I’ve been making a lot of changes to this site (and, resultantly, to several other sites) over the past couple of weeks, and it’s all been a bit spread out, so here is a handy roundup:
First, Anatomy of a Game is now Anatomy of Games, with a dotcom at the end. Since launching that site, two new Super Metroid entries have gone live, covering the first and second portions of Ridley’s lair in lower Norfair and the first bit of Tourian. I’ve actually written and prepped all 19 entries of The Anatomy of Super Metroid at this point, so those will be going up over the coming week, beginning with the one that went live today. Please look forward to it.
Secondly, Metroidvania.com still exists, and I plan to begin developing that into something more than just an image gallery soon.
Thirdly, before I do that, I’m finally going to wrap up the Talking Time fundraiser obligations I’ve been dabbling at producing over the past six or seven months. Sorry those have been so slow in coming along; life keeps getting in the way. I know there’s been some doubt about Talking Time’s continued existence since I don’t use it anymore – it’s gradually degenerated into exactly the sort of toxic kind of forum I established it to have a refuge from, the inevitable laws of the Internet exerting themselves once again over mere good intentions – but as long as it’s paying for its own existence and the occasional good thing comes from it, I am happy to let it tick along like the brutish little time bomb that it’s become.
Finally, I’m still not done separating content across different sites to insulate you poor, delicate video game fans from the dire thuggery of comic book and television commentary. I’m no longer treating my blog as a front page; instead, these different sites are just content repositories dedicated to specific topics to help strengthen their focus, and social media serves as the hub. Pick your poison:
- Twitter (also includes the usual weather complaints, food photos, and aspiring-dad humor that Twitter is known for)
- Facebook (doesn’t feature any fancy extras)
- Tumblr (includes random reblogs of stuff I find amusing or stupid enough to repost)
- Google+ (god bless you if you understand how this works)
I’ll probably set up a standalone RSS aggregator of my own for you traditional types who still believe in the dying concept of a WWW-based front page for websites. I mean, someone out there is still using My Yahoo!, right?
Plus of course I still work at USgamer and contribute to Retronauts and, if the second issue ever ships, RETRO Magazine.
And… that’s about it. OK, that’s it, cowboy, get back to work.
You are a busy man! Keep it up!
…but don’t forget to leave some time for yourself. ;)
Thanks for including an all-inclusive RSS feed. I know I will use it.
Nice stuff. Yours is one of the few sites that I check regularly. (With the help of those automatic social media thingers.)
One thing that would be nice is that if the tumblr reposts were excerpts instead of the full post. I have some folks who do it that way although I have no idea if they do it by hand or automagically.
Should be possible. I’ll look into it.
I’m a bit of an outlier. I miss the days when people would just have their webpage, which consisted of a big largely unsorted wad of everything they ever do on the internet, either in its original form, or collected from elsewhere. If you’re willing to constantly link everything from a ton of different places though, I suppose it’s easy enough to just bookmark one of those.
I am usually happy enough just lurking around this site, reading your stuff without actually contributing anything — which is hardly the most productive approach, admittedly, but there you have it ;)
These latest changes have managed to lure me out of hiding, however, because there are some things I would like to point out:
First, the obvious stuff: This is your blog/website/whatever, so you get to call the shots. If that means spreading the content across several outlets, fine. If it means collecting it all in one place, as you used to do with this site, fine too (better actually, but that’s just my personal opinion). So far, nothing new, right?
Here’s the thing, though: It seems almost unbelievable to me that someone would take offence at the odd post or two being about something different than videogames, and I am not exactly sure this kind of narrow-mindedness should actually be encouraged by separating your content into more sites.
You seem to be quite sure that people come here (or to your other sites) mainly for the subjects addressed, and while that may be true in part (I wouldn’t be reading this if it were a gardening blog, for example), has it occured to you that both YOUR writing and YOUR selection of topics are what actually draw people in? For the record, I couldn’t care less about stylish dresswear, but your article on seeing the way you dress, among other things, as a way of maintaining a bond with your late grandfather was still an amazing read, even though I wasn’t all that interested in the subject per se. Likewise, your posts on music, TV shows or what have you help people to discover things or get new perspectives on things they are already familiar with. Sure, your articles on the anatomy of retro games or your ponderings on various games series are “the shitz”, but the other stuff is sometimes just as interesting — and sometimes even moreso.
In this day and age, the various tools and platforms on the net give us ways to filter content and to search stuff we think is relevant for us. But like Googleshng above, I think it’s actually the – sometimes unstructured – juxtaposition of various topics that actually makes things interesting. If all we find on the net is stuff we expected to find in the first place, where’s the fun in that? And good writing is always worth the time to read, mostly regardless of the actual subject ;)
So yeah, what I am trying to say here – in a rather roundabout way – is that I’ve been reading your stuff because it’s well written and because that would sell me on the stuff I am not all that interested in as well. Now you’ve changed around the way you organise your stuff, as is your right, and I’ll still keep reading all (or most) of it, but I actually liked it all just as much, if not more, before.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I really wanted to get this out of my system. Keep up the amazing work, Jeremy!
Cheers,
KS
@krautscientist I appreciate the thought, but traffic stats don’t lie.