Blaugust

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 Wrap-Up – What I Learned

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The last theme week for Blaugust is “Lessons Learned”. I can’t say I learned anything new, I’ve been blogging for a while, literally decades, and I’m already aware of well, all of that which comes along with it. As, kind of depressing as they are. But let’s pretend it’s all fresh and new.

Daily Updates

As much as I like the idea of updating daily, I am not cut out for it, not anymore. Maybe never, though this isn’t the first time I put effort into daily blogging. I like to think I have plenty of idea of things to write about, but I also don’t really have the time to write about all of them, and over time, I start to feel repetitive. Maybe a little repetition isn’t a bad thing. In theory, new people come to read the blog and most aren’t going to be reading through the archive.

I just kind of hate feeling repetitive. It doesn’t really matter though, with “lesson 2”.

No One Cares

They really don’t. I don’t really care that they don’t, really. I accepted years ago that I do this, write these dumb pointless posts, for my own outlet. I kind of hopped things would at least bump a little when I started posting daily, but it didn’t. That or WordPress stats are busted as fuck. The total views and visits for this month, are pretty much, to slightly lower, than the views and visits last month. Maybe a bit lower.

Last month, when I wasn’t posting daily and actively sharing some posts out into the world.

I really don’t care about how many people read this blog, but it’s kind of really disheartening. For the month, it’s around 100, people. Total. For the year it’s around 1500 so far. Let’s contrast this a bit, with something that’s not really a 1:1 comparison, but kind of in the same vein. I posted a short video from the Alanis Morissette show on TikTok a few days ago. Within 24 hours, it had essentially more views than my blog has gotten, all year.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s really really just like, you know, why bother?

Wrap-Up

Anyway, on that downer note, here are my posts from the month:

Honorable Mention to 10 syndicated movie posts from Letterboxd and 18 automated link digest posts.

I also did all of the little made-up achievements so that means “Going Platnum”.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Staying Motivated

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This week’s “Blaugust theme” is “Staying Motivated”. These days especially, I have to say, I have, almost zero motivation. There are a lot of factors as to why, I’m not really motivated to discuss them at this time though, maybe later, sometime (X-Doubt.jpg). Instead, let’s look at what keeps me motivated.

I think one thing that keeps me going a lot of the time is gamifying things. I think the idea of “gamification” seems really stupid on paper, but it also works pretty well. Achievement badges are actually kind of a weakness. I once spent an afternoon playing around with the chat program we use at work after discovering it has achievement badges. It’s basically fucking AIM.

I’ve gotten on a bit of a kick lately trying to 100% achievements in games, for example. I don’t super-push myself when some of the achievements are annoyingly bad though. Like Blaugust here, I don’t really know how it’s graded, it’s mostly an honor system, but there is a list of made-up achievements for it. Basically, the only one I have not done is “Pickup Group”. I guess I should try doing that to get the achievement for “doing all the achievements”. I am also on track-ish to do 31/31 posts for the month, this post being number 22. Numbers 25 through 28 should be taken care of as well. One of the five remaining needed will be my “Lessons Learned” wrap-up, probably on the 31st.

  • Reading the Manual – Read the introductory blog post with the rules of the event.
  • Joining the Cause – Sign-Up for Blaugust.
  • Recruit a Friend – Convince another blogger to participate in Blaugust.
  • Spreading the Madness – Promote Blaugust on your blog or through your social media of choice.
  • Friend of Wumpus – Join the Blaugust Discord.
  • Sharing is Caring – Post your content in the “Share Your Content” Channel.
  • Forum of Friends – Take part in a discussion on the “Post Discussion” Channel.
  • The Pet Tax – Post a picture of an animal friend on the “Stuff and Things” Channel or create a blog post about them.
  • Friend Like Me – Answer a question posted on the Blagust Discord or help out a new blogger.
  • Shared Thoughts – Comment on a blog post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Federation of Bloggers – Sign up for a Fediverse account and follow the official Blaugust account.
  • Getting Inspired – Write a blog post inspired by a post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Pickup Group – Play a game or take part in an activity with one or more Blaugust participants.
  • Hot Topics – Write a blog post based on the Blaugust Prompt List.
  • Welcome Wagon – Write a blog post based on the first week’s theme of Welcoming Folks to Blaugust.
  • Introduce Yourself – Write a blog post based on the second week’s theme of Introducing Yourself.
  • Creative Appreciation – Write a blog post based on the third week’s theme Appreciating the works of some Creative or Company.
  • Staying Motivated – Write a blog post based on the fourth week’s theme of how you have managed to Stay Motivated.
  • Lessons Learned – Write a blog post based on the fifth week’s theme explaining some of the Lessons you have Learned through Blaugust.
  • Going Platinum – Complete All of the Blaugchievements for Blaugust 2023.

Completionism like this can be bad though, and sometimes I have to stop myself. Like, for while I was really bad about buying toys I didn’t really want because it would “complete teams”. Marvel teams, Transformers teams, whatever. It can certainly lead to some bad behaviors for sure.

Streaks are another good motivator. Possibly a better motivator. A few good examples of these in my life, that I may actually get into more detail on in full-fledged posts, I’m considering maybe doing a series of “Track all the Things” posts, maybe after my “Computing History” series. A lot of what keeps these going now is “streak motivation” of “I’ve been doing it, so I should keep doing it.”

  • I have tracked the gas and mileage on my car every fill-up since I got it. It’s all in an Excel book with graphs and such.
  • I track all my spending in categories and charts in an Excel workbook. I have done this for years.
  • I have almost a 1700 Day streak in Duolingo.
  • I use a daily mood and activity tracking app called Daylio that I have a 2056 day streak in.

The motivation is to not break these streaks of activity. Keep it going, keep it flowing. I would love to blog every day, and get that streak going but I find that much stress ends up killing the quality of posts (not that there is much there to start with on that).

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Cat Tax Day

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I’m all off this week thanks to screwy work and an extra post and just a general chaotic time. So I’m going to do a bit of a filler day and fulfill the “Cat Tax” for Blaugust. Against my better wants, we have 7 cats. We have the space and the people, but personally, 7 is too many. Also, they don’t always get along. At the moment, two of them we have to keep separate at all times, which is a pain, shuffling them between which is locked up in a room and which is not. If we don’t they will literally just, fiercely deathmatch, instantly.

I’ll go from oldest to youngest.

Scarlette (#10)

I’m going to throw some numbers on these, Scarlette is the tenth cat I have had in my lifetime.

Scarlette doesn’t really have any other nicknames. She is the oldest at around 13 years now I think. Like all of our cats, we got her as a kitten. She was actually a replacement cat, from the vet. We had adopted a calico kitten that the kids were calling Uganda. When it came time, we set it to be fixed at the vet, and the poor kitten didn’t make it. The Kids were of course devastated. Shortly afterward, the vet (who was sort of a friend of the family because our kids were friends) called up and they had another kitten that needed a home, so we adopted Scarlette. She had come from a “cat hoarding” situation I think, and she was extremely skittish. To the point of, we lost her in the house at one point for days.

Later we discovered that she had been hiding inside the boxed springs of the bed. For at least the first year she would regularly just, vanish into the boxed springs.

My family commonly refers to her as “My Girlfriend” (as in me personally) because I am definitely her favorite of everyone in the house and when I go to bed, I don’t care where she is, she will come running in to join me in the bed. I’ve also worked with her to get her to be less skittish and more cuddly. Even after years with us, she would cower in fear anytime you tried to pet her, despite that she may have just been trying to get your attention for pets. I have no idea what happened to her in the brief time before we adopted her, but it had to have been pretty horrible.

Simba (#11)

The next three are actually all from the same litter, so I’m not positive of the age difference, though whatever it is, it’s minutes. We sometimes call them “the Triplets”. Simba doesn’t have any nicknames aside from maybe “Jackass”, because he is kind of a bully sometimes.

Simba’s fun story. At our old house, eh loved to go outside and hunt birds and rabbits. We tried to keep them from going out, but that didn’t really work out sometimes. When we last moved, during the move, he got outside. He is, notoriously hard to catch. In the end, we left him behind, with plans to come back for him. Over the course of a month or two, we would periodically drive the 45b minutes (one way) drive down to the old house and see if we could see him. It was mildly irritating because he would come to the door of our old house, but the new owners refused to let him in. All they needed to do was let him in and give us a call, we would have been there and taken him away.

Eventually, our old neighbor called us up. He had managed to catch Simba in a Raccoon trap and he was recovered. Now he has zero interest in going outside ever.

His absolute favorite thing is when I refill the cat food container and he can come and eat the super fresh out of the bag food directly from the source. I like to let him indulge in that since it only happens maybe once a month.

Kiara (#12)

The girl of the triplets, sometimes called Dobby or the “Basement Troll”. Kiara likes me, and is pretty agreeable with people, but she hates all of the other cats except maybe Kovu, and especially after the move, she claimed the basement as her domain and hides down there all the time.

Kiara is our smallest cat. She likes to hide in the most random and strangest places.

Kovu (#13)

Kovu is the largest cat we own, though pure weight-wise, Simba is very close, though Simba is pretty lean and is basically all muscle. Kovu is sometimes called “Fatty”, which I’ll admit is a bit rude. He likes to think he’s not fat though and often climbs up all over the place and jumps between furniture, chasing people down to get petted. He’ll let you know too, because he’ll squawk at you and reach out for it.

He’s probably the overall best-behaved cat. He generally doesn’t get in fights with anyone else and he doesn’t cause any problems. His worst offense is being too pushy sometimes about getting attention, which is made worse because he is a fat ass and will knock things around getting to you.

Jackie (#14)

Jackie is my wife and I’s baby, though don’t tell her, Scarlette is probably my real favorite. Jackie came from my father-in-law’s shop as a kitten and we basically brought her home expecting her to die. which she did not. Originally she had one eye stuck closed so we called her “One-Eyed Jack”.

She is extremely spoiled and thinks she is my wife and I’s favorite and gets pissy and jealous anytime the other cats get attention.

Lettie Bug (#15)

My daughter’s cat officially, though Lettie prefers my wife over everyone. Also known as Lettie, Buggers, and (from me) Boogers. Boogers because she is an absolute bitch to me, at all times. Seriously, fuck this cat. She will attack me anytime I come near her, for no reason.

She is part Maine Coon and quite fluffy. She mostly avoids the other cats but only really actively attacks Kiara or Wilbur, sometimes.

Wilbur (#16)

Wilbur is the youngest cat. Sometimes I call him Kovu’s Boyfriend, because they get along well. Also sometimes, “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE”. He’s an ok cat but he’s also a dick to all of the other cats. He also pisses on things, a lot. He’s a little jack-ass. He likes to be in the middle of whatever you’re doing but doesn’t really like attention. If it were up to me, I would seriously consider rehoming Wilbur, because he is a bit over-aggressive towards the other cats and he’s damaged a lot of things, including our old TV. It’s not up to me though.

He’s a good cat, he just, could be better. I am hoping as our older cats start to “age out” for a sterile way to phrase that, he will get better. He could literally BE the favorite if he would stop pissing on things (yes, we had him checked at the vet, he is just an asshole).

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Creator Appreciation Week

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The “theme” for this week in Blaugust is “Creators Appreciation Week” or something along those lines. I’m not really great at this sort of thing, I can’t really say I particularly have any sort of “idols” or anything and I follow a zillion people on various platforms, I could never really properly pick even a handful to ever spotlight. Plus it always just feels weird to me to put anyone on a pedestal, though maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, people appreciate being appreciated usually.

Instead, I guess, I wanted to talk a bit about Leo Laporte, “The Tech Guy,” though I am not sure he really goes by that anymore since his syndicated radio show ended.

Why Leo?

Because of all the content creators out there that I do follow, I’ve possibly followed Leo the longest. Leo currently runs the TWIT Podcast network, or at least, hosts most of the shows, I think his wife actually “runs” things. He created it, however. It’s a collection of tech-themed podcasts on a variety of topics.

I’ve followed Leo since before that time though. I actually have a bit of a funny history there. Back when I was in High School, I think probably at the tail end, around 1997 or 1998, while living in Indiana, our cable added a channel, ZDTV. The whole channel had this great almost cable-access feel to it. I don’t remember a ton of the other shows, but I always would watch The Screen Savers, with Leo Laporte and Kate Botello as the hosts. They would just, talk about all sorts of computer and techy stuff. The content was perfect, and the production quality was a bit dodgy, it was the best show I had ever seen.

After High School, I briefly attended school at IUPUI for one semester. During that time, my dad transferred his job and my parents moved back to Illinois. I lived with my aunt and uncle for a bit attending school. After that one semester, I moved back in with my parents in Illinois.

Which meant no more ZDTV, no more Screen Savers, the cable we had in Illinois didn’t carry ZDTV.

Which is where the “funny part” comes in. From what I gather, a lot of Leo’s followers and fans came from his time on TechTV, and later G4, which ZDTV transformed into. I am not sure I’ve ever had access to or watched G4 TV at all. I just caught him early on with it was still ZDTV.

A good while later, and I have no idea how I discovered it, but it was very very early on in the life of it, I discovered TWIT. I should probably sidestep here to mention, TWIT stands for “This Week in Tech”. It may have been the only show at the time, and Leo was doing it out of his house or maybe just the original Cottage (hell it may have been the same thing), but there he was, Leo Laporte, still talking tech. On a weekly basis, in a podcast.

So I picked it up. I had to download each episode manually to put on my music player but I started listening every week. In fact, I’m not sure I have missed an episode in all that time, not of TWIT at least.

Eventually, TWIT became the TWIT Network and added more shows. I picked up Windows Weekly very early on. I used to listen to Net@Nite with Amber Weekly until it turned into This Week in Google, which I listened to for a while but don’t currently. Occasionally I pick up episodes of Security Now. I mostly stick to Windows Weekly and TWIT, I am a big fan of Paul Thurrott, who can get a little repetitive in his rants but I sympathize with a lot of his grievances so much.

Ever present in these shows is Leo though, who hosts most of them. I also really enjoy the rotating menagerie of interesting people each week on TWIT. I’ve picked up so many blogs and other accounts to follow through TWIT. It’s one of the things I look forward to the most each week honestly and it’s always entertaining.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Introduction Week

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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.

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