Introducing the Introduction

About me

My car battery died again, the auto repair places seem to be closed for new year's, I've completed most games that I am interested in playing right now, and I need a break from doing design work and prototyping for massive projects that will probably take another decade to be presentable. Time to blog.

I suppose I should explain why I am so late to the table that is ‘Web Part 2: Son of the Web’, or whatever Big Business feels it needs to be called to add to their vocabulary of buzzwords. This is the first ‘blog’ that I have ever written, unless you would count lifesnotsimple.com, a site that I wrote content for along with a friend. lns was started in 2003, a time when ‘blogging’ was not mainstream enough for me to hear my parents use the term, and we certainly never set out to make our site into a ‘blog’ site. For one thing, the content was created by two people, and it was just as much a review/humor site as it was a site about keeping people up-to-date with our lives. It was good enough for me, as a means of converting the tomfoolery going on in my mind into a digital, publicized form. Ren (the other mind behind lns who wrote 95% of the content) and I shared similar tastes in entertainment and humor, but there naturally seems to be something stifling about sharing a url with another person. As I do not enjoy web-fu as much as my partner-in-crime, I found my interests in lns dwindling over time. The more effort he put into it, the more I realized I would never ‘catch up’ and the more disinterested I became in the whole affair. It started with just having a few weeks of deadlines (video games that I wanted to beat) keeping me from having the time to produce content, and the next thing I knew I was caught in a vicious cycle of procrastination — ‘I can post this later’, or ‘If I make a post tomorrow people will expect me to post the next day and the next’, or ‘I'd better hold off on that thought until I can formulate it more eloquently’.

Toward the end of last year, lns went down, taking Ren and I by surprise as we thought we had at least another half year of web-mucking before having to renew our site. This happened when I was in crunch time on a video game (crunch-time in the games industry, your infamy is apt and well-deserved), and when Ren had just started a new job in a new place. We let go of the site; he has his blog for bitching about Ruby and poor web-compliance with certain browsers or whatever it is that web designers blog about nowadays, and now I have mine for discussing goings on in the games industry and the related(?) art of game design, as well as how smart I think I am. Hopefully, the personal aspect of this blog will keep me updating it more often than lns.

About this blog

Under normal circumstances, I don't pride myself on being a master of the English language. To make matters worse, I am using a new keyboard, and it tends to miss letters at times when the same letter is repeated separated by another letter (for example, ‘were’ or ‘mono’). I hope that this will cease as I ‘break in’ my keys, and I will try to correct any such occurrences that I catch as I type. I will take it upon myself to, unannounced, correct spelling or grammatical errors in old posts, but I will try to remark on situations where I make a logical correction or change the meaning of a sentence or passage. I also don't remember those forty letter character combinations for presenting certain symbols, so likely you won't see the proper quote marks or dashes or the correct one of one hundred whitespace symbols for this particular situation. I will try to improve in these areas with time, but not to the point where I stop enjoying the writing of this blog.

I welcome and encourage replies to all of my articles. I particularly encourage posts that disagree with what I say as long as they are written in a constructive manner. I will not delete or alter any post that feels like a legitimate response to an article, even if it is trolling (though I won't necessarily dignify such posts with a response). I will, time permitting, delete posts that are spam, duplicates, or completely off-topic (and hence probably spam). I am quite ego-centric, I think I get that from being human, and I will probably check back every day for replies even if I do not add a new post myself.

I am thinking about changing the look and title of my blog. Using my pseudonym as the title seems pretentious; I have a better one in mind, assuming blogger will let me change it at this point (oh surely…). I am creating this blog with a light text on dark background style. I personally feel this is a more pleasant style. After all, light adds up to white, therefore less white means less light hitting the eyes which means less eye strain as I theorize. I feel that the web's love for black text on white background is based more on the legacy of physical print than any objective benefit, and briefly skimming through some forum posts and research results shows arguments for both sides. I may change in the near future to use the standard dark text on light background style if enough visitors feel this would be better. I was even going to do that for this first post, giving up what I felt to be a better style in the name of conformity (not always a Bad Thing), but I decided that choosing this style explains a key characteristic of myself that I want everyone to be aware of: that I am willing to — no, unable not to — take the road less traveled if I feel it is a more sufficient journey.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog, and I hope it gets you thinking about at least a few things in ways you haven't thought before. Please let me know if there are things you don't like about the style or layout and I will look into changing them. I am not married to the current design, it is kind of just there because it is a blogger default and something needs to be there for me to transmit these words to you.