, when I talk about Web 2.0 and social networking.)
So, put short, Essay Week is five straight days on the blog about a handful of topics I feel the need to speak to. I come close sometimes outside of the designated Week, but usually scrap those because the topic on my mind at the moment is (nine times out of ten) fanboyism, and I’ve kinda done that one to death. The purpose of the week, when I first did it last year, was to give me some time to work through a game without having to worry about writing for the blog (recall I was working on the nonstop-posting challenge). This time it’s a little bit of an inversion– I’m writing so that I can, in essence, focus on my writing; the draft, specifically, needs some solid attention without interruption, and this coming week is an excellent way to do it. So, by prepping five long posts ahead of time, I can ensure that content stays flowing while at the same time giving myself a break.
Now, if that’s the purpose, why not simply take the week off from the blog? After all, Shutdown Day is coming– why not just stay offline and out of relative contact for the entire week? That’s more than a little impractical in this case. First off, I’m flirting with inertia enough as it stands. Recall my rules of writing– if you stop doing something long enough, eventually you stop doing it altogether. The second reason is that I do pride myself on having “something” up when I say I will. Even the excuses I’ve habitually posted, in my mind, count– it’s not that I don’t want to write for the main page. Sometimes things just come up, or sometimes there’s nothing really I want to say (or what I did say isn’t just bad, it’s whiny and annoying and you really don’t want me to post it, trust me). Finally, I did make a resolution to try to keep up a consistent set of updates, and I intend to keep that promise. (Maybe next year I’ll try daily updates on both sites…. hrm.)
So, now you know what it is, and why I’m doing it. Just to give you all a little taste, the five topics I have in mind– I’ll be writing the essays tonight and tomorrow– are as follows: “On Social Networking”, “On The Tantalizing Fringe”, “On A Lack of Organization”, “On Reinventing Oneself”, and “On Being A Programmer”. I do hope that you enjoy these topics.
One of the things I’d like, really, is to see people start discussing the topics a bit more. I always feel a little self-conscious posting all this crap up, as if I were some sort of twenty-first century Walter Cronkite telling you all The Way It Is. As much as I style myself a Forum Tyrant, I think there’s room to challenge me on a few things.
One way or another, I hope you’ll all join me in at least exploring some of the things I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.
At 7:26p, I completed the final case of Phoenix Wright: Justice For All on the Nintendo DS. This is the twelfth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Beyond Good and Evil (PS2), followed by Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation (GBA) and The World Ends With You (DS).
Due to the visual-novel nature of the Phoenix Wright games, from this point onward they will no longer count for or against my Games Complete or Backlog totals.
Yeah, so I’ve not exactly had much to say this week. It’s been busy at work and I’ve had other concerns. This weekend I’m hoping to get enough gaming and anime watching done to be more loquacious in the week to come… I will say that I did finish watching Please Teacher! over this past week, and I’m saving some thoughts on that for the April anime report, but overall this has been a slow month, as expected. I needed this month to slow down and “recharge”, I suppose.
Anyway, thinking about both running the Game and Anime reports next week (since otherwise they’d be delayed until the 12th and 14th), and setting up for an early Essay Week. I’m also curious: would it be too over the top to do two Essay Weeks in 2008? Maybe one in late October? Of course it’s really up to me, but I’m wondering if maybe it would be considered a little too, I don’t know, overbearing.
Off to enjoy the wonderful weather, folks… that’s why there’re portables, you know.
Not much to report right now; thunder threatens to take out my connection, so I’m going to just get this up and not worry too much about writing something deep for now. Catch you tomorrow on the LJ, I hope.
You can dress up a video game review in as many ten-cent words as you want. You can get all hoity-toity with the analysis of game as art. You can even pull out the big guns and examine, with a fine-toothed comb no less, the social implications of the Friend code system and the quantitatively better or worse aspect of the various elements of play. You’re welcome to do all of that, and more power to you if you do so.
Sorry, folks. Today’s post just isn’t gonna happen. I’d embed the Bailout for today but I can’t… I do encourage you to check it out, though, as it’s the Fate stay/night vid I mentioned in the Tekko report.
Tomorrow’s post for the LJ is set, and will be on time, but for now, go watch video.
If you noticed the blog page loading kinda sluggishly of late, you weren’t alone. A vulnerability in WordPress caused a great many sites to be hacked, with loads of spam links, invisible to the user, being injected into the footer. WP2.5 closed this hole, but unfortunately upgrading was a pain in the ass and a couple of custom features were broken in the process. I’ve restored everything to a more-or-less usable state and as a result things should be back to relatively normal. If you notice any strangeness on the blog, please let me know.
But really, please go look at the Tekko Report. Really.
As you can see to the right (or here if you’re one of those weird RSS people), the Tekkoshocon 2008 report is up. I’m still working through what few photos I do have, and once I get them all into Flickr I’ll post a link to that set, but that might be a while longer. In any event, I hope you like text.
Still working on the Tekko report. I didn’t get to too much more writing last night, but on the plus side I still have the list of events, and more importantly I’ll make an effort to work on it during lunch today. I’ll try to get as much of it done as soon as I can, and have it for you either tonight or tomorrow, if the world doesn’t kick my ass as much as it did yesterday.
Off to the con today; weekend updates will conti– wait. I don’t do weekend updates anymore. Hrm.
Oh well. Have some Red Bull. You know I will… well, probably not, as there’s usually enough Bawls to go around at Tekko. (And I don’t want to hear any remarks from the peanut gallery about “Bawls at an anime con”.) The full Tekko report will be up… eventually.
