What year is it? · 5:44pm Apr 5th, 2014
Seriously, I have really lost track of time. Being busy sucks. I'm pretty sure it's a different month than it was the last time I posted something here, though, so we'll just go from there.
The first pieces of news worth mentioning are the websites I am slowly but surely working on designing for myself and Chris Bowling (SocraticBrony) to host our personal works and keep them more specific to us. Truth be told, I just don't like owing allegiance to anything I don't have to, so I continue to separate myself from the detriments of media control. Yes, I know this also means separating myself from the benefits of media control (AKA exposure) but I've gone this long now having quit being "popular," so big deal.
I'll keep you all posted as to when those finish. Hopefully it will be soon, at which point my monthly blogs here will probably stop. I'm trying to decide on which is more convenient for everyone at the moment: a website where you can simply read my stuff, and never need to register, doing the simple and easy anonymous thing... or a website with user creation and authentication that would allow me to work in more features, such as bookmarking my stories (so you don't get lost in them as an anon), posting comments, rating stories, and the like. Truth be told I'm not terribly interested in the rating thing myself, but it is useful for finding out what people have liked and have not, so I know better where to improve.
Regardless you would be able to "leave comments" as it were, though if I go the anonymous route it would be by email, and not via comments on the stories themselves on the site. Similar questions are posed for Chris' (Socratic again) website also. Let me know what you think.
I've done a lot of thinking on Visionary lately, most of which involved some major changes to the changelings (go figure). These changes transcend the changes I had envisioned initially, and hopefully they are all for the better and will deliver a more sensible and engaging fantasy for the readers. Nothing sucks more, in my opinion, than a world full of nifty mechanics, laws of magic, and the like that are just poorly explained or seem to come out of nowhere, so I'm doing my absolute best to make everything coherent, if not "realistic".
Another major problem pre-more-changes to the changelings was that my initial modifications to them made it actually impossible to make Malik one of them, and since I was super invested in Shroudbearer's story (but not it's execution en-pone) that would have been a major sacrifice for me to have made, personally, so I am glad to have found a nice way to work around it.
Expect much exposition when the story becomes a real thing. As always, I will try to perform it in an entertaining and useful way that doesn't just bash you over the skull with the inner workings of my world.
In lesser news, I have recently purchased a Chromebook. Some of you just groaned internally and are wondering why I bothered, but truth be told the silly thing is precisely what I needed to cover my gap in chapter production. See, at work I have little to no access to the internet, which means using google docs (the online kind), dropbox file sharing, and things of that nature are out of the question. So I end up writing in MS word, and having to e-mail myself whatever I was working on, which, by the end of the day, I normally do not remember to do, and then I cannot continue working on it at home, because I don't fucking have it and just... fuck.
Yes I could use a flash-drive, but that would be too easy and inexpensive.
The Chromebook is nice for me, because I can take it to work, create offline Gdocs and type away, then when I get home and it finds a wireless connection it just syncs them to the online Gdocs automatically, saving me time and making it easy to continue working from anywhere, which I very badly needed. So this should result in a boost in production, which I am excited for.
Anywho, that little tangent was just for the nerds who care.
The last of the news is that CoS hasn't moved forward lately, or at least not by any margin major enough to mention (points for alliteration). That hardly means the project is dead, but unfortunately life has a way of impacting the various contributors to the project at separate times in separate ways, making it hard to collaborate. The good news is that we've recently seen a rise in interest from some of the people we were hoping to get as contributors for various aspects, specifically the concept artwork bundle of the team.
It's not like my dropping his name would connect him to it for certain, but in case any of you know his work and want some hype, Io Kusanagi has mentioned in passing that he might enjoy working on the project with us, and that would be a godsend when it reaches that stage of development. So, even though I'm in charge of the writing and it's going to be shit, at least it will look pretty if Io joins in.
I think that's all the news worth talking about, unless you want to hear about how I've started playing Final Fantasy XIV and EVE Online again. Pretty sure you don't. Me too.
Have a pleasant month,
Aaron.
Ok... wait, what? I might not read every blog every author posts, but didn't you said some time ago that you're finishing with writing MLP fanfiction? Not that I'm not happy, but what happened? That wasn't April Fools, was it?
Whoa whoa whoa, wait.
You play EVE online?
*internet hi-5*
Also, consider rather than making a site with unique logins for readers, to rather use one of the multi-site comment systems, like the one EQD uses. Less hassle for everyone.
1983868
You play EVE too?
Look me up, 'brony2893'
1983820
No, I'm reworking Visionary as a separate piece of original fiction.
1983914 1983948
Oh. That's kind of... I don't know, good and bad at the same time.
More Visionary is good,
nothing of anything else is bad.
1983989 Nice.
YES! Another one of these wippee :DDD
Okay, as always, these are always interesting. I just don't really even have anything to say about this more than just yey and nice to know what's up.
luv u ♥
1983868
Yes I play EVE. You even commented on my blog eons ago when I posted the buddy link for people to play with me, lol.
In other news, I had forgotten about the silly mulitpost plugins. Good call for if I decide to avoid registration altogether. Couple that with "subscribe for email updates" and I can even separate the notifications out, too, which wouldn't be a bad idea.
1984045
Luv u 2 bb.
1983944
Played. Resubbed using a leftover PLEX just in time to get included in the memorial, but currently too poor to afford the subscription. Maybe I should stop spending all my money on ice cream.
1984080
My memory is like swiss cheese sometimes.