Nothing to see here...

Thought I'd take a look at Blogger again, especially with the onset of Google+.

Nothing really going on, but I'm bored at work and I'm just playing with the new interface here. I'd been thinking of using G+ as a blogging tool, not that I regularly blog, but then thought I should come back here for my blogging activities. If people are interested in reading about my adventures in game design they can do so without me shoving it into everyone's stream.

I may or may not start a new blog for Glitch when I start playing it. It looks very neat.

Probably more blog later. This is just a random rambling post.

Freelancing

I guess I'm starting to take this writing stuff seriously again.

I've started freelancing over at TextBroker. It's technical writing, but the pay is more immediate than the mythical residual ad revenue from HubPages. Yes, pay. Honest to goodness dollars. Clients post articles that they need written, and you as a freelance writer claim these "offers" for a certain price per word. So far I've made about fifty bucks and I've only been doing it for a few days. It translates to something around five or six dollars an hour right npw, but you've got to start somewhere, and it's not bad for a supplemental gig that I can do during the downtime at my real job.

So far I've written about Six Sigma certification, ladder bookshelves, carnival party games, FedEx's Walk This Way child safety initiative, and country style hallways. I've got an article on Trivial Pursuit waiting for me to get to tomorrow morning. As you can see, there's a wide variety of articles available - I even saw one on how to buy a sex toy for your girl. I didn't take that one. It's really interesting, though, and I'm enjoying gradually learning new things. I'm only taking stuff I feel comfortable writing, but I'm pretty good at research, and as I write more, I learn more which in turn allows me to write more to learn new things and so on and so on. I'm having fun with it.

I'm also getting ideas for new HubPages articles. At this point, the HubPages stuff is on the back burner. It's stuff to write when there's nothing biting over at TextBroker. Up front money comes first. I can always build the residual income articles in between.

It would be nice if I could get in a groove with this and build a career in freelancing. It's not the most creative of work, but it's interesting and something I do well. I see it as a continual supply of writing exercises. Technical writing can only help my creative writing.

Time for bed now. More writing tomorrow.

Victorious!

I have just returned from battling The Monster for hopefully the last time. I just need to find its horcruxes now to dispose of the thing for good. But aside from clusters of roots, the blackberry bush in the back yard has been removed. I already have plans for that area. I want to put a bench there and make it into a pretty sitting area.

We never did get around to mucking out the garden areas. I guess we'll do that next week.

I thought I had more for this blog post, but I don't.

Blogging in Bed

I love being able to blog in bed. We have a tempurpedic, which is pretty much the Cadillac of beds. So while my fiancee is off at a bachelorette party (not hers), I'm having a wonderfully relaxing night. And after having "one of those days," I need a bit of relaxing. Beer, pizza, World of Warcraft, and playing with my iPad in bed = a wonderful time.

I'm starting to get into the HubPages thing. I've set up two accounts, one for me and one for everyday life in the house, called the Ordinary Couple. The OC is where I'll post the beer reviews and various self help stuff, like caulking a window and how not to grow a blackberry bush, for example. The Crifmer account will have game stuff and personal essays and creative writing. I'm working on a couple of short pieces to put up. I may also put up my roleplaying game on HubPages for free while I get artwork and format a pdf version. It won't have the custom dice, but I'll include equvalent tables, and maybe do up a pdf of papercraft dice. It's got a long way to go before it's suitable for public viewing, though.

I also rethought the Upgrade cards for Galaxy Corporate. It also makes logistics a bit easier, too. Not that means anything to you, dear reader, but I don't know why it hadn't occured to me before.

And just when I get to the lounging in bed portion of the evening, my fiancee calls asking me to meet them at the VFW. It's a good thing I took my time and enjoyed my beer rather than drinking my usual three beers in an hour. Two beers in two hours is a good pace. And I won't really be able to drink because I'm driving.

Well, off to have a good time, I suppose. Maybe I'll bring the iPad and blog from the VFW. I won't be able to post it until I get home since I don't have the 3G, but that's all right.

Now where did I put my pants?

Blogging at the Bar

Sitting at one of our hangouts, the 101 Pub, watching the Yankees and blogging. I love my iPad.

I'm really just writing this to rub everyone's face in the fact that I've got a pretty good life. Yes, that was mean.

I dug out a lot of my old writing from the archives in the basement, trying to find something decent to put up on HubPages. My estimated earnings from the Google ads so far is 58 cents! I'm making the monies! Yay! I found a couple things that I might revise and put up on HubPages, but most of it sort of embarasses me. It's typical high school writing, and most of my college stuff was sort of tossed off since I didn't have a lot of time to write all the stuff I had to write. A few things have potential, though.

I started a second account for various reviews and various observations of coupled/married life, called An Ordinary Couple. Yesterday's gardening adventure inspired the first article: An Ordinary Couple vs The Blackberry Bush. I've decided to get rid of the Monster. I'm not sure if the first round goes to me, or turned out to be a draw. Next time I'l wear my denim work shirt, though. I need some armor against that beastie.

Now I'm writing this on the patio out in the backyard. It's beautiful out and we dusted off our rocking patio chairs. To digress, Mom bought us a really nice patio set as a housewarming present (along with a couple of matching chairs for herself) back when we bought the house.

Anyway, we decided to wind out the day relaxing in the back yard with some beer. All in all, a nice day.

Testing

Just checking to see if Blogsy is back to playing nice.

I guess it is.

Yay.

I thought I might make this my general/game design blog, but it's not playing well with my Blogsy app anymore. Despite what I said earlier, I might just go back to WordPress. I'd rather not be shackled to a computer in order to blog. Writing them offline (and not having to cut and paste to post) was rather nice, and crossposting was very easy.

So unless I can fix the issue, I'll go back to WordPress and let this one fall by the wayside.

Meanwhile, I just published my second article on HubPages. I've got a couple more ideas for articles, and then I'll see where I go from there. I want to do a couple "game design workshops" building off the racing game examples I used in the Game Design 101 article.

I can never end posts to my satisfaction, so I'm just gonna stop because that's all I have to say for now.

Just a quick post to sort out my "I have too many blogs" issue.

Since I already have a general blog and a Crifmer Creations blog on Blogger or Blogspot or whatever they're calling themselves these days, I'm going to put the WordPress blog on hold. I'm not deleting it yet, but I don't see the need for the duplicate blog.

I love this Blogsy app, bee tee doubleyoo. Makes blogging very easy. Now I just need to make my posts interesting and I'll be all set.

Also, I broke my glasses. Just one of the earwires on the frame, though. Nothing a little glue can't fix.

Untitled

We cleaned the house today. Mostly. Well, my fiancee mostly cleaned the house. I went out and bought snacks and beer. I did some vacuuming, though.

My brother and his fiancee are coming over later to hang out and play games, thus the house cleaning.

I discovered today that using the mobile version of Google Docs sucks. Safari can't really support the full desktop version of Google Docs, so I'm a little out of luck for now if I want to edit those docs on my iPad. Unfortunately, I want to edit those docs on my iPad.

I've given in to the cloud computing era, and I put all my stuff on Google Docs now. I just get the writing done, and then convert it to Word or whatever when I'm ready to edit and do cool formatting. It makes it easier to work from home or the office, and I no longer have to carry or email the document back and forth. That's how I wrote the HubPages article, and how I'm writing the next one, but I just discovered I can't do it sitting on the couch in my living room. I need to go boot up the computer instead. So I'll just blog about it.

Sherlock Holmes is on HBO. Never seen it, but I hear it's not bad.

I had a few ideas after my first article, so I at least have a few game design things to write. Maybe I'll get some more ideas after that, and there'll be enough content for a site or something. We'll see, I guess. I'm not sure I'd review games, but maybe a deconstruction or two if a game has a particularly interesting mechanic to it.

One of the things my fiancee and I were talking about was a beer review blog, mainly so that we can keep track of what we've had and liked and didn't like. I'm going to start another account on HubPages for this. Who knows, maybe people will find it useful. Like everything else, I'm just doing this for me, because it's fun, and if something comes of it, that's awesome.

Which Blog?

So I downloaded this new app called Blogsy.

It's pretty cool.

Right now, I'm blogging in my uber-comfy bed on my iPad, and unlike the WordPress app, I can publish this post on both my WordPress account and on my Blogger account. So this begs the question: which account do I use?

I started the WordPress account because I got the WordPress app, but now I can use the iPad for Blogger, too.

But Crifmer, I hear you ask, couldn't you have used the iPad with Blogger anyway via Safari? Well, yes, I answer, but it's not nearly as user-friendly as using a native app. For instance, with an app I can see what I'm typing a lot better. And with Blogsy, I can drag and drop content like pictures and video right into the blog post and format easily. Not that I've done that yet. This is only my first post with Blogsy.

But I am going to make an effort to blog more. It's funny, talking about blogging seems to be my number one topic in my blogs. How I'm not really a blogger and never know what to talk about. But I think having an app that lets me write and save local drafts to be published later will help a lot. The WordPress app was paranoid about being connected to the internet, and the one time I tried to write offline, it ate half the post in a nervous fit.

My renewed interest in blogging comes from a recent writing spurt I've been having. I broke through some writer's block and started work on my (latest) novel again, and that's been going very well. It feels great to be writing again, even if it's something rambly like this. The other day I stumbled onto the content sites HubPages and Squidoo, and yesterday I wrote my first article for HubPages. According to my brother (a soon to be Master of Writing at Rutgers University), I should be blogging. So I'm warming up and rambling. I don't know that I'd be able to sustain a regular blog, but I enjoyed writing my article, and I'll try my hand at some more. Maybe I will find that I have enough in me for a blog.

But writing this post was fun, anyway.