Enjoy!
Topic – Star Trek Online Open Beta
Music – MoShang 32 – http://moshang.net/soundjeweler_blog/
Thera
PS: Yes, I was shaky at the start, yes I said unfortunately to drinking game proportions, but I’ve been off air for nearly 3 months, let my muse come back, please.
So if ya haven’t heard, I’m having a small get-together with 4 friends who are relatively close to me, they’ve been with me for over 6 years now and are an essential part of my life. They are the more core group of friends. Now that core group isn’t the only group right, I’ve got my co-workers, online and random event friends… These groups are all separate and don’t interact with each other, which makes selecting them based on occasion, and let’s face it, there are times when you would rather hangout with a person you can connect with over say a person with a great sense of humor based on how you feel, day to day.
So yea, it floored me when one of my co-workers found out about my party only to get pissed off that he wasn’t invited. Seriously! Just because you are my friend, does not make you entitled to do EVERYTHING I do… I told the person that we were just having a small party, cutting loose in a hotel for a night and that we were at capacity. The person flips out and starts saying how I’m so not their best friend and shit. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “We ain’t in fucking highschool anymore chap! Now straighten up, or I won’t have anything more to do with you ever!” Sure it wasn’t the most graceful way to approach an enraging buffoon but is there really a graceful way to deal with that? They were past seeing sense…
Honestly, if you are reading this and are either acting or have people around acting like this, either stop or stop hanging around them. They are detrimental for half the “depression” and stress that we have in our current state of living. If they are your only friends… You need to get out more, quit WoW and make some real friends already. Even I, one of the most obsessed WoW players in history, has managed this feat-of-strength…
Dave
As for the whole, it’s my co-worker thing… He ain’t anymore, I transferred to another supervisor on that shift…
Ya know, it’s been a hard last few months for me, I moved back across the state for the 2nd time in under 6 months, I had to give in that I wasn’t strong enough nor ready to move out and I started to get depressed. I started out by venting through my blog, I even started writing music again, but that didn’t last. See, I’m not a very good musician and my singing sucks. I’m only passable when it comes to looping and creating beats and honestly, there is little effort in doing that.
So I started to vent to other’s music, you may have seen a tweet by me a while ago, “My Anti depression = Dan Bull, My liquor of choice!” and it couldn’t be closer to the truth. I would listen to the music, be enveloped by the music and let it take over my life. Now, Dan Bull is a great artist, some would even say a revolutionary new artist with his stance and actions toward how Britain is more or less fucking their entire capitalist state by hand feeding the lobbyist with new legislation, but I started to grow off of that music. I slowly started listening to rap (something I hadn’t done and was an advocate against) and I started to understand why people say rap and music in general is an art form. It’s a beautiful collection of sounds and pitches that gives your ears such pleasure that we can’t live without it.
So I’m listening to Eminem, 8 Mile was the closest I had ever come to liking rap in the past, so I figured, go back where your roots in the genre were. Ya know, I’m so glad Eminem makes music, he has some of the hardest rap out there that comes at you in stiff shots and such explosive means that it just blows your mind. Seriously, if you hate rap, I dare you to listen to his and not change your mind. After that I found Drake who did the collaboration song Forever with Eminem, K West and Lil Wayne and slowly started to enter into his arena of slower, smoother beats.
Recently, I started listening to an artist by the name of KANO, and infact I was referred there by Dan Bull through Twitter. Needless to say I’ve now bought 7 rap albums in a month and a half when none had ever existed in this bedroom / studio of mine. It’s fucking amazing! That’s all I can say, but it does prove me wrong on one thing. I’ve always lived off of my own appeals for life, in which I would refuse to change. I promised myself at a young age, I would remain, sensitive, caring, loving and never like that rap shit… Well, now I’m leading a blog that is all about being an asshole and I love rap, WTF!?!
Love is a fickel bitch ain’t it? Seriously, you fall in love, you never really get out, you just mask it inside and then something comes along, takes a sledgehammer to your wall and you fall into depression. Lately that is how I’ve been feeling. One special person in my life, who I’ve been hanging out with on and off again for the last SIX fucking years now, just happens to be one of my ex’s… And she wasn’t just some girl I dated and dumped (btw she dumped my ass ^_^) but I fell in love with her. Ever hear that line, you fall in love, you lose? Yea, that’s how I feel, like I lost my feelings because I fell in love.
Now that sounds a shit load worse than what it really is… What I mean is that I look at other girls and nothing compares, I think of dating and don’t want to, I think of marriage and say that I’m content with being single. Before, I’d be hitting on just about anything female, moved and was in my age range. But like I said, over the years I’ve learned to control myself and came to peace that, most likely (unless swamp gas from pluto hits rays from the sun at exactly a 60 degree angle) we will always remain friends. But lately I’ve started to lose control, it’s like a sickness that you can try to hide. Eventually it will either go away or you become so sick that it spews out and you’re rushed to the hospital. Now I ain’t saying that love is a sickness or any of that emo bullshit, but it is pissing me off.
If anything it is making shit confusing and awkward. I want to go out and have shit tons of fun and all that crap, but am I really so attached that I need to watch what I do or what she says so that nobody gets hurt? I know most likely she don’t give a fuck and I plan on having her read this, but what the fuck man… I just want to go back to having my bulletproof wall of isolation and solitude and being the horny best friend. Can I go back to being that? And if not, does this mean it is time for me to leave?
As for the rest of my story these last few months, I seem to have given up just about any fight for my liberties. I feel like I’m in a box full of idiot politicians who are all after one thing, money… Let’s be honest, we know that the government is straightup corrupted. It ain’t the theory from the doomsayer on the corner, it’s common knowledge that politicians are being bought off more now than back in the 1920s. But what are we to do? I call my congressman and he tells me he will, “Try”, ya know, fuck trying. It ain’t getting us a whole lot of anywhere other than to a more ruined economy and more restrictions on what people are allowed to do with their life.
We have people telling us exactly how we are to get medical treatments, how to go about purchasing objects like movies and music and where we are allowed to do certain activities like drink, smoke or fuck. Ya know, it really bothers me when I go outside and wonder if I’m gonna be busted for some new shit they passed without us knowing. Now I don’t know bout the rest of ya, but Ohio passed this Smoking Ban ordinance, law, whatever. They ripped it straight from Cali (who apparently was just in love with it) and people tolerated it. About half the pubs in the downtown metro have closed because of this ban alone, but we let it go on. Now we come into the third year of having this ban and there are new regulations on it, shit like no smoking 20 feet infront of entrances and exits, having to have regulated smoking areas, and some places are forced to have a time limit on how long you can smoke…
Sound familiar? Sounds like a fucking concentration camp to me, ya know, those things that the Nazi’s threw all the Jews in that they didn’t slaughter… So what is this? We are now living in some communist country masked by a democratic state that only appears to be in our best interest? When will our states get their proper name of camps? And when is the slaughtering going to begin? We gonna start passing harsher penalties anytime soon, say, shoplifting = a death sentence? I may sound like some paranoid idiot, but you have to look at the shit that is going down that got me to this point. My paranoia is at 120% 24/7, I question every action I make and think about just about everything I’m gonna do. And honestly, I miss the spontaneous gestures. Meeting someone, going out to a place, not worrying about anything and having a great fucking time. Now I’m to the point of a death mute that looks over his shoulder every 15.2 seconds.
Dave
The following is all true, parts seem surreal and over the top or flat out illegal, and you’re right, they were! I left most names out due to concerns about their images but have permission to publish the ones I do. Once again, I do not state the schools in this story, what city this happened in or what school district, I have no intention of ever doing so. AKA, if the people this is about see this, you can’t sue me and piss off! Have A Nice Day!
So, highschool is a really weird time to write about and look back at my life, it didn’t go particularly well and started a dramatic shift in how I saw the world and interacted with it. Before we delve into my Freshman year, let me give you some background on what my status was to that point. I had just come out of middleschool (6-8th year) which hadn’t gone particularly well then either. I had been bullied for being overweight, a nerd and liking Japanese and Irish cultures way more than the standard US Christianity bullshit. For that I was practically crucified and persecuted by, not only the kids in my year but the teachers as well. One example was my HR (Home Room) and SR (Study Room) assignments for 7th year. One was a German that clearly didn’t like my being Irish and the other saw my disinterest with nationality as treason. I was soon put into a program called Boot Camp 116, which was the room number of my SR. We were considered to be “bad” kids and as punishment, we were forced to do additional, in class assignments, yet received the same grade. Yeah, one of those things that people would go WTF now-a-days. Alas, he got away with it and my shitty educational career continued.
It wasn’t really all that bad until I had my life threatened by some bully with a locker next to mine. He would pick on me, which at the time, I was just happy for the attention, I wasn’t particularly popular. I wouldn’t feed him for his enjoyment though and finally he burst. He shoved me up against a locker, told me he was going to kill me and nobody would care. I managed to scamper away by kicking out of his arms with something Sashimi had taught me from her visit and ran out of the school. Needless to say, I ratted the bastard out and the next day, there were 7 police cruisers in front of the school, I am escorted by 8 police officers (either they haven’t heard of car pooling or ran out of cruisers) and am forced to meet the kid face to face. I’ll never forget his face, looking like he was seeing his own execution about to begin, he just kept apologizing over and over again until he finally passed out from stress. After that, nobody messed with me and I started my way off the shy path to true enlightenment. Now once again, this story is entirely true, if I asked the kid for the police report, he probably still has a copy (Yeah, I talk to him on a regular basis still, we became fairly good friends).
So that’s how my life merged from middleschool over to highschool, coming out this super hero who won’t take shit from anyone. Needless to say, it got me a rep as a rat aswell. Meet the Jocks, the ex goons of the kid who bullied me and threatened to kill me. See, when he got a police record against him, he was forced out of most of his sports which meant that whatever teams he would have played for, just lost their star player. And now he was hanging with me as a wingman of sorts and they didn’t like that one bit. Obviously I wasn’t fit or I would have already been in sports so their allegiance was out. Wasn’t all that thrilled about being a would be prep, one of the guys who is so popular that he has all the best clothes with all the perfect women and shit, oy, sickening. And our school didn’t really have a nerd group when I first came in, so I went with the last one which were the Goths.
They were fairly laid back, let just about anyone hang around and go to their parties as long as you liked weird shit (I did) had no problem with bending rules (what rules?) and didn’t act all preppy (preppy as a puppy!). Unfortunately there was a huge power struggle for the school courtyard of all places. We ate lunch out there because of the cherry blossom trees (yes my school somehow managed to keep cherry blossoms alive in freaking horribly cold climates! How? No idea!) and because it pissed the preps off that we were around their precious Spirit Bell. Honestly, we weren’t your typical Goth, we weren’t all sad and shit, infact we probably had the most fun out of any of the groups, between giving free hugs out (we had a fucking sign!) and writing POOPSEX! (I did the exclamation point) in the snow after Winter, we always had a ball. Unfortunately, the others (Ben Lynus, That other girl and the girl who died in season 3) didn’t like us having so much fun. They went on the offensive, literally.
For about 3 months, we had a fight during lunch EVERY DAY! They would send ONE person from the group to come take a swing at us and we were fine with it. They wanted to get suspended or expelled? Fine by us! The school didn’t seem to care either, they knew it was happening like clockwork yet didn’t try to stop it. Finally, at the end of my Sophomore year, an explosion happened, we had a ton of our members who were going to graduate and a plan was hatched that if they got kicked out, they wouldn’t get to and would have to either take Summer school or repeat half the year. We get to the courtyard, start to say our goodbyes and people start running out of doors all around us. It seriously reminded me of The Matrix where Neo is having to fight the 11bazillion Smiths. Girls who had no right to try to pick a fight were clawing their way forward trying to seek blood and vengeance. 2 minutes later I’m on the ground, slowly starting to wake up with blood and scratches on my face. There is smoke in the sky and I realize I am being moved by rent-a-cops towards the Gym. (Wow didn’t know Rent-a-cops were actually useful)
So in the end, something like 46 kids were suspended, 14 were expelled for the next year and 2 were brought on criminal charges for bringing knifes in to the fight. Funny thing was, even during all of this crap, only 4 of our members had any negative effects, and I was about the worse. 1 other and I had gotten out face kicked in (though the other guy apparently fought back) and 2 others had gotten suspended for 14 days for the next year. Little action came on our side for the simple fact that police mystically appeared about 60 seconds after the first punch was thrown. (Still wonder to this day if the school knew it was going to happen or not and chose to do nothing). School paid all of my medical bills and we didn’t sue in return.
I came back the next year and things had changed drastically, so many of the members that were left had been suspended for the start of the school year, there were NO GROUPS to be had. Most of the Goths had either graduated or changed schools that, that group had become defunct as well. So with the help of the senior council and ideas from the juniors, we came up with a new system of groups, much more diverse and open than before, opening clubs back up for each of them and allowing people to get over the whole war thing. With the help of Justine (one hell of an Irish girl who kicked some major ass) we started the Anime and Nerd group which had previously been merged with the Goths. Sarah (a fiery red-head who was forced to repeat her senior year) helped with the Art and Spirit group. Z (the kid who had gone from threatening my life to being a friend) started the Jocks back up and kept everyone in line. Annie (a Russian exchange student who was working on becoming a DJ) started the Goths back up. And I helped start a computer group that would later replace our out-sourced tech support for good. It was the perfect storm of having all of the idiots out of the way, so that we could fix things before they came back.
And they did come back! They came into this new environment with over 5 groups and were culture shocked at what happened. Some tried to rebel and bring the old way back, but when that happened, all of the groups would join as one and stop them in their tracks. We were NOT going to let that old hatred ruin what we had achieved. Unfortunately for me, this is where my story started to go downhill as my anxiety, caused by the fight, started to kick in. I started passing out, having asthma attacks and just losing control of my body due to acute-anxiety disorder, which I have to this day. I had to leave school and get homeschooled. I was still allowed to come to club meetings and do my radio show on our school radio but other than that, I was down for the count. Fortunately all of my assistants that helped me create the group filled in and kept the peace going. We eventually took our idea of internal tech support to the board of education and were granted the start of our senior year.
At the start of my senior year, I felt obligated to atleast attempt to come back to school. I found out that since the board had approved our internal tech support that a staff member was now trying to control our group. I didn’t like that one bit and attempted to retake control, I was prompted with a notice that illegal content had mysteriously found its way into my shared folder and that my computer privileges were being taken away for 15 days. Needless to say, in a group that does tech support and in classes that are all about computers, you need to be on a computer. I gave up on the group, figuring there was nothing more I could do at the time and instead focused on the Anime / Nerd club, whose leader had graduated at the end of last year. I took over and had 3 cat girl assistants. (Not kidding, they had cat ears and tail on 24/7, pretty cute to me, but yea it was still strange… I ended up wearing my elf ears to school every day, just to fit in) I had met my ex online and had been hanging out with her for a while; she ended up helping out with the Goth group. Just as I got my computer privileges back, I was served with another letter, stating that they had found illegal content again! I was like, wait, what? How did I put illegal content on my shared drive, the very instant I got my computer rights back?
I take complaint to the Principal of the school and he gives me the normal shit of how he must protect his colleagues and fully supports the actions… I take it to the board who gives me the same run around, this being the same board that approved my tech support idea less than 8 months prior and was saving thousands of dollars by it. So what did I do? I held an open protest; I stated that if the situation was not handled, the groups would go to war with the school. Next thing I know, I’m being served suspension notices left and right. I ended up with 24 days of out of school suspension (max is 21, but they didn’t care). I come back after nearly a month and find nothing changed. So we take the leaders from the groups and approach the board. We told them the situation, how the school was not only taking the situation for granted but was also operating illegally within the state law and their own code of conduct. They do nothing! So we continue our protest in silence. First the internal tech support halts all tickets. Demanding that they either be paid or be given work credits toward college for their volunteer work. Secondly, the anime club starts refusing to talk in English. Most of us knew Japanese and some of us even knew a bit of Gaelic that Justine had taught us. The Goths started to be Goths and be all depressed and shit and would start doing the stereotypical, WE WILL NOT COMFORM shit when they were asked to do anything. And then came the deathblow, the Jocks refused to play ball. OMG! There was the final nail in the coffin, the school FREAKED out! They started suspending random people for random crap and eventually I just said, “NO! Enough is enough, if you are not going to change, then fuck all you idiots! I’ll just quit then, let’s see how many people follow…” I went back to homeschooling and about half the Junior class followed.
In the end, there was enough ruckus rose that many people were fired, including two board members. Groups found new leaders and everything has been great. I received about 50 apologies from the school or people related to the school, which I promptly threw into a fire. I didn’t want to remember it ever again at the time, but it hit me that, this history is important, it is part of why I am so proud for the issues I believe in. It is what defined me as a leader, willing to run in with the troops, willing to take the first and most devastating blow for being different. It is what got me over being shy, making me not give a shit about what people thought. It is the whole reason I came to where I am today.
Note, anyone out there wanta make a movie of this? Call me up! LOL! I think it would make an awesome true story movie, cheesy slow mo war scene and all…
Dave
This is being posted over here do to the TSG marathon… It will be mirrored after Dec 21, 2009 at 7pm EST
So Mike is now gone from WoW Insider, and everyone FREAKED THE FREAK OUT! Seriously, people are acting like he died! So, I’ll conform and do the same. Mike Schramm and I didn’t always see eye to eye, I gave him a good trolling once or twice (by sleeping under his bridge and eating his lost sheep) but I do respect what he does in the blogging world. He tries to be professional which is something that is a rarity to find right now. He gives his opinions when needed but tries to uphold to standards put out by the company he is writing for and his personal standards as well. Sure, he doesn’t always get it right and sometimes there are miscommunications or misinformations, but such things are common across all blogs and authors, even myself.
Mike isn’t disappearing all together though, as announced on The Twisted Nether Blogcast Year Roundtable episode, he will be heading over to the great home of Joystiq to write over there. Both companies are linked via AOL’s Weblogs project, so you can probably expect him to jump from site to site if he is told to do so… As for why he left WoW.com? He never gave a real reason for it, though my own personal thoughts are that he wanted to go into gaming news in general and possibly even free himself up a little bit. His reasons are his own though and we need to respect his privacy if he wishes not to tell us.
Mark Turpin aka Turpster has also left the show, though he is near impossible not to find in the community. They had their last episode yesterday which can be found, here.
Mike and Turprah, we wish you well. You have definitely made your mark on the WoW community.
Dave
I am writing on here since Sacred is all set for TSG and I don’t want to have to reorder or take away from the attention that the event is gathering. The only people that see this are random people looking up TWITTER HACKED and those looking at the @kkotd Twitter feed. As we know, Twitter was hacked tonight by a group who only calls themselves the Iranian Cyber Army. A group of faceless people who apparently think attacking a website at 10pm Pacific Standard is going to be enough to disrupt America. Well, they partially won.
See, we Americans fall into a trap, and infact by writing this, I too have fallen for this trap of spreading these cowardice attacks around like wildfire. Something happens that would otherwise go unnoticed and we freak out about it. People are all ready calling for America to automatically go to WAR with Iran. And to be honest, why the hell should we? What do we know about these people? How do we know that they were even Iranian? And if they weren’t would anyone give a shit?
I say this because, though not as dramatically impacting, this type of act is much like 9/11. We have what appears to be a somewhat organized group, that is on a mission to not only disrupt our lives but also to strike fear and spread their propaganda around through shock media outlets. In the morning, this news will spread across Fox, NBC, G4, ABC and CNN at record pace. As I write this, hundreds of journalists are picking this story up to post in the national news. Thousands of bloggers are writing stories about this worldwide and millions are worrying that this some how may affect their lives in a more dramatic way.
Let me explain what happened in easy to understand words. The self-proclaimed Iranians gained access to the DNS records for the domain Twitter.com, they then redirected it to the IP where the image was hosted.
In English, it’s like taking the address number from your neighbor and switching them to your house. Everything for them would go to your house and you could fairly easily confuse or frighten people who are trying to find your neighbor. This is basically what they did, they took Twitter.com and pointed it at an image. Nothing more! There is no reason to believe that they accessed account information or that you need to call and cancel your credit cards, or pay a private investigator to make sure that your identity is safe… EVERYTHING is fine! So, some asked WHY THE HELL is the search tag “Iranian Cyber Army” at number one? Well, to be honest it isn’t anymore! But this was caused by blogs using the Twitter API to auto tweet their blog posts. It wasn’t anything the hackers did, it was caused by the immense sensationalism that people took to writing stories.
So what is there to worry about? NOTHING! There will be a lot of scary news stories in the media tommorow, that is to be sure, but Twitter will let us know if there were any security breaches or if we need to do anything additional. Not that big a deal people! Just a publicity stunt / cyber terrorist attack on a site we use and “love”.
If you have additional questions or would like to ask me about the article, email me at main@kkotd.com if you have questions for Twitter, @twitter reply them for more information. Additionally you can mail them at:
Twitter, Inc.
795 Folsom St., Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94107
Dave
Some people may wonder what types of “rituals” I go through when writing a post for one of the various blogs I either admin or contribute to and so I wanted to document them for you.
To be honest, I don’t do much. I first name the article by the subject I plan to write about, I say plan as about a quarter of the time, I end up writing on something completely different. I then look at what the audience is for said blog, are they 18+ or 12-17, can I use expletives, can I have an opinion, do people care and how many people will be seeing this on average?
Age range is really important to me for several reasons. A) I wouldn’t want my kid coming upon a site like Sacred and that being his daily source for information and commentary, I would rather him go to some place like Firebloom. B) If I am talking to an 18 year old or up, the ability to use bigger words like cataclysmic (which all teens should know the meaning of now) or complex words such as metamorphic becomes easier as I can expect most to either know what the words mean or have a basic understanding of what it SHOULD mean. C) Responses are going to be completely different. If I go and replace one of the muppets on Sesame Street and start telling Big Bird how he fails at life and should shoot himself on the spot, kids may flip out, where as an adult (who’s kid isn’t watching) might grab some popcorn and start watching the series again. That’s why I am very kind and professional on Firebloom and an unforgiving hardass shock jock on Sacred. If I show superiority over everyone, they nearly worship me and continue to listen, almost like my own little cult of video game freaks. It’s almost like playing Overlord and your listeners are the little gremlins… (YES! I just called you all gremlins!)
Well, now that Rina aka Kate (ZOMG, who’s she? The Co-Owner that is too damn shy for her own good) and myself decided to change the parent network name to “KKOTD: The Opinionated Gamer Network”, we now accept that there should be atleast some opinions on any site. But how much is the key. If I’m posting on a blog that prides itself on Journalism, I wouldn’t go in talking about how I hate Obama. No, I might find a story that puts him in a bad light and write about that but I wouldn’t directly show my opposition. Same thing that I may believe in some Christianity, Muslim, and Buddhist beliefs but I wouldn’t publicly put on the site that I am the biggest religious mut / poster for Chruslist, the new religion that I made up in 5 seconds.
Opinions have their place, and they also have the time to shut up or get out, and when they are allowed it is incredibly important on what ways you present that opinion. For instance, if I came out and said that I was right that PC gaming was the only possible way to be a hardcore gamer and that all those sissies who play on consoles should not only go get a job and get out of your moms basement playing Halo ODST, but should also hang themselves on the door knob on the way out, I might get a bit of a lashing in the feedback department. (Hell knowing the Sacred audience they would beg for more…) But if I turned around and made a nice 15 minute segment that detailed all of the reasons why PC gaming is better, hardware is about the same price now, games are $10 cheaper, and the PC is more versatile in every respect, whether it be the ability to plug in a USB controller and go or be able to mod most games in anyway you like. I may get the fan boys that bitch, but for the most part, I would get positive feedback.
As it was said in the old coliseums during the Renaissance, “You, audience of champions, make the hero that will be victorious today! Let him feed off your energy and strength, let him know that you want him as your champion!” Honestly, if it weren’t for you guys, I’d saved myself several hundred dollars and canned the project last year. I can’t stress enough that I don’t get a dime from this and usually pay money OUT-OF-POCKET for this site and network. I do it for the fans, for the good causes we will support through groups like The Speed Gamers, Azeroth United and newly added for next year, The Desert Bus for Hope! I do this for you, and if for whatever reason, you guys vanished, I’d lose my reason to go on (with the site).
Knowing that people care is fairly hard, but a quick search for people talking about you on other sites will help you get a bigger picture. Unfortunately, there are MANY Theranos’ out there. The name has slowly started to take off and I’ve already had ONE person trying to impersonate me. But adding Sacred Podcast to the search with Theranos, narrows it down alot! Go ahead and do a search for me, you should find Sacred as the number one hit, advertisements I’ve posted below that and then random discussions and reviews about the show under that. Now how many? That is something entirely different. For instance I may have between 7,000 and 8,000 viewers listening to a show, but how many cared? How many of those hit play and then shut it off before the ending? Well, unfortunately, I don’t have that in my stat tracking but what I can look at is the number of people that either downloaded the file, streamed the file from here and look at how long they stayed on the site before leaving or who streamed it off of another site and how long it took for them to come back to Sacred if they came back at all… All of a sudden, my 7,000 viewers becomes around 1,200 who cared about it. Usually it is much less…
When I’m writing a blog post I can expect it to take atleast an hour and probably closer to two. I usually write everything out in WordPress’s HTML editor, coding the tags as I work and fixing spelling mistakes as I go. I then preview the post fixing grammar and then publish it. Writing takes about an hour and editing takes close to 30 mins. For longer posts or reviews, I type everything into Microsoft Word, have it do its magic and then go through my regular editing process. Even then errors still get in! For instance, during my Dragon Age Origins audio review, a review I typed in Word and went over 3 times before publishing, still had atleast 4 mistakes I ran into during the recording.
After publishing, I make sure I set the right categories, and fix them as needed. I also make sure that the story posted to Twitter and didn’t have a problem there. I make sure all my links work properly and that sources are linked to the correct news stories. I also will usually email Creative Commons license owners that I hadn’t spoken to previously of my use of said license. After a post goes up, I sit on Twitter for a while waiting for @kkotd replys and respond to them as needed. Once again keeping interactivity up to a maximum. Other than that, there’s little to nothing extra, just time, patience and research.
Dave
So it’s been a week now and I’m getting back to normal, having just moved across the state for the second time in a year. It really is weird to be back in a house that you’ve known your whole life, almost like being on a vacation in a hotel and then coming back to the real world. Anywho, someone emailed me about how I source information in posts and then also asked what I condemn as legitimate opinions and if rants or bitching had any place in a blog or podcast.
Sourcing is always a sore spot for blogs or podcasts, some don’t do it and steal all their content, some link while writing and some do like I do and blatantly post Source (which will take you back to this post) at the top of their posts going HEY IDIOT, OVER HERE! I personally don’t like when people source information while writing because, though it matches the flow of what is going on, most people don’t bother to click the link when it is in the post and it makes it damn confusing for anyone trying to find the original source to write on the same story as them. 9 out of 10 times, unless it is opinion, their story is not original research and has been borrowed by some other news site. 9 out of 10 times, that news site that they got their story from ALSO got their story from yet another source. 1 out of 3 times, that third site got THEIR information from ANOTHER source. It goes on and on until finally you somehow manage to find the original source and by then the story has passed and is obsolete. This is why I just blatantly post my story with a source and then they can go there to find what the other people said. Now as for opinions… Oy
First, let me start off by saying that blogs and podcasts aren’t regulated. They aren’t regulated because it’s not a news cast or journalism (atleast not to the companies that regulate journalism) and isn’t held to those high standards. This is the same reason we can curse on air, talk about whatever the hell we want or even make blatant mistakes with little recourse. Now saying that, most people atleast attempt to add a sense of professionalism to how they approach blogs and podcasts. Some will pick a stlye and just stick with it, once again adding another depth of how they react to ANY situation.
For example, I hate to use him but he’s used to being an example for everyone else, Totalbiscuit over at WC Radio.com is about as far as you can go for professionalism while also ranting and complaining via his show Blue Plz!, which recently went on hiatus. Yet he also shows that he can do a near 180 and be quite the efficient critique when the show demands he be one like in his other show, Gaming The System. It’s the knowing when you can let go in all your fury and rage and when you have to reel it in and be a good boy or girl that counts. Plus you need to know your audience, if you can find a style that not only informs them but also entertains them, then all the better.
You know how I handle things on my show over at Sacred and that I’m a total dick half the time, but I’ve found that people like it more when I am that way. Whether my audience are all a bunch of masochistic freaks or they just like the controversy, I don’t really give a damn, it works! But over at Firebloom I am perfectly normal and usually just post my reviews and the occasional news topic that strikes my interest. Infact I made Firebloom because of all the young people who were at Sacred, giving them an option to both be informed and entertained in a “clean” way. Unfortunately you idiots didn’t do as I commanded and now just watch both sites…
So what constitutes an opinion, a rant or just flatout bitching? Well, the first two have to do with the style in which you take, the tone and how you go about releasing the content. If you want to do your opinion then just state in a slightly biased tone that you think so and so about whatever. For example, if I think that Bobby Kotick is a douche, I say that and then stop. You don’t have to explain anything for an opinion, because it’s an opinion and if you explain it then you are just arguing with an invisible audience that doesn’t give a shit. If you want to bump that up to rant, all you have to do is up your tone and start explaining about what it is you don’t like. You’ve seen me do this when I start screaming at the mic on a podcast about how Blizzard did something so asinine that only complete idiots could begin to see it as a good change. Bitching is like a rant without a purpose, for example, I don’t like the colors of leaves, they are all fucking green and then right when you start to fucking get to know why they are green, they go and fall off the tree and change colors. Those insensitive bastards!
So which belong in a podcast or blog? All of them! Like I said, podcasts and blogs are not regulated, it should come down to the owner or host to find their own suit of what works and what doesn’t. If you can’t do even that, then go get hired by someone else to be a show host, and if you can’t do that because of whatever reason then you shouldn’t make a podcast or blog. A) It’s a hobby, it is very rare that you get paid for anything and B) It takes work! You don’t just wake up one day and say that you want a show or blog that has thousands of visitors. And C) If you are too lazy to do the bare minimal of what is required, you aren’t entitled to have it your way. Podcasts and Blogs are not the Burger King of the internets, you don’t have it made for you in 3 minutes only to pay a buck for it.
Dave
Warning, the following post may make you go WTF… I used to do this on Sacred from time to time, basically do a self examine in Meta, Secondary and Post Realities. Basically, it is looking at yourself, what makes you unique. Noting anything that might be considered abnormal and trying to figure out why it is that you possess such an abnormality. For me it is easy, I can fortell the future with my dreams and have been able to do so since I was 6. Apparently it is a genetic trait that is passed on since my sister and father can do the same thing. Anywho, I do reports like this to keep myself in check and make sure I haven’t picked up anything else along the way. Thought you might like to see one.
Kinda feeling like Juno in the movie… Um, Juno. And well ya know when you are walking down the street and it just seems that nothing is changing. You know those depressing days when the skies are grey, the wind is cold and you get pissed at small things like paint on the sidewalk construction not being painted straight, yeah, that’s totally me right now.
As most of you know, I just moved back to Dayton and I’m really out of it. I’ve been hiding this entire week doing game review after game review, hoping A. To get caught up on them and B. That it will keep me distracted. Neither of those seem to be getting accomplished. I’m at a crossroads, on one hand I can look at what happened as a good learning experience and move on leaving it all my past and on the other hand I could keep fighting trying to fix what went wrong.
Like a dog who is digging a hole and the hole gets so deep he could fall in. He accidentally drops his favorite bone in there. The dog has two options, to try digging more and get the bone yet risk falling in himself or to let the bone go and find another one. Now that’s a really cheesy way to look at it and you may be asking yourself why the hell the dog would dig a hole that deep or even how but let’s go with it.
So on one end I could look at my life right now and see that I have several tangled threads that need to be rewoven to get back to my norm. On the other end, I could cut those threads out and patch a new experience in. Now, I’m not saying that I am going to run out and try to forget my sister and act like she doesn’t exist but can I replace that memory with something better? It sounds horrible to think of trying to replace the memory of moving out of your parents house for the first time, but is it something I wish to hold on to?
I found it quite odd that I was able to come back to this house, place everything perfectly back into alignment and fall right back into my norm here as it always has been, even though I was gone for nearly half a year. My mind has also gotten back to its norm and that is unusual as I was starting to lose focus of my own conscious state of being. You ever see that episode of Lost where Desmond keeps going back in time, then comes to the future and goes back and forth until he almost dies? Well, I was starting to do that. Not to the extent of what ABC portrayed the experience as, but I would close my eyes while in my bed in the apartment, open them and be in my parents house. There were even times I could hear my mom screaming about something or other.
Whether this was some nostalgic syndrome I was experiencing or some kind of mind altering second reality, I really don’t know. I’m guessing the latter is impossible though we never quite know what the human mind is capable of now do we?
For those who know about my dreams, they have become quite a bit more frequent and have all stayed in line with the short term reality, usually between 1 and 3 months in the future. Which is normal for every winter as I get closer to my birthday. I just wish I knew how to control it more though I’m not quite sure it would help anything.
Something new has happened though, my ability to fortell incredibly short term things (1-60 seconds) has started again while I’m awake. This hasn’t happened since 1997 and makes me wonder what the hell is going on. I can tell what show is coming on before I check, I know when the phone rings and I can even tell what case they are going to open on Deal or No Deal.
Once again, for anyone who reads this and goes, “You really are fucking crazy!” The truth is that this is more of an outside the box look at my mind. In reality, all that I put in this blog post has happened / been happening for several years. And for those who don’t understand half the shit I put, let me put it into easier terms. My mind acted like I teleported back to my house, and I have dreams of the future that always come true, I even have a book now for over 2,000 occurrences that this has happened, some being multiple images in one dream. Scare you? Yea, scares me too…
Also for those who look at this and go, “Cool, so when ya gonna change the future?” You can’t change the future that I see. I only see the things that are marked down as destined to happen no matter what you do. I’ve tried to change things, such as my cousin dying and it only meant she died a week later yet still in a car accident. I could have taken her keys away and she would have died while riding gunshot. It doesn’t matter, and the only thing that happens when you try to change the future is that it happens with some type of twist that acts as punishment. The punishment / message for me for trying to stop my cousins death was that it happened in front of a barn that had a riding school program, which at the time I rode horses competitively as a hobby. And no it wasn’t just coincidence.
Dave
No, not remove as in get rid of but re-move as in I’ve moved now twice in one year! Some may have wondered where I had gone or why this blog hadn’t gotten brushed under the virtual rug and honestly, it’s because I don’t have much to rant about in my daily life and the stuff I do, I won’t do publicly. I am a fairly private person when it comes to people who are close to me, making me sad, happy or flat-out angry. I won’t usually use names and if I do they are fake.
This site is different then Sacred or Firebloom. It is where I get to be ME, not some alias that I made up or some hip radio DJ, but ME! And that is a very odd feeling for me. I have never been able to simply talk on what I wanted to for the hell of it. Usually it has some type of story behind it and is relevant to what my audience wants. Let no one tell you that I don’t know how to entertain a crowd and make every person in that crowd feel important.
To a certain extent you are important, without you, the sites wouldn’t matter and without you I wouldn’t give a damn anymore. But that’s about the extent of it… You aren’t someone who will change my life forever or that I care to meet or even talk too. And that’s the damn honest truth. Sure some I care more for than others but at the end of the day, I am an entertainer and you are my fans.
If this comes at a sudden shock for you in your life that you may have realized that your hero doesn’t really give a flying shit about your interests or that you are the best at balancing dishes on a stick upside down wearing a tutu, then you really need to get checked out. If this is the case, then you are so desperate for attention you just fabricated some meaningless attraction for a relationship that will never come to exist. I know quite a few show hosts that have had people like this that became near stalkerlike.
But one thing to remember is that, whether you think you know me or you say you know me, you don’t.
Now that, that’s out of the way. I would like to thank everyone for hanging around the site in the brief absence and to keep enjoying all of the shows / blogs this network has to offer. I know Throm is getting some money together and should be returning with some great movie reviews when he can. I am working on 4 games and plan on reviewing those at sometime in the future. And the podcast should be returning this coming weekend.
WE LOVE YOU ALL,
Thera
