John Zeitler

So my grand experiment on not using this blog as a free billboard is coming to an end today. Did I learn anything from it? Oh yeah. Did I affect anything because of it? That’s a bit harder to gauge.

Let’s start with what I learned. Thing is, I cheated a little bit; I wound up having to drop the generic bit on my micro-blogging service because I realized I used that more as a direct communications tool than I initially thought. Most of my posts on that service had to be ‘branded up’ because they were recommendations to friends and so forth, and going generic would defeat the purpose of the message. I went as long as I could, and tried to keep things generic afterwards when they weren’t replies (such as the miniature painting progress), but that wound up being more or less a failure.

Although, I did realize that there’s a distinct difference between word-of-mouth support for a product or service, and false-grassroots “movements” in support of one. It’s probably unjustly cynical of me to presume malice or monetary impetus for anyone talking up something they like on the web or in real life, but sometimes it’s really hard to tell. In general, though, if someone makes a forum post about something cool they found, they’re not likely to be getting paid for it– particularly if it’s someone you know or trust. (We’ll set aside the issue of whether or not you can really “know” or “trust” someone you’ve only met online for now; I think everyone knows my stance on that, but as with everything it’s not a universal experience.)

Advertising in and of itself is not an evil thing; it’s just been so grossly misused and misapplied in modern society that it can get very overwhelming very quickly. To a certain extent I can sympathize with the views of folks like the Adbusters or their comrades in culture-jamming, even if I think they’re being just a tad bit too radical in their approach. It’s easy to say “f*** it all” and want to just withdraw from the commercial world altogether. Then again, that approach is dangerous as well.

Ads serve a twofold purpose. Their primary purpose in the world today is to garner sales for the product or service depicted in the ad (we’re assuming that the product or service actually is depicted in the ad– I’m looking at you, scuzzy pharmaceutical companies). However, their original purpose, and one which is more or less relegated to a side effect these days, is to inform the populace that a new product or service is available, and to tell the public about it. One can draw a distinction, then, between ads which serve primarily the first function– let’s call them “hypes” (as in Don’t Believe The)– and ads which primarily serve the second function– call those “dopes” (as in The Straight).

Hypes are everything negative associated with advertising. They’re glitzy, flashy, attention-grabbing or in some cases attention-arresting, and offer little to no substantive content. What content a hype may contain is either deceptive, misleading, or in some cases completely false. In computer terms, they’re viruses: they hijack a user’s computer for fairly small slices of time at a time to self-propagate and perform a detriment to the user.

Dopes are the more benign usage of advertising. They are detailed, specific, subtle or even understated, and tend to err on the side of the uncomfortable truth. A dope winds up being obviously an ad, but one that sometimes gets sought out by a consumer. In computer terms, they’re the documentation for some underused command-line arguments on a program: you don’t need it all the time, but when you do seek it out, it tries to present itself as the best solution to your problem, whether or not it actually is or you happen to have the problem it solves.

Modern ads can’t be so clearly and neatly divided into these two categories. How do you define, for example, a particularly pleasant earworm of a jingle? What about a dry, deadpan ad for a slimeball ambulance-chaser portraying himself as legit? Furthermore, the thought that pervasiveness equals success has caused most ads to shoot for viral status over being informative. Witness the titillating ads for a particular domain registrar that pop up every Super Bowl; how many average football watchers are going to give two rats’ asses what a web domain is? It gets worse in that hypes tend to be viral in a very literal sense, “infecting” consumers to the point that they themselves, either knowingly or unknowingly, start spewing hypes: commonly manifested as fanboyism.

I’ll freely admit to starting this month in anger and outrage, but the irritation was mostly with myself. It seems like I was constantly regurgitating the hype mill from some source or another without adding anything meaningful to the commentary. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my decision on what to talk about and what I didn’t want to talk about was itself a form of commentary, and that most of the time, when I made a post about something commercial, I felt the need to make at least some brief (ha ha) remarks on it. A lot of my irritation was being directed at the aftermath of a few product revelations, or in some cases lack of revelations, that had been going on at the end of January, and as a result I found myself defending a position that wasn’t even mine to begin with. It turns out, though, that taking this month to reflect on my online activity and what I was posting did me a world of good.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m going to start talking about commercial interests again starting tomorrow; I’ve already got the next three days’ worth of posts lined up, and that also includes two Game Clear notices (I’m skipping doing Save and Quit for those games). The thing is, though, you can count on the fact that all of what I discuss here is my genuine opinion. I’ve only been paid to promote something online once in my life, and I’ve made it abundantly clear what that thing was (also, my obligation to do so is probably long since expired) and didn’t proverbially pee in the well; so, honestly, this blog is what I actually believe. Warts and all, perceived fanboyism and all, it’s my opinion. I’ll try not to jump to the defense of companies in comments on other blogs, of course– if I see some flagrant stupidity or fanboyism, I still feel obligated to point out logical fallacies and inconsistencies at the very least– but I’m not going to censor myself just because I’m not being paid to promote something I genuinely like.

As a final little coda to this, remember that buyout plan I left open in the initial post? Yeah, nobody bit. I didn’t expect anyone to, of course, but it was worth a shot.

Welcome to 2010, ladies and gentlemen. At least three hundred and sixty five posts from now, we’ll be counting down to 2011.

I realize that I’ve kept largely quiet since around the end of October. Whatever I got sick with knocked me right out of commission for the better part of November, and kept me from being terribly productive through into December. Only yesterday did I really feel I was ready with some of the projects I’m working on that were literally due today; the most prominent one (being the launch of Frangible Time over at Linguankery) was in essence a compromise, given that I still have yet to finish the story (but am planning on doing so– I just have until July now instead of a packed holiday season). I feel bad about it, but I have to let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies. Not all of them– I still have to take pride in my work– but I have to understand when I’ve reached a physical or mental limit.

The past two years, either on the old (now defunct) TFO.net or on this blog, I made promises at the beginning of the year to do daily posts, to reprise my fairly good run from 2007. Needless to say I didn’t live up to it. Still, I am again making that effort, and hopefully I can hold myself to it. The biggest hurdle will be preventing myself from posting “nothing new” or “I’ll have a big post tomorrow”, because having those kinds of posts being up just discourages me. What I should be doing is encouraging myself to post something creative every day. It’s not like I’m not a creative person. Just fantastically lazy.

I still intend to be pro-actively lazy, though; my challenge to finish fifty games in 2010 still stands and starts… oh, now. What’s got me a little more psyched for this is the fact that I really think I might even be able to pull off yet another Gamerscore Double-up. It’s a pretty nifty goal to shoot for, given that I’d need 24690 points by the end of the year, but it’s not my primary goal. I’m making a change to the Game Clear rules for the 2010/50 challenge, though: I can count games I’ve cleared before if and only if I haven’t cleared them within the past five years, and the clear time on the save file is over twenty hours. That list obviously includes anything I’ve already claimed a Clear for in the three years I’ve been tracking them, and on top of that I’ve got to account for everything beaten in ‘05 and ‘06 as well. Funny thing is, I think I managed to post about those when I did them, but didn’t formally track them. I’d wager that there’s roughly 120 games off-limits to me… which is fine because I probably have easily that number on my stack.

That’s another thing. The first quarter of this year is positively rank with games coming out, most of them having elected to skip a head-on confrontation with Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, and/or New Super Mario Wii. Thus, a bunch of games I was initially hyped up for are now being released in a period where I have to scale back my purchases, either for the sake of my shelving units or my wallet. I made up a list of what I consider my must-have games within the next three months, and came away with eight as a generous number and five as absolute will-not-misses (FF13, Pokemon SoulSilver, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Ace Attorney Miles Edgeworth, and Sakura Wars Special Edition, if you were wondering; just missing the cut, pending reviews, are White Knight Chronicles, Glory of Heracles, and Ragnarok DS).

I still have a Reclamation List, though that project’s revival is made both easier and harder based on the subject of the list: retro games! I’m planning on making 2010 the year I start reclaiming and re-collecting games I had for the pre-Playstation systems. For obvious reasons this is easier, because they’re less expensive and far easier to come by the vast majority of them (particularly because there happens to be a flea market right near my house, and a second game dealer has moved in there). Of course, it’s harder than the old one because not only are the games I had pretty damnably obscure, they’re obscure and old, meaning they’re going to be far harder to find at decent prices. 80% of them will likely run me a song. The remaining 20% will run me ragged; it already is, because my quest to find an Atari 7800 is fairly fruitless so far.

I’m also still going to write, code, and do the video podcasts here and there, so it’s not like I’m going to be sitting here on my thumbs all year. Once Frangible Time is done, I have a pretty hot idea for continuing the story set forth in A Civics Lesson; I have a zillion figures to assemble and paint before I have even the beginnings of one Warhammer 40K army; and then there’s the pesky business of mere survival.

Strap yourselves in, folks. 2010 is the year the accelerator makes contact with the alloy.

Just to give you folks a heads up: I removed the Twitter feed from the front page because, as it turns out, it interferes with the instant-notification I have set up for Echofon. Basically, the reason that it doesn’t show up sometimes on the blog page is because there’s a limit to the number of times it can be called from anywhere, and that number is somewhat small. Additionally I had no idea that I was getting enough hits to warrant hitting the rate limit (~150 an hour), so I’m thinking there has to be a better way to do that.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to look for that better way right now… I’m still writing Frangible Time, work is getting busy as I near a deadline, and then there’s the usual holiday stresses. So, for the foreseeable future, it looks like the Twitter feed is off the page.

Later, folks. I’ll try to have a better update sometime next week.

I realized this afternoon that I am making things much, much harder on myself in terms of getting ahead in writing up Frangible Time. Therefore, I’m probably going to go into total lockdown mode for the duration of the writing. I should have been in this mode since the first of November, but I wasn’t; and then once I got sick I used that as a crutch and an excuse to not write. This irritates me beyond the capacity for reason.

Until further notice, I’m suspending regular blog posting, Twitter updates, forum participation, gaming (both offline and online), and, well, pretty much everything that isn’t writing. This also means that, despite my best efforts, I’m probably going to have a lapse in posts on Linguankery now that A Civics Lesson is done. I’ll post status updates on that site, and once I’m closer to a respectable goal I’ll post here again. (I have to finish FT before I can start posting it there, because I refuse to start posting something I’m not going to finish.)

That’s all. Sorry for the abrupt and terse tone, but it’s like a band-aid. Best to pull it off in one quick motion. Catch you all in a couple weeks.

Sorry, folks. I have an early morning tomorrow and had a very, VERY long day today. This week is pretty much shot, just for the record, so I’m going to just call this a mini-hiatus and get back to you all on Monday. Sound good?

I promise, these aren’t too abysmal. In fact, this first bit is sheer concentrated awesome.

(Okay, so the Halo “aria” could use some work.)

The second thing, though, is a bit more self-serving. Most of you folks know I’m on a big productivity kick, and part of that means getting as much information available as passively as possible (read: lazily). To this end, I’ve set up another panel on my GeekTool desktop to show me which podcasts in my regular rotation have not yet been listened to. You can see the general effect here. You also get a glimpse at my incredibly boring schedule.

Anyway, that’s really it– tomorrow I’m going to do more coding work, or possibly the D&D campaign review I keep meaning to do. Oh, and as you can see the Twitter feed is back online on the main site page. Catch you all later.

Upon arriving home, I discovered that the Twitter widget in the sidebar was malfunctioning, blasting out my extended tweet stream rather than just the current status. I apologize for the inconvenience; once it’s working normally again, I’ll restore it.

Beyond that, I’m off to bed… catch you folks later.

There’s been a bit of gaming news here on the blog this past weekend, and that’s because I was making a concerted effort to actually accomplish something on the gaming front– you know, so I don’t feel like I’m spinning my wheels. It helped that I completed a game I thought I would be stuck on for a very long time (I’ve never been terribly good at flight games with the exception of Star Fox). Anyway, pretty soon I’ll be back to making at least weekly blog posts, if not more often. Not sure exactly when that will be, but it will be soon. ‘Till then, folks.

Oh, and AC6? Awesome.

Folks, I think I need to take a break from writing and blogging for a bit. I know, I know, it’s the same as it always is with me– I start something and it never gets finished. I’m coming to the point where I need to decide what it is exactly I should be focusing myself on first, and going from there. At this point it could be writing, blogging, programming, or not “producing” anything at all. It can only be one of those, though, and unfortunately the rest have got to be scaled back drastically if I’m going to get anywhere. I need to take some time to figure out which one I’m best at, and which one I should do going forward.

Since the novel posts are automated, those will continue. Everything else is on hiatus until further notice.

Thank you for your understanding.

Folks, I don’t advertise too much on my site, particularly not for A Civics Lesson. Granted, that may be why it’s garnered almost no attention whatsoever, but I think there’s another reason: it’s really hard to get caught up. Fortunately, I’ve managed to change that aspect.

You can now read each chapter in linear order as they are completed.. I recommend spending the next couple of days getting caught up through to the end of Chapter Five (it’s a doozy); Chapter Six will be done in a week or so, so you can catch it there then (or start here, now with the “next segment” tag), and from there I really recommend using the RSS Feed to stay current.

I’d also appreciate it if you folks could spread the word about the book again. Thanks.