Tag: blogging

And Now, a Respite

Posted on by Nimgimli

Blaugust came and I started blogging again. I did daily posts for the month of August but when Blaugust stopped I kept going, right up until today.

And I’m tired. It’s time to take a break and recharge. I have been doing daily posts because an object in motion tends to stay in motion whether it is having fun or not. I had sort of hoped I’d form the habit of daily posts and I’d enjoy writing them, but that hasn’t happened. It still feels like a chore to blog every day.

Additionally, I need to work on self-improvement in terms of technical skills. In order to find time to do that I have to either give up the daily blog post, or give up gaming, or give up spending time with the family. Only so many hours in the day. Obviously not going to set family aside, and gaming is my primary form of relaxation and one of the things that keeps me sane. Plus I mostly blog about gaming so if I stop gaming I wouldn’t have anything to blog about anyway!! 🙂

So, taking a break. Hopefully it won’t stretch out to a year-long break! I just kind of feel like now I’m in the habit of daily posts and I need to break that habit. Once the ‘streak’ is broken I hope I’ll feel less pressure. We’ll see.

I can’t honestly say for sure if blogging is still for me. I’m not really happy with the quality or the content of my posts. A few of them were OK but most just read like filler to me. I don’t feel like 5 weeks(ish) of daily blogging is making me a better writer; I kind of think the quality of my posts has dropped, if anything. Yesterday I find a post in my drafts about my dog and after reading it, it didn’t really seem any worse than posts I wrote and re-wrote and tweaked. (So I published it, what the hell.)

Anyway I need to step back, think about things and decide what my next steps are. I may be back day after tomorrow and this may turn out to be the last post before the site shuts down. I’m just not really sure yet. But that’s what the break is for…to figure things out.

I definitely WILL keep reading other blogs though. That is a habit I’ve developed and that I definitely AM taking a lot of joy from. So the rest of you….please keep writing!

Until next we meet, be excellent to each other.

Always Something To Read!

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With Blaugust over I’ve renamed my blogroll to “Always Something To Read” since I’ve kind of started using it in lieu of my RSS reader (Feedly, in my case). You can see it over on the right rail unless you’re on mobile where it kind of goes poof because when I wrote this theme the right rail was kind of pointless. I should address that.

Anyway today I’m asking for MORE BLOGS TO READ! Not that the blogroll was ever strictly Blaugust, but it was Blaugust and a few friends who were already in my old ‘static link’ blogroll. Now I must cast the net wider!

So if you have a blog (and, y’know, you’re a person, not a marketing bot) drop a comment or hit me up on Twitter and I’ll add your blog to the list. If you do this I can almost promise that you’ll get 2, may 3 extra page views over the course of a few years! Maybe. 🙂

[Header image is from Far Cry New Dawn, Xbox One version. I just thought it was pretty.]

My Latest Blogroll Solution

Posted on by Nimgimli

Problem: My Blaugust blogroll was a boring list of static links that I doubted anyone would ever notice, let alone use. I wanted a blogroll that showed activity and a preview of recent posts. Something to catch the readers interest and entice them to go visit other blogs.

Years ago I did this via some long forgotten plugin but it was glitchy and several times I got a nastygram from my ISP about how many resources my blog was taking up because of it. So I retreated to a static list of links.

But with Blaugust getting me pumped about blogging I wanted to give it another go. I read about how others did it. For Bhagpuss it just comes with being hosted on Blogger, I believe. Wilhelm cobbled together a system using a few services and wrote a great post about it. Naithin uses a currently maintained plugin (I found several WordPress plugins that offer this service but most hadn’t been updated in years.)

Inspired by these other bloggers, I got to work.

Ideally I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on this since, prior to Blaugust, I hadn’t even written a blog post in like 8 months. I didn’t want to pay for a service if I was going to basically abandon the blog come September.

Trial #1 used Zapier to monitor a Feedly category and create an RSS feed based on posts as they hit Feedly. This worked OK, but it turns out the free version of Zapier is very limited in the amount of resources it offers. I would’ve been out of “tasks” by the end of the week, and the cheapest Zapier tier is $15/month which is more than I spend hosting the whole blog!

Then I looked at some plugins (Feedzy and WP RSS Aggregator, which is what Naithin uses) and they both are pretty nice but I was wary of how much of a load they’d put on “my” shared server. Ideally I wanted to offload the fetching and sorting to somewhere else.

OK at this point I’m even boring myself so let’s cut to the current solution.

Feed Informer is an RSS aggregator that for some reason is free to use and really flexible. You add the feeds of the blogs you want to include (sadly there is no mass import, you have to add them one by one and the service validates them as it goes) and then you choose a “widget” to display the feed. I used a javascript embed, which I just added to a Custom HTML widget in WordPress. The display of the feed is determined by a template. Feed Informer offers a bunch of these and lets you preview your feed on the fly. I got something close to what I wanted, and then used the ability to edit the template to make some changes to get it to where I was happy with it. The available tags are well documented, and you can tweak CSS and such too. It was super simple to set up.

Since it’s a javacscript embed pulling from Feed Informer it should put no load on the local server.

Of course that was 10 minutes ago so we’ll see how reliable it is over time. The only gripe I had is that it didn’t like certain feeds, giving me a warning about them being formatted incorrectly. I could choose “add it anyway” and I did, and I can see posts from some of those blogs in the feed now so they seem to be working.

I am also not 100% sure how long it caches the feed for, so I’ll be watching that over time.

The worst flaw for me personally is it won’t read Naithin’s Time to Loot feed. I can open his feed in a browser, but Feed Informer says “nothing was returned from the server” with no real opportunity for me to debug. This is a huge bummer because I really enjoy Time To Loot and I bet you would too. I’ll try to add him again tomorrow in the hopes it is a temporary glitch.

By the way if you see your blog over in the side bar and you want it removed, let me know. And if you’re part of Blaugust and don’t see your posts there (or, y’know, it says Blaugust & Friends so even if you aren’t part of Blaugust but we know/read each other), let me know that too and I’ll add you.

NBI: New Blogger Initiative launches!

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s the first of May, which means it’s time for May Poles (are those still a thing?) and the time to celebrate Beltane for my pagan friends. But for bloggers and in particular wannabe bloggers, May 1st means the start of the New Blogger Initiative (NBI).

So what is the NBI? It’s a program run by Syp of Biobreak that strives to invite new writers to try their hand at blogging (and to give them some help and guidance getting started). Maybe you’ve been meaning to try your hand at blogging but you’re not sure where to start, or even HOW to start. Well then the NBI is for you.

During the course of this month you’ll be seeing NBI posts pop up all over the blogosphere: Syp says over 70 blogs are participating! All of us existing bloggers will try to share what we know (or even what we don’t know) in order to help you get your blog off the ground.

But I’m going to spoil the event on you and tell you the deep dark secret of blogging: There is NO SECRET! If you can write a comment or an update on Facebook, you can blog. If you’re worried your writing isn’t strong enough, don’t be. First of all you’re probably better than you think you are, and you’ll continue to improve with practice.

OK end spoilers.

As a participant, I’ve agreed to write at least one post during the month giving advice on getting started. I’m aiming for the middle of the month for mine. (If all 70+ of us write just one post, that’s still going to be plenty of advice.) So who am I and why am I qualified? Well I’m qualified because Syp asked me to participate!

If nothing else I have longevity going for me. Dragonchasers is celebrating its ten-year anniversary this month. My first post was in May 2002 (though there’ve been big gaps at times when I took a break from writing for a while). Before Dragonchasers (long before it) I was associate editor of a now-defunct PC gaming magazine, Strategy Plus and executive editor of a multimedia magazine (it came on CD) called Interactive Entertainment. I’ve also done some freelance writing and in addition to Dragonchasers I write a personal technology blog for ITworld.com.

And that’s all I’m going to say about me, because NBI is about you: the person who has something he or she wants to say and is thinking a blog is the right place to do it.

So how do YOU get involved? Step one is to head to the forums set-up for the event, NBIHQ, and register there. Then head to the Newbie bloggers instructions thread and follow the steps to get started. It’s easy!

I can’t wait to read your new blog!

Lemons and Lemonade

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week has been a challenge for me. I *really* want to be playing Fallen Earth, Champions, and the new EQ2 game update, but this thing with my arm continues to plague me. I logged in to Fallen Earth on launch day and lasted maybe 10 minutes before the ache became uncomfortable enough that it forced me to quit playing.

So still no MMOs for me (in theory I could play Champions with the gamepad but when I tried I kept ending up back on the keyboard typing, which sorta defeated the purpose of using the gamepad). But on the bright side, I’ve been playing my consoles. I set up an elaborate tower of pillows on the couch and rest my arm on it ‘just so’ and I can play without any pain. In light of this, I’m changing some of my near-future plans. Games I was planning on getting for the PC (Borderlands, possibly Dragon Age: Origins) I now think I’ll get on either the PS3 or XBox.

So this week I’ve been playing The Beatles: Rock Band and Need For Speed: Shift on the PS3, and I picked up Halo: ODST on the 360. TB:RB I can only do for a little while because the aforementioned tower of pillows doesn’t work too well with a plastic guitar. But the other two I can play as much as I like.

So I think I’m going to start doing more write-ups of single player games here, since I can’t say too much about MMOs if I’m not playing MMOs. Plus there’re a lot of single player games coming out that I want to play. In addition to the two I mentioned, there’s Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legend, Forza Motorsport 2, Modern Warfare 2, The Saboteur, and I’m betting I’m forgetting a couple. It’s going to be a good season of gaming coming up!

The one that got away

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I hooked a striped bass that must’ve been 35 lbs if it was an ounce. I had it right along side the boat, net ready, when the line snapped…and there it went. It was huge though. One of the biggest stripers I’ve seen.

Last time I saw a fish like that, it was caught by some noob doing summer stock at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton (where I grew up). Guy had no idea what he was doing and he reeled in this monster while surf-casting. Don’t think he caught another fish the entire summer. Not having a clue what to do with it, he gave the beast to me. I had to ice it down in my bathtub while I gathered the prerequisite number of fish-loving party goers, then I butchered it, fired up the grill and they feasted (ironically I’m not much of a fish lover). It was a good spur-of-the-moment gathering, at least.

The 2nd paragraph is a true story, BTW.

Anyway, back from the virtual fishing trip after a shorter-than-expected break. Part of the reason I cut the break short is that it just felt like a self-imposed gag order. I just like to talk, in case you haven’t picked up on that. 🙂 [Except in-game where I rarely speak up. What’s up with that?] Second was the amount of negativity being directed at Champions Online (though I’ve procrastinated to the point that has died down a bit, but more on that later). Thirdly was a post made by Professor Beej that reminded me of something I already knew. I wasn’t replacing blogging with any other kind of writing, so that meant I just wasn’t writing (well, other than a daily blog post for ITWorld). And that’s no good.

Anyway, I’m still tired of arguing, but I think know there’s a place for positive blogs, like MMOQuests and OverlyPositive. So I’m going to try to blog about the good side of gaming and let the bad stuff be handled by others.

Thing I realized is, negativity is important. I came to this rather obvious revelation during the aforementioned Champions negativity. Right after launch, people were really slamming Cryptic and the game for a last minute patch that folks felt nerfed a bunch of characters too much. Additionally, the cost of retconning (respeccing in the CO vernacular) was much too high.

I was having a great time and was kind of dismayed that so much bandwidth (somewhat in blogs, but more in forums and in-game) was being devoted to slamming Cryptic and the game. My instinct, being a hot-headed internet denizen, was to try to shout down the people promoting the bad aspects of the launch. But I knew that’d just lead to arguing and no one changing anyone’s mind, so for once…for this ONE TIME, I actually kept my mouth more or less shut.

The irony of all this is probably not lost on regular readers of Dragonchasers, because 2 weeks ago I was ready to burn Cryptic HQ to the ground over their yanking of the Lifetime Membership option. And I ranted and raved about it like an f’ing lunatic. All too frequently we don’t see ourselves for the comic & hypocritical entities we are until after the fact.

But this time I caught myself and I finally realized that negativity is important. Users and potential users voicing their unhappiness over a company’s policies or game design decisions is what gets the company to reconsider those policies and decisions. If a bunch of us hadn’t gotten really really mad about the premature end of the 6 Month & Lifetime special offers, would Cryptic have decided to re-open them? Probably not.

Cryptic has also promised to get early entry players a free respec of their characters so we can rebuild them under the ‘new rules’ that came in the Day 1 patch. Would they have promised this if the outcry hadn’t been so loud? Again, it is doubtful.

The flip side of the coin is that we, the consumers, can’t just assume that if we scream loudly enough things will change. We need to find that point where it’s time to let go and move on. I’m not sure where that point is, and I’m sure it changes on a case by case basis.

But all that negativity is *tiring* isn’t it? Well it is to me at least. I don’t like arguing, in spite of the fact that I do so much of it. It drains me. So for now at least, I’m going to pass the Baton of Righteous Indignation on to someone else, and try to focus on what’s good in the world of gaming.

Right now I’m playing Champions Online (I did spring for the Lifetime Membership once they re-opened it…how could I not?) and I’m having a blast. I’ve pre-ordered Fallen Earth, mostly because I got caught up in the moment when Ethic from KillTenRats was talking about it (jeez, I hope it’s Ethic who runs the KTR twitter account) and it was a digital thing — moments after reading his tweet I’d pre-ordered, before I had a chance to think fiscally, but what’s done is done and I’m happy to be supporting a small developer and seeing how the game came out. I’m in the Open Beta of Aion but that’s not going too well for me, but I didn’t really expect it to. But its so darned pretty! And of course my Lifetime sub to LOTRO and my EQ2 account are both loitering in the background waiting for me to get over the latest infatuation.

I’ll probably be talking about Champions for a little while at least. I think the game makes a tepid first impression and that a lot of testers never got into the good stuff, so it’ll be my mission to expose some of that goodness to Dragonchasers readers.
infernal_fight

There’s a hole (MMO shaped) in my mind

Posted on by Nimgimli

I didn’t really make a Decision to stop playing MMOs. It just kind of happened, mostly due to an economic crunch that has since eased. I keep thinking “Now I can afford a sub again!” and Angela would love me to rejoin her and our friends in EQ2, and I keep saying I will… but I don’t.

I missed MMOs for a few weeks, but then I started feeling a kind of lightness of being. Like some weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It has taken me a while to figure out what’s going on, and I think it has a lot to do with the out-of-game cost of playing an MMO, namely keeping up to date on changes and feeling a vague pressure to ‘keep up’ (or ahead) of the curve, or even just feeling like “I’m paying for it, I should play it.” At least I think that’s what’s going on. I’m still not 100% sure.

Maybe I was burnt out without realizing it, and this feeling is just the burnout lifting? Whatever it is, it feels good, like a long-standing care has been lifted.

But what’s even stranger is the social impact this has had on my life. Now keep in mind I’m a die-hard solo player in MMOs; one of those people that is often told he should be playing a single player game since they’re much better than playing an MMO solo.

First of all, they aren’t better. Not for me. I keep starting single player RPGs and finding them unfulfilling. Even critically acclaimed games like Fallout 3 just feel empty and dead. I haven’t gotten very far in Fallout 3, just in Megaton, but when I hit that town and all I see are NPCs following their pre-programmed wander routes, it just feels lonely and pointless in a way that MMOs never do, even when I’m not talking to or interacting with other players. Other players add life to the experience, even without direct interaction. Single player RPGS just aren’t as compelling. (Though I loved Fable 2, but I think the difference was that I was also playing an MMO at the time, so I had that ‘living world’ itch being scratched elsewhere.)

Anyway, back to the social impact. My RSS feed is filled with MMO bloggers. Lots of them have been writing long, well-considered posts about MMO design, how to move the state of the games forward, what’s broken and how to fix it. Really thought-provoking stuff.

And I just don’t care.

And that makes me really sad, because a mere few weeks ago I was enjoying the hell out of debating these points with these smart people. And now, I just find I have nothing to add to the conversation, and even find myself sometimes thinking these people are wasting their energy in debating this stuff. Huh? Where are THOSE thoughts coming from? I *love* being an armchair game designer! Anyway, this all leads to my standing on the sidelines watching, and I no longer feel like part of the community of MMO bloggers. That carries a great sense of loss.

And, as an add-on to that, I’m not posting a lot here, either. Now a big part of that is the blogging gig at ITWorld. My ‘word bag’ has only so many words in it every day, and I’m finding it’s pretty low on words by the time I get done a day at work, a day of twittering, and written a blog post or two (9 posts in the past week over there). My ‘hour bag’ runs low, too. I’ve been meaning to write this post for several days but just don’t find both available time and available energy intersecting conveniently.

On the bright side of all this, I’m re-discovering the joys of (non-rpg) single player games. I’ve been playing the hell out of this little “Aquia” game on the new DSiWare platform, and am finding Rune Factory Frontier (the latest “Harvest Moon” game for the Wii) to be incredibly compelling.

I think I need to just follow my muse and morph Dragonchasers into a single player gaming blog for a while. I’m not sure what that will do to the audience…will having ‘off-topic’ posts drive away people who would stay subscribed to a quiet RSS feed? I guess I’ll find out. I mean I’ve always been a little bit ‘all over the place’ with my book reviews and the odd “check out these neat thing” posts, but Dragonchasers never really took off until I really started focusing on MMOs.

Every day brings new adventure, though. Doing the ITWorld Blog has felt incredibly rewarding and is, I think, helping me to slowly get my writing chops back. And the money from it is what ended the financial crunch I referenced above, so both artistically and fiscally, I’m very, very grateful that gig fell in my lap. Maybe some day I can transition to writing full time. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

PS Props to anyone who got the B5 reference in the title of this post. Vorlons FTW!

Syp’s other blog

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/PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m probably the last one to learn this but just in case….

Syp of Waaaaaaaaaagh fame (is that too many “a’s”?) has a non-Warhammer blog, Bio Break, where he talks about games beyond Warhammer. He must have started it after I stopped reading Waagh! and all the other Warhammer blogs.

/END PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

New Widget curtesy of Tipa and XFire

Posted on by Nimgimli

Over in the right column you’ll see a new widget I just added: “Playing on PC”. (It’s the 4th chunk down as I write this, but I move stuff all the time.)

That’s a widget that Tipa from West Karana coded to import data from XFire.

Installation is a snap and it works as advertised! Obviously you need to be an XFire user to put it to any use. 🙂

Thanks Tipa!!! Very much appreciated!!!

Re-Imagining Dragonchasers

Posted on by Nimgimli

Regular readers may have detected a change of tone around here lately. I hadn’t detected it until my last post, after which I scrolled back and saw a lot of ranting and a few brief news items.

At which point I thought… “Yuck.”

This might be a good time to explain where the name of my blog comes from. Feel free to giggle, but one of my favorite movies is George Romero’s Knightriders. It’s about a traveling troop of modern-day knights that roam the country re-enacting jousts, only on motorcycles rather than horseback. Their King is played by a very young Ed Harris, and he is an idealist. He really is trying to recreate Camelot, while some of the other members are just having fun doing stunts on their bikes. Anyway, not really the point. But in one scene, Harris is trying to explain what he’s doing and how much it matters to him and he yells “I’m chasing the dragon!!”

I always interpreted this as ‘chasing a romantic [in the classical sense of the word] dream’. Chasing adventure, wonder, heroics… So that’s where dragonchasers comes from. The tagline (which no longer displays) is “A thoroughly mundane fellow’s quest for adventure.” And of course I chase adventure through games. 🙂

Two notes: 1) Harris might actually say “I’m fighting the dragon.” but when I created the blog I hadn’t seen the movie in years. 2) I’ve since learned that “chasing the dragon” is a heroin user’s term!! No correlation to drug use is in any way implied!

Recently a friend of mine told me he’d formed a WoW guild called DragonChasers and he felt a bit weird about it since he knew that was my blog’s name. He’d decided on his own what the term meant, and his feelings (I don’t think he reads this blog) were right in line with mine, so I guess the term does evoke what I originally meant it to invoke.

Anyway…I’ve been struggling lately with getting anywhere close to this theme. I’m conflicted in a lot of ways. I’ve been writing a tech blog for IT World (and I think that’s going really well… my posts have made the front page of Google News and Slashdot and traffic is really good, I’m told) and enjoying it so much that I start to daydream about those days when I was writing for a living. And I’ve been sort of enviously watching other bloggers getting noticed by PR people from various companies. Y’know, the Warhammer Valentines are one example, and folks getting review copies of games and stuff are another.

And I lost my way at some point, and started quasi-writing Dragonchasers in a more controversial way. One thing I know well is that pissing people off gets a site page views. [My 9-5 job is working as a web developer in online publishing.] At the same time, I’ve been making half-hearted attempts at being more ‘newsy.’ But not really committing enough to that to make it matter.

This is getting wall-of-text-y, sorry. Add to all of this some personal stuff going on with my mom, who seems to be rapidly slipping away from us, and I’ve just been being very unpleasant in a lot of my posts, and for that I’d like to apologize.

It took the comments in reply to my sneering last post to make me take a look in the mirror and see where I’d wandered to. I’d really like to thank Tipa, Werit, Green Armadillo and particularly Scott — who took a good chunk of his time to give me some solid advice — for helping me see the blog through the eyes of readers. And of course, to thank Angela for always having my back.

So I think it’s time to step back from this blog for a little while, and rediscover the magic of chasing dragons before I start posting again. When I return, I hope to once again be sharing my love of ‘adventures through gaming’ with whomever happens to come by to read me.

In the meantime, I’m pretty active on twitter (pasmith) if you feel like chatting. There’s a pretty nice community of gamers there, having an ongoing and slow paced conversation about the games we all love. Please come and join us!