Aim for the Head

This is something that likely no one will care about but me, however I figured I would make a post about it anyway…

In order to cut back on spam I have set the blog to disable comments on any entry that is more than one year old.  Probably 99% of spam comments are made on posts from 2006 or older.  They all wind up in my spam queue for holding and deletion, but I’m neurotic and like to keep an eye on the spam queue for valid comments so I want to reduce the amount of garbage I have to sift through.

Anyway, that’s it.

Enjoy.

I am messing around with my theme today, so forgive me if it looks bad or broken.

I finally got around to picking a name for the blog besides “weblog.probablynot.com” … it is now titled “Aim for the Head”.  There could be many meanings or significance to this name, but I will leave it up to you all to decide what you want it to mean.

You may have also noticed, if you aren’t reading this with an RSS feed reader, that I have changed the theme as well.  It started off as a theme called Desert Grass that I have made a few changes to, most obviously are the rotating header image, the logo display in general, and the sizing of certain page elements.  And more changes are to come as I’m not 100% sold on the color scheme and a few other odds and ends.

As always… enjoy!

You might have noticed that since Hamlet 2 back on August 29th, there have not been any movie reviews here.  That’s because I have moved them off on to their own website, and that website isn’t ready yet.  If you are a crafty individual, you might find it, but I’m not going to officially link to it until I have finished the graphics and layouts.

So, stay tuned…

For a long time now I have been content with calling this place “weblog.probablynot.com” and leaving it at that.  But while I begin considering expanding my empire, I figured it was time to give this blog a name of its own.

In all likelihood, I will ignore every single suggestion made here… but I may not.

So, keeping in mind that I ultimately plan to spin the movie reviews (and perhaps the book reviews) off into their own corner of my domain, what name would you suggest for this blog?

If you want more info about me to go on, just ask questions and I’ll answer them as best as I can…

In 1998 I was playing Team Fortress with people I’d known and a larger group that had grown from my earliest days “online” dialing in to BBSs. At the time, I was hanging out in IRC chat on the GamesNet servers, mostly in the Disciples of Syrinx room. I had moved back home with my parents at the end of the previous year after successfully (in my mind) living “on my own” for a few years so that I could focus on school, doubling up my classes, and finish my four year degree in six years (maybe I hadn’t been so successful on my own). I spent my free time, and since I wasn’t working there was quite a bit of it, playing games and reading the .plan files of developers. Mostly it was the id software crew, but there were others. Blogging wasn’t so popular back then, but people did have websites, and game developers, especially in the first person shooter arena, kept up with .plan files. With college nearing its end and loving computer games, I had this idea that I would get into the gaming industry. Months later and many unreturned phone calls and rejection letters, I would set aside that dream, but at that moment, I decided to start maintaining my own .plan.

I did it in IRC at first, so the only people who could read it were people who knew to look and only when I was online with my mIRC client. Soon enough I moved it to Geocities. June 17th, 1998 marked my first post on the internet, and because I’m a pack rat and paranoid about computer crashes, I always kept spare copies of everything, so if you want, you can dig through the archives here and actually read everything from the beginning. After Geocities, I moved to my own domain, loadfix.com. If you try to go there now, it redirects to a .de domain that gives back a 403 Forbidden error. A year later I would move on to squadleader.com with dreams of eventually running an online magazine for first person shooters. I never did, and now that domain is a squatter’s hope for cash (a crap website placeholder of links doing nothing but praying someone wants to buy it). I would have kept squadleader but for one, I wasn’t playing shooters anymore after EverQuest took over my life, and the other reason is it turned out I didn’t own it. Sure, I registered it, paid for it, but my hosting company put everything in their name, so when I tried to switch providers, they kept the name. Thus begins the probablynot.com era.

To be perfectly honest, when I put my first ever posting on the internet, I never thought I’d still be doing it ten years later. In fact it didn’t even cross my mind to consider it. In one respect, its like keeping a diary, and now and then I’ll go back and root around through the old posts and laugh at myself, or shake my head, smile, or nod knowingly. However, unlike a diary, its out there for other people to read. There are times I’ve considered going back and deleting some of the old posts. When I migrated from Coranto to WordPress, I had the perfect opportunity to just lose all the old content, or pick and choose what to put back in, but I ended up importing all of it. Good or bad, I wrote it, its me, or at least was me at the time, and as I’ve written before, if you are happy with who you are, you can’t really regret your past because your past has made you who you are.

However, ultimately, my decision to import all the old posts came down to one thing, that I’ve been doing this, emptying my brain onto the Internet since 1998, for me. When people comment, or send emails, about what I’ve put out there, it feels good, but I’ve never done it for that. I always just wanted to put my thoughts down on “paper” but I didn’t want to hide it under my mattress or in a closet or behind other books on the book shelves where no one would ever see it, because maybe, just maybe, my words might affect someone else, or someone’s reading of my words might affect me. Do I sound emo? I think I sound emo…

Anyway… ten years… some times it just kind of blows my mind a little… well… here’s to the next ten years.

At some point during this week, once I’m sure none of my needed plugins will be broken, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.5.  This is an apology in advance for when I screw it up…

It does certainly appear to have a number of new features and fixes (read about them here), and I’m excited for it.  However, in the past, while bug fix releases have always gone smoothly, full releases have always taken down some esoteric plugin I had built my site around causing me to have to redesign the whole damn thing.  I’m hoping that’s not going to happen this time.

Even if it does though, I’ll work through it.  WordPress has been the best blogging software I’ve come across, so unless someone just blows them out of the water with cool useful features, it is here to stay.

The move has begun, and if you are seeing this message, you are at the new website.  I hope to begin my regular postings soon.