The KISS Principle at Work

For someone who has tinkered with electronics and computers since the early 80s, I'm a bit of a low tech guy when it comes to blogging.

The Blogger suite is one that worked just fine a decade ago, but Google has pretty much abandoned it for no good reason (or at least one that I've heard), so the toolset is --to put it charitably-- lacking in modern conveniences.

You'd think that a company that owns both Blogger and YouTube would find a way to seamlessly integrate YouTube channels into a Blogger Widget so that you can see the latest entry in each channel, but that isn't the case. You don't even have much of an option to easily tinker with designs the way you can with Wordpress; if I'm going to study code at home, it's not going to be to customize my own blog but focus on enhancing my work skillset.

But I will say that Blogger is much more customizable than LiveJournal (or Dreamwidth, which is largely the successor to LJ), so it's not exactly the bottom of the barrel as blogging platforms go.

Regardless, the blog hasn't exactly changed much in terms of design since Cataclysm came out*, and every time I've tinkered with something --such as replacing the leading graphic with a GIF-- I discover that I have to pay in order to get the kind of GIF design I really want.**

Writing for PC is straightforward, too: I utilize the Blogger post page and just write when I can. I used to use Word and then transfer it over the old fashioned way (by cut and paste), but I'd found that Office was a huge resource hog on my laptop and just writing in Blogger itself was simpler. I have occasionally tried scheduling a post, but for some reason that never seems to work properly for me, so I decided that I'll post when I post. And yes, that means I'm really awake on those oddball middle-of-the-night posting times.

Why? Because that's when I get most of my writing done.

***

Like I mentioned on the 10 year blogoversary post for PC, I prefer to write at night when there's a lot of solitude. I'm a night owl, and doing things when the sun goes down appeals to me, whether it's gaming, writing, or tinkering with various other hobbies.*** A writer acquaintance of mine used to set a timer over his lunch hour at his work and try to see just how many words he could cram into a single session. And there are other writer friends who have chat sessions going through the day --the War Room, they call it-- and set up 5-10 minute challenges to see just how many words they can put onto (virtual) paper during those times.

So my writing approach is threefold: write what you want, when you want to, and edit/publish when you feel like it.

Not a bad gig overall, as long as you keep up with posting.

#Blapril2020





*Did the graphic give it away?

**The free ones simply don't cut it. There's a specific time limit, and the more images you select the less time those images spend on-screen. And, to be honest, the images would need editing and whatnot, and that inevitably means using Photoshop or one of its competitors/relatives to get what I want.

***I used to work on homework sets while I attended UD during the late evening and overnight hours. I got to know the overnight DJs of the Dayton area radio stations quite well, whether they were a national feed (Peter Van de Graaf for WDPR) or totally local (the DJs for WTUE, WAZU, and WOXY). I always meant to call WTUE up at 3 AM and ask for something obnoxious to keep me awake while doing homework, but when 3 AM hit I was far more interested in just finishing the damn stuff up so I could go to sleep.

Being a Short Order Cook Blogger

You know one thing I kind of dislike about this urge to post lots of things, Blapril or not?

The sheer volume of unfinished drafts sitting in the "post" section of Blogger.

Not counting any fiction I'm working on, there's at least 5 articles from the recent couple of months still in draft form that I intend to publish. It's just that I look at what I'm working on, whether it makes sense to finish it now, and deciding that I'd be better off leaving them unfinished for now.

It's not like there aren't unfinished drafts in the blog's Post section; over the years we've accumulated quite a few of them.* A lot of those I started, got partway through, and decided to either table it for another time (that never came) or that it wasn't working and decided to abandon it. But now, with too many things to say but being uncertain in which order to say them, I have a lot of mostly finished posts that just need to be put in some semblance of order.

***

When I started blogging, I didn't expect this would be a problem. I thought that you'd write something, post it, and maybe you get some commentary from it, and that'd be the extent of my involvement in PC. However, with the dawn of the modern influencer movement has come the expansion of brand promotion, data analytics, and all sorts of other "non-content related" activities with running a blog.

Which, on the face of it, seems silly for a blog that is largely about a gaming movement that is long past its heyday.

Even if you discard --like I do-- a lot of the analytics, brand promotion, and other traditional "influencer" activities, you still have content that needs to be presented in a coherent way. And that's where my dilemma is.

When I have one major idea at a time, it's not a difficult matter to write, edit, and post. But if I get a lot of ideas at once --hey, my brain does kick in every once in a while-- sorting them out takes a few days. Or a week. Or two weeks.

But I guess the entire point of this massive jumble is that it's a good thing to have so much to say, but making sense of it all requires an understanding of blogging meta-issues that, to be honest, are not why you got into blogging in the first place.

***

Perhaps a better analogy is comparing blogging to cooking.

Both can be fun activities, and there are times when both feel a lot like work. With both you can take the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach and just make something with whatever you've got on-hand at the moment, whether it be a specific topic (blogging) or whatever is in your pantry (cooking). However, once you get into planning things out, you can then anticipate with regularity when you'll need to focus on different things. For example, some people do the "Taco Tuesday" or "Wine Wednesday" where they make meals that fit into a theme. Converting that into a blog, you can have a "WoW Wednesday" or a "Miscellaneous Monday" where a regular topic means you have a ready made posting direction.

Sure, you can mix and match elements as much as you like to keep things fresh, and gaming news has a way of interfering with the best made plans out there, but sticking to a regular schedule helps a person plan things out and also allows for consistent feedback.**

***

But in the end, whatever works for you is worth it.

If I'm going to meet the Blapril scheduling demands, however, I need to be in more of a planning mode if I'm going to order my unfinished posts properly as well as meet the increased demands of many posts in a month.

(The same goes for cooking, given that we're in lockdown for the foreseeable future.)

Oh, and one more non-blogging tip: despite my skepticism, air fryers work. I didn't ask for one and I had no intention of buying one, but I was given one for the Holidays this past Winter. Once I realized that a so-called "air fryer" is actually a mini convection oven, that opens up all sorts of avenues for cooking that I didn't have before. But yes, you can make killer onion rings in them, too.

#Blapril2020



*I can officially say "we" because Soul has exactly one in there from eons ago. Still, it's a blank entry, so I guess it might not count.

**Sheesh, I sound like a big data miner.

Going in With Eyes Wide Open

I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking, but I signed up for Blapril.

It's not as if I don't have things to do, games to play, work to keep me busy, or family to keep an eye on, but I guess I just wanted to to it.

Well, and looking back on last month I was uncommonly busy, posting-wise.

Even if you take out everything affiliated with One Final Lesson I still posted seven times, which is high for me. I typically try to hit a once/week posting schedule, with a couple of extra posts thrown in every month, so I'll freely admit that March 2020 was definitely unusual from my blogging output.

Of course, March 2020 will be remembered for another particular reason that I need not expand upon here.

***

And now I have to come up with a boatload of topics on an almost daily basis. I realize you're not required to do that in Blapril, but come on. You know what you're getting into when you commit to something like that. And unlike my last several forays into NaNoWriMo, I'm going to try to make this stick.

Why should it be different this time, you might ask? Probably because I actually finished a story.

Sure, it was a "shouting into the void" moment, but once I started writing an "origin story" of sorts for Cardwyn, I simply couldn't stop even if I wanted to. And now that I finished an actual work of fiction, I've found I can't stop. It's like I've been transported back to 2008-9, when I first joined LiveJournal and began to connect with all sorts of aspiring writers. I burned through a lot of virtual ink during that time, writing something that could only be described in hindsight as Mary Sue meets Marty Stu with lots of angst in the way. But being able to step back and realize what was happening, writing wise, meant I could actually write something better the next time around.

And less cringe worthy.

At the same time, I dropped fiction in favor of, well, this blog. I found it sated my need to write while keeping me on a (semi) regular schedule.

To be honest, I even stopped reading or watching fiction, because I felt I couldn't devote the time to it that I felt it deserved. I was happy to see SF/F take a more prominent role in our fictional worlds --written, visual, and virtual-- but I couldn't see myself devoting time to books, movies, or comics because of my completionist tendencies. Well, that and the desire of a lot of content creators to inject a lot of "pathos" into stories just to make the stories feel more "adult". Like I've said many times before, I don't need that in my fiction because if I wanted that I'd just turn on the news.

But you know how to get the fiction you want? You write it yourself.

And you actually finish the damn thing. And post it as proof that you finished it.

***

And now I've come full circle, with an urge to write fiction and devote more time to writing non-fiction as well.

Which includes doing something stupid and signing up for Blapril.

Oh well, I guess you couldn't say that I don't know what I'm getting myself into.

#Blapril2020

Wordpress Doesn't Seem to Like Me

No, really.

I've commented on several Wordpress blogs lately, including The Last Chapter Gaming Blog, Kamalia et Alia and The Ancient Gaming Noob, but the comments never appeared.

My first thought was that I'd somehow screwed up and pushed a Cancel button or something instead of Post Comment, but I've since discovered that there is no Cancel button.

Okay, I thought. Maybe I ended up on a spam list somewhere.

The only issue with that is that I'd assume that if that were the case I couldn't post on Blogger hosted blogs as well, but I have no issues there.

So go figure.

It's not as if this sort of thing hasn't cropped up before. My wife managed to get our main PC infected several years ago, and even after I removed the infection our PC showed up on some block lists that our ISP subscribed to, so I had to wait until our PC vanished from those lists before we could connect to the internet once more.

I'm kind of hoping that's not the case, because removing infections can be a royal PITA.

Saturday Musings in a Brave New World

In these extraordinary times, when "shelter in place" and "pandemic" and "cancelled" have become active parts of our lexicon, I've been wondering about gaming. Obviously, if you're stuck inside the house one of the activities you can do --by yourself or with family-- is play games. If the mini-Reds were a lot younger, we'd be playing a ton of boardgames in our free time*, but nowadays they've been playing video games.

And yes, that includes MMOs.

The oldest mini-Red has noticed an uptick in gamers in LOTRO recently, and I've noticed more players online in WoW Classic as well, although the opening of Arathi Basin might have something to do with that.

As for ESO I can't tell, because I mainly craft these days.** and I've only been puttering around Belsavis and Hoth in SWTOR lately, which aren't typically your most populated zones.

But I've also been playing a lot of Civ IV games, and the second mini-Red has been playing a lot of Civ V.

What have you noticed? Has there been noticeable uptick in gaming?




*Relatively speaking. I work from home, and that hasn't changed. And my wife still works retail, and her job hasn't shut down yet as it's kind of important to distributing food and supplies.

**I've got it in my head that I'm going to do all of the expansions (both major and minor) in order, and that means saving up money to either subscribe or buy the mini-expacs outright, so I'm kind of in a holding pattern there.

You know the world has turned upside down when....

...I pull out an album I've not listened to since roughly 1990.

My wife asked me to fix her old Magnavox
stereo system, ~1987, so...

Some of the oldest mini-Red's university stuff is to the right; her university is going virtual for the rest of the semester, and I'm pretty sure that the second mini-Red's university will follow shortly.

EtA: Aaaand we just received word that his university is definitely going virtual. I guess it's time to hit the road again.

Happy Tenth!!

In the midst of everything going on, I forgot to mention that Kamalia of Kamalia et Alia has celebrated her tenth blogoversary on March 9th.

Kamalia's Gravitar.

I've enjoyed her fashion sense with her Sunday on the Promenade recurring series, having been able to create fashion outfits out of the tons and tons of WoW gear that you can use. Me, I'm just happy if I don't look like Burning Crusade clown gear, but maybe I should learn a thing or two about fashion sense (and I don't mean wearing white after Labor Day).

Over the years, Kamalia has seen her family grow with two new additions, and I can truly appreciate her efforts at keeping the blog running with two little ones around.

Happy Tenth, Kamalia!!