The Blogspot of Games

My first blog was Yahoo!360° (circa 2005-2006?).
My oldest blog that’s still around today is technically DeviantART (Dec 2007).
My second oldest blog still active today is Blogger (May 2008)

After 360° closed down, I migrated my blog over to a site called Multiply, which didn’t last more than a year before transforming to an e-commerce site and eventually shutting down altogether some years later. Blogger, meanwhile, has frankly managed to defy the odds and stay up and running for all these years. I’ve speculated before that the only reason Google keeps Blogger around is because of the goodwill it builds with users, the potential backlash of closing it down, and the overall small footprint it takes up on Google’s servers simply not being worth the effort to delete. It does worry me that the day may come when I have to say goodbye to Blogger. I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point besides go all-in on WordPress (where I’ve been since Dec 2014).

In my last entry, I wrote about the Crazy Castle videogame franchise, a series I’ve never actually played beyond once holding the box of the first game in a grocery store in the American midwest in 1989. Videogames have been a part of my life as long as movies, starting with the Atari 2600 all the way to my current collection of consoles that’s only one generation behind the current lineup. This meant I also read quite a number of videogame magazines such as Nintendo Power and Gamepro. Eventually, I found my way to the internet, where games journalism wasn’t bound by the conventions of print media. One of these sites was Gamespot, which is still active today. Not content with merely being a place to post articles about the games industry, Gamespot wanted to be a haven for gamers, a place where a community could thrive, where people could make connections and share their experiences with titles both new and old.

To this end, they offered a blogging service.

Although there were no real hard and fast rules about what you could post there, it maybe wouldn’t be the best place to host your travelogue of Europe or your collection of photos of telegraph poles or your thoughts on the self-determination of the South Moldavian people. Generally, if you were reading someone’s blog on Gamespot, you were reading about games, maybe anime, possibly movies, and technology as it pertained to the gaming space (graphics cards, console specs, etc.). As I was exploring options in case Blogger went the way of Multiply and 360°, I started a blog there in August of 2009. My first entry was announcing a short story I’d written that was posted to both my DeviantART and my Freeservers site (which is still somehow up and running). My last entry came in October of 2014 with a review of Velocity 2X, a PSVita game and sequel to a really nifty shooter originally released for the PSP. 47 total blog entries in those years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I think the only reason I’d checked back in on it was I was wondering whatever happened to the site 1UP, as I had a small presence there. 1UP is completely gone, folded into another publication with all records of user-generated content wiped. That was when I remembered Gamespot and managed to uncover my old account there.

It really took me back. For one entry, I was complaining about how I couldn’t use certain words like class and style because, the way the site was coded, these would cause a Javascript error. I had to spell them with 5’s. Even “classic” caused an issue. I seem to remember this error was fixed, but I never bothered to correct my entries. In another entry, Gamespot seemed to think the name Shizuru was a curse word and wouldn’t let me post until I changed it to something else. Makes me wonder how people with Shih Tzus coped when they wanted to share their dog pictures.

In the years since making these entries, Gamespot has undergone many massive changes to their backend (all the technical stuff under the bonnet, so to speak), so a number of images I posted to my entries are broken, though at least one of them can still be seen if I access the site on my phone instead of my Mac or iPad. Most of them were covers of games, while others are complete mysteries as to what they were. One of them was about a portable NES console, which really doesn’t narrow it down given how lucrative that little market was, so I have no idea what image I’d have to use if I were to archive or preserve the blog.

As of this writing, Gamespot not only still has my blog up and running (images notwithstanding), but I can make a new entry anytime I want (maybe I should test to see if class and style still cause coding issues). They don’t offer any sort of migration tool the way 360° did. So, if I were to archive these 47 entries, I’d have to do it the old fashioned way of going through one by one and copy-pasting them into Notes or Pages before I could re-upload them to Blogger or WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go that far, unless I want to repost something on an anniversary or in regard to a recent event. As I said, my last entry there was a review of Velocity 2X in 2014, a series that’s remained stagnant to this day while Futurlab (its developer) focuses on Powerwash Simulator 2. Someday, maybe there will be a Velocity 3, and on that day, I’ll dig up my old Gamespot review and we can all contrast and compare, see what’s been improved, what still needs work, and even where the series can go from here.

Game on, everybody.

Housekeeping

First, as my old Video Art professor would say, some housekeeping: tomorrow I leave for Albuquerque. As such, my Twitter page will be my only means of making updates. I'm going by train, and that's for three reasons:
1. The FAA is run by lemurs who take turns driving nails into each other's heads.
2. Said nails are apparently made of gold, hence the absurd ticket prices and fees.
3. It takes as long, and costs at least the same as driving (if not less on both counts).
In any case, I'll have a lot of free time. Thankfully, I've got my unabridged audiobooks of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountainhead to pass the time, along with my PSP. I've got Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and I'm going to try my damnedest to get some enjoyment out of it this time.

After a little soul-searching, I decided to renew my pro account over at Flickr. At first, I was apprehensive for three reasons:
1. I'm not really making that many photographs right now.
2. I'm broke.
3. I was spending more and more time on DeviantART.

Now, however, I'm still going to be spending most of my free-time on DeviantART, but since I'm not going to renew my premium membership (unless substantiated third-party "permission issue" reports are given the same validity and treatment as DMCA reports), that resolve did give me a little financial leeway (enough for 24 months instead of 12). In short, I'm going to support Flickr because they know how to run their site and listen to their users.

Also, I found out that a non-pro account with Flickr is a little more restrictive than I'd thought; instead of just limiting the number of sets you can display and photos/videos you can upload within a month, they also limit your photostream to your 200 most recent photos. That was a real shocker to me; in fact, there was an honest moment of panic that over 400 of my pictures had been lost. Luckily, they are stored, and by pruning a few of my more recent images, the older ones take their place.

Flickr was sort of my first love before Becca-chan persuaded me to join DeviantART. My Nikon s50c came with 3 months of FlickrPRO, and I was hooked for the next two years. It's a good and strong community, if spread a little thin, and I really love how in touch the site's creators are with their users. I've harped about this before, I know, but I still consider the way they handled introducing video uploads to be an act of pure genius. It's just clear they put a lot of thought into it before going public, and were very receptive to feedback both before and after launch.

That's another reason I reinstated my FlickrPRO account; I want to help get the Video community more recognition. Although it's a nice video community, I feel like no one's really given it a chance and people are very slow to warm up to it. Most videos are lucky if they get more than 100 views, and I don't think I've ever seen a video with views counting over 1,000. So, I want to do what I can by uploading a few more videos (I posted my Pattern 158 animation there first before posting it and the rest of the trilogy here) to my photostream. I haven't decided what they'll be just yet. I'm just fascinated by the 90-second time limit; I take it as a challenge. It makes me think of how, in my video art classes at UNM, we'd have assignments with one, three, or five-minute time limits, and yet despite repeated emphases on length, someone would always have a ten or even thirty-minute "magnum opus" on the due date. Sure, we would still watch it and maybe even give a fair critique at the end, but it was obvious that, despite any praise or comment, what most of us really wanted to say was "Really? You couldn't keep THIS under 5 minutes? Are you THAT in love with yourself?" In our defense, it wasn't out of complete impatience; one of my really good friends always delivered these technical and artistic masterworks that were, by contrast, criminally short, like 10 or 15 seconds (including titles and credits). I swear, one time at least five of us simultaneously let out variations of "damn it" when one of his pieces ended. I can appreciate that a project can start as a small idea and then grow over time into something bigger, but when that happens, you're really supposed to put that project on the backburner or produce it in parallel to a new, but shorter, project.

Anyway, that's the news for now. I've got a few more journal entries waiting in the wings that I'll post once I get back around next Sunday.