Geek Bravado

The blown hard arrogance of Parallax Abstraction.

Category Archives: Personal

What’s the alternative to ad supported content?

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 23, 2013

I intended to have more posts this month and have a couple in the brain hopper but between working on my YouTube stuff, my day job and some crazy housing related stuff that may be coming our way soon, something had to give and it was unfortunately this. I hope to rectify that soon.

There’s been a lot of discussion among enthusiast sites (principally gaming related) of late on the subject of supporting them with advertising and how a large and increasing number of users are running ad blockers. These ensure they get the content without having to see the ads which allow that content to be offered for free. It’s been a subject of debate in the background for some time but it came to a head recently with a post on Destructoid in which their head guy lamented the situation in the politest way possible. A while after, Ben Kuchera from Penny Arcade Report chimed in with his version of the situation, in which he states that the types of click-baiting articles many of us hate are necessary because they drive the ad revenue that allows more meaningful (and sadly, niche) pieces to be authored. It’s an interesting perspective, though as usual, skewed by Kuchera’s ego which led him to speak as if he was representing the entire industry and not his own site, which is run under a unique arrangement to put it mildly. John Walker from Rock, Paper, Shotgun took him to task in a better way than I ever could so just go check his post if you want to know more.

Normally I would just observe this debate and little else but as someone who recently started producing video content which I do hope to eventually make a bit of money from with, you guessed it, advertising, I’ve been thinking about this a lot more. I haven’t used an ad blocker ever. I see banner ads of all shapes, sizes and levels of obnoxiousness every day. I consume hours of YouTube content every month and most of it has pre-roll ads, post-roll ads and sometimes, even ads in the middle. None of it bothers me. Sure, I don’t like having to wait 15-30 seconds for an ad to clear before my video starts or worse, waiting 10 seconds only to have to click the Skip Ad button to avoid a longer one but I tolerate it.

The reason for this is simple: I’m being given content for free and that content creator has to pay the bills somehow. Ad revenue is a pittance to begin with. When I looked at how big I’ll have to grow my YouTube audience just to make enough per month to pay for my Internet bill, I thought it was a typo. When I then thought about people using ad blockers and watching the content I worked hard on for literally nothing, my first reaction was one of anger. It takes time and money to produce this stuff. I’ve already put almost $500 into my YouTube channel and will probably put another $500 into it within the next couple of months. This is on top of the several hours a week of my very limited free time I put into recording and editing the videos. You aren’t being asked for anything but 15-30 seconds of your time to watch an ad before 20+ minutes of content. And that’s too much to ask? Seriously? It’s amazing to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making video content to get rich. I’m a realist, I know I’m not going to be the next TotalBiscuit and I’m not sure I want to be anyway. It’s a fun project first. I would like the videos to make enough money that it’s not costing me anything to produce them in the end but that’s my only real expectation. I get frustrated to think that some people are so short-sighted and entitled as to think that they can refuse to give the creators their pittance and still expect the content to come out, with the same level of quality, for free. This is the real world kids, it doesn’t work like that.

That said, I also know this is an issue that can’t be completely solved. People will always find a way to make ad blockers work and they will always find justifications for why they’re using them. They’ll say that ad networks sometimes deliver viruses (something that’s so rare now it’s basically a bullshit excuse), they’ll say they slow the browser down (you may want to consider using something faster than a Pentium II), they’ll say they’re distracting and make articles hard to read (I can do it and have major attention span issues, get over yourselves.) Whatever the reason, they’ll keep doing it and neither I nor anyone else can stop them. If you find a way to completely block out your content from those using ad blockers, guess what? That part of your audience will just go away and read/watch something else. You can either work within the constraints you have (however unfair they may be) or just get out of the game. It saddens me that many people are taking the second option. It also saddens me that the solution many are employing is sensational headlines and click-baiting stories, both of which are a plague in the tech and gaming press these days. Those types of articles aggravate me more than even the most obnoxious, auto-playing video ad.

While I do and will work the constraints of the audience, there is one thing many do that takes the entitlement to a whole new level and that I simply cannot abide. That is the people who go “You’re relying on an outdated business model and that’s not my problem!” Nothing drives me further up the wall than people who think themselves fit to tell someone else how they’re running their business wrong without offering a better solution. And worse yet, people who use that as a crutch to justify ripping a creator off. They did it with the music industry, they did it with movies, they did it with games and now they’re doing it with web and video content. They claim the “old ways” don’t work and need to evolve but they don’t step up when other evolutionary paths are offered. “I will pay you directly for this content, all you have to do is ask!” is an argument I see bandied about quite a bit. Has anyone ever thought that maybe no one’s doing that because those who tried it didn’t have their audiences step up? Don’t believe me?

Giant Bomb and the Whiskey Media family of sites tried this. They couldn’t pay the bills with advertising so they instituted premium memberships that removed the ads, got you access to exclusive content and a host of other benefits. Enough people (including myself) stepped up and paid for this to slow their cash bleed but it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat. Eventually, the company was split up and sold off. Jeff Gerstmann has since lamented in two of his Jar Time videos if they hadn’t sold, those sites likely wouldn’t be around today. The Escapist tried a similar approach with their site and was recently sold as well after a fairly well publicised period of financial hardship. In short: People love to say they’ll directly contribute to support content they love but in the end, most of them are all talk.

If you are one of those people who say that the enthusiast press (or any other industry for that matter) is failing because they are clinging to an outdated business model and you think you can do it better, I suggest–nay implore–you to start up a consulting firm because if your method works, you will make more money than you will know how to spend. The brightest minds in this industry can’t figure out another way to do it. If you’ve got one, you’re missing out on an opportunity to write your golden ticket. If you don’t have a better means, then just shut up because you don’t know jack shit and are just trying to rationalise not supporting something you’re getting for free just because you can. Ripping people off is one thing and that’s bad enough but chastising how they do business while sitting on your high horse with no better answers is way worse. I make content and if you want to block my ads, I can’t stop you, I accept that. But don’t tell me how I’m doing it wrong if you don’t have a better option.

As a creator who likes to think his content is worth the price of admission, all I can ask of you is that you whitelist my site and my videos on YouTube. Better yet, set your ad blocker to whitelist by default and only block the sites that have ads you disagree with. Give them a chance to demonstrate that they can’t do it tastefully before you pass judgement on them. The ads pay the bills (or at least some of them) and if people keep blocking them, something will have to give and in some cases, that’s already happening. Stuff costs money and if people can’t at least make that back, they won’t keep making the stuff. If you’re like me and you’re sick of seeing enthusiast journalism go down the toilet in favour of top 10 lists and click baiting, then step up and do your part. It’s really not a lot to ask and helps more than you may realise. At the very least though, if you do feel justified in blocking the ads, at least keep your opinions of how we monetise our work to yourself. If you have a better idea, we’ll listen but if not, we could do without your salt in our wounds.

Coverage, Coverage, News, Personal, Technology, Video Games , , ,

Introducing Two Guys & A Game

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 9, 2013

So hey, remember that YouTube show I launched a little while ago? If you haven’t been watching it and spamming the Hell out of it to everyone you know, go rectify that right now before you become a truly bad person. But wait, how would you like even more video content? I knew you’d be stoked for that! Well, wish and you shall receive!

I’m pleased to announce that the first episode of Two Guys & A Game is now live! So what the Hell am I doing launching another YouTube show when I’ve barely got Retro Flashback right and what’s this new one all about? To answer your first question, because I’m stark raving mad. To answer your second question will take a few more sentences. My good friend Dan (known as StylezXP) and I have been trying to figure out some kind of project to do together for a while. We’ve wanted to collaborate on something and we both have busy lives (him especially since he and his wife recently had a kid) so we also wanted something that would give us a reason to get together more often.

Then one day, we were reminiscing about all the co-op games he and I have played together over the years. We both love the co-op experience but it was made further unique in our case because we often did a kind of Mystery Science Theater 3000-style snarky commentary along with the games we played. We enjoy the titles we play but some of them were not exactly pillars of narrative delivery and we enjoyed taking the piss out of them while we played them through. We had talked about how awesome it would have been if we could have recorded those experiences. And then it hit us: Let’s do this but on the Internet! And thus, Two Guys & A Game was born.

We know there’s a ton of YouTube game content out there and a lot of it is Let’s Plays. Neither of us are really big on those types of series and most of them are dreadful. We didn’t want to do that unless we could bring our own unique flair to it but our banter is what we think makes the difference. We plan to play a variety of different games from different eras on various platforms but we are starting with the latest release in the Army of Two series. These have been guilty pleasure games for StylezXP and I so we figured it was a great one to start off with. We hope to do episodes that are an average of an hour in length, though some may go longer or shorter. We hope to do these on a regular basis but given how busy both our lives are right now, we can’t guarantee they’ll be coming on an exact schedule. The best way to find new episodes is to subscribe to my channel and keep an eye on the official playlist. We will play whatever game we are currently working on to completion before moving on to the next one. We may also do special one-off episodes dedicated to things like spoiler discussion or talking about the history of a game series we both like. The co-op comedy is the meat of the series but we plan to roll with other things too.

Just like Retro Flashback, this series is an evolving thing and both of us are coming at this with minimal experience both in commentating and production. You’ll notice that the commentary audio is pretty bad in the first video. It took me literally an afternoon to get the dual headset recording working with my laptop and capture software and what we got is the best I could do and that was after a lot of post processing on Sound Forge Audio Studio. I’m hoping to improve it more as we go forward and should the show gain some traction, I will consider investing in a portable mixer and some more professional grade microphones. That’s not in the financial cards for me this month though so I hope you’ll bare with me. I’m still confident in saying that even this first attempt sounds better than a lot of Let’s Play content on YouTube. There’s also a bit of an issue mid-video that required a bit of a gap in our recording but I think I covered that in a way that will make you grin.

We really hope you guys enjoy this new series. If you do, please consider subscribing to the channel, giving a thumbs up to the videos and telling your friends. Even a mention on Twitter, a post on a message board or a link on Reddit goes a long way in helping us find an audience. We also welcome any feedback, positive or negative, just as long as you offer it in an intelligent manner. Please comment away if you have something to offer. We’re really excited to be doing this and I hope we can entertain a bunch of people with it. So, without further ado, check out the first episode below!

Coverage, Culture, Personal, Video Games , , ,

Introducing Retro Flashback

1 Comment Posted by on March 24, 2013

After months of gestating in my head and exhaustive preparation, I’m super excited to announce my new YouTube project, Retro Flashback! I’ve been jonesing to get this out to the world for a while and the day of my final(?) live stream for Extra Life seemed like the perfect time to maximise synergies.

So, what’s this all about and why should you care?

After finally getting a turbulent few years of my life normalised last year, I got bit by the creativity bug. I wanted to make something that I could use to apply my kind of scarily large knowledge of video games to in a unique way. I also have some knowledge of video editing thanks to a freelance client of mine and while I’m certainly no expert, I know my way around the process well enough. The problem is, there is already a massive excess of video game related content on YouTube and good chunks of it that are very good and have large audiences as a result. Just throwing my voice into that chorus (especially when I’m to say the least unskilled in comparison) didn’t seem to be the best thing to do.

Then I noticed that aside from some game play footage and the occasional Let’s Play, there’s a serious dearth of retro game coverage on YouTube. I’m a huge retro gamer and I used to be a pretty serious collector at one point before I went too far down the rabbit hole and got myself into some pretty serious debt buying rarer stuff at inflated prices. I actually ended up selling that collection (mostly at a loss) both to help right my financial ship and also to teach myself a lesson about excess. Nonetheless, my knowledge of and enthusiasm for retro games is pretty substantial and I thought this would be a great opportunity to put that to use.

The show gets its primary inspiration from the likes of TotalBiscuit’s WTF Is… series and Giant Bomb’s quick looks. They idea is that the personalities do first impressions of usually new games. It’s a simple formula, just them talking over captured game play footage but they bring a lot of informative and unique discussion. Their videos are not Let’s Plays, which is generally just someone narrating themselves playing a game with no insight or in some cases, not talking at all. I don’t really care for that and I wanted to do something more interesting. That’s when Retro Flashback was born. The idea is that I will do a similar style of presentation to the shows I mentioned before but discussing not only what the retro titles are about but also what made them good (or bad), why people should (or shouldn’t) seek them out and how they can do so.

I was listening to a podcast a while back and in discussing some other topic, the hosts got off on a tangent about how gaming discussion is starting to change. For the first time in history, we have a generation of young people who didn’t grow up with some of the most iconic titles from the beginning of mainstream video game culture. Up until this point, everyone not only knew what Super Mario Bros. was, everyone had played it at least once. That’s not so much the case any more. Obviously, you don’t have to know everything about the history of video games to be able to appreciate them but I thought it would be really neat to do something where people who are deep into this hobby but never had the chance to experience its beginnings could see some of what it was like and hear someone who was there talk about the roles many of these older titles had in what we play today. The tag line for the show is “Showcasing gaming’s roots for a new generation” and that’s what I hope to accomplish with it. My hope is that I can encourage more people both young and old to go back and experience some of these iconic titles for themselves or at least learn something valuable about them.

Giant Bomb is actually kind of doing something like this with their Encyclopedia Bombastica series but that’s cool. I hope to do my show more regularly but even if not, there are a lot of older games out there so I think there’s room for lots of participants. Plus, the Giant Bomb guys are awesome. I have no restrictions on what types of games I will cover or what systems I will cover them on so expect to see a wide variety of things from both old consoles and computers. So far, I only have capture setups configured for NES and Super NES and it’s actually not as easy to do as each one has its own unique quirks but I’m confident I can get everything working with the tools I have at my disposal. You will notice that a lot of the videos will be in 480p. This is because most older games are in 480p (often 360p) and there is literally no benefit to encoding at the more demanding 720p. Trust me, I tested it. When I do captures of updates retro titles from consoles and the like, I will be encoding at 720p where it fits.

I do not take direct requests for what games to cover because I have no specific coverage plan and am going to talk about what I like at the time. However, I’m maintaining and ever-expanding list so I welcome people to submit ideas both here and in the comments on YouTube. I know what YouTube comments can be like and should the show get popular, I know I can’t avoid them turning into what YouTube comments often do but I’m going to hold myself to a policy of only dedicating a set amount of time to reading and answering comments and only responding to the intelligent ones. Some people like TotalBiscuit like to engage with the idiots but I have neither the time or energy to deal with those people. Your comment doesn’t have to be praise or agreement and I welcome all feedback so I can improve the show but if you can’t comment intelligently, don’t expect a response.

It’s also worth noting that I have no experience doing this. My editing skills are competent but minimal and I have no vocal training. Currently, I’m just using a Razer Carcharias headset mic which sounds OK but not great but I do have plans to upgrade to a Blue Nessie microphone once they go on sale. Just in practising for the series, I’ve improved my commentary skills a lot but I have a long way to go. I’m doing this series as much for the challenge as the fun so the journey’s going to be half the experience of it. If you find my commentary not to your liking, that’s cool. I encourage you to leave suggestions for how you think I can improve and then check back a few weeks later so see if things have maybe changed. I’ve been polishing this for a while but the one piece of advice every YouTube personality has offered is that you need to eventually just put your stuff out there and iterate. So that’s the plan!

I hope to do a couple of episodes of the show a week but that’s only my goal, not a guarantee. I’ve spent the last couple of months coming up with a streamlined production method that should allow me to crank them out quickly but I also have a day job, a side business, a girlfriend, two cats, a dog, and a desire to play a lot of newer games too so depending on my free time, it could be more or less. I also have terrible upload speeds at home which require me to take the videos into work to post them, though I hope that will change soon and with it, that I’ll also be able to do some live streaming stuff as well. My eventual hope is that I will be able to monetise these videos, either directly through YouTube (though I hear that’s really tough when you use captured footage) or by maybe securing partnership with a network at some point. Unlike TotalBiscuit and others, I have no desire to make a full-time career out of this. I think it would be cool but also incredibly risky and I’ve lived a risky career life for too long so I’m happy with the stability I have now. Making money from them is secondary though, for me this is about the challenge of doing it and also what it can hopefully bring to those who want to learn more about where gaming came from. It’s an important subject and I hope I can contribute to a greater understanding of it for some people.

So yeah, that’s my more in-depth explanation of Retro Flashback. I really hope you all enjoy the videos and again, I welcome any and all feedback, as long as it’s given intelligently. Below, you will find a shorter video version of the intro as well as the first episode which is of Code Name: Viper for the NES. Enjoy everyone, I can’t wait to show you more!

Coverage, Culture, Personal, Video Games , , ,

Video Mayhem: Amnesia Live Stream Date & My New YouTube Show Launches the Same Day

1 Comment Posted by on March 7, 2013

Hey, do you remember when I did that Extra Life thing a while back? Remember how I said if I hit $2,000 raised for the charity, that I would single session the scariest game ever made and that it would be hilarious to watch me suffer horribly? If you watched the show, you may even know that I hit $2,000 during that day because a bunch of amazing people (including a bunch I’d never met outside that Twitch chat) were incredibly generous/insane. You know how it’s been months and I still haven’t done the Amnesia show? Well, that changes this month! My single session playthrough of Amnesia: The Dark Descent will be broadcast live for everyone on Sunday, March 24th, 2013 starting at 3PM EST and going until I’m done!

I feel bad for keeping people in anticipation of my on-camera suffering for so long but life just got nuts. We underwent (and are kind of still undergoing) a merger at my day job which has been a crazy amount of work and between that, our amazing (but also time consuming) new puppy and a bunch of other stuff, I just haven’t had a lot of energy at the end of the day lately and well, this will require a lot of that. In addition, there were rumblings that my ISP would finally be able to start offering sufficient upload speeds that I could maybe do the show from home instead of the board room at work. Sadly, those speeds are coming but not until later this year so it will still be an office thing.  Things are finally starting to normalise though and I’ve booked a week of vacation starting the day after the live stream so that I can get some rest and possibly check myself into an institution to recovery from the nervous breakdown playing this game will actually cause.

Even if you didn’t watch my other two live streams (which are archived on my Twitch channel if you want to see them), you won’t want to miss this one. For those not in the know, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a PC game released in 2010 that is considered by many to be the scariest video game ever produced. People who are big horror fans have a hard time finishing it. I detest all things horror and watching me play through the whole game (which can range from 7-10 hours in length) will be must see television. It’s going to be miserable for me and hilarious for all of you. I will archive this show as well but being able to see it live and mock me in the Twitch chat will be way cooler. It’s going to be a blast!

However, there is a dual purpose to this day and I hope that you will all indulge me and assist me in getting the word out. In the last year, I’ve been bitten by the bug to do something creative and I’m finally putting that into motion. During the live stream, I am going to be launching a brand new YouTube show called Retro Flashback! I won’t go into details here as I’ll save that for another post and for the live stream but it’s going to be a semi-regular YouTube program devoted to showing game play of retro video games with me providing commentary about the titles, their development, what made them good and how they created to the makeup of gaming history. I’ve never seen another show like this and since I have a frankly embarrassing amount of video game trivia in my head, I thought this would be a great way to showcase the great games of the past to a generation that maybe didn’t get a chance to experience them. More details will be forthcoming later so watch this blog for more!

What I’m hoping you all can help me with is getting the word out, both about the live stream and my new show. I’m going to be running a little contest the day of the stream to try to get some subscribers to my YouTube channel to get an audience going. I haven’t decided on the number yet but if people can get the word out and I can hit that many new subscribers during the show, I’m going to commit to doing yet another single session live stream of another highly regarded horror game, Condemned: Criminal Origins. I think this will be a good incentive to get people to spam their friends a bit and can help me get the foundation going to grow an audience.

I am super excited about this and would really appreciate everyone’s help. Please retweet this blog post and tell people to pack in for the show on the 24th. I think we’re all going to have a great time (even if it drives me mad) and I can’t wait to show you all Retro Flashback and hopefully get it out for more people to see. See you on Twitch!

Culture, Personal, Video Games , , , , ,

My Uneasy Peace with Christmas

3 Comments Posted by on December 25, 2012

Christmas and I generally don’t get along. It’s been a tense but accepted stalemate for the last 20 years or so. I accept it because society won’t let me do otherwise but I don’t tend to enjoy it. The progression is usually the same: For a good chunk of December, I tend to get grumpier and more miserable as the day gets closer. Everyone around me tolerates this but I can feel their frustration. They understand why this time of year bugs me but I can also tell that many wish I would either get over it or at least, try to force at least a bit of a smile throughout it. I still participate in all the yearly rituals with my Mom and the families of the various girlfriends I’ve had but most of those years, I usually wish I could just isolate myself, go to sleep and wake up when this whole bloody thing is over with. For me, this time of year that is happy for so many others tends to just make me sad and angry at the past.

Like most, when I was a young kid Christmas was one of the most awesome times of the year for me. My family was never religious so it had nothing to do with that but it was a time of year when I was hanging around with them, off school and getting presents all at once! Some of my fondest childhood memories are of Christmas morning. I remember one Christmas, I really wanted Faxanadu for the NES. I knew where my parents would hide my presents before Christmas morning. It was in a walk-in closet off the master bedroom of the townhouse we lived in at the time. One day, I snuck in there and managed to cut the tiniest hole in an NES game shaped present, just enough to see the unique and memorable pattern of the Faxanadu box. It turns out that hole wasn’t tiny enough and my parents discovered it. They ended up burying the game inside another big present that was actually for my Mom, enough to make me think they’d returned it and I wouldn’t get it at all. When it was later revealed to me, I was never so happy to have learned a harsh lesson in my life. My Dad said I could hook my NES up to the big TV in the living room (while was a holy grail moment for me) and he (a total and complete non-gamer who never understood what was so cool about them) proceeded to sit and watch me play a classic 8-bit action RPG for the entire morning. It was so incredibly awesome.

My good memories of Christmas like that were stopped cold in 1992.

That Christmas morning, my Mom told me shortly after I got up that there was a change of plans and we were actually going to the house of one of my friends whose parents were her friends as well. This was very sudden and when I pressed for an explanation, I was told that now wasn’t the time and that all would be revealed later. When I came downstairs, I saw my Dad bundled up in a blanket on the couch, staring at the TV but clearly not paying any attention to it. He had a despondent, other worldly look on his face I’d never seen before. I asked if he was coming with us and he didn’t answer. He didn’t even blink or turn his head. My Mom interjected and said he would be staying behind because he wasn’t feeling well. This all seemed very odd to me but I also remember not giving it more than a passing thought. We bundled up the presents (which I didn’t get many of that year because our family was in financial straits that I knew the existence but not the extent of), headed to my friend’s place and had a pretty good morning.

Then my Mom told me we needed to go downstairs for her to tell me something.

It was then I found out that my Dad had been accused of having an affair with a business associate (which I much later confirmed to be true despite his denials, one of the reasons I haven’t spoken to him in 17 years), that he and my Mom were planning to separate and come the new year, we would be moving out of our home and into my Grandma’s place which was only a few minutes away. I still do not know what my Mom’s motivations were in breaking this to me on Christmas morning and why it couldn’t have waited until after the holiday. I was in blissful ignorance of why we were celebrating Christmas at our friend’s place and had she waited until the new year, I probably would have been none the wiser. To this day, she still can’t explain why she needed to tell me then and says she feels guilty because of how it permanently tainted the holiday for me. I love my Mom to death, she comprises pretty much the only family I have and I think she’s one of the most amazing people in the world. But even today, I still hold some resentment toward her for doing that. If there was a single thing in my life I could go back and change, I think it would be taking this news she had to deliver and pushing it forward a month.

The next few Christmases came not only with this baggage but also the reality that we were dirt poor for several years after my parents separated. My Mom had spent most of her career working for my Dad’s various crooked business schemes. She ended up having to go back to school and retrain, living and supporting me and my Grandma off her Canada Pension, students loans and credit cards for a couple of years which didn’t afford much in the way of Christmas presents and cheer. She worked bloody hard, tried her best and made do with very little but still made the holiday harder and my Dad’s latest scummy enterprise starting to fall flat on its face made him an even greater misery to be around than he normally was.

Since then. around the start of December, my holiday depression begins to kick in. Unfortunately, Christmas has for many years just been a reminder of the intense shock and trauma that occurred back in 1992 and with the holiday being the crass, commercial enterprise it is, you can’t set foot anywhere in December without it being shoved in your face. Everything’s decorated, endless variants the same 10 Christmas songs are played ad nauseum everywhere and everyone just expects you to be happy. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard “How can you be sad at this time of year? It’s CHRISTMAS!”, said in a tone that’s soaked to the bone in cheerful snark. It’s a vicious cycle. Every year, I go into December saying that this is the year I’m going to bury the past in the past and embrace how this cherished holiday can often bring out the best in people. But in the end, I get stressed from work, from present shopping and the financial worries that come from that and inevitably, my brain drifts back to memories of 1992 which get intensified and reiterated by the endless reminders of the holiday I see all around me. This depresses me further and ultimately makes me a bit of a grinch. I’ve had several girlfriends over the years (including my current one) who absolutely love Christmas and as you can imagine, being around me at this time can be a buzz kill. More than a few fights have been sparked by this which obviously, does not help my mood any.

I’ve had several health issues over the years but one I’ve never had has been an inability to sleep. Christmas Eve is always an exception, this year as well. I really don’t know how insomniacs handle it because dealing with this even for one night drives me nuts. One year maybe a decade or so ago, I was hanging out with a life-long friend of mine and we decided we just had to do something, anything to shake off our misery. So we grabbed a ton of CDs and coffee, got into my car and just drove around the city. All night long. There is something eerily beautiful about driving around a big city like Ottawa on a holiday night. In this town, there’s always some amount of traffic a buzz going on, even in the middle of the night. When you go out at 11pm on Christmas Eve, there’s nothing anywhere. Everything is shut down, still, quite, at peace. It’s a surreal experience and one that brings a very calming effect with it. We drove from one end of the entire Ottawa Valley to the other, criss-crossing everything in between. We would do this for a whole work day’s worth of hours, talking about anything and everything as we went. The first time out, we ended up at Elgin Street Diner, one of the only food serving places that stayed open that night, sharing bad grub and misery with a restaurant full of equally unhappy, lonely souls. Yet somehow, it made us feel better. When I came home from that trip, I slept like a baby. As the years went by, this became a recurring tradition. Different friends would sometimes tag along, we’d go different places and talk about different things but we always did it on Christmas Eve and I always drove.

Sadly a bunch of drama occurred in 2009 that I won’t repeat here. It made me realise that I needed to re-evaluate my friendships, even the ones I’d had for most of my life. Those friendships have largely crumbled into dust now and as a result, my car now sits motionless on Christmas Eve. I once tried to just do the same kind of drive by myself but it’s just not the same. It’s empty, silent and incredibly lonely. It’s funny how feeling incredibly alone is so much more bearable when you can do it with other people. All that drive ended up doing was making me restless and it didn’t serve to tire me out in the slightest. The thought has occurred of trying to call those people and seeing if they’d like to do it again but how incredibly weird would that be to do? “Hey, I know we don’t talk any more but do you want to go for an all-night drive again just because you know, we used to?” I don’t see it working.

Last year, I spent the late night in my office with my girlfriend asleep in the room beside me playing Rochard and this year, I spend it blogging while listening to Solar Fields. I’ve been up for almost 16 hours, have to be up at in 6 hours to take the puppy out and I’m not tired in the slightest.

For all the bring down I’ve posted above, Christmas is starting to get better for me. The great job I landed 2 years ago has relieved a lot of the financial stresses I was under for several years. I can actually afford to buy nice presents for people and I love giving people things that I know will make them happy. While my amazing girlfriend still has to tolerate a lot of “bah humbug” sentiment from me, her love of Christmas is starting to break through I think. Her parents are amazing and since both our families are so small, we all get together at their place to do Christmas together. We do most of the presents together, we eat a great meal together and we all enjoy each other’s company for the day. It’s really great and makes the day feel like more of a family holiday for me again which I really missed. My Mom and I also still do our Christmas Eve tradition of having cheese fondue at her place (the last meal we had as a family before the events of 1992) and this year, I got to bring our new puppy over to hang out for the evening which made it extra special and fun. Best of all, I get to do all of this while on a nearly 2 week paid break from work which I desperately need and which I get to fill with relaxing and catching up on the year’s backlog of games.

I have a lot to look forward to in 2013. For as hard as this time of year is for me, I really don’t want it to be and I do hope that I can eventually shove my difficult past aside and learn to look at this time of year for what it should be, not what history keeps wanting to taint it with. Every year it’s a struggle but every year, I also feel like I’m making a bit more progress. It’s a terrible thing to be at war with your own mind but sometimes, you can come out of it the other side with a fresh perspective and ultimately be happier for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever grow to love this time of year the way so many other people do but maybe I can reach a state where I can at least start looking forward to it rather than dreading it.

I hope everyone reading this has a fantastic holiday and that it’s full of warmth, cheer and loved ones. I have bitched and complained about a lot of people on this blog in 2012 but everyone deserved to be happy on this day. This Solar Fields album is winding down and I suppose I should try to go to bed. Maybe this year’s the one where I can finally get a good night’s sleep before Christmas morning.

My uneasy peace with Christmas continues but at least it’s still peace.

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Extra Life 2012: Amazing For Some Unexpected Reasons

2 Comments Posted by on October 21, 2012

It’s about 10:30am this morning and I’m driving back from my office, having just completed playing Dark Souls live on the Internet for 24 hours straight to support an awesome children’s charity. I had to do it at work because my Internet at home can’t upload fast enough to do a live stream. I quickly realise that it’s reckless for me to be driving myself home as exhaustion is producing symptoms very similar to slight drunkenness, which is probably coming across in how I’m driving as well. But there isn’t much traffic on a Sunday morning and my bed is calling. As I fight to keep my eyes open and can think of little more than sleep, I still feel this incredible sense of euphoria that keeps a grin on my face the entire way.

I took part in Extra Life last year and enjoyed it but decided to amp up the challenge for myself a lot this time around. It was a challenge I looked forward to but also dreaded somewhat. There were a million things that could go wrong and I’d taken on a lot to maintain when enduring increasing fatigue. I really had no idea what to expect from the day and fear of the unknown is always a big problem for me. What ended up happening was more than I could have ever hoped for, both for Extra Life and for me personally.

I set my rig up in the office board room the night before so it would be all good to go Saturday morning. A trip to the Carp Farmer’s Market for a Bacon On A Bun on my way in and I was rarin’ to start. Last year, my amazing supporters raised $728 for my Extra Life run and I was already over $1,300 for this year. I’d passed my first stretch goal to do a second live stream of Duke Nukem Forever but it looked like my second goal to do one of Amnesia: The Dark Descent was not going to happen. No big deal, a ton of money had still been raised for sick kids and I made that Amnesia goal very lofty on purpose because well, I don’t really want to have to do that.

I get the stream rolling and all seems to start well. I have zero experience doing any kind of commentary and one of my biggest worries in doing this little show is that I’ll come across as stiff and boring, a problem not uncommon among amateur Twitch and YouTube types. This will drive away viewers and with the way my brain works, knowing that I endured a complicated streaming setup for nothing will drag my morale down and make the day even tougher. I get a few co-workers and Gamers With Jobs folks watching and my viewer count goes up to about 10. In the grand scheme of Twitch, that’s nothing but for a largely unpromoted first attempt, I think it’s decent so I’m feeling good. I start to plug away at Dark Souls and as one would expect, progress is slow and frustration filled. I die, a lot.

Then something incredible happens.

A friend suggests I specify in my Twitch profile that I’m playing Dark Souls which makes the channel easier to find. Once I do, random people start joining the stream. The viewer count starts going up and a real fun dialogue begins in the chat. Everyone’s really into this, offering advice, helping to guide me through the game’s massive and very confusing world and figure out how best to level my character and choose equipment. Occasionally I get trolled into hitting an area I’m not ready for but hey, it’s a charity event so it’s all good. People start asking me questions about why I’m doing this and hours go by with a bunch of us–both people I know and never have before–just shooting the breeze as I Prepare To Die.

A few people who own Dark Souls suggest having me summon them into my game to help me on the journey. Dark Souls’ matchmaking system is all but broken and summoning fails most of the time and leads to some slow periods but we all stick with it and soon, I’m barrelling through tough areas with amazing expediency thanks to the help of these great people. We play and chat together for hours and hours, some only leaving the stream because they simply can’t stay awake anymore. Many hilarious moments involving a hacker, facepalmingly dumb deaths and my reactions to meeting some freakish creatures for the first time are had. The number of viewers continues to go up (peaking around 40 which still isn’t much but is way more than I expected) and surprisingly, I start to get e-mails saying a lot of them are following my Twitch channel, which otherwise has nothing on it. Most of these people I had never met before today and most of them didn’t even know this stream was happening until they tripped over it, yet here many of them are as much as 12 hours later.

Many of my viewers are saying they love the job I’m doing commentating the stream. They say I’m funny, engaging, interacting with people (which I guess a lot of Twitch personalities don’t) and they’re sticking around because they really enjoy what they see. I get asked if this is something I’m going to do more and when the next stream is going to be. I didn’t know how to process this and still kind of don’t. I’ve had some ideas for a while about doing some Twitch or YouTube content as a creative side endeavour but after hearing the kind of work the big guys like TotalBiscuit do, I made myself laugh thinking I could ever pull that off. But these folks were saying I could and that they would tune in if I did more. There’s a lot of potential hurdles standing in the way of such a thing becoming a reality between copyright issues, my home Internet speed and of course, time and money or lack thereof but I’ve suddenly been given a sense that maybe there’s something to this. The gears in my head are turning faster now.

I went into the day thinking that if I could raise a bit more money and double last year’s takings, that would be a major victory and could leave satisfied. My Amnesia stretch goal was almost $700 away and I figured most people who were going to donate probably already did. Boy was I wrong. As word started to get out and the viewer count went up, the donations started coming in and not in small amounts. Multiple rounds of $50 and $100 started showing up and the total began to skyrocket. Within a few hours, my day’s goal was smashed and $2,000 actually seemed within reach again. As we reached the final $100, one of the founders of Gamers With Jobs piped up in the chat after putting $50 in and said if we didn’t reach $2,000 by 1:00am my time, he would make up the difference. My brain kind of stalled at trying to realise that I went from the second stretch goal having no chance to being guaranteed. I can’t even remember what I said at the time, only that it probably wasn’t very coherent. What I thought was a wildly ambitious goal had been achieved and people rallied to make it happen. $2,000 is a ton of money for a charity and none of that was me, that was all of you! You are all superheroes!

The experience of doing this live stream was tough but it was also some of the most fun I’ve had in years. I’m both elated and terrified at the thought of now having to do one of Amnesia. It’s going to quite possibly be the greatest challenge I’ve faced in almost 30 years of playing video games. But with a bunch of people in the Twitch chat, it will also be a ton of fun and I think the anticipation outweighs the fear, for now at least. I decided to do this because though playing video games for 24 hours isn’t easy, it’s also a leisure activity and I felt the spirit of Extra Life was best served by making things challenging. But it also ended up becoming something much more and led to me thinking of a lot of things I never expected and hitting a goal I purposefully setup to be very unlikely. This was a day I’ll remember for a very long time and in what was a pretty good year so far, this stands out as one of the biggest highlights. I can’t wait to do the upcoming two bonus streams and who knows, maybe more stuff later on. I still need more sleep but even as I groggily type this, I’m still smiling.

Thank you to everyone who made this day so special. The army of Gamers With Jobs and WESA/BluMetric Environmental folks who donated and helped spread the word, my best friend Dan (also known as StylezXP) who came to visit at night with Tim Horton’s and got me some Reddit coverage and in particular, the army of amazing random people I met on Twitch who helped guide me through Dark Souls and provided many hours of co-op fun. KeyMastar, Aikao (Supagroop amirite?!), Dhaz15, PrimeDragoon, Blackdrop and many others I know I’m forgetting, the whole day was exponentially better because of you and you also helped raise a ton more money than I ever thought for sick kids. Regardless of how much fun this was for us all, helping a deserving charity out so much is something truly respectable. Thank you so much!

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Extra Life 2012: Sponsor and Watch Me Punish Myself for Sick Kids

2 Comments Posted by on September 6, 2012

It’s been a busy month and I haven’t been in a blogging mood for some reason but I’m getting back at it and kicking it off by asking for money! Awesome right? Last year, I decided to take a shot at doing Extra Life in support of my local children’s hospital. Thanks to the awesome generosity of people from my work and Gamers With Jobs, what I thought was a difficult goal of $500 was well surpassed, reaching almost $800 when all was said and done. I’ve decided to amp up both the goal and the challenge this year and I’m hoping you dear reader can lend a hand for the kids at CHEO.

The way this works is that for an straight 24 hour period on Saturday, October 20, I play video games. This sounds like all fun but even when I was young, that much gaming in one session was a tall order and it’s even harder now that I’m older. Last year wasn’t easy but thanks to some well timed caffeine ingestion and determination, I made it through without too much trouble. This year, I plan to work extra hard for your donations by not only playing a single game for the whole 24 hours but a game I normally wouldn’t go near, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for the PC.

If you notice the title, you’ll know this isn’t a game designed for the casual player. Dark Souls is balls hard, something that some gamers love it for and others hate it for. I’ve always respected this type of game and the masochists that consider it entertainment but I stay far away from it. I rented and tried it’s predecessor Dark Souls once and after the first boss, I knew it wasn’t for me. Playing this title (and it’s shoddy at best PC port to boot) for an entire day is going to be brutal, frustrating and a challenge indeed for me. In the event of technical difficulties with Dark Souls (which I plan to avoid with testing but you never know), I’ll be switching to Evochron Mercenary, a space exploration game that’s admittedly in a genre I much prefer but which is also known to be very complicated and hard to get into.

As if that wasn’t torture enough for me, I’m also going to be live streaming the entire thing so you can watch along and laugh as I undoubtedly and quickly start to lose my mind. I’ve never done a live stream before and the process of learning how this works has been quite a trip. The guys who do this all the time make it look easy. Beyond all the setup and testing, I’m going to have to do the entire event at my work because my cable connection’s crap upload speeds can’t handle it. Maintaining this little voyeurism show is only going to up the challenge of the day. My hope is that I’ll be able to chat with people both through Twitch’s text chat room and maybe even Skype but I haven’t tested that yet so no promises.

You’re welcome to donate as much or as little as you want, there no minimum but obviously, the more, the merrier. 100% of your gift goes to help kids at CHEO. I’ve already paid for the games and a subscription to the XSplit software I’ll be using to stream the event and WESA is kindly donating the office and the fibre Internet connection. You can donate on my Extra Life page with credit cards or PayPal. If those aren’t an option, please leave a comment with a way we can get in contact and we’ll work something out.

What’s that you say, you want even more? You sick sadist. Alright, fine. To add more fuel to the fire, I’m introducing stretch goals this year, a concept I learned from the way too many Kickstarters I contributed to recently. So what’s a stretch goal? It means that if I get a lot more money than I’m planning, I’ll take on the burden of doing another live stream where I will play another title front to back in one sitting. So far I have two stretch goals but I’ll add more if people really step up and go past the second one. Neither of these games are short so while neither will result in another 24 hour marathon, rest assured your money is buying you several hours of me suffering on video.

Goal #1 ($1,000) - The game will be Duke Nukem Forever. This game was highly anticipated when it was announced. In 1996. It ended up being in development for 13 years, killing 3D Realms, getting cancelled as a result and then being resurrected by Gearbox Software who eventually put it out in 2011. In short, what gamers got after a 13 year wait was a mound of burning garbage for $60. It was considered one of the worst big budget game releases in years. I’ve purposefully avoided this steaming pile and never had any intention to play it. If I have to, rest assured the show will be filled with hilarious snark.

Goal #2 ($2,000) - The game will be Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This is considered by many who would know to be one of the scariest video games ever made. Even horror aficionados like Patrick Klepek have had a hard time getting through it. I hate horror anything. Put on what’s considered a tame horror movie with all the lights on and I’ll be scared. Seriously, DOOM 3 freaked me out, that’s how much of a weak sauce I am. Playing through this will be an absolutely torture and will seriously likely cause nightmares for me. You’re in for a treat if you end up getting to watch me live stream it. I’ve been gaming for over 25 years and this will probably be the hardest thing related to this hobby that I’ve ever done. If you want some kind of idea, watch TotalBiscuit try to play it and picture me being way worse.

As you can see, I’ve taken the challenge of this event and turned it up to 11. I’m more than a little intimidated by the goals I’ve set for myself but I also like a challenge and never shy away from hard work. This is going to be tough but I’m super stoked to be doing it and I’m hoping the additions I’ve made will help secure a lot more money for a great cause. I’m really looking forward to it and I hope you can all help out. I’ll be posting more information here as things progress and once things get rolling, I’ll link to the live stream and if WordPress permits, you might even be able to view it straight from here. Thank you all for your help and let’s smash past those stretch goals!

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Please help some good people in desperate need

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 31, 2012

This is “out of character” for this blog but it’s for a good cause so bear with me. I have a couple of online friends named Zach and Hillary. They’re both in their early twenties, making do with the barest essentials and are among the nicest people I knew. I’ve never met either of them in real life (something I hope to change soon) but they are both wonderful and are textbook examples of how this world often has no heart and screws over good people repeatedly for no good reason. I’ve no intention of spilling their personal lives here but suffice it to say, I’m a guy who has dealt with a lot of bad luck and been screwed over in many severe and unfair ways over the years and what I’ve endured can barely hold a candle to the life that these two have had to live over the last couple of years. Despite it all, they continue to push forward.

As of today, their struggle got a lot harder. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they are now in danger of losing the home they are living in. They already lost one home before and moved to this one to keep a roof over their heads. It was supposed to be temporary and has become anything but and now they are at risk of losing that too. In the cruellest of fate twists, shortly after finding that out, Zach’s son (who Hillary is the de facto step Mom of) has been essentially kidnapped. He was sent on what was supposed to be a month long trip to visit his “real” Mom and now she is refusing to send him back, something she has apparently done before. They are looking into options but there is a chance they in addition to saving their home, they may also need to hire a lawyer to fight to get their son back.

I wish I could say that this was some kind of sick joke but it isn’t. It’s happening right now to some people who couldn’t possibly be less deserving of it. I spend a lot of time on this blog bitching about the games industry, Apple fanboys and Auzentech but now I am using it to make a plea for your help in getting these good, honest people out of a monumental bind. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know nothing of them or their plight. I totally understand not wanting to put money towards an unknown cause but dear reader, if you have come to trust me at all from my writings to date, trust me when I say that this is honest and Zach and Hillary deserve and need your help. I do not lend my name to things I don’t believe in, I believe in this. If you have the means, please consider supporting them via their ChipIn page. Unfortunately, WordPress won’t let me embed it in this post. You’ll be doing something good and directly supporting people who are in a bad situation for no other reason than sometimes the world is awful to those who just don’t deserve it. I hope that some of my money and this post will help them in some way to achieving the better life that they’ve already earned twice over as far as I’m concerned. Please consider giving what you can. Thank you.

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Don’t ever buy a product from Auzentech

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 27, 2012

Bad customer service is the rule and not the exception today. I’m a victim of it every day both personally and in my job as is most everyone else and like those people, most of the time I just have to suck it up and accept it as the way things are. However, my recent experiences with boutique manufacturer of sound cards (and other things) Auzentech Inc. has been so incredibly, mind-boggingly awful that I had to write something about it not only to vent but as a warning to anyone else who is planning to give this awful company any of their money.

I built a new gaming PC a little under a year ago. I use a good headset and discovered quickly that the mainboard’s built-in audio didn’t have enough power to properly drive it. I tried out a mid-line Asus sound card and wasn’t terribly pleased either but then found out about the Auzentech X-Fi Forte 7.1. This card uses Creative Technology’s well regarded X-Fi chip but has much better amps on it. It was well regarded both in reviews and on forums so I went for one at a cost of almost $150 after taxes. Until recently, I couldn’t have been happier. The sound quality was fantastic and it had all the features I wanted.

Then a couple of months ago, I started running into a problem where after extended play sessions, the sound would get very staticy, like you were listening to a radio that was out of tune. I did some poking around and discovered this to be a common and known problem with the Forte 7.1. The built-in heat sink is not good enough and it can sometimes overheat. This problem has worsened over time. In addition, the latest drivers made available from Auzentech’s web site will not install because they say the installation CD isn’t inserted (putting in the one that comes in the box doesn’t help). Several people said Auzentech has fixed the static issue with a new hardware revision and that setting up an RMA to get my Forte 7.1 replaced would solve everything. I’m never pleased with having to pay shipping to get someone else’s screw-up fixed but such is life. I created a ticket on Auzentech’s web site and waited for my RMA number.

That was six weeks ago and counting. No acknowledgement, no response, no replacement card. I have about a month left on the warranty and the time gets shorter every day.

I started looking around some more and discovered that many people going back as far as 2008 have had problems with Auzentech taking weeks to answer tickets and in some cases, never answering them at all. Apparently in their minds, actively selling premium products with a legal warranty doesn’t mean they have any obligation to honour said warranty. As usual, the useless tech press never mentioned this in any reviews of the product (save one from HardOCP that I missed originally), despite it being well known among users. The consensus I found was that Auzentech products are great when they work and don’t break often but when they do, you’re basically screwed. Not in my world, thank you very much.

Since the second week went by with no response, I’ve been on a quest to get a hold of someone, anyone from this company and get the replacement I am legally and morally entitled to. This has been neither easy nor fruitful thus far. Auzentech does not offer phone support and the only US phone number on their web site is a voice-mail only line. I’ve left multiple messages, none of which have been returned. I have not yet incurred the expensive to call the South Korea office but I don’t imagine I’ll get anywhere there either. I tried to join their forums but new accounts have to be manually approved by a moderator and mine never was. I did manage to discover e-mail addresses for their RMA department the company President Stephane Bae but so far, those have gone unreturned as well. I’ve tried to dig up more on this guy but other than finding out he once worked in marketing for another company that was at the same address until around the time Auzentech started, there’s not much out there. All of this has the feeling of a company that’s gone out of business but their phone number still works, their products are still being actively sold in stores and online and just this month, they made a news posting on their web site about migrating to a new server. They’re clearly still around, they just seem totally uninterested in honouring their warranties.

I’m not sure what to do from here. I’ve submitted this story to The Consumerist twice and been ignored (likely because this isn’t a big company they can publicly shame). From what I can tell, there is no real legal recourse I have for this other than suing which obviously isn’t fiscally practical for an issue like this. I’m considering replacing the card with another Asus model that’s in the same ballpark but it’s over $200 to do that and I won’t recover much of it by selling my Forte 7.1, which I would have to do at a steep discount because of its issues. I’ve asked the place where I bought the card if they have a different support channel but have gotten no response there either. It truly appears that there’s nothing I can do at this point, something I’m quite certain Auzentech is aware of. If anyone knows of anything else I may have missed to try to find out more information about the company or how to contact their employees, please feel free to leave a comment or let me know over Twitter.

I’ll post more about this saga if anything further develops but needless to say, I don’t think anyone should give this scumbag, fraud practising company a dime. If you are in the market for a sound card or anything else Auzentech sells, run, don’t walk away with your money. Don’t believe the useless tech press reviews, this is a company that knowingly sells products with design flaws and seems completely unconcerned with honouring the legally binding warranties they include with them. Whatever their reasons are for this, I don’t care. You took my money, you have an obligation to support your customers and if you can’t, you should stop selling products to them. I’m hoping this public shaming will cause someone at this company to crawl out from under a rock and provide me some kind of help but I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE: I got fed up with the continuing issues and after some research, decided to pick up an Asus Xonar DGX because I couldn’t justify the expense for the higher end ROG Xonar Phoebus. Ever since, I’ve been kicking myself for not buying one of these back when I built this PC. It cost about 1/3 as much, the drivers while not as elegant as Creative’s, do still offer a ton of customisation options (including a manual maximum volume cap which I’ve wanted and the Creative drivers couldn’t do) and the sound quality through my Razer Carcharias headset is fantastic. Beyond that, I have actually noticed a noticeable improvement in both my frame rate when gaming and my overall system stability. I used to get occasional blue screens (especially when resuming from sleep) that I blamed on my overclock and my monitors would also refuse to sleep because the system kept thinking an audio stream was open, even when there was nothing playing. Both problems have vanished with the Xonar DGX, meaning there was more wrong with the Forte than I even realised. I’m going to continue fighting to get this card replaced and if I can, I’ll be selling the replacement and sticking with the Xonar DGX. An Auzentech product will never go near a system I own again.

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Same Geek, More Bravado, More Brevity

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 13, 2012

In keeping with the title, I’ll try to make this brief.

Over the last while, I’ve been trying to figure out how to improve this blog, both in terms of having the time to contribute to it more and drawing in more readers, which is to say any at all really. I read back over a bunch of my past entries and discovered that they share a personal trait of mine that I’ve had since childhood and only recently started to manage in real life: I talk too damn much. My posts are less frequent than I’d like because it takes me sometimes hours to write the massive text walls that many of them were and I can’t start a post and not finish it in one sitting. I appreciate people with a fine attention to detail, but there is also something to be said for making the same point in fewer words and I’ve decided I need to force myself to learn that. I originally chose the name Geek Bravado because I like and respect people who state their informed opinions bluntly and unapologetically and that was my goal as well. However, one of my other failings is a perpetual fear of offending or even slightly upsetting anyone. While my posts were based in strong opinion, they were often written with softer language that made the point but with only rounded corners. I also wrote in a way that assumed anyone who read this blog didn’t know about or understand the background or ideas behind my commentary and needed it explained. I’ve realised that’s silly. If you’re coming to a site called Geek Bravado, then you’re either going to know what I’m talking about or are smart enough to know how to find out in short order.

It’s time for some changes.

I can’t guarantee that all my posts will be short (in fact one I’m brewing for the future kind of can’t be, though I have a plan) but I’m now going to strive to post more often and make my points faster. No lengthy backstories, no more 5 sentences to make a 1 sentence point. This way, people won’t be scared off or bored and it also gives me the freedom to write posts on my lunch hour or while waiting for dinner to cook instead of at the end of a long day. Also, when I feel very strongly about something, I’m going to start using language that is applicable to the tone of my true thoughts. That doesn’t mean that Geek Bravado is suddenly going to become not safe for work. The occasional bad word may slip in if I feel it conveys my emotions well but my real goal with this is to show how I truly feel, rather than to just state it softly and hope people understand my passion for a subject.

I’m making these changes both in the interests of trying to grow my readership but also as a personal challenge in my own journey of self-improvement. Though these sound like simple goals, they will be tougher than you might think with my personality type being what it is. I’m excited though and in the end, I think the quality of my writing is going to be better for it. There will likely also be some appearance changes coming too. Finding a better theme and maybe getting a logo made have been on my to-do list for a while and once I find the time, I hope to make things nicer on the eyes here too.

I’m looking forward to the future here and if you’re reading this, I hope you are too. Thanks for looking!

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