#oneaday Day 894: Clip Show

Clip episodes are TV shows’ way of making a low-budget episode and not having to worry about being the slightest bit creative.

After 893 previous daily blog posts and having just been on my Couch to 5K run for the evening, I’m knackered and can’t think of much to write about, so I’m going to do my very own clip show. In the process, I will highlight some posts from the past that you may have missed. There are likely to be a lot of these, as this blog currently has 953 posts on it (893 of which are, as previously mentioned, posted at daily intervals) so you would be forgiven for having not seen some of them in the past. (If, on the other hand, you have seen each and every one of these posts because you’re good enough to read them daily, first of all, God bless you, and second of all… uh… thanks.)

I started blogging on this site back in July of 2008. I’d tried keeping a blog on a couple of other sites in the past — here’s one from 2005 (composed almost entirely on a Nokia N-Gage, believe it or not) and here’s another from the year prior on the subject of my experiences as a secondary school teacher. (The latter was a spinoff from a series of emails I used to send family and friends while I was training to be a teacher.) I did used to have a self-hosted blog on my own personal domain, too, but that is long since defunct. This ol’ WordPress site here is probably my most long-standing web presence that is still actually updated. Which is nice.

Prior to starting posting things daily… well, things were pretty much the same as they are now. I’d post on a range of topics from video game-related business to board games, the death of a beloved family pet and even trying my hand at music review blogging. (The linked post there actually led to me being specifically invited along to another band’s performance a short while later — the “review” in question is here.)

I’ve spent some time in curious virtual world Second Life over the years, and in February of 2009 I wrote a couple of posts on the subject — firstly, on the subject of virtual worlds in general, and secondly on the subject of how your on-screen persona can affect your own self-perception. You’ll doubtless notice some parallels with my recent post on why I play as women in video games. I still find Second Life fascinating, sleazy elements and all, though I haven’t paid it a visit for a very long time. Some of the people in that crazy world provided great comfort to me in lonely periods and just writing this is making me feel a bit bad that, to them, I must have just upped and vanished one day. Perhaps I’ll return sometime — though whether it’s as my male “real me” or female “total escapism” avatar I couldn’t say! I certainly used to enjoy the whole “CG artwork” aspect of it, where I’d take pictures of things in the virtual world and then mangle them beyond recognition in Photoshop. (A great way to learn how to do crazy things in Photoshop, incidentally.)

In April of 2009, I revisited a game I used to play on the Atari 8-bit: Alternate Reality: The City. When I originally played it, I had no idea what a role-playing game was or what I was supposed to be doing. In 2009, I was armed with The Internet and a map I’d printed out, so was much better-equipped to go on some adventures. This post chronicled one character’s ill-fated expedition into the cheerily-named city of Xebec’s Demise, and I like to think it gives the reader a good feel for what this unusual game is all about.

A month later, I remembered that the “pictorial story” idea I’d done with Alternate Reality was rather fun (if time-consuming), and decided to give it another shot, this time with The Sims 3. Remembering my previous post on evil in games, I figured it would be interesting to see how messed-up it was possible to make a Sim. Very, as it happens; the many and varied mundane adventures of Lars the Bastard will attest to this fact.

You may remember the spammers’ craze for sending bizarre narrative emails with unsubtly-embedded pornographic exhortations within from around September 2009. I took it upon myself to compile some of them and see if anything coherent came out. Nothing did, as you can see.

In December of 2009, I discovered Warhammer Quest. I also discovered the joy of writing down the emergent narrative which comes about during a game session of a theme-heavy board game such as Warhammer Quest. The result of this initial experiment was The Adventures of Count Kurt von Hellstrom and Company, a saga which hopefully will continue someday — though I haven’t had the chance to play Warhammer Quest since writing that post, I don’t think.

And in January of 2010, I started posting entries daily. But that’s another story. And I’ll compile a selection of my favourite One A Day posts for tomorrow’s entry. I bet you can’t wait.