The Future of Tales of a Scorched Earth

I have not played a game in exactly seven months.

Well, that's not entirely true. I should probably specify that I haven't played a console or PC game in seven months. I've gamed on my Treo 650 and my video iPod. I spent all of 15 minutes with Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. But does it count?

To be honest, I don't really miss it all that much. Life is busy with the little one, and I now know that time actually can pass faster. Changing responsibilities at work and at home has left me with very little spare time, and even less of a desire to sit at my computer and have to install and learn a game, and possibly squeeze in a play session. It doesn't feel right.

Nevertheless, I keep coming back to this place and looking at the last time I updated it. While I like writing for the Cultural Gutter, I don't really consider those "updates" in the purest sense, because I'm writing for someone else. After two more articles I will no longer be writing there anyway.

I recently felt the urge to write about games like I used to, but I haven't played any that provide suitable inspiration. Well, except perhaps MoonFighter, a devilishly enjoyable exercise in navigating extremely basic physics. It is on my Treo.

I missed the holiday season, and the post-holiday season. My sister and her finance have a Wii that I haven't touched yet (but desperately want to). Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is on Xbox Live Arcade. Computer Games Magazine has died a premature death and I never submitted a feature. I don't recognize the shelves of my local electronics retailers anymore. I have no idea what games people are talking about. The only newsworthy item I can relate to is the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which made me laugh because I had written a preview for the game to be posted on my site in 2003. It has been getting decent reviews. I may even play it.

I don't want to abandon Tales of a Scorched Earth completely, but I'm having trouble approaching what I'm going to do with it. I always said I prefer writing substance than linking and quoting, and that's not going to change. I have also come to the realization that I liked writing about games more than I did playing them, because it is a form of entertainment that is still emerging and being shaped more by the people that play them than the media that reports on it. I have also come to the understanding that this is an integral part of my life, and harder than I thought to separate myself from. I hope to be returning within the next few weeks as my life approaches a semblance of equilibrium.

One thing I've learned from doing more reading than writing in the past seven months: bad writing isn't just a boil on the ass of game journalism. It is everywhere and it is inescapable. Good criticism is mostly forgotten or buried under the piles of readable, yet completely innocuous commentary that people are paid for. As ridiculous as it sounds, weblogs are still providing better entertainment be they inane or thought-provoking. As much as I hate the idea of them, they are a fair reflection of society at large. They are unconventional, they are brutal, they are sometimes (?) completely misinformed - but they approach the sort of verisimilitude you would expect from a crowd of like minded individuals. At least one thing hasn't changed.

a warning about backblogging

In the past, I didn't think much about back dating the occasional post a couple of days because I felt it should have that particular date on it. This website has always been a catalogue of my thoughts as they arrive, so using that method only seemed natural. Some readers may have even noticed. However, aside from writing some full length reviews for Clickable Culture, I spent the better part of the Fall in an unproductive spree that resulted in an unplanned hiatus of sorts. In between Real Life™, and not wanting to do much else after coming home from work except turn my brain off (read: World of Warcraft), I have amassed a pile of old entries that were started with the best of intentions and never finished. These aren't just reviews either - they were timely posts that I just never got around to putting online. I could have easily just linked the stuff as I do in my sidebar, but at that point I may as well just give up. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it's about god damned time I got things back in order.

So over the next couple of weeks if you find an article or review you swore wasn't there the last time you checked, you're probably right. To everyone who's still reading, thanks for being patient.

Site Maintenance: now with TypeKey protection

I apologize to the few people that comment here on a regular basis, but in order to add to the conversation you must now register with Movable Type's TypeKey service.

I thought that upgrading to Blacklist 2.x would be enough, but in the past 48 hours my site has been hit an unusual amount of times - all of them trying to post comment spam. Movable Type's automatic moderation of irregular comments is fine, but it's becoming impossible to keep up. Waking up to a stack of about 200 new comments that have to be added to my spam blacklist and then deleted is not something I want to keep doing. I'm sure my webhost isn't too happy about absorbing this excess traffic either.

I am hoping that this is only an interim fix, as Jay Allen posted on the MT development blog, and a more robust solution is developed. Movable Type is an excellent piece of software, and after seeing 3.0 I have no plans on switching. Like Windows is the target of viruses, the large install base of Movable Type is clearly the ripest target for the craven propagators of comment spam.

Site Maintenance: Upgrading to Movable Type 3.121

My quick and dirty upgrade of Movable Type seems to have been successful. I'm especially excited about using MT's implementation of Category heirarchies, something that Wordpress has been doing since the beginning.

The process was pretty easy, and took just over half an hour to get things up and running again. I would recommended it for anyone still running 2.661. SixApart's licensing scheme isn't as draconian as some would make it seem; as long as you're still running your single-author non-commercial blog you can get the full version for free. Most importantly, though, the deluge of comment spam I have recieved was finally put to rest by an up to date version of Jay Allen's most excellent MT-Blacklist plugin, an invaluable application in the face of even the most cleverly written, iron-clad URL exclusions.