[Music Monday] Blog Revival – A Brave New World (War of the Worlds)

Well, it’s time for this blog to return to life. I’ve wanted to make the return post on a Monday, and the first day of a month. So while this is April 1st, it’s not an April’s Fools Day post. This post is the official resurrection post for this blog, and unlike the last time I have a plan this time, to allow me to get things rolling and keep them rolling.

But first, Music Monday dictates, so a song:

I think this is a good song to get you pumped up and ready in the mood to keep on striving, it sure does that for me (even if I couldn’t find the version I wanted for you guys). I’ve been a huge fan of Jeff Wayne‘s The War of the Worlds ever since I’ve first heard it, back in the 4th grade. Originally a musical style disc from 1978, which is hard to guess from the sound of the music, based on H.G. Wells‘ novel from 1897.

The most well known piece and the blog-resurrection parts after the jump.

Editorial – Coming Back to Life

Wow, it’s been 4 months since my last entry. I’ve really been remiss in my updates of this blog. I guess you could say it’s taken an end of summer and autumn hibernation. It’s not that I didn’t have what to say… I had a lot to say. But once you stop updating, it’s sort of what I experience with certain fora (plural of forum) or topics; they remember where is the first unread post, so if you see they have 15 unread posts, you wait till you have time to read them all. And then it’s 150 unread posts and you know you’ll never get to it.

Zombie Jesus lives too! Well... sort of?

Grrrrr. WordPress just ate a couple of paragraphs I wrote…
Anyway, there are two ways to get back to posting: Go with “I’ll post whenever I feel like it”, so you’d make a post without feeling an obligation to keep on posting, which I dislike (and also, once I resume posting, it’s not an obligation as much as a snowball; can’t stop!). The other method is to bite the bullet. Stop procrastinating, and just resume blogging. Delve head-first.

There’ll be a blog post coming once a week, gauranteed. Even if the skies fall or Cthulhu and the lost city of R’lyeh resurface. I will try, and I think in most weeks will succeed, to get two posts up. I’ll be aiming for Sunday-Tuesday for one and Thursday-Saturday for the other. Some weeks may have three posts, but I’m not promising. I’m too wise for that.

On Piracy.

Well, this is a big one, not just in the anime/roleplayers’/video games’ cycle, but for all of us who live in the modern world with internet and fast connections. Piracy. Illegal downloading of goods through the internet. This was somewhat brought to my mind again due to the recent issues between Amazon and MacMillian regarding the pricing of eBooks.

Let’s begin with a couple of statements, from which everything follows:

1. Piracy is theft*.
2. People don’t want to think of themselves as thieves.
3. (Well, a third: People would rather not pirate.)

Sinfest strip. Copyrighted by Tatsuya Ishida.

Blog update: I’m currently in my tests’ season, well, mostly home-tests and assignments, so for the next two weeks expect posting to be a bit less timely, and be patient with awaiting comments. Thanks

Figure Friday Feedback Edition.

This is not actually a Figure Friday post, but a post where I talk about Figure Friday a bit and ask for your input.

As you may have noticed, the last time a Figure Friday post was written covered October 16th-22nd, and there had been a couple of major causes for that, which can be summed in one simple word. Time.

There’s an upside and a downside to this being an issue of time: The downside is that I am a full-time student, and if I have a busy semester or busy week at school there simply cannot be a Figure Friday, and even before we sometimes had the post delayed (ok, after a certain point it was almost always delayed). The upside is that should I find ample time again, I could just go back to writing these posts. I expect the upcoming semester to be slightly easier on my time, BTW.

The other point is that I doubt most of you understand how much time it takes to write a Figure Friday post. While I love having these posts written (and not just for the number of comments and views, which is much higher than usual for this blog), but I liked the accomplishment of having completed such a post. But how long does it take to get a Figure Friday post up, you want to know? From the time I begin working on it until it is published, well, let’s call it about 6 hours.

Six hours. I go to Neko Magic and Kumo’s blog, and find and open all the interesting figure pages, then I try to whittle it down to the best and the worst, and sometimes the most interesting, I try to limit the number of pictures I use for each figure, so there’s more indecision and option-weighing going on. I write down my thoughts on each figure and then I try to find a place for you guys to reserve it, sometimes adding notes on how to go with special stores and deputy services, etc.

And of course, the adding of the images. After I finished everything else, adding the images from Flickr… it used to take me about 3 hours or so, but I found a way to take it down to “only” an hour, an hour and a half. Getting the images to be about the same size, not too big, centered properly, etc. It’s such a headache, it’d truly be easier if I were to only post one or two images…

And after it all, I go over the figure sales I find on eBay, various sites, the restocks, the new releases, the news of conventions, and this takes some time as well. Not as much as other things, but it all adds up.

Options:
So now, here comes my musing about the options, things I could be doing to help get Figure Friday more on track. And yes, I know I promised Figure Monthly and it’s not out yet… I hope to get at least November and December, if not also October, next weekend (semester break begins, and I have a relatively small number of tests, on account of having numerous large assignments instead, whee!).

10k Views Milestone. Also, Twitter-tastic.

Greetings and Salutations, loyal readers, and new visitors. I am aware that Figure Friday did not go up on schedule, and for that I am sorry. I have no real excuse, but merely would state that I’d been feeling out of it for several days, somewhat a combination of sleep deprivation and weather (going from one extreme to the other, and back again). It’d go up when I feel like making it, and we’ll all hope that’d be soon!

Jake Richmond sends his wishes. Figures and miniatures

Anyway, this blog post is here to commemorate, and perhaps celebrate, the occasion of this blog passing 10,000 views (or rather, 10,087), which happened somewhere along early Thursday, and much earlier than I’d originally planned.

NaNoWriMo and Reader Questions.

We’ll begin with my NaNoNoWriMo 2009 thoughts, and move on to my questions to those of you loyal readers of my blog.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, where one attempts to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with the emphasis being put on quantity over quality, trying to get people to write. I am not going to write a novel, and if we are honest, it’s been several years since when “National” had truly been the focus of anything.

And so, I present to you NaNoNoWriMo, which stands for National Non-Novel Writing Month. In the end, NaNoWriMo is all about setting a goal to yourself anyway, so I’m thinking I’ll be writing posts and ideas, and attempt to get to the 50k words mark (not all posts and thoughts would get posted immediately, but at the normal blog(s) spacing, and perhaps some will not get published at all). The posts will include philosophical musings I would like to elaborate on, perhaps a short piece of fiction or two, and posts. Posts for this very blog, or for my personal blog (say, about morality and politics), posts about Role-playing theory, and so on and so forth. Another option is to write about 40k words, and spend time editing and revising some of the texts of one or more of my RPG projects.
I might collect them all in one big PDF at the end of the month and share it.

Now, some questions to those of you who read my blog, or blogs:

1. What would you like to see my write more about?
2. What would you like me to write less about?
3. Why do you read my blog?
4. Does my blog give you something you don’t get from other blogs/sites, if so, what is it? Feel free to list more than one.
5. I began my “Things I Like” non-reviews as quite short (see the Tenjho Tenge, Gurren Lagann and Damages posts), and moved to considerably longer posts, which range upwards of 1,400 words (such as RahXephon, Mai-HiME, and 07-Ghost posts). How do you feel about that?
6. Continuing the above, I tend to pick one thing in the Things I Like posts and focus on it, should I just keep that one thing, which is what I did in the shorter posts, or do that and also add other interesting bits?
7. How do you like my “Non-review reviews”, where I give thoughts on things, and elaborate on interesting things, but you can’t tell from my posts what the series/book is about?
8. Anything you want to tell me, or talk about?
9. I am nearing 10k views on the blog. Does anyone want to do some piece of art (photoshop, doodle, haiku..) for the event?

[Updated] Holy Flaming Computers, Batman!

Here is a friendly suggestion to you all, something which I’ve known and didn’t act fully upon, against my better judgment: When you can hear one of your computer’s fans make noise, call your nearest hardware store, get a replacement fan, and either pay them to change it for you or ask a friend who knows what they’re doing (alternately, look it up online and become the person who knows what they are doing).

An exaggeration.

 Update 23/10/2009: Fan replaced, considering replacement of other non-critical fan, and adding a cooling body to my GPU. BUT! Computer is up and working, and got 2G of RAM from a friend

Blog Success. Part 2; Getting Them to Come

This is the second part on how to get your blog a certain amount of success. This entry deals mostly with what to do once you have a blog with some content. Here‘s the first part, dealing with getting your blog up and running.

Letting People Know:

Once you “build it”, it’s not enough. After all, if people don’t know about how hot the content in your blog is, they won’t come and read it, would they?

Be advised, because this takes time, and because of how people work, new visitors are not going to visit most of your older blog posts. This means that if you have truly mind-blowing posts you want a lot of feedback on, you might want to save them for later. This is not to say that the early posts should be throw-away, because if they are, people won’t come and read your future posts, defeating the purpose.

Blog Success. Part 1; Building.

This post will help you achieve more success with your blog: More hits, more comments, hopefully. This post will describe what it takes to get about 2,500 hits a month. Follow less of the steps and/or make less posts, you’ll get less hits. Follow more of the steps and/or be more active about both the steps and making more posts, and you could hit several hundred hits a day.

This post had been split into two parts, because it turned out to be very massive, and quite comprehensive. The next part will appear in about 13 hours, and will deal with how to get your blog the attention, once it’s there.

I’ll begin with the age-old adage, “If you will build it, they will come.” That’s almost correct, I’d append it to say, “If you keep on building it, and keep telling people that you are building it, they will probably come.”

I want to make one last thing clear: I don’t do things just to get more hits. Almost everything I do is how I do normal blogging, I just tweak it slightly to increase the amount of hits I receive. My advice will help you get more hits, but hopefully you won’t do these things just for the hits.

The Basics: Posting.

This is the most basic thing, and a blog that does not have posts, and new posts, is not a blog worth following. In other words, you need to write blog posts; I know it sounds elementary, but it should be hammered in, time and time again. The more blog posts that you will write, the more that people will come, but more important than number is the regularity and spacing.

Figure Friday Pushed to Sunday; Once.

Ok, due to having a huge test on Sunday and some mishaps with schedule, this week’s Figure Friday, and ok, last week’s (when Nekomagic was down), will have to wait for this Sunday, when I’ll post one, and I’ll post the other a day or two later.

I hope you will bear with me, as this is definitely the last test for at least a couple months.

Anyway, here’s a question to you in the meantime, to pass the time: How interested are you in hearing about my non-geek life, like the area I grew up in, my cat, etc?

About my geek life you’ll hear anyway, stuff like shipping and customs to Israel, my history of growing into geekhood, conventions and geek culture in Israel, etc. The question is not about that, but rather about my non-geek personal life.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

P.S. This entry was written in advance, I’m probably reading Hobbes or Descartes right now, or trying to come up with a curriculum for the year. I thought it’d be best to try and get my studying as uninterrupted as possible.