Wednesday, January 01, 2014

State of the Blog 2014

Another year down, another decent time to look at how things have been going chez Ziggyny's blogs. This makes daily post number 1024 in a row. I apparently missed thinking about number 1000 but 2^10 is a decent replacement. Woo!

Star Trek has been down for the count for almost a year now and I don't think it'll be coming back in the short term. SNES is still going strong and I'm happy to keep it running. It's going to be 8 months or so before I hit a game I'm really looking forward to but I don't recognize all the names so maybe there's a hidden gem in there!

The Final Fantasy marathon has stalled out and that makes me sad. The HD remakes of Final Fantasy X and X-2 are scheduled for release on March 18th. I _really_ want to play those and I'm only a few games away from FFX so I'm going to kick things into gear to get those knocked out in time for the 18th. I don't have a PS3 or a PS Vita but Byung mentioned a while ago that I could probably borrow his PS3 when the time arose. If I do that I'll want to play X and X-2 one after the other to minimize the time I need the PS3 which means I should consider playing the games between those 2 in the interim... There are only 3 such games. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Wow, coupled with the bookends of FFX and FFX-2 that's a pretty great 5 game lineup! Ok, time to get back to the Chocobo Dungeon...

Top Ten Favourites also fell off the rails a year and a half ago. I think part of the problem there is I started just playing all the SNES games so posting about them felt wrong. But it's going to be a decade before that finishes up... It may well be time to resurrect that too!

Bridge posts are back, and I'm liking the one per week rate in terms of how often I post about it. It feels like not enough bridge though. I played some bridge at Andrew's yesterday and felt super rusty. Oh well. If only there were more time in the day to play games...

Blog stats remain a real annoyance to me. Blogger continues to fail miserably even when I know it has the numbers. It has a nice graph with a month by month comparison of site visitors but it skips around stupidly. Dec 2007, Jan 2008, Feb 2009. Actually, it works exactly like that for every year. It advances the month and year after December and again after January. So I lose basically all of 2008, 2010, and 2012. If only someone at Google could do something about that to fix it... I can't compare 2013 to 2012, but it's about doubled what it was in 2011. Woo! It doesn't even look like it's all spam bots either since my number of spam comments feels like it's gone down.

It's funny, but I actually feel like I've had less to blog about now that I don't work. I didn't really have the option to play games on break or while running scripts at work and I spent about 2 hours per day in transit. That time on the bus and the minor downtimes at the office meant a lot of extra time thinking about games. Thinking about games is how I get a lot of the post ideas, especially ideas about numbers to crunch. Now I'm in the state where I could sit down and crunch damage numbers for League of Legends or I could just play League of Legends. Now the answer is generally to just play the game. But I used to not be able to play the game at work, but I could sure look up stats and formulas and think them over on the bus. More time to game, less time to think? I got to spent more time browsing the internet for Path of Exile builds while out in NB with a bad computer than I seem to get here. Maybe I need to find a job so I can read more gaming websites? Eugh.

So posting every day feels more like a chore than it used to. But not so much that I actually want to stop. I know if I let up even a little it'll all fade away and that's not cool. 1024 posts in a row is not something to give up on lightly!

Anyway... That's how things are around here. Here's to post 1389 in 2015!

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