Tag: Update

Well, technically not post-vaccination since I got the Pfizer vaccine, and I need a second shot of it in three weeks or so, but it’s definitely a start.

I just wanted to give a brief summary of what kind of writing activities I will be up to in the next two months, both here and on DeviantArt. I have two ideas for major essay posts. I’ve wanted to write a post detailing how being on the autism spectrum affects me for a while now. I feel that it’s important to share my story to maybe give other potential readers out there, be they neurotypical or otherwise, perspective on where exactly I’m coming from.

I’ve also become interested as of late in comparing different anarchist schools of thought to see which ones I like best. I’m personally biased towards anarcho-communism since that’s the one I currently know the most about (aside from anarcho-primitivism, which I’m not really a fan of). Still, I’m very interested to learn about other philosophies on the libertarian socialist front to see what they have to say.

Of course, those are likely to be very research-intensive subjects, so I definitely won’t be able to get both out before the beginning of May, which is when I plan to roll out a new yearly project: the Birthday Retrospective. My birthday is in May, so I figured I’d give myself a present by doing a retrospective on a media franchise that had a big impact on me at some point during my formative years. What’s this year’s retrospective going to be about? You’ll have to wait until May 1st to find out. It’s a surprise!

Finally, there’s the matter of what the coming months will hold for my DeviantArt account. I haven’t posted there since I uploaded my Melonheads story sometime around Valentine’s Day. I plan to change that shortly, as I have made it my goal to upload the first part of my Divine Conspiracy pilot before I get my second vaccination. That might take a while, as I’ve had many ideas for changes to the opening scenes ever since I first published the manuscript for a college writing class three years ago. The good news is that I feel the manuscript gets better as it goes along, so there will likely be less need for major changes as it goes along. Stay tuned on my DeviantArt site for more info.

And that’s pretty much everything I have to update you on at the moment. You can probably expect the autism piece sometime before the end of this month, and I’ll likely be getting to the anarchism ranking list after the May retrospective. Have a nice spring, and please, for the love of God, get yourself vaccinated so we can get this virus under control!

So, remember how I’ve kept going on and on about how I’ve wanted to join social media so I can promote the blog? Well, I finally did it! I’ve joined Twitter and DeviantArt.

So far, my Twitter feed isn’t really much to look at. The only original tweets I’ve made are threads dedicated to showcasing my work on this blog. Most of the others are retweets of some Youtubers I like and scientific articles and animation related things. I haven’t thought of anything really original or witty to say as of yet, but rest assured, I’ll get there eventually… maybe.

As for the DeviantArt, I thought that my first post should be a story I wrote for a creative writing class about the urban legend of the Melonheads, which is basically my telling of their supposed origin story. I keep you posted on Twitter as to when that will be coming out.

As for what you should expect on this blog in the near future, I have a few ideas for posts regarding my religious beliefs. The first will probably be a post examining my relationships with various religions, including Christianity, neopaganism, Taoism, Hinduism, and others, to show how my beliefs compare or contrast.

The next post will be one I’ve been eager to do for some time now. A while back, I read a book called Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed, written by Chad Meister, which examines several philosophical explanations for the existence of evil, secular, or otherwise. I thought it would be fun to rank the book’s explanations from least to most favorite.

That’s all for now. All I have left to do is add the SumoMe app to the blog for you to access my social media accounts more easily. I hope your celebrations for Biden’s victory, and the holiday season, are as joyous as ever. Just remember that COVID is still a thing, and don’t go too crazy, alright?

Hello again, dear viewers.

I just got back from vacation. Don’t worry, my family and I didn’t travel far. We only sent a week in a campground in the same county we live in. I’m pretty sure COVID will be knocking at our door anytime soon. But enough about stuff in my personal life. We need to talk about where I’m taking this blog in the near future.

First, I want to join more social media sites to help spread the word about the blog. I already have a Pinterest account, although I have yet to figure out how to post my blog posts there in the form of a “pin” as of yet. The only other social media app that I feel comfortable joining is Twitter. Sure, Twitter mobs are a thing I’m a bit paranoid about, especially considering my far-left political views and how Jack Dorsey seems a little too comfortable sharing his platform with alt-right demagogues. However, between that and Facebook’s history of privacy invasions, data collection, and political manipulation, I think Twitter is the much safer bet here.

I also still intend to join DeviantArt sometime in the near future so I can share my fiction writing, especially the stuff I have completed on The Divine Conspiracy so far.

I suppose I should also talk about what kind of blog posts you can expect to see in the near future. There are quite a few ideas I have, so I think I will list them all in bullet point format:

• A blog post detailing my religious beliefs (it was partially my questioning about the nature of God during my college years that inspired The Divine Conspiracy in the first place)
• A post based on the book Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed by Chad Meiser that examines several explanations (secular or otherwise) for the existence of evil in the world. I thought it would be fun to rank the options presented from least to most favorite.
• Maybe a post going into how being on the autism spectrum has affected me
• You might also expect a few posts debunking myths related to certain hot political topics of our time, like man-made climate change, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.
• Related to that might be a few posts debunking conspiracy theories like JFK’s assassination, 9/11 Truther beliefs, anti-vaxxer myths, etc.
• Similar to that would be a few posts dedicated to showing scientific explanations for ghosts, things we could be mistaking for UFOs, reasons why cryptids like Bigfoot, lake monsters, and others probably don’t exist, etc.
• Finally, I have an idea for an ongoing series where I talk about certain songs that have left an impact on me. As a person who loves music from many different genres, expect a lot of compositions to be discussed.

Of course, this might beg the question of where I might find the time to do all this. Previously, I said that I planned to post once a week, usually on Saturday or Sunday. However, given that I hold a steady job that keeps me occupied for about eight hours three days of the week, I have come to realize that is no longer feasible. Therefore starting at this point, I declare that I will post on this blog every ten days, equating to three blog posts a month.

Three shall be the number of blog posts per month, and the numbers of blog posts per month shall be three. No more, no less. Four posts shalt thou not expect, nor shalt thou expect two posts a month, excepting that thou then preceedeth to three. Five is right out. One the third blog post is reached, being the third of that month…

Sorry, had to get that out of my system. Anyway, I hope that leaves you with a better understanding of where this blog will stand going forward. Have a wonderful rest of your summer, wash your hands, wear a mask, and for the love of God, do not vote for Trump in November!

Yessir, it’s my birthday today! As of today I have been on this planet a full quarter century. 25 years, my friends! But you don’t care about that I imagine. You probably want to know where the hell I’ve been the past month.

There’s been quite a few things hampering my writing muscle these past few months. For one thing, I’m having a bit of trouble fitting much writing time into my work schedule. It has become rather painfully clear to me how pitifully underdeveloped my time management skills are. Indeed, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on YouTube as of late, perhaps more than I should.

Of course, writer’s block has had a lot to do with it as well. I decided that the next post I was going to do after the Midsommar review was a post detailing all the reasons why Donald J. Trump is the worst president in the history of the United States. However, I found myself at a loss as to how to approach it. Like, how many of his sins should I include? Which ones should I focus on? The sexual assaults? The defrauding of charities? The attacks on journalists? The naked racism of some of his statements? His comforting of white supremacists? His complete unwillingness to confront Russia over the election meddling? There were times when I even considered scrapping the Politics category on this blog entirely, mostly because the research that would be required for it seemed daunting.

I eventually decided to retool that piece into a simple overview of my political beliefs, specifically how my libertarian socialist ideology differs from the authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union and how I believe that anarchism is the only way forward as capitalism slowly starts to collapse under its own weight.

I also want to write a piece detailing my religious beliefs, which have sort of become an amalgamation of several different spiritual traditions (i.e. Gnostic Christian direct revelation, pagan naturalism, Hindu reincarnation, etc.). After that, I’ve kicking around several ideas for “debunking” posts, talking about conservative myths about climate change and gun control for the Politics category, as well as some debunking conspiracies surrounding JFK’s assassination and 9/11 Truther beliefs. I also want to do some about supernatural topics, probably including ghosts.

Some other ideas for posts that I currently have include a review of the two recent movies adapting Stephen King’s It, comparing them to the book in the same spirit as my Dark Tower review. Another is inspired by a book I recently read called Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed. This book outlined several philosophical arguments, both secular and non-secular, for why evil exists in this world, and I thought it might be fun to rank them by which ones I think make the most sense.

In addition to all of that, I recently ordered a book about how to market my blog on social media, so I may be occupying myself over the next figuring out how Twitter and Pinterest can help my blog. I’m still hoping to get a DeviantArt page started for my fiction writing as well, so keep an eye out for that.

And that’s all I have to say about that, ladies and gentlemen. Until next time, take care.

Not that it matters much with the lack of traffic here so far, but what the hell…

So, the world has kind of lost it’s shit since I last posted on here. Trump made probably the biggest mistake in his entire presidency…

He dismissed a coming epidemic as a hoax for months while it continued to encroach on our country. And so when it finally hit us in mid-March, we were forced to close our businesses and tank our economy so that the coronavirus didn’t infect more people than it already had. Hell, I even lost my job at the local hardware store because the proprieter wasn’t making enough income to pay me. So now here I sit like a bump on a pickle, as more rustic circles might say.

So why haven’t I been working on the blog more? Actually I have. Unfortunately, it has mostly been behind the scenes technical stuff. Yeah, remember when I said that most of the technical stuff had been taken care of in the last update? I was too optimistic. For one thing, it was a lot harder to get SSL certification than I anticipated. And even how that I have got it, the address bar for the blog proper still isn’t showing a padlock, so I have to figure that out.

Also, my site health tab keeps going back and forth on whether or not my site can be found on search engines. I’ve had it analyzed by Ryte.com, and it’s given me warnings about internal no-follow links, internal temporary redirects, duplicate content, and other things like that, so I have to figure out how to fix that stuff as well.

In the meantime, though, I still want to at least try to get some more writing done on the site. My main goal right now is put at least one entry in the other categories besides Art and Entertainment. I know that for Politics I want to start with a post further explaining my current political beliefs and how I came to them. I also may be doing posts outlining all the reasons I hate President Trump in another post, so you might look out for that. I don’t really have any solid plans for the Supernatural and Religion and Spirituality categories yet. I would like to talk more about my personal spiritual beliefs, although considering that those beliefs are playing a big part in shaping The Divine Conspiracy.

Of course, any discussion of my own fantasy epic will be going under the Personal Stuff category. You can definitely expect a post expanding on the basic premise of the story I’m writing, as well as maybe some elaboration on the characters and what they will go through. I also want to do a post talking about how being on the autism spectrum has affected me personally, and maybe also do a post debunking common myths and misconceptions about ASD.

I have definitely decided that building a second website with the two-domain purchase InMotion gave me is out of the question considering how much of a hassle creating this website has been. So I intend to make a DeviantArt account sometime in the near future to post my fiction work. I also need to expand my social media presence so I can promote this site more. I already have a Pinterest account, though I have yet to figure out how to promote the site there.

The only other social media site I’m willing risk joining is Twitter. Yes, I’m aware of the hate mobs and that Jack Dorsey does not seem concerned in the least that the alt-right is slowly hijacking certain parts of it. As far as I know, however, it doesn’t collect data on its user, at least not to the extent that Facebook does. And it doesn’t run political ads, meaning Russian bots can’t use it in the same way they use Facebook.

Before I do all that though, I need to figure out all the technical stuff so that my site is as healthy as it can be, even as the rest of the world sickens around me. I still plan to post weekly, and I still wish to try for a Saturday or Sunday deadline. I’m looking forward to what the future holds for this site.

Till next time, friends.

I know there’s probably no one out there to read this yet, but I figured why the hell not because there’s a few more ground rules I want to set down before I truly get started on this blog.

First of all, I’m pretty sure I’ve completed most of the technical stuff. All I have left to do is to figure out how to purchase SSL certification and change my password away from the automatically generated one I’ve been using since I purchased the domain. I’m sort of at a loss as to where I’m supposed to find SSL certification, mostly because I’m not sure if I want a free SSL or a dedicated one that I’ll have to pay money for. I may need to consult with my parents on this one.

As for the Dark Tower review, I’ve been a bit too busy lately to focus any attention on it. The technical stuff with the blog has been a major reason for this. Another big reason is that it’s that time at the end of the month where all the big streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are purging certain titles from their rosters, which means I’m trying to watch as many of the ones being deleted from my queue as I can before they expire at the end of the month. I don’t even know what’s leaving Netflix yet, since they usually warn me only a week ahead of time (i.e. the day after the time of this writing) as opposed to Hulu, which gives me a two week warning.

Still, Amazon says the Dark Tower movie is free to watch on their site if I sign up for a 14-day free trial, so that should be easy. True, it will probably mean supporting the eldritch monstrosity that Jeff Bezos built, but no worries. I’m sure Bernie will win the election and lay some long overdue ass-kicking on those capitalist pigs, right? Right!?