The Most Magical of Months

First off, this isn’t a “Sorry I haven’t been writing, I promise to do better” post. The last post in this blog is from December 2020, and that’s fine. There’s a very good chance that there will be a big gap between a similar post this December and November of 2022, when I do this Buck Fifty thing all over again!! 

That’s right! It’s back! So I’m back. This time last year I joined in with a small but passionate community to write just 150 words a day for the month of November. Others do NaNoWriMo, where they try to write the first draft of a novel in a month, or Movember, where they try to grow a mustash in a month. I can’t do either of those things, the former because that is typically around 50,000 words, so, yikes!, and the latter because it’s itchy. So, so itchy. 

But 150 words I can do. In fact, I already did it! I successfully wrote 30 posts during November last year, each at least 150 words. Actually, not to brag, but my shortest post last year was 180. You have no idea how much I had to talk myself out of making this post check in at exactly 150 words. 

Weirdly, while writing what you’ve read so far, I almost felt Iike I was cheating. I had originally sat down with an entirely different post in mind, but as I started typing, this is what flowed out. For a brief moment I caught myself thinking “Is writing about the Buck Fifty challenge itself a valid post?” But the answer is “Yes! Absolutely!!”. 

And I like it. It sets the scene for the next 30 days.

The joy of Buck Fifty is that it doesn’t have to be a single novel length coherent story, or a perfectly manicured facial hair. It can be whatever you make it. A stab at that script idea you’ve had bouncing around. A series of tabletop RPG ideas. Designs for a board game or video game. Movie or game reviews. Short stories. Not a whole novel, but 150 words at a time on an aspect of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a month of daily blog posts written to amuse and inform, but mostly, written for you, the writer, to look back on in years and decades time and think “I’d totally forgotten about that hilarious day. I’m sure glad I wrote it down in this online public diary format that I can reference at any time.” 

Now, wouldn’t that be something?

Who? Who Are You?

I’ve now posted ten mini blogs in November as part of this Buck Fifty challenge, not including this one as I write it. I am very happy with my current progress, and genuinely hope I can succeed at completing the month without skipping a day. 

But what is truly surprising is how consistent the views have been. Each post gets around 25 views. I’m sure most readers are coming from my Twitter, as I’ve linked all but one there, and that post that I didn’t link got significantly less views. 

I’m curious who you are. I know one of you is my wonderful aunt, who’s mentioned my blog in the past when I was posting regularly too, and commented on one of these posts last weeks. Hi Carmel! 

But the rest of you are a mystery. I don’t mind. I write these for me. My blog has always been almost entirely for my own pleasure. I love going back through the archives and finding wierd posts from the last fourteen years! Moments that I’ve long since forgotten, moments that I’ll never forget, stories, reviews all sorts of stuff. Fourteen years. Wow.

Thanks for reading my nonsense. If you like, stick around for tomorrow’s post. It’s going to be a special one! I’ve been working on it all summer. 

Point Five Kay

This is it!! A new milestone! One I did not expect to ever reach at several points in the lifetime of this blog.

My 500th post!

I often start things, get excited about them and then forget about them just as quickly. I had hoped that this blog would break that mold, and while I've gone radio-silent a few times, my desire to post random stuff is still strong today.

I started this almost eleven years ago, on May 2nd, 2006! I can't believe it's been that long. Since then, I've gotten married, moved to Canada and become a father, and parts of all those years have been documented herein. Though a lot of a lot of 2014 and 2016 have been lost ot history, with only 11 and 9 posts respectively those years.

Let's not waste any more time and push on to 1,000!

Post Script: I actually had to cheat a little to get this post to fall on the 500th upload. Last night I posted the reviews of the Game Canopy and cajon bags, and the cajon post became my 500th. I'm going to alter the publication date on that post to move it after this one, rewriting history in real time!

 

I Have A Doubt

Firstly, why is "doubt" spelled with a B. It just doesn't make any sense!

Anyway, it's Friday, November 27th, so we are, by definition, 27 days into November, and 27 days into my NoBeProMo attempt to post 30 blog posts in the months. I currently stand at, including this very one, which totally counts, 23 posts, putting me a whole four posts behind.

I'm not confident I can make that up.

Mostly, I've just been lacking in inspiration for what to write about. Inspiration comes from all kinds of places. A whole lot of the posts have been about Ada already, because they're easy to write. Her and Claire and all that are on my mind some days. My previous post on trailers came about because of the recent Captain America: Civil War first trailer.

I've been desperately trying to write some short story stuff as well, but I'm having major minor writer's block. Why "major minor"? Well, it's only a short story for my personal blog, not the fifth installment in a massively successful fantasy series. It would suck to not be able to write the next book in a series millions of people are waiting for. I'd honestly love to write something again, as my short story posts are ones I enjoy going back and reading again years later. But it's just not happening.

Work hasn't helped, even though I can't complain. I've been crazy busy and it's been lots of fun. I've been working with the toddlers and infants a lot, which is always an enjoyable experience. But all this fun has meant little time for writing.

So, I'm behind. I'm honestly going to do my best over the weekend to catch up, but... well... the post title says it all.

Good luck to me.

Stumped

When I got home this afternoon, Claire and Ada were out with friends, so I immediately tried to write a post to stay up to date with this month-long project. I had fallen behind this week, unable to write over the weekend, due mainly to feeling numb and uninspired after the horrific events in Paris this past Friday.

I had managed to catch up, and wwe proud of myself for posting some interesting stuff, but today I just can't think of anything. I've started a few posts, but been unhappy with the level of writing in any of them. I wanted to try to write a short story, which I sometimes post here, but couldn't come up with a plot.

So blearg. This is still something. A brief, high level glimpse into my state of mind this evening. Uninspired. Not bored, or upset, in fact, far from it. The evening has been lovely. Cuddles with baby and wife, watching YouTube videos, getting frustrated at a video game. All good. Just creatively uninspired.

Tomorrow evening I'm hoping to be playing board games at a friends place, so we'll see if I fall behind then too. But at least today, I have this post. Uninspired, but content none-the-less.

More

Happy 2014! It's been a great start to the New Year for me, and I have tonnes of stuff to look back and blog about from the Christmas holiday, but let's start 2014 off by looking forward.

While I don't make New Years resolutions, my goal for this year is to be "more". Make more, do more.

I'm going to draw more, and craft more. I have lots of art and craft supplies built up in a storage box, and I haven't been using them enough. I made my own Christmas tree this year, which was awesome fun, and I'm determined to make more stuff in 2013. Also, I'm going to draw more, both in sketch books and digitally. I still what to make a webcomic, so here's the deal: Ask me about it. Pester me about it. When I run out of excuses for why I haven't started, you have my permission to demand it. I love drawing, and I get a little bit better every time I take out my pencils. I just need to stop making excuses to leave them where they are.

I'm going to blog more. Yes, I realise the irony of saying that given that it took until now to write my first blog of 2014, but I'm going to do this. I'm immensely proud of how long I've had this blog now, and how much I've written in that time. 2014 is not going o be the end of that, but a strengthening of it.

For Christmas, Claire got me a monster fo a gaming PC. Suddenly, I found myself able to record my game plays, edit and upload them to YouTube and join the Let's Play community. I'm going to do this more and develop my editing skills more. I've been really enjoying it so far, and I find I'm even enjoying the game more because of it. I'm going to try live-streams in time, but before that, I want to try playing games I'm brand new to (Thank you Steam and Humble Bundle), and recording my commentary live as I react to these new experiences.

I'm going to role-play more and board game more. There was a time last year when we were board gaming every other week, sometimes more, but I stopped over the summer and only got back into it during Christmas. We gamed four times in that week, and I loved it. Also, it's been over a year, and probably closer to two since I GMed. Time to fix that.

I'm going to be with friends more, and talk to friends far away more. I'm going to Skype more and maybe even try this new-fangled Google Hangouts thing some time. I have my own PC with Steam now, so I'm going to try to game with friends more.

2014 is going to be more.

And anyone I can take along for the ride, I'll be happy to have the company.

It Was Also Bravestarr's Horse

I did it! Thirty posts in thirty days over the course of November. I didn't think I'd actually manage it, and only have done so through a slight bit of cheating and bending of the rules. I think the idea is to post daily, but I missed that on two occasions. Despite that, I did get in the thirty posts within the allotted month.

This only stands as a personal achievement. I didn't raise money for a cause or make anyone's lives better because of what I wrote (not that I'm aware of anyway). My friend Cian took part in Movember and raised money for prostate cancer awareness. His was a much better cause, all told. To alleviate my guilt, I donated to his cause. Also, he had a smashing 'tash.

But I'm proud of what I did. The quality of posts meandered a bit, sliding below the imaginary average level this blog aspires to maintain. There were funny posts, nostalgic posts and far too many posts about video games! It started with an angry letter to Google and finished with some thoughts on the value of living. But they were all fun to write. Once or twice I arrived home from work without a single idea on what to post that evening. I would just turn on the laptop and start typing. Those often turned out to be my favourites.

Now that it's all done, you might be interested in some facts:

• I recorded 1,684 page views from November 1st to 30th across the entire blog, not all for the new material, but there was a marked jump from the 700 view per month I've been averaging since June. 
• Taken as they stand, my total word count is an astonishing 14,948 words, averaging just short of 500 words per post (498.26), peaking at 1,723 and dipping as low as 112.
• If you removed the cut'n'pasted poem from my post on the 5th of November (which I obviously didn't write, nor had to retype) from the count, it stands at 14,873, or an average of 495.76 words per post, peaking at 1,723 and dipping as low as 37 in the altered post.
• The median word count was 419.
• There were 10 comments left.
• Currently, the highest viewcount for a single post is 86, for the very first post. Second place has 32 views.
• There are 22 images and one video. 
• The instances of blatant disregard toward the conventions for the proper use of italics and bolding must number somewhere in the hundreds.
• Occurrences of spelling and grammatical errors are similarly numbered.

I had a lot of fun completing my 30/30 (now you should get the title's reference, if you hadn't before this). Hopefully I'll try it again next year and compare the results.

How were they to read? Generally boring? Too long? Painful to view on account of the previously mentioned disregard for literary conventions? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

And thanks for reading.

I Got Nothing

Ack. Oh well. I've been trying to do this whole November daily blogging thing, and I hoped that by not actually mentioning it or making a big deal of it I'd kind of sneak through the whole month without getting myself stressed about having to post every single day!

I've been kind of cheating anyway. For one, I had built up somewhat of a buffer, writing a few related posts together but saving the extra for the following week. I'm not too upset about that as I still had to write the posts.

My other sneaky method had only just paid off. I have my blogs date and time still set to GMT. I just never got around to updating it. So I've been able to post late in the evening Pacific time and have it appear as early the next day on my blog. This gave me a small amount of leeway in case I couldn't or forgot to post something. I could post the following Vancouver evening and justify to myself that I still managed a post per date, if not day.

Unfortunately, I missed Saturday both in Ireland and Vancouver. You see, I spent it entirely playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Well, almost entirely. I got up at 10am, played until about 3pm, took a walk and got some fresh fruit for a snack, played a short bit of Gears of War 3, went out for dinner with the lovely Claire, and then back to the world of Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

So here we are. An excuse post. I hate it as much as you. It's so late Claire is gone to bed, I've probably made a dozen typos I'll see in the morning and I'm too tired to even add relevant links.

But I have altered the date so that this appears to have been posted on Saturday. I'm still awake. My day hasn't ended yet. It counts, right?

EDIT: Fixed some typos. 

Fuck You, Google. Fugle.

Dear Google.

In the past I have enjoyed your updates to my number one electronic mail service, Gmail, both on the cosmetic level and the features it supports. The most recent version of your email service is clean and effective, visually appealing and easy to find what I need. Features such as Priority Inbox, labeling, and custom skins are all available if I choose to use them, which, in most cases, I don't. I like the basic plain white template and I don't get enough emails to need to prioritize them. But that's ok. I'm not forced into using any of those features.

My blogging days began with this very site, some five and a half years ago! Since then I have posted almost 350 ramblings of varying interest. I have witnessed at least two major updates to the Blogger system. The first I adapted to quickly, considering it an improvement over the previous version, but the most recent I never really warmed to. The "Reading List" at the bottom of the Dashboard cannot be turned off from what I can see. The only thing I have in there is your own "Blogger Buzz", which I couldn't care less about, but I can't turn it off!! I get repeated errors while writing blogs as well, from my paragraph format screwing up when I add an image, to random double spaces, or errors when I hit Enter twice.

Wave was too confusing for me to understand, along with 95% of potential users it seems.

Buzz held absolutely no interest for me, a view I once again shared with 95% of potential users.

All this brings me to Google Reader.

When I was first shown Reader I was mildly impressed. I could read most of my favourite sites without having to have a million tabs open. It even removed the need to compulsively check if a site had updated yet. As more of my friends got into it, I realised that Reader wasn't just mildly impressive, it was freaking incredible!

Not only could I keep track of everything in one tab, I could read the best of what my friends were following when they shared items! My short list of sites grew swiftly, and soon I had to create multiple folders to keep everything in order. Many of the site I follow were suggested to me by items shared by friends. We could comment on the best, the weirdest, the cutest; sharing not only the article, but also our own thoughts and feelings related to it.

But all that is gone. Google Reader is dead. And you killed it. The latest update has, inexplicably, removed the best feature Reader held. Now it is just my sites, with none of the social interactions.

This, of course, is not just a random, insane move. You want me using Google+, sharing my finds there and commenting through the newest addition to House Google. But therein lies the problem. I couldn't give two fucks about Google+. Since it's release I can count on the fingers of two hands how often I have clicked over to it, in an attempt to see if anything of interest is being posted. Every time I close the tab, reminded why I not only dislike this new feature, but why I disliked it's predecessor, Facebook, as well.

And while I can sort my friends into varying sets, the default, which cannot be altered, shows me everything from everyone. If I could guarantee that people would only use Google+ to share articles in the style of Reader, I could just delete anyone that I didn't follow in Reader, and keep it to that small set of friends whose shared posts I enjoyed reading. But that is not how you want it to be, Google. For one thing, the full post doesn't even show up in the feed, just a preview. I have to click through to read more. You are making it harder for me to share with my friends!

But it's not just the whole push towards Google+ that has gotten me all hot and bothered! No. The new Reader doesn't even fit on my screen. I use a small netbook for my internet needs, and the old Reader worked perfectly fine on it, fitting articles into my screen size 95% of the time. The latest update has extended the width of the main area far beyond the right edge of my screen. To read anything I now have to scroll to the bottom, then use the horizontal scroll bar to move right to read the end of a sentence, the last panel of a webcomic, or see the other 33% of an image. And some images or comics require a second scroll bar within their own feed! Arg, Google! ARG! Text cannot describe how infuriated I am right now!

Gmail has all kinds of features, but it is my choice to use them or not. Blogger can switch back to the older style whenever I want, but for how long? Reader is a permanent, complete change, and I don't get a choice in the matter. It's your way or the highway.

You've crossed the line, Google. You're straying into Facebook, and more recently Netflix, territory, trying to force your users to adopt a new system that benefits you when they are more than happy with the previous one.

Tread carefully Google. You are opening yourself to a new start-up that can provide the same features as the old Reader that the fans loved. And when that happens, I for one will be dropping you like a hot rock and jumping on board.

Denis Ryan