Reviving the Ol’ Personal Blog

Is this blog alive again? Who can really say?

Truth be told, I let it get so out of date that it got infected, so I had to just trash the whole install and start fresh. In the process, I was backing up a few things, dug up a few other things, and remembered that sometimes I do actually like to write.

So right now it’s really just an experiment. I have a few things I’ve already written that are ready to publish, and a few drafts that are just about done:

  • Already live is a recap of some podcast guest appearances over the last… uhh… three or four-ish years. I tweet about them when they come out, but after that they pretty much disappear into the ether, so it’s nice to be able to collect them here and re-promote them.
  • I have a post in the works that acts as a follow-up to my “Amateur Podcast Production Tips, Tricks, and Techniques” article, this one instead focusing exclusively on interviewing (on podcasts, not for jobs!). I drafted it… uhh… it looks like almost exactly two years ago. I should finish it!
  • I have what I think is a fun article looking back on Final Fantasy XIV already written that at this point I’m just gathering screenshots for. It looks back at A Realm Reborn and my time learning and growing with the game. It was one of those articles just started poking at when I needed a distraction, and suddenly a pretty long piece of writing emerged.

And then there are the experiments I’m running. I leave all of the technical stuff on Kanzenshuu to Heath, so here I’m all on my own customizing themes and such. A few things I’m toying with:

  • First thing’s first: you should be running uBlock Origin. I am. That said, I’m running ads on the blog. I really don’t get much traffic here, but I figure I can learn how it all works, customize the ad displays, etc. If anything happens to take off, great, I can make a couple cents off it. (There are still no plans to bring ads to the actual main Kanzenshuu website, so don’t worry about that.)
  • I have no idea what I want this blog/site to look like, I don’t have design chops anymore (did I ever?), so it might look wildly different every time you visit.
  • Every once in a while I’ll toss something out on Twitter, it ends up getting some traction, and I wish could have had a little more space to expand on it or otherwise provide a little more context. One example in recent memory was our Animal Crossing save corruptions right as the game hit the Switch. It would have been great to archive that in a more longform kind of way. (I don’t know that this belongs here in the “what I’m experimenting with” section, but it didn’t fit anywhere else.)
  • I’m recategorizing a bunch of posts and adjusting the menu to make things a little more clear/obvious. I’m going to keep all my old “vgconvos” writing (and, begrudgingly, podcast episodes), but that branding is just confusing at this point.

Anyway, it’s wild going back and reading some of the stuff here. A decade doesn’t feel all that long ago to me; our podcasts and news coverage from that era on Kanzenshuu sound in tone and presentation as if they were made today, but some of the crap I was writing here was just wooooooooooow who even WAS that guy. I might clean up some of those articles (namely the “Why Episodes of Bardock Makes So Much Sense“, “The Great Canonical Debate“, and “Why the Frieza Spelling Drives Me Nuts” articles) — they’re all perfectly good evergreen content, just written kinda… well, extremely sloppily, and it’s a bit embarrassing.

If you’re reading this, cool; if you’re not, well, you didn’t just read that.

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