Let me tell you.

I haven’t been blogging much as of late for two reasons:

1. Work—lately I’ve been working at night, which is usually when I’m online and in the mood for causing a ruckus.

2. WordPress being annoying—I know, I know, I’ve talked about this before, but I really need a quicker/faster/simpler way of posting so that I don’t get all “but it’ll take me forever!” when I feel like posting. I think I may reluctantly return to whichever client was built directly into Firefox, if only because it’s one of the few I remember not being too overly-bothered by.

September brings with it the long sought-after focus I need to maintain this thing.

It’s about the gameplay…

That’s it. The final straw. The one step over the line. It may sound like an over-reaction, but I’m canceling my subscription to the InDigital podcast, and it’s because of Wil Wheaton.

I’m a fan of his blog, actually. He writes well, it’s usually interesting, and it’s updated fairly regularly. But the minute I see him on InDigital, a deep, dark anger grows inside of me and threatens to explode into, well, into a short diatribe against Wil Wheaton.

How many names can he drop an episode? “Me and uh, Kevin Rose…” “I was talking to the, uh, Penny Arcade guys…” How high can he stick his nose? “Well, for me it’s really about gameplay…” No, for him it’s really about the 80’s! I know I wasn’t around for most of what sounds like a really wicked decade, but I’m sick to death of the Atari/Amiga/Commodore 64 references. Yes, he likes classic games–he even writes a column about it–but there’s more to the world than his recollections of twenty years ago. Good games have been made since, and they’ve been made by evil corporations too! And they have good graphics! They’re pretty! They use more than two pixels! And gameplay can be directly affected by the quality of things like sound and graphics!

Thank you.

(P.S. Leo Laporte…I’m on to you…)

Frustration.

So I can’t find a job.  Okay.  I get that.  But it wouldn’t bother me so much if I could get myself doing something else instead.  Anything, really.  All I’ve done this summer is sit around staring at my computer.  Sure, some of the time it’s to write, but I don’t do it enough.  I don’t go outside, I hardly go upstairs.  I’m just completely off schedule without something to do everyday.  I’m staying up too late at night, getting up too late in the morning.  I need structure, people.  Structure.

That is all.  I’ll have something about Asia later.

A Somewhat Expected Lull

Don’t worry—I’m still alive.  But things are afoot, changes are being made, gears are turning…and so on.  So if there’s a tiny bit of slow-down here, fear not.  All will be well.  Nothing bad will happen.  Just keep traveling the tubes.

WordPress.com+Flickr=Prolonged Sigh.

All I wanted to do was put a dumb little widget, preferably flash—something dynamic, in my sidebar.  I thought it might be nice to add a little color, a little variety to my blog.  Good intentions, indeed.

But no.  WordPress didn’t want to play along.  The sidebar, a collection of so-called widgets, allows you to add blocks of text, and thus presumably code.  Unfortunately, WordPress likes to take that code, rip it to shreds and leave you curled up crying on the floor.  It refused to let me do any kind of flash…anything, and even deconstructed the offical Flickr badges.  I eventually found something somewhere that was just a dynamically created image of my last uploads, and so the code is pure HTML linking to the source…or something.  I don’t know.  It works.  It’s nowhere near as pretty as I’d like it to be, but I’ll live with it…for now.

Watch out, crappy little sidebar thing, your days are numbered.

The Big Idea.

I don’t care if you steal this, because I think it’s an amazing idea that just needs to happen somehow.  If it already exists, that’s cool, too.  But this needs to be going on and brought to my attention: 

Half-way around the world, sort of.

As quiet as my love for comics is, my love for China is, to most people, nothing more than a whisper.  While at Lakeland, I took a semester of Chinese and afterwards decided that one day, somehow, I would end up in China.  It just seems so far, so remote, and so different.  I want to be thrown into something unexpected and totally beyond my understanding with the hopes that eventually I will understand it.  I wish I remembered more Chinese, as knowing Chinese is rather pivotal to the whole Chinese experience thing, but that’s what books are for.  One of my favorite books right now is called Shenzhen, which is a graphic novel/travelogue by an artist who spent time in China, and then recorded it all in comic book style.  It’s amazing, and if I could do that sort of thing the rest of my life, I would be there in a flash.  But again, I can’t draw.  One tiny dream of mine is to perhaps go to China for a year or two after I graduate to teach English.  There are a lot of programs available (for a lot of countries around the world), it’s just a matter of finding something perfect.

Those looking for an interesting perspective on China and foreign cultures in general will appreciate Sexy Beijing, a series of videos on Youtube.  They’re human-interest style pieces, but quite funny, the introduction being a parody on Sex and the City.  Even if you don’t care a bit about China, check out the video.

Sitting in the dark.

I’ve been in discovery-mode lately, and therefore found a nice, tiny little application called JDarkRoom. All it does is bring up a black screen for you to type on. It sort of reminds me of the DOS days, but prettier. It saves to .txt files, but it’s easy enough to just copy and paste into whatever you want. It’s nice for whenever you’ve got way too much going on on your desktop and you just want to sit and write. Enjoy.

[UPDATE:] Or, as Jason points out, you could just download WriteRoom, the original Mac program the java version is based off of. It’s nice, and a lot more user-friendly. The one thing I don’t like about it is the pop up you get every time it’s opened—they give it to you for free and then never let you forget it.

Script Frenzy: I’m, uh…in.

From the people who brought you Nanowrimo comes a new and interesting way to fail at a month-long commitment—instead of (not) writing a novel in a month, it’s Script Frenzy!  With Script Frenzy, you (or you and a partner) (don’t) write a 20,000-word screenplay or stage play in one month.  My brother and I are planning a partnership, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about how we do it from two different states in the coming weeks.

It’s not there.

I searched and I searched, but I could not find a decent WordPress client to use on a Mac. They all bother me in some way—they all don’t even have blogging as their primary function (Journler and Flock, which I don’t understand at all), so why they are on the official WordPress list as clients, I don’t know. Qumana seems to be all about Google Adsense, which I’m not interested in. And the download for JBlog Editor is broken. The only one close to being decent is Scribefire, which is a Firefox plug-in—except if I have my browser open, what difference is there between opening that up, and opening a new tab and going straight to my dashboard? I don’t even know why I would need a client, but it was just something I was looking for and could not find (for free, see below). But I’ll live.

[UPDATE:] Matt made a good point in his comment—MarsEdit and Ecto are both good programs. I guess I just wish there were free programs that were as good, but that’s probably asking too much. I’ll try to be more clear next time. This was sort of rushed.

Gettin’ back in the game!

I’m so happy we’ve both decided to continue our long-lost blogs.  It’s so brotherly of us, like we’re related or something.  And because of that, and our shared predictions concerning the longevity of this commitment, I think it’s only fair to take bets on how long this will last.  I think I can make it until December.  I think he might make it to August.  Just putting it out there…