Site News
Testing a few things
If anybody even browses this blog, desperately waiting for me to do an update, you might have noticed some theme changes. My plan was to eventually ditch WordPress to a flat file blog platform but I never have any free time to code up something myself the way I want it. I’ve made some quick changes to the existing ancient template I’m using to kinda match the site a bit better (updated logo and push button on the side) and a few alignment changes for wider screens.
Sadly, this site is (should be) SSL only so I have no clue if older browsers break on it. Comments are also re-enabled for the time being, though there’s nothing of value here to comment (yet). The spam filter within 30 minutes kicked out a bunch of weird tech support scam stuff with Indian IP addresses and emails, so who knows how long this will last. I really want to ask where are humans online anymore.
12 years in with this blog and I never really accomplished what I wanted to do with this, which was just vent and provide some other random content, like movie and book reviews. I’m a little sad at this, but I have nobody to blame but myself with it. I have a bit more motivation now to do something seeing that I don’t use any kind of social media so I don’t have an outlet, but we’ll see how long this lasts. I might be opening up publishing to a few other select people to post random stuff too like what was originally planned with my website ages ago.
In other news, I am in search of a few ideas on how to handle book publishing online. My original plan was to just dump text and PDF files on my site here for anything I write, but with the web as dead as it is outside of the social media walled gardens and spambots, I’m not sure I’d get any hits or visits. It basically removes my drive to do anything. My older stuff will still be html only in a sub page I’m going to be calling “The Basement” on my site but that’s a summer task when I have a weekend or two to toy around with things.
In regards to this, I’ve been picking up litrpg audiobooks on Audible lately while I travel for work and I like how a lot of amateur writers seem to have gotten quite a bit of attention, though I don’t know where any of these people started. I do see a lot in common with them, one of them grandstanding and making me realize that extreme political stuff needs to be removed from books as they’re a bit of an escape, and another with the frequent word order use. Example of this is an author using “x frowned” or the constant use of the word “juncture”.
Anyway, enough for now, I do have something I bought the other day that I will be doing a review with and posting on here whenever it arrives from China. I’m hoping that will be the first start to bringing this place back from the dead.
Changes coming up
I’ve decided that after having to reset this place a handful of times so far due to getting nailed by zero day exploits coming from Russia and China that I will be moving this platform off of WordPress to something else. I seem to do more janitorial work on the backend than I do actually writing anything because of this platform. I’ve yet to decide on what platform, I even debated returning to just a static layout that I had previously on older projects that this blog came from. Likely if push comes to shove, I’ll write my own platform, although my web design skills are over 10 years out of date now.
In the past 6 months, this site has gone two server migrations in the process. Currently we’re running on a machine running Devuan Linux. I wasn’t a fan of the way Debian (or some of the other mainstream Linux distributions) was going and after toying with OpenBSD for a while I decided to try and stick to something I’m familiar with. I will be rolling out SSL on this server and make it mandatory within the week likely.
Also looking back at some of the stuff I wrote myself, I think I might revisit a few topics, mainly since my views on a few things have changed since then.
Also, anyone have forms of motivation to finish a 12 year old book that’s had its entire plot designed out but not fully written?
Not forgotten…
It’s been almost a year since I posted any updates on here. Between moving and setting up for a new job, I haven’t had the time to sit down and come up with original content like I planned on. Hopefully that will change soon. I have a bit of a priority to spend some time working on my book in the next few months so I’ll finally be getting around to doing an update to that.
I have a good guideline I want to follow that’s 90% done, however the hardest part I’m struggling with is out of all things, the beginning. I have a few other things I might post about here soon that aren’t really rants and not stupid things like me going off on license plate frames.
On a side note… Arguing with environmentalists is just like arguing with someone who doesn’t think evolution exists, it seems like their brains are wired exactly the same. (More on this later)
Curse my inability to draw
So, being done with college now and having a somewhat more predictable free time schedule, I decided it’s time I attempt to dedicate more time for my very neglected projects.
I’ve never been quite too fond of the current theme I have setup, I wanted something a bit more… neonish, dark but somewhat scifi for a theme. Older versions of this site that I never got off my butt to finish always had a black background with either blue or green text, attempting to mimic the old monochrome monitors of the early 80s. I still want a variation of that, but themeing WordPress seems to take up a bit of my time. I have a prototype theme I think needs a bit more work, so I’ll clean it up soon and launch that as the primary theme.
Next is the logo. I’m a horrible drawer, personally I haven’t done much besides cad drawings and schematics in probably 5 years. Stuff for fun even longer than that. As a kid, a few friends and I used to draw these really embarrassing (in my eyes now) comics depicting humans fighting various alien species and some times humans of the opposite sex or different countries. It was something that led to me being made fun of by people, which I honestly didn’t really care about at the time since I thought they were wonderful. That stuff dropped off in middle school, when I started to gain interest in doing fanfiction and began to teach myself about computers. I rediscovered the comics I drew as a kid a few years later in high school when I was trying to find leftover school supplies. On the back of one of the comics was a plot guideline for the entire series we had planned. That guideline became the rough edges for my incomplete story Space Junk.
As for the logo, the idea is a variation of some of the old Strangeness Networks logos I made on paper back in high school when this site was set up to be an “alternative media” website. It never took off because we all lost interest a week in. Basically, the site was supposed to display a different logo every 24 hours, usually something unusual. One logo was the sites name drawn with a smoke trail of a Saturn V rocket (yes impossible). Another was with frogs. Some were kinda plain, for example one was a schematic drawing for a building but instead drew the site name, whereas some were super unusual as they involved measuring equipment or kitchen utensils. My idea for a logo was a combination of all of the above, each random object representing a letter for Strangeness Blog. I was thinking of a rocket drawing an S, the T being a fork and spoon, the R as a ladle, and so forth. I know I did want the L to be a ruler and the G a extension cord. Think of it like the Google logo when it changes for special occasions. Also, if I could figure out how to integrate the lochness monster for the “ness”, that might be awesome, who knows?
I purchased strangenessblog.net the other day, and I intend to move the site over to that. What happens to strangenessnetworks.com, I’m not sure yet. I intend to set a 301 “Moved Permanently” message for any webcrawler that hits this blog to be sent to the new domain. I don’t intend to do away with the old domain as all my emails go to it, but I’m debating having a go with possibly doing a media hosting site a year or two down the road again. For now it’ll meet the same fate as bigbiteindustries.net, mainly a redirect to this blog. I don’t feel right letting that domain go even though I have no idea what to do with it. I do offer subdomains for strangenessnetworks.com if people are interested, for now.
Speaking of Space Junk, yes, I will actually upload chapters soon. I actually finished rewriting Chapter 1 the other day. A weakness I seemed to notice with my writing from 2007-2008 was it was all damn dialogue, so you had little to no idea what the characters were seeing or experiencing, just what they were saying. I actually have a complete chapter guide, plotline and everything done for one story, and a transition into a second story, but that’s another blog post. I really wanted each chapter polished enough to the point that I don’t have to go back and revise anything as much so I could possibly make a pdf of the entire at the end with little modification and make it look much like a real ebook that can be read on a tablet.
I was in a debate of finishing a old fanfiction series I started writing before Space Junk. I did revise several sections and started uploading them to fanfiction.net a few years ago, but stopped right before the good part. I might possibly work on that a bit for the heck of it. I read back on it last week and noticed some continuity errors that kinda are nagging me now, which is why I’m now considering it.
Strangeness Blog turns One!
Strangeness Blog is now 1 year old. As a way of telling myself to get off my ass and actually post something, I have posted the prologue to my story “Space Junk”.
I wrote this chapter last July, and then forgot about it until the other day. Hopefully from here on out, I’ll at least try to roll out a new chapter a month or so.
I made some changes to my plot line a bit from the previous revision. This was necessary since I’ve kept the sane time and location when I started writing it back in 2007. It was set to take place in the year 2014, but seeing it was a year away, that doesn’t seem plausible, so I set a generic time somewhere within the next twenty years or so. In addition, I’ve pulled a bit more current events in relation, since I want to make the time period seem a bit like the beginning of a very doom and gloom situation.
I’m also in the middle of developing a nice looking theme for WordPress at the moment. For someone who hasn’t touched HTML in the past decade almost with the exception of using very basic tags to do posts on sites elsewhere, getting anything that looks nice seems to be an uphill battle. My goal is to try and get a retro looking theme (think the old monochrome green monitors with a melting text logo). Since my spring break is in a few weeks, I think I’ll try to spend some time working on it.
