Launch Detected

 

Hey all I’m sorry for taking so long to get another update to you all on how I’m doing and when I’ll be starting to blog again. Things have been stressful and I really needed time off from my blogging to get stuff under control. It was getting to the point where I was losing sleep and was visibly looking unwell across a video call to some relatives of mine. However the end is in sight, and I’m planning on starting to blog soon.

So when is it?: My plan is to resume blogging on May 1st, a month after this post. And no this isn’t an April Fools joke. the plan really is for me to get back into blogging then and keep to my previous post schedule of doing one every 3-4 days until the beginning of August, where I hope to have gotten back into the swing of things enough to start up my daily posts. The covered material will stay the same as it was before the break, with me keeping to doing different topics for each day of the week. I’m still deciding on whether to do it every three or four days at the moment though and I can’t say for certainty which it will be.

I haven’t been idle these past months and while I wasn’t up for writing about stories, I still was consuming them at my usual pace so I’ve got plenty of material to write about. I just want to ease myself back into writing, as this is the longest break I’ve taken so far from writing since I started doing so over 5 years ago. The usual book and audiobook reviews on GiN will be posted as they have been while I’ve been taking a break and any games I get will be reviewed as well. In fact I’m emailing one to my editor right after writing this post. So please look forward to it.

Thanks for putting up with my long hiatus, I’ve really needed the time, and hope you all weren’t too upset with me taking this break for my own mental health.

5 Years and Update

Hey all I’m back with a quick update on how I’m doing on this 5th anniversary.

First off I’d like to say thanks to all those readers who have stuck around since the beginning of this little writing experiment that has gone much longer than I ever thought it would. I had meant this blog to be a challenge to myself to see if I could put a post out about some kind of story or game related thing every day for a year, and then it grew to two years, and then three. That isn’t even counting when I was contacted by GiN to post there as well and when I started game and book reviews for various publishers. When that streak was broken by my computer breaking down I had to take a break to replace it, and I’ve had to get back to writing a couple times since then. I can’t promise that this blog will continue forever, since I’ll probably run out of stories I’ve experienced, in one format or another, to cover eventually, but I’ll keep it going as long as I can.  Now on to that update about myself.

How are you doing?: Well I’m feeling less crappy after this month and a half of taking a break since the family dog has died and I’m not nearly in such a bad place in terms of my mental health. That being said things haven’t been great in other areas of my life so I’m still going to be taking a break until things settle down. To make a long story incredibly short my estranged grandmother and uncle have moved back to Oregon after being gone for nearly a decade and half. Things are a lot more complicated and totally not any of your business, but it will keep me stressed out for the foreseeable future.

When will you go back to writing blog posts?: If this family issue wasn’t occurring I’d have been back to writing by the beginning of February at the earliest, or today at the latest. As of right now, and I’m writing this at the end of January so take that in mind please, I can’t say for certain, but I’m hoping by March 1st at the earliest. I’ll still be doing the weekly book reviews and any game reviews for games I get a review copy of so I’m not taking a complete break from writing.

Here’s hoping the year has been good to you all thus far, and I’ll hopefully be back to blogging soon.

In Memoriam 2018

Hey all 2018 sucked for a lot of people. It really sucked because of those we lost, and for me personally as I lost someone really close to me the last day of that year. It’s In Memoriam 2018 Edition!

Stan Lee: This man made many of our favorite comic book heroes relatable and vibrant characters we all know and love. His loss is greatly felt by everyone, and it’s going to really suck when the next MCU movie after Avengers 4 comes out and it won’t have a Stan Lee Cameo. He was an inspiration for many, and a truly generous man who brightened lives around the world.

Anthony Bourdain: This man was both harsh and generous, a man who was a true world traveler he went around sampling not only the food but the cultures that so many people don’t get to experience. If you’ve never watched a show of his, you really need to do so.

John McCain: I’m not a Republican, I’m what my High School Government teacher would call a “Spineless Moderate”. But I respected Senator McCain for not only his service in the military but his service in the Senate where he made a true impact. He was never president, and I didn’t always agree with his views, but I did respect the man.

George H.W. Bush: He was the president when I was born, so I never really got to experience his policies when I was aware of the world, but he was a man who deserved respect for his service to the American People, even if his views weren’t always what I’d agree with.

Paul Allen: He was a big name around here in the Pacific Northwest and owned both the Seahawks and the Trail Blazer franchises. I’m not a huge Microsoft fan in general, but he did get my respect for his various charitable actions in the area.

R. Lee Ermey: The Sarge Hartmann, this man was a true film icon and if you’ve never seen Full Metal Jacket you need to go watch it.

Stephen Hawking: Dude was a genius physicist and that’s really all that needs be said. This man furthered our understanding of the world by decades if not centuries and we are truly less for his absence.

Now as for me and my loss. Well my family had to put our dog to sleep on New Year’s Eve at the age of 15, and while she beat the odds it hurts a ton to lose her. I’m pretty out of it at the moment and I’m writing this the day it happened as I won’t get this updated at any other time.  This post was supposed to go out in a couple weeks, but I really don’t feel like writing much more today and I’m going to be taking a break from blogging.

I won’t make a guess on when I’ll start blogging again, but it may be in a few weeks, or it might be months I just can’t tell you at the moment. I was really close to our dog and this loss hurts worse than all my recent family deaths have for me in a long, long time.  I’m in tears while typing this up so I’ll have to ask you to forgive any spelling errors that occurred in this post. There will be a regular post tomorrow, but after that it’s going to be a while until I write a blog post.

I’ll keep doing my book and game reviews over on Game Industry News’ front page so if you want to see my writing more please do go check them and the rest of my colleagues work out. That said I will not be having a book review this coming week so please don’t expect one.

I hope to write for you all soon, but for now my heart feels empty and broken so I’ll be signing off here.

Return and Some Changes

Hey all I’m back! I’m sorry it’s later in the month, but I did warn that was within my expected time to return. There are some changes that will be occurring with my posts, and my reviews that will affect some things.

Posting Schedule: Until I get back into the swing, and I really hope I’ll be able to do it sooner rather than later, is that I’ll be doing posts every three days. I do plan on eventually going back to daily posts, but that isn’t a 100% sure thing at the moment. Currently I’m actually enjoying the hell out of Destiny 2: Forsaken, Final Fantasy XIV, and Fate Grand/Order (Blame Nero Fest), and since those all had major updates/releases in the past few weeks I’ve been focusing on that more than my writing while I was getting settled into my new home. I won’t promise that I’ll definitely get back to daily posts, but that is currently the plan.

Removal of Plot Synopses: I’m removing these from my posts for a few reasons, but one of the big reasons is that it just takes me way too much time to write these up if I have to hand craft them instead of using a carefully edited premade one by the publisher or author. In the past I tried to use some carefully pruned versions of ones you’d find on Amazon or other sites like that in order to give a brief idea of what the story is about for that given subject. But I won’t be doing that from now on.

What does that mean?: It means my posts will be shorter, and since some of them were already pretty short, that means they’ll be incredibly short. If I do get back to writing daily posts this will help me cut back on the time I spend on writing them, particularly the Translation Necessary Thursday and Serial Saturday posts as those almost always had me writing a custom synopsis. If this change proves to be highly unpopular, and I please ask all you readers to comment on this, I will reconsider it. Like I said there are other reasons why this is happening as well, and I’ll have to weigh the pros and cons before returning to them. This isn’t a change I made lightly, but frankly I think it’s best for me and my writing.

Addition of Grammar Section: This will apply to my Serial Saturday series only, at least for the most part but if I find it’s particularly grievous in any other medium I will make note of it. Since Serial Saturday deals with amateur authors for the most part, this will help you as a reader avoid those series which have particularly bad grammar.

Why are posts so short? Well there’s a good reason for that, frankly I’ve read tens of thousands of stories, and experienced at least a hundred thousand of them overall from various sources and mediums in my life. That number has only climbed higher and higher, and with greater speed, in the past few years since I’ve started writing posts. Most stories don’t particularly impress me, however that isn’t to say I don’t enjoy them. I enjoy pretty much any story with a few notable exceptions for certain genres, topics and authors.

But most aren’t all that impressive, and so I don’t have much to say about them. If you look at my game reviews on GiN you’ll note how different in length some of them are, and that’s because the ones that are longer are ones that made a big enough impression on me for me to comment about them. If I’m particularly impressed, and this is usually reserved to those I feel in a good way, you’ll find me writing a couple thousand words on them.

Ones that are just so-so, and aren’t all that impressive are ones who get smaller posts and reviews from me. It’s that simple, and if that offends you content creators, I’m sorry, but frankly if you don’t make an impression on me, your reviews aren’t going to get all that much comment from me. If I find them fun and enjoyable, I’ll say that, but unless something is particularly impressive it just doesn’t warrant me taking time to write fluff and nonsense just to pad the length for a review of that content. I hated doing that for school essays, and once I learned that almost all teachers hated reading that as well I stopped trying to hit word counts and just wrote to answer the questions posed by the essay.

That’s it for my changes that will be occuring. Look forward to my next post this Saturday with a series that I was asked to review by the Author!

Hiatus Update

Hey guys I’m back with an update. I’m sorry it’s a week late, but things have been happening and I had little control over most of it.

What Happened?: Well it turns out that the Internet that I was getting wasn’t broken the way we thought it was and had hoped for a quick fix. It turns out that the Fiber Optics line that went to where I live is completely cut due to someone’s fuck up. As I live in a place that is having a lot of construction at the moment, it could be one of any number of people who is at fault.

However Frontier, the ISP we used, never notified us until the 20^th of August, which was a full month of no Internet by that time, that they couldn’t fix it at all. Which is really quite a shitty thing to do on their part as we had to call them at least a dozen times trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and they knew at least two weeks prior into this situation that it was completely unfixable, but failed to notify us.

What happens now?: Well it turns out that we’re moving in the next couple of weeks. So while I have no internet now, I will hopefully have it by the middle of September after we finish getting all moved in. We won’t be using Frontier, and will be resorting to Comcast, which may or may not be better. We’ll see, but as it’s literally the only other service in the area we have little choice.

Regarding my daily posts: I won’t be able to write anything until I get fully moved in, which will be in the mid to late half of September. Sorry, I just can’t go to my local library and hog a computer for 10+ hours in order to punch out a bunch of posts for you guys. And I don’t own a laptop to use at a Starbucks or something similar, and I’d still have to loiter their for 10+ hours to do the writing. There are other reasons why those two options won’t work, but I’m not going to list them here.

Regarding reviews: I’ve got a game review written up that I’ll be sending off to my editor right after I get this scheduled to post. My book reviews will be delayed until I get back unfortunately as I’m busy getting ready to move, not reading.

Sorry once again for the late update, I really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter and with me moving it’ll be a bit less than a month hopefully before I start writing daily again.