05.26.08

The Enemy’s Gate

Posted in Site News, Writing at 7:03 am

Good morning, everyone. I hope that, for those of you who have today off, you’re enjoying the day of rest and are duly reflective of the sacrifices made by the military to bring us this day of peace.

Today is a weird day for the blog. I don’t want to say that anything is over, per se, but I do want to indicate some news that might trouble you. As of today, I’m no longer doing weekday or daily updates to the blog or LJ. Updates will return to their random, unpredictable, pre-2007 schedule. I will try to get at least one or two posts in a week, though, across both sites; whether or not I manage that remains to be seen.

Why I’m ceasing the regular schedule is a valid question, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a single, all-encompassing answer. The biggest reason is that I don’t think the blog is well-served by having single-line “nothing to report today!” posts for weeks at a time when the world is kicking my ass, and venting about it on the blog– while it certainly would be entertaining and cathartic– would probably be extremely counterproductive. I lucked out last year in that the jobs I worked at for the majority of the year allowed me enough free time to write for the blog over lunch; that’s not been the case since about, oh, March.

More than that, I’m not thrilled that I went to so much trouble to set up this month’s Essay Week only to have forces beyond my control destroy its purpose. I had meant for it to be a point where I would have everything under control so that I could concentrate on the novel draft; that kinda didn’t work out, as you know. Still, in the end, I did have some good luck with games, so I don’t think May went nearly as poorly as April did.

As it stands, I’m thinking that I might do this: The two sites will still have segregated content for now, and I’ll try to update both sites once per week or more. Any monthly or special-occasion posts will continue to be made as per usual; I’m trying to relax more here until June, so you might see more Game Clear notices here before the Game and Anime reports go up on the LJ next week. Who knows; perhaps after summer’s over, I’ll be able to go back to daily or semi-daily updates. We’ll see.

Anyway, I want to talk briefly about the other reason this is happening now. I tend to push myself, as you all know; this past week I managed to finish three games by Sunday morning, and the thought that consumed me for most of Sunday afternoon was, “All right, how can I make this four?” I had, at the time, completely forgotten that my goal was to clear three games. I was ignoring the fact that there were a couple of games I wanted to play, which I knew I would not be able to finish over the weekend’s remains, in favor of starting a new game that would be sufficiently short. In the end I decided to call it a good weekend, see Indy, and start watching through Season 2 of Veronica Mars. All were excellent ideas (though VM was certainly one of the highlights). I have a few loose ends to tie up today, but overall I can relax and not stress myself further before I go to work, where other people will do that for me.

Still, writing this has eased me a little bit. Writing has always been very good for my state of mind. I hope that this explains the sudden and uncharacteristic relative silence out of this blog for the foreseeable future to a sufficient degree as to ease your mind as well.

I’ll catch you all… eventually.

05.25.08

GAME CLEARED: Ikaruga (360)

Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming at 7:31 am

At 8:24a, I destroyed Tageri, final boss of Ikaruga on the Xbox Live Arcade. This is the fifteenth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is No More Heroes (Wii), followed by Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) and Super Robot Taisen OG (GBA). Final clear time was four hours over 47 days.

05.22.08

GAME CLEARED: Penny Arcade Episode 1 (360)

Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming at 9:18 pm

At 10:05p, I defeated the final boss of Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 1 on Xbox Live Arcade. This is the fourteenth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Beyond Good & Evil (PS2), followed by Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) and Super Robot Taisen OG (GBA). Game was cleared over two days.

Irony Man

Posted in Coding, Gaming, Movies, Rants at 5:33 pm

So… ( The promised Iron Man minireview is behind this. » )

In the interim between writing the above discussion of Iron Man and the retooling I did of it here at lunch, something else has started to bug me, and I feel it ought to take precedence over movie discussions. Most of you know that the little scrolling thingy at the top of the blog front page is powered, normally, by Twitter. I was introduced to Twitter through one or more podcasts that I listened to, and found it to be a pretty clever tool. Twitter’s primary function is as a micro-blogging tool; you’re given 140 characters to describe what you’re doing or where you are. It feels almost like a haiku, actually; you have a very small space to work in yet complete freedom within that space. Needless to say, I love the concept. I’ve even used it to somewhat great effect here on this ol’ blog.

Twitter’s implementation, however– and this is being nice about it– sucks.

Now, I’ll be completely honest in that my utilization of Twitter is not exactly what the developers intended. I imagine that the Twitter team felt it would be a slower-paced version of instant messaging; more akin to passing notes around class than a live conversation. To some degree, then, my use– posting thoughts without devoting the amount of time it would take to make a full post on the blog– could be considered a case of “you’re doing it wrong”. I’m fine with that. The problem is, however, that my “wrong” use of Twitter stays perfectly within the provided capabilities of the service. I’m not hacking anything, haven’t made any bizarre customizations, and nothing I’m doing is anything someone else couldn’t do. It’s the intent I’m conveying that seems different from other Twitterkin. That’s not my complaint.

My big complaint, in all honesty, is the same complaint I had that forced me to move from Blogger/WordPress.com to a custom tool back in 2005, and then back to WordPress in ‘06. I did not want my ability to work on my site to be reliant on an external application which fails repeatedly and inconveniently. Yesterday’s post exemplifies the fact that Twitter’s instability is causing problems for me. Therefore, I’m thinking about a way to do more or less the exact same thing as Twitter… but just for my site. I don’t want to knock the efforts of the Twitter team, but the constant downtime and slow access of the web client are more than a little irritating.

To that end, I’m thinking maybe I could create a small Windows or OS X client to carry around (ultimately creating an iPhone/iPod Touch version as well). I’m actually leaning towards creating an AIR-based client to start with, as that would easily let me prototype what I want the actual client to look like. And, you know, use it before I do the native clients. We shall see, of course. I imagine I’ll have a web-based mockup available soon.

Catch you folks tomorrow.

05.21.08

Strange Irony

Posted in Gaming, Rants, Site News at 8:46 pm

I want to make brief mention of my enjoyment of Wii Fit, We Ski, and Penny Arcade, yet Twitter is down. I recognized this fact, internalized it, and calmly went about other business. Then I decided that I wanted to complain that Twitter is down, but did not feel the need to post a full entry on it. So I opened up Twitterriffic and stared at it for a good ten seconds before it really sank in. It was one of those weird “the phone isn’t working, so I can’t call the phone company to come and fix the phone” moments. Which leads me to believe that I ought to finally quit Twitter.

As long as I’ve got you here, then, let it be known that We Ski is pure liquid awesome pressed on a disc.

05.20.08

GAME CLEARED: The World Ends With You (DS)

Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming at 7:44 pm

At 8:01p, I defeated Megumi Kitaniji, final boss of The World Ends With You on the DS. This is the thirteenth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Beyond Good & Evil (PS2), followed by Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) and Super Robot Taisen OG (GBA). Final clear time was 92 hours over 27 days (this counts time spent in Mingle Mode, which is otherwise not play time).

D’oh

Posted in Bailout, Gaming, Movies, Site News at 7:36 pm

Okay. It appears that in my rush to get through TWEWY– and believe me, it was a rush– I forgot that I wrote up a post over lunch. So instead of that post– which was about Iron Man– you get this, and the Game Clear notice that’s about to go up. I really am sorry, folks; I’m not usually one to space on this sort of thing, but as work is calming down (proof of this being that I really did get the post prepared over lunch) I should be getting more verbose very soon. Let’s just stick the Iron Man post on Thursday and see what I work out for tomorrow– I’m thinking I might watch NCIS now that the DVR’s built up a good buffer, but we shall see, huh?

Game Clear notice imminent…

05.16.08

Party Lines

Posted in Bailout, Site News at 5:28 pm

……..right, so I’ve finally overused the excuse of “no time to write”. Fine.

Today’s my birthday, so you get no post just yet. This was a rough week, and today’s celebration(s!) took the majority of the day. Over the weekend I’ll collect my thoughts and relax. So until then.

05.14.08

Rebound

Posted in Bailout, Site News at 6:13 pm

Yeah. Long story short: don’t expect any long entries this week. Hopefully over the weekend I can relax and get my thoughts together for something substantial here.

On an unrelated note, I wish the best of luck to the folks I know who are making some changes. You, as always, know who you are, and also as always know that you’re in my thoughts.

05.12.08

Bounce

Posted in Bailout, Site News at 6:48 pm

Sorry for the false restart today, folks. I got a little overwhelmed at work over the past week and a half, and have needed as much relaxation time as I can get. That kinda meant losing myself in my current games list, so unfortunately there’s nothing for me to write about right now. If all goes well there might be a piece up at Netjak soon, but that’s about all I can promise for this week. Beyond that, I’ll do what I can.

Incidentally, absolutely no writing got done last week and that seriously pisses me off since that was the entire point of Essay Week this time around.