Tag Archives: LiveJournal

Closets full of skeletons

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Livejournal Icon | Basic Round Social Iconset | S-IconsAs part of switching over to a new setup and layout for the site, I’ve needed to finally go back and switch from WordPress’s category system (old and busted) to the tagging system (new hotness).

It’s tedious, but it’s worthwhile, and I should have done it ages ago. I’ve started at the oldest posts, and am working my way forward. Of course, those posts are part of the massive LiveJournal import I did before I closed that account. And hoo boy, are these LiveJournal posts.

The signs for my anxiety and my migraines were clear, and I was a stubborn idiot not to recognize them. I had thought that my first real migraine was on my honeymoon with my first wife, but these entries say otherwise. All of the symptoms are there, and some of the headaches lasted for days. I’d been having them a LOT longer than I’d thought. And my anxiety, mostly about work and failing those I cared about… wow, it was intense. It wasn’t the same flavor as when my life began to revolve around children, but it is clear as day to me, in the now.

There are all kinds of details that I’ve misremembered over the years. Not the big, life-changing ones, but the small ones that I could have sworn went another way.

Also, it should be known that, as a bachelor, I marinated A LOT of what I cooked overnight. Maybe I should start doing that again.

Also, since all of this was posted to the internet, and I’ve decided to keep the posts alive here, I should NEVER run for office. Or, I suppose, if I do, be ready to glory in my younger self, rather than be ashamed of the shit that came out of my mouth.

Whichever. :)

Writing Journal

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My No Man’s Sky character doesn’t really have a personality. He’s made choices, buffeted by the story line and the revelations that came from finishing quest lines, but he’s never been active about it. He’s never had a driving goal, or something to accomplish for himself. A completely passive character isn’t compelling, and isn’t fun to write.

The game has been fun to play, don’t get me wrong. There’s no way I’d have as many hours into it as I do if it wasn’t. I would never have stuck around through the bugs, the graphics clipping, and the new bugs introduced (and then subsequently resolved) with every major update. I’d have never weathered the game’s detractors and the controversy surrounding its launch that still hangs on, four years later. My favorite aspect of the game, base building, is still hobbled by the game’s inability to negotiate between terrain modification and terrain regeneration/respawn.

And yet, it’s fun for me, and I stick around.

The difficulty with my fan fiction idea is that I chose to make my PC the main character, when he’s just a thin veneer laid over whatever neat thing I want to accomplish next. That leaves two options that I can see:

  • Write stories about another Traveler out in the No Man’s Sky multiverse. That leaves me to continue playing as I have, and allows freedom to stretch that might not exist if I’m constrained to writing about what happens in-game.
  • Take the opportunity provided by switching to playing on PC to actually play a character. I’ve started over in the quest and story progression, which means I can play a character in the game, rather than letting the game drag me along.

I should give this some thought, and find out what my streaming community thinks.

I don’t like most social networks.

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There, I’ve said it. It’s true.

I hate Facebook with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I could go on for hours about all of the bad and the terrible. In fact, I have. It’s pretty easy to get me going, in fact.

I fought joining Twitter, until signing up meant that I was more likely to get that job that I was after. Once I did, I was pretty well addicted. I fully embraced it as a microblogging platform, until Gamergate showed how lax they were with enforcing any sort of abuse policy whatsoever. I stayed as long as I could stand it, but eventually a vote was taken, and the citizens of Skippy chose Twexit.

Google Plus was just disappointing from beginning to end. Not only did Google/Alphabet/whatever decide to get rid of my favorite Google products (I STILL WANT READER BACK! YOU HEAR ME?), not only did it force gender-normative real names upon YouTube comments, not only did it replace Picasaweb (IT WAS FINE YOU JERKS), but it ended up being lackluster and bland.

I tried ello. Flash in the pan, and pretentious to boot.

Livejournal was my home from 2001, and I slowly migrated away from it, until its new-ish Russian parent company decided that all users were subject to Russian law.

I missed Vine entirely. I blinked, and it went away. And, yes, I’m going to point out how similar its life was to the length of its videos.

Snapchat? EEeeeeuuuuggghhhh….

Diaspora? Now THAT ONE had my attention. I signed up for notifications, and I wanted to host my own pod, and it was awesome and was going to be the best and… I have no idea what happened. I don’t remember ever getting the notification that it was available for use, or I did and never signed up or… ? No idea.

Mastodon seems to be a modern Diaspora, and the only problem I’m having so far is figuring out which node I want to be associated with for the life of the platform and/or until that particular node goes down for good. I’m unsure about how that data can be migrated if that happens, but whatever. I’m going to give it a try.

I’m not looking for a replacement for this blog, or for my vlog, or for my gaming videos. Actually, I take that back, I’d love to find a replacement for YouTube. But, I’m not expecting Mastadon to be that. I’m expecting it to be a place to connect with friends and view microblogging content and that sort of thing. On a distributed, open source platform.

If you’re interested, check it out. :) I’ll be posting my contact info there soon!

When it rains…

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I feel like I’ve just finished migrating my blog off of LiveJournal and onto my WordPress blog. Now I need to find a Flickr substitute.

Yahoo!, I can’t brag about having worked for you any more. It’d be like bragging about when I worked for Comcast. I mean, Verizon? Really?

2K, seriously?

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So, I got The Bioshock Collection for the PS4 for Yule. I asked for it, and getting it made me very happy. (Thanks again, brother-in-law!)

Later, I found out the hard way that 2K disabled streaming from their game on the major consoles. Odd, because they’d used Let’s Play videos as a way to spread interest in the game. While a bummer, I still had three games I wanted to play, that I’d get to play. I just wouldn’t be able to share them.

I had an idea today while watching one of my stepson’s videos. Had they disabled the console’s video recording feature? If streaming was off, that should be off too, right?

Nope.

I’ll be able to record my gameplay and share it after the fact! Yay!

But, wait. Why go through the effort of turning off streaming at all? WTF, 2K?