The Great UnGoogling: The Sign

I genuinely once wrote a blog entry using the browser of a PSP while sitting outside a library after hours to use their Wi-Fi. That was many years ago, and I have a lot less patience for when things don’t work. I’ve had my Blogger account for longer than any other platform, with the possible exception of DeviantART. It’s been far from perfect overall, but I’ve stuck with it. I’ve tolerated the occasional workarounds, to say nothing of the site’s frankly dated interface. If anyone were to ask me where to go for a blogging service, my knee-jerk is pretty much WordPress. For all the issues I have with them putting features behind paywalls after previously offering them for no charge (as well as their domain name services, which are downright scummy), WordPress offers the single best WYSIWYG interface for making media-rich text. Everything is laid out nice and neat, I can move things around with ease, and post settings are straightforward and intuitive.

My point is the problem with WordPress is more with me than anything they do. I suppose it’s fair to say that Blogger spoiled me. Everything Blogger offers is free (unless you want a domain name) because Google is a big evil monolith of a company that gets their money by other means (in my case, cloud storage). WordPress is not Google. At least, they’re nowhere near the size of Google and have fewer means at their disposal to keep the lights on.

Recently, I’ve encountered an issue with Blogger using my browser of choice, Safari. It acted like I wasn’t logged in, even though I was. This problem’s worst aspect was being unable to upload or otherwise post any images. After a tedious back-and-forth with Google’s worthless support, I eventually figured out the issue is with WebKit, a toolkit at the very heart of both Safari and my other browser of DuckDuckGo. I waited for a few updates to my OS and had better luck, but as of this writing I’m still not able to post images. That’s a slight lie; I can post images but I have to use another browser that doesn’t rely on WebKit, such as Edge or Firefox. I don’t want to do that. I know this sounds like being stubborn, but I’m just tired of workarounds. Updates always cause certain pieces of software to break, that’s unavoidable. What’s frustrating however is how long an issue can persist. In a time of software-as-a-service, I don’t think there’s any excuse for a known issue; You’ve got the revenue, you’ve got the personnel, fix it… and no pizza or energy drinks until you do.

This all coincides with a recent change I’ve been making over the course of the past year to UnGoogle my life. It started with no longer relying on Google for logins, password management, or two-factor authentication. That was a very big step and so far it’s had no downsides. I do still have a Google account overall, including a Gmail and cloud storage. Gmail is the best email service I’ve ever used and the cloud storage is really just a backup for other storage services I have, including some good old-fashioned physical drives I have to plug in to my desktop. Blogger is my biggest anchor, the most important reason I haven’t abandoned Google entirely. The recent WebKit fiasco, however, has given me pause. Couple that with the promo pricing offers that WordPress likes to email me, and I can’t help but see it as a sign to jump ship and go all in on WordPress for my blogging needs going forward.

So, given the scope of this endeavor as well as my reservations, I consulted my decision matrix. The decision matrix is a spreadsheet that catalogs the results of three virtual assistants asked to flip a coin. At the risk of sounding spiritual, I concentrate on the question while each coin is being flipped. Heads means to go for it. Tails means don’t do it. The result is a two out of three. The assistants are Siri, Alexa, and Google. Siri said to go for it while Alexa and Google said not to. The only time I’ve ever vetoed the decision matrix was when I upgraded my phone from a 12 mini to a 15. I’d held on to the 12 for a long time, even replacing the battery at one point, and the price on the 15 was pretty hard to beat since it was on the way out. As for WordPress, there exists a possibility of being vetoed and I go all in, but don’t hold your breath. Besides, the deal would only last for three years, and then I’d have to pay closer to full price again. I just don’t feel like it’s worth it right now.

I did decide on changing the theme for my other WordPress site for the umpteenth time. I was going to go for a rather bland but practical number creatively called Twenty Twenty-Five. My only real beef with it was putting color customization behind a paywall. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the futility of the situation. For as much as I love dark mode (give me light text on a dark background or give me death), not everyone consumes blogs the same way, and that's completely fine. You've doubtless got a "reader mode" on your browser of choice and can therefore render any theme on any blog obsolete. If you want black on white, white on black, yellow on navy, orange on gray, maroon on pink, I cannot stop you and I wouldn't want the power to do so anyway. Please, by all means, go bananas with my blessing. 

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.

A Rant (Part 1 of X)

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is said to have hailed the internet as the death of the novel. Makes me wonder what he thinks of movies, given I’m sure more people have seen the Trainspotting movie than read the original book, to say nothing of all the people led to his books on the power of the film. Maybe he doesn’t consider that a fair comparison since the internet, despite the rise of short-form audio-visual content like TikTok or Instagram, is still largely a text-based affair. It's been argued that we’re reading less and less as time goes on, but the reality is that people are reading as much as ever, they’re just reading things other than books, magazines, and newspapers.

To build on Mr. Welsh’s assertion, if there’s one singular iota of beef I have with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s that they’ve almost singlehandedly killed blogging. Microblogging offers a conciseness and brevity that’s simply easier to digest in short, controlled bursts of scrolling. I remember an English teacher telling me about how the Industrial Revolution lit a fire under the short fiction market because people were simply too busy to read a full novel, preferring instead a tighter narrative that could be read in a sitting.

This is not me complaining about any shrinking traffic to my own blogs; they were never that high to begin with. Rather, my complaint has to do with the way too many people are using social media to share their thoughts. Essentially, they’re trying to jam the round peg of long-form blogging into the square hole of microblogging, and it’s frustrating that people aren’t more upset about it.

Here’s what I mean: In the latter years of Twitter, before the Elongated Muskrat came along, there seemed to be an uptick in people posting multi-part tweets to get around the character limit. Specifically, after the death of TotalBiscuit the Cynical Brit from bowel cancer, a certain user made a very long chain of Twitter posts about his axes to grind with the former vlogger (complete with an image of several axes leaning against a wall). I don’t remember if he was a journalist or a game developer, and I don’t care to dignify his display of pettiness with a check, but all I could think when I was scrolling through it to see how many replies to his own Tweet he needed was, “Why doesn’t he just make this a blog post and put the link to it in a Tweet?” People can still reply to what he said below the Tweet; they can just go to the blog, read it, and then come back with their thoughts on it.

Look, I can understand when you need a little more room to say what you want to say. Even the most generous character limits can be frustrating to work within. If I see someone posting a reply to their own post to finish their thought, that honestly doesn’t bother me. If it’s a reply to their own post giving some additional context, or reacting to the general vibe of the other replies they’re getting, I have absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes, we don’t choose the right words and we need to add some qualifiers. It happens.

What does make me angry is when you’ve essentially taken a long form blogpost, chopped it up into sentences, and then posted them one at a time to a microblogging site, just hoping that people will be able to navigate the thread amid all the other replies from people responding to it. Seriously, if you need that much room, get a blog.

The sad reality of why this is happening has many roots, the first of which is that some people simply like to keep their online presence more centralized. They’d rather focus on one site than micromanage a thousand different pages, leading to at least one inevitably being neglected. Secondly, it may simply not be worth it for them to set up a blog just for that one especially long stream of consciousness. Thirdly, and most tragic of all, is that social media users are creatures of habit. Many don’t feel like following a link to an external site, even if the URL clearly shows where they’re going and isn’t potentially some kind of trap.

On that note, remember TinyURL and Bitly? On paper, it sounds like a great way to put web addresses in Tweets so you wouldn’t use up as much of the character limit. In practice, it’s absolutely awful because all you’d have is a string of numbers and letters. You could have been getting sent absolutely anywhere and the internet is a dangerous place. Nowadays, more sites offer shortened versions of their URLs for this very reason. You now know for sure you’re clicking on a link to a YouTube video or a Twitter post or a Wordpress blog. Also, social media platforms have gotten better at integrating URLs without it eating up half of your character limit. You may even get a little preview window of what you’re going to see.

Before I go, I should address another use of social media microblogging, and that’s using it to publish fiction. There’s two approaches this takes. One is a more traditional method that builds on what we’ve talked about with people trying other shoehorn longer form writing into a format that favors succinctness. An example of this is Ratha’s Island by Clare Bell, which was essentially “serialized” to Twitter one sentence at a time, one post per day at roughly the same time. The other form of “Twitter fiction” is a modern take on the literary genre of Epistolary fiction. Epistolary fiction is a subgenre of fiction that presents its story in the form of letters and other documents written directly by the characters in the story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the go-to example of this that most people are probably familiar with. In the case of Twitter fiction, sometimes called “unfiction” due to the interactive quality of using social media, An account is made “in character” and it is that character relating events in their life as though they were posting to social media as anyone else would. A good example of this is a horror story called The Sun Vanished, about someone waking up in a world where the sun has been inexplicably blocked out, among other odd goings-on. The only problem with this approach is that social media platforms don’t make it very easy to read posts in chronological order from the beginning. Also, unless each post is labeled as part of a greater work of fiction (which is immersion-breaking), it’s more than possible to mislead casual readers into thinking they’re interacting with a real person’s journey, especially if it’s of the less fantastical variety.

The reason why I like the “in character account” better than the piecemeal presentation of a novel is that the former takes advantage of the medium and conforms to its inner workings, whereas the other is an old dinosaur trying in vain to adapt to the new world.

The Death of Drafts

Something I need to get in the habit of is using Evernote to write my rough drafts before bringing them into Blogger, rather than my usual method of writing into Blogger directly. The interface is fine when I need to insert things like links or videos, but as far as the core activity of writing the entry, it's not always as smooth and pleasant a user experience as it should be. I feel the same way about WordPress, though to a lesser degree because the block system it uses is relatively intuitive. Blogger is too much like a word processor; it's very much about the WYSIWYG philosophy.

To better illustrate what I mean, we have to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. A lot of people don't understand the relationship between the movie and the book, specifically which came first. Technically, the book was written first, but it was meant to serve as something of a wiki for the screenplay. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Before you can make a movie, you need a script. Before you write a script, you need a story." Screenplays, by their very nature, aren't really meant for embellishing details or offering backstory to a spotlighted item. There's an unwritten rule in screenwriting of no paragraph of more than 3 lines. They're designed to be concise and quick to read, each page amounting to roughly one minute of screen time. Novels can play with time and structure in ways screenplays can't, hence why some novels are deemed "unfilmable."

There's another rule about screenplays, that the first version of your screenplay submitted is always your first draft, no matter how many rewrites it went through up until that point. When I was in school, we made these things called rough drafts. They were handwritten on paper, and your teacher would eventually hand it back to you with red marks all over it, pointing out every little mistake you made (sometimes with helpful suggestions on what to do next). You would then completely start over and write out another paper taking the edits to heart. I'm sure this is still technically done, only with digital files instead of sheets of notebook paper. My point is that word processing created a convenience in terms of editing your written work. Some writers forgo "drafts" altogether and edit as they go along, never even bothering with the "version history" feature some word processors and notetaking applications provide. There's no more starting over, barring any serious fundamental hiccup like finding out a source is inaccurate or an entire premise is off the mark. It's overall a more nebulous process. You can still number your drafts, but those can be reserved for page one rewrites rather than little typos or moving a sentence from the end of a paragraph to the start of one. 

This concludes the experiment. Draft was successfully transferred from Evernote to Blogger. 

I Am The Alphabet And The Omega

Google has declared my site unfit for advertising. I imagine it's due to a low level of traffic. I'm far from an influencer, and if I had to guess, my WordPress blog probably gets more views than anything I've written here in the past year.

And that's fine. 

The upshot to all of this is it means there are no ads on my site, which is how it should be. Contrast this with YouTube, where a channel can be demonetized, but still have ads all over it. The channel in question simply does not get the money. Maybe that's how it should be, though. After all, what advertisers were most afraid of when it came to YouTube was their money going to content creators who they disagreed with or otherwise didn't want to be associated with. The platform still got the support it needed, and users were free to share what they wanted to (within reason). 

Of course, I'm sure Blogger takes a lot fewer resource to maintain than a data hog like YouTube, so Google didn't have much of a choice when it came to their "advertiser friendly" policies. It's what makes Elon Musk's recent middle finger to advertisers so frustrating. He's both right and wrong for more or less the same reason. Businesses have a right to decide who they will and won't do business with, just as consumers have a choice with where they spend their money. That's called the free market. However, just like George Carlin said about the American Dream, you have to be asleep to believe it. Right now, big businesses hold more power than they deserve and the average consumer is in no position to do anything to their bottom line and therefore effect change in an unfair market. 

When consumers boycott, it takes a town, so to speak. When businesses boycott, it's usually a handful of guys in suits sitting around a table, never mind the hundreds or thousands of employees who may feel otherwise. This is the fundamental flaw with voting with your wallet, something I used to advocate for quite vehemently. When people vote, it's one vote per person. When dollars vote... well, they can't actually vote. The people holding the dollars do. As Douglas Adams said, "On the whole, it was not the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." 

As for Blogger, I intend to stay; monetization wasn't the goal... not really, anyway. I've been comparing WordPress with Blogger for a few weeks now as the former keeps sending discount codes my way. Blogger technically offers a lot while asking for "nothing" (besides your data) in return. The only real paid feature on Blogger is registering a domain name. WordPress, meanwhile, offers a more streamlined user experience, but only if you play their paywall game. Automattic is not Alphabet; they can't afford to give WordPress away for free. They want money, not data. 

As of now, WordPress is my after show for Blogger. Anything I don't feel like posting here usually ends up over there. At most, WordPress is my back up if Google decides they don't like keeping Blogger around. It wouldn't be the first time I've had to migrate from a blogging service, and if the Muskrat's acquisition of Twitter has affirmed anything for me, it's that no platform is permanent. 

Self-Branding

I've been with Blogger since May of 2008, making it the oldest website I've used that's still standing today besides DeviantART (which was December of 2007). Yahoo 360 and Multiply are long gone, as are the message boards from IMDB. I've never bothered with MySpace, and I recently culled much of my Facebook page to keep it to a "friends and family" platform. If there's anyone on Facebook I haven't met in person that I'm not related to, it's because I know them from Yahoo 360. 
I also have a Wordpress page I've used since 2014. Originally it was meant to replace this site as there had been some concerns that Blogger would either be discontinued or otherwise abandoned. On the whole, my only real issue with Wordpress is all the damn paywalls. I get that certain features come with a premium for the site to create revenue, but it's all over the map as to what features come with what plan. To compare, Blogger lets me put my Ko-Fi button in the sidebar of my page without any fuss. Wordpress won't even let me do that with the personal plan I recently splurged on. I have to get their business plan if I want to add any kind of plug-in to the page. I can have a full domain name, but I can't embed a button. I may try and transfer the domain once the 60-day window is up. 
In any case, I don't plan on leaving Blogger any time soon.