Merry Christmas or whichever winter light festival you and your loved ones choose to celebrate, and a Very Happy New Year, dear Hypothetical Audience, see you all in 2019 to continue our adventures!
—Ndro
Tag / more blogging
On Tumblr & the Woes of Automoderation
So it looks like Tumblr is royally screwing the pooch (possibly bad choice of words) over this “blanket ban on adult content” thats going on over there right now, which seems to have left the site determined to drive a wedge between the service and it’s user base. While the circumstances are different, somewhat depressingly this has revealed its routes in a trend that is common across the modern social media orientated internet, and is simply a new reaction to an existing problem.
On Continuing
Excuse me a second as I blow the dust off my blogging engine will you? Ahem. There we go.
Hello, hypothetical audience, it has been such a long time hasn’t it? I figured, since this fully armed and operational… I mean URL’d up blog is actually getting some intermittent content from me once again I might as well hammer keys to circuit board and actually blog again, but more on that later. First, since it’s been such a long time since I did this outside of fiction, how are you all?
Continue reading →
On a Lack of Ideas
I’ll level with you, Hypothetical Audience, I have absolutely no idea what to write this week. Total Zip. Part of me wants to write about the past weeks events and their ramifications, part of me wants to avoid the subject entirely and write something entertaining, but on either case I’m not feeling anywhere near enough inspiration to actually come up with anything substantial, and especially not enough to do justice to current events. So here I am, on a winter Sunday afternoon just typing whatever comes to mind in a bid to come up with something. And it royally sucks, if you ask me. I started doing this on a regular basis to both get into practice with writing deadlines and to try and get a constant stream of inspiration flowing, and this feels like a bit of a failure on both counts. It’s especially grating when I know I do have a steady stream of views from all over the place, so presumably I’m not the only one reading this. Right now, I’m blaming fatigue, as I’ve not been sleeping too well the last few days and it’s left me a little… vague, for lack of a better word.
Anyway, that’s the situation, and why there’s not a lengthy post this week. Really sorry about not having anything, but hopefully there’ll be some improvement next week, if nothing else I have some fiction resting in my hard drives that just needs proofing and polishing before unleashing on the world. I surmise I’ll be revising my technique and time management in future to prevent this from happening again.
Until next time, folks
—Ndro
—Nope, still nothing 
On Shared Universes and Marvels
Hello Hypothetical Audience, did you have a good Christmas-solstice-whatever and New Years? Brilliant! But now we must face facts, accept that 2015 has now occurred and get on with things once again. So, for the first column of the year I thought I’d share some thoughts I had while watching films over the break. Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching an awful lot of films that have come out of the Marvel film studio, and for the most part they’ve been very good (the only dud I’ve seen so far being Iron Man 2, which was merely a passable filler), and they’ve been attempting to do what the comics have been doing since time immemorial by tying all the characters and events in to a single shared universe. This is a departure from how this has been run previously, mostly due to the fact that all the licences are now being held under a single studio rather than the mess that previously existed, allowing for multi film-, and even franchise-, arcs to exist. This is certainly the first time something like this has been tried with such a large scope, however it may not be as good a thing as it sounds, depending on how it’s handled, and I shall tell you for why after the read-more-thing.
On Being Inordinately Busy This Week
I’ve had something of a busy week this last 8 or so days, so going to have to take one off. Sorry guys, but normal service should resume shortly and I’ll be in orbit again next monday.
Until next time, folks
–Ndro
–Genuinely surprised I managed to last 10 weeks before resorting to this
On Smart Watches
As ever, technology marches on. Just take a look at how things were at the turn of the century compared to now, and then go back even further and contrast with now. Within my own lifetime, a paltry 25 years, consumer technology has gone from clunky CRTs, beige computers dominated by command lines and the internet being a niche oddity to sleek, flat touch screens, silver tablets with intuitive GUIs and the internet dominating modern life from how we talk to how we shop. This process will keep going whether we like it or not, with new things coming out of the woodwork and then its up to us to figure out what to do with them. And one of the latest bits of technology to present itself to us is this weeks subject: The Smart Watch.
On Going Forward
Hello my hypothetical audience, did you miss me? I ask not really expecting a response, as in well aware no one reads this stuff, but nonetheless here I am once again trying to make a go of this blog lark. Lucky us.
The reason I stopped after such a barnstormer couple of months was, unfortunately, the sudden onset of paid employment. The upside was that I could actually live at affordable means again, downside was the relocation, loss of spare time and constant tiredness that comes from early mornings. Needless to say blogging was not forefront of my mind for the last twelve months (not to say I’m not grateful for the sudden change in luck). Of late, however, I’ve been trying to get back in the writing game, since of all my various hobbies and interests that’s the one that keeps drawing me back after all the years. Which brings me nicely back to here.
To keep things interesting and keep my skills sharp I’ve decided to make this blog thing a regular deal for the foreseeable future. Every Monday evening GMT, barring two weeks off at Christmas, I’ll endeavour to write something here, be it my usual rumblings (the “On [subject]” stuff), any fiction I happen to write or maybe some media reviews and anything else I can think of to keep things fresh. Either way I’m going to be getting into the deadline lark for better or ill. Getting into good practice, see? And hopefully as time goes on this’ll help me improve any of the skills I need for the writing thing.
In addition, I’ve also decided to try, though less rigidly than the above, to write a thousand words of fiction a week too. I know that a professional writer is supposed to be able to do that a day, but I’m also doing a 8-4:30 job at the same time, so cut me some slack. Again, this is to sharpen the old skills and get my insane creative flair out there. Some of it I’ll publish, some of it I won’t, it depends upon what it is, why I wrote it and if I can get it proofed. It’s also a convenient cheat for the “once a week blog post” outlined previously, because I’m clever like that. As always, Anything I do decide publish will likely be here, on DA and/or Weasyl, although some formats may preclude one or the other depending on what I cook up.
I’m also planning some other changes for the blog. First and foremost a domain name will be purchased, mainly to avoid over reliance on a “.wordpress.com” address. Not entirely sure what it’ll be yet, but I have a short list drawn up, so shouldn’t be too long before that happens. After that I’m considering adding a seperate blog, or index or something exclusively for my fiction works, just so I can put it all under one roof and have somewhere to put more precious works up without the dubious copyright status of some art sites. Perhaps this’ll lead to a proper website around the blog, but that’s far off at the very least.
Either way, I finally have plans for all this stuff, which is either exciting or terrifying, I haven’t decided yet. We’ll have to wait and see how it pans out over the coming weeks, won’t we? The fun starts next week with some musings on the nature of fandom I’ve been wanting to write down for a while now.
‘Till next time, folks,
–Ndro
–Have I ever mentioned I hate the phrase “Going Forward?”
Ndro's Adventures in Reality 