About

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Introduction Week

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

There isn’t a hard schedule or any real requirements for Blaugust, it’s literally just an excuse that people can use to write blog posts. The timing feels really great though considering social media seems to be starting to collapse on itself and maybe people are more primed for “personal blogging”. Week two is “introduction week”. Since the month started last week on Tuesday and my post then pretty much met the “Welcome to Blaugust” theme, I figure today I could go ahead and keep up with that with an introduction post.

I’ve written plenty of introductions in the past, and a lot of this all may already be covered on my About Page, if it’s up to date. I tend to get a bit rambling on these sorts of things so I’ll do my best to keep it down, it just feels like there is a lot to cover and a lot of it could easily be it’s own blog post or blog post series.

I am, Josh Miller, aka Ramen Junkie. I like to push the “fun fact” that I have been “Ramen Junkie” for more of my life than I have not been Ramen Junkie. People often shorten it to simply “Ramen”. I’ve been called “Ramen” in real life by real people in person. I originally started using the name online back in the late 90s on Usenet, most often in alt.games.final-fantasy or alt.toys.transformers, but elsewhere on Usenet as well, I was really big on Usenet back in the day. I am also the duly elected “Supreme Dictator for Life” of alt.games.final-fantasy.

I have run into a few other Ramen Junkies, though the only two notable ones are on Something Awful’s forums, that isn’t me. And more notable, is Ivan Orkin, who runs several actual Ramen shops and is RamenJunkie on Instagram, and I think X-box. I say X-box because when I tried to reset the password, the domain attached was clearly “ramenjunkie.com” and dude has that domain. If I ever get out to New York, i hope to go to his place there and maybe meet him. Just for fun.

I was going to move on, but I wanted to also add that the name has several sorts of origins, like a Marvel hero. One, Ramen is “cheap hacker food”, so being a ramen junkie seemed cool at the time. I also do like Ramen, and regularly make ramen for meals, both instant (of a wide variety, I like trying new ones) and more homemade with custom broth and noodles and ingredients. The other (true) origin was that I wanted to make a slightly more “trollish” name on Usenet, at the time I had been posting as Lord Chaos, and part of why I picked “Ramen” was because many people who were not Japanese would post using Japanese names from anime. Ramen was an intentionally shitty take on people with usernames like “Shinji” and “Tenchi” and “Usagi”.

Anyway, it’s just sort of stuck.

So now, moving on, the blog itself. I’ve always enjoyed just, writing. My first real website was on Geocities, and though it didn’t have a proper “blog engine”, it has a “blog format” made with manually coded and edited HTML pages. For a while I was using SHTML, which had a mechanism to embed a header and footer page so things could be universal across the site. That first site was The Chaos Xone (The X is for Xtreem!), because in the 90s, Xs were cool. Unlike some folks, I eventually moved on from the cool X. For while I had a second, fairly popular website called “The Geocities Pokemon Center” with all you needed to know about Pokemon Red and Blue.

From Geocities I went to Livejournal, and the name “Lameazoid“, a name chosen because it sounded a bit like “Freakazoid” but also had a sort of retro and self-depreciating undertone to it. For a while I also had a site hosted on my college’s computer hosting, because they provided web space to students, this was sort of the start of a split between having a personal blog and a fun blog. Eventually I landed on WordPress.com, and later with self hosting WordPress on a server of my own with its own domain name, at Lameazoid.com.

Lameazoid kind of stalled out for me, partially because I kept trying to make it more structured. I wanted someplace to put “personal blogs” that didn’t quite fit the “theme” of Lameazoid. At one point I had all my blogging there, but basically, I wanted a personal blog again, where nothing mattered and I could just, post what I wanted. That ended up becoming this blog, [Blogging Intensifies], which has stuck pretty well. It’s a play on the meme [XXXXX Intensifies], which is why it gets stylized with the brackets. I sometimes abbreviate it as [BI]

I’ve always had side blogs, and I have a bad habit of starting up new blogs and then just, folding the content elsewhere and deleting the blog. Sometimes I used WordPress, and sometimes I would try Blogger. Here is a list, of what I can remember, with the name, general content, and where the posts ended up, if anywhere.

  • Livejournal – General posting, Games, Reviews, etc – Ended up all over, though mostly archived due to low quality
  • Snapshot of the Mind – Personal blog on WordPress – Archived or maybe on [BI]
  • Pen to Paper – A writing-focused blog on WordPress – Archived mostly.
  • My BLARG – Shitposting blog on WordPress – Archived
  • OSAF (Opinion Stated as Fact) – A political commentary blog – Most of this has been archived because those opinions were shitty

I know there are more. I probably have a list somewhere.

I suppose more important for an introduction post, is interests. It would almost be easier to list what I am NOT interested in (sportsball) than what I am interested in. Lameazoid has always primarily been about my interest in video games and toys, with a side of comics and movies sprinkled in. My main hobbies are playing video games, of all sorts, and collecting toys, of all sorts. I also like to just create, in general, which is where a lot of the other content comes from, and these days, gets thrown here, on [BI]. Mostly these days I create code, but I also used to write a few stories and draw some, and I actually kind of want to get back to that at some point. I imagine I’m a bit rusty these days, it’s been probably 20 years since I did any of that seriously. I like taking photos and like to think I am ok-ish at it.

I also have always enjoyed music, though more recently, I’ve actually been more openly EXPLORING music, which is why currently this blog gets a fair amount of music-related content. Because it’s one of my current passion interests.

I also enjoy learning and trying new things. I learn to code (constantly). I learn languages (Spanish and Norwegian currently). I am trying to learn the Piano (and absolutely 1000% failing at actually trying). I want to get back into drawing and learn to get better at it. This is all content that sometimes I will talk about here, mostly, as i mentioned, it’s a place where there are no stakes and I can just write about whatever.

It occurs to me that I have written an awful lot about myself, but not a lot about ME. I actually don’t often but for the sake of completionism. I’m (as of this post) 43 years old. I live in a small city in the middle of Illinois. I’m married, going on 16 years now, and I have 3 stepkids who are all adults now, though they still live with us. They all have some sort of (varying) health issues, and my wife used to blog about it herself on her own site. I work in technology for a large company, and have worked on the back-end technical part of Television for around 18 years now. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, though I had considered Journalism.

I am generally a bit of a “jack of all trades” type, pretty good at a lot, master of little, that sort of thing.