Red Ring of Sadness

Microsoft, you sly devil. Playing with my emotions. Your fine Xbox 360 provides me with joy, then suddenly, the blare of static emanating from my TV tells me the inevitable. My 360 has caught the (not-so-rare) “Red Ring of Death” virus.

This of course means that I’ll be without my entertainment device for at least three weeks while I send it off to Microsoft’s 360 burial grounds and have a new console returned to me. Quite sad. At least I still have my Playstation Two and Star Ocean to keep me company in these long, lonely nights.

As an aside, I think I pissed off the spambot people with this post. I logged in today, and found 42 (coincidence?!) new spam messages in the Akismet queue. I’m sorry spammers. :(

Looks like I’m on track for at least three days of my “one post a day” project. :D And I know I’ll have a post tomorrow (Anberlin / Taking Back Sunday concert), and possibly a follow-up on that Sunday. And just to clarify one “day” (thanks to my weird sleeping pattern) is roughly from 10AM to 3AM, right now. Which may account for some weirdness when considering “days”.

Thoughts

There have been some things lately that have made me think as to why I keep this thing around still. This thing being my blog.

First, I get no visitors. Really. I don’t. None. I can just take a look at my stats to see that I might get 5 visitors on a good day (that takes out of consideration articles that have been submitted to StumbleUpon and get a modest page-viewing). It shows up again when I look at my web host’s control panel and see that I barely use two gigabytes of transfer in a good month, and most of that is from one-shot things that I host on files.galador.org. I realize that not much of what I have to say is that interesting, but the stats are really disheartening.

I think that leads to point number two. I don’t make updates to this thing as much as I used to. Though it is up somewhat from Fall/Winter ’07-ish, it’s still barely half of what it used to be. I don’t know. I just don’t have as much drive as I used to to update this thing. And another thing is that I haven’t really done much interesting stuff lately to write about. I haven’t had a reason to make a huge WoT (a Wall of Text, for those of you out of the know) like I used to. To quote Andrew McMahon, “My life has become a boring pop song, and everyone is singing along.”

Thirdly, as a recent comment made me realize, people are assholes on the Internet. They don’t give a fuck about your life. They’d rather sit on their ass and make fun of you. To the commenter: if you read this, then know that I actually enjoyed your comment (for various reasons) I could have easily said, “What an asshole.” and deleted the commend from the moderation queue, but I didn’t. I’ll be honest, I did give it a thought, but I decided to give a fair representation of whoever happens to read this thing. I also took the time to respond honestly, and hope you take the time to read the response.

Fourth, it makes you feel really shitty when one of your friends finds out you have a blog, and they say something like, “What, you actually write stuff on there? What do you put, ‘today I used my computer?’ in a condescending tone. Really shitty.

So yeah. This article almost sounds like it belongs more on Xanga/MySpace/et al than a self-hosted blog as it’s all self-pitying and shit, but here it is. I’m not ashamed to speak my mind and bitch. I should really learn to do it more often. I think my life would improve a lot if I weren’t so passive. But that’s a story for another place.