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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.

My DIY Projects

Re-mulching and other Activities Outside the House

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I have been slacking on my posts, though technically still doing better than I had been. It’s a combination of being busy and just being generally meh overall. One think keeping me busy was re-mulching the flower beds around the house. Not just throwing down new mulch though, I mean raking up the old and putting down new weed barrier. This meant going around the existing plants and the little metal stakes to hold the weed barrier down were a pain because there is a ton of super packed rock in the area that makes them hard to insert into the ground.

In the case of the tree out back, it also meant digging up the ground around the tree to add a new flower bed space completely. We added a lot of new plants to the area as well, though most in pots for ease of use.

Then my wife put all her decor out again.

We also started working on the basic garden set up for the year. In the past we’ve had issues with trying to garden at this house because there is a lot of wildlife that comes around that eat or dig up everything. Right now it’s in buckets, though I plan to put legs on these wooden boxes we have to put the buckets into. Which is part of what the pile of wood behind the garden plants at the bottom is for. We also may use the stairs as a tiered herb garden. It’s all wood that was salvaged from my parent’s deck which they recently had replaced.

Anyway, here are some photos of the completed set up.

Here is a random bonus of the backyard from when I was mowing recently.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Various Activities of Late

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It’s been a bit since I really just wrote out a regular blog post so I thought it would be prudent to do so, mostly just touching on some of the stuff I’ve been doing or thinking about recently. I’ll just break things up a bit into some sections, for easy skimming/ignoring.

Old Writing

Every so often, I get this weird bug to just delete all of my old posts and start fresh and the old content all sucks and blah blah blah. Then that never really works out as hoped and I kind of miss having all the old content hanging around and I drag some of it back. Well, I’m currently in the “Dragging it all back” stage of things. Part of this is also part of my ongoing organizing of all of the shit I’ve written over the years.

I tend to get frequent “Project ADHD”. By the end of this blog post, that will definitely be very clear, but every time I have started to organize all of my old writings, or I just start a new method without pulling in old stuff, I’ve left a blob of “to get to” files. This applies to things not JUST writing, but the writing is particularly bad. I’ve got some that only show up in my blog archive hosted internally on my network. I have some files buried in “to sort” folders on a storage blob somewhere. I have several different folders in my own personal archive sorted using different methods.

These span different formats from Text to WordPress DBs to Doc files to even some old files I couldn’t open (I’ll touch on this in a bit). I’ve been converting it all to the new format, which basically falls into two major categories. i am sure I have said it about previous organizing attempts, but THIS is the way.

This is decidedly the way going forward. It’s been the way I WANTED to do things for a while, I just, wasn’t motivated enough to do it. The two over arching categories essentially amount to “Journal Entries” and “Structured documents”. Sorted into my One Drive Documents (for backup) as Journal and Documents. The Documents is sorted down into Reviews, by topic (video games, toys, etc), Original Fiction, Fan Fiction, Essays, and School. I’ll get to the School bit in a later section. The others are a bit more self explanatory, but generally, these are “longer form structured writing”.

Journal is everything else. This post, is being written into Journal, in a file called “2023.03.22 – On Recent Activities.md”, though that may not end up being the blog post title. This is the way. Everything starts in the Journal, with a date in the filename, because file system dates are incredibly unreliable, and then gets posted elsewhere, sometimes.

Ok, not everything starts there. Some of the Journal Entry documents start as Joplin Notes from my phone, because I’m not near a PC. Or they start as Reddit comments that end up going on long that I want to keep a note of later, where they get copy/pasted into One note, and later turned into Journal files. But, it is the ultimate repository.

I’ve been diligently converting old files to this format. Part of why I don’t just stick everything in there is that reviews often contain images, and the simple file format requirement of Markdown makes images a pain. Yes, Markdown can do images, but it’s much simpler in a Word Document. The issue in the past was that could mean I can’t open those Word Documents anymore in the future, but keeping things in One Drive helps stop that from being a problem, since everything these days is connected, and I have confidence that Microsoft will keep my documents up to date.

School Documents and Old Documents

Which brings me to the school documents. And as I said, “Documents that can no longer be opened”. A lot of my super old documents from the 90s, are in a Microsoft Works format, WKS or WPS. Word can’t open these. Notepad can sort of open them but they don’t have a proper format to them at all.

So I’ve collected these files up and spun up a Windows XP Virtual Machine. Thanks to Archive,org, I can get a copy of Microsoft Works from the 90s. I wanted to go really pure on the experience and run a Windows 98 VM, but I couldn’t get it to recognize the CD drive ISO to install Works, so Windows XP it was.

Fortunately, Works can save out .DOC files. They are Word 97 Doc files, and modern Word throws up a warning about them, but it can open them, and they are properly formatted, so that’s the goal. I also snagged an old copy of Microsoft Publisher from archive.org, to do the same with some ancient Publisher files. The modern Publisher Reader available online literally says “These files are too old and can’t be opened” when I tried that route. I also had some old CAD files, though those were able to be opened by the modern Autodesk Viewer. I kept the files, but I also did a bunch of print screens on each one to preserve them in an easier to view format.

I don’t really know why I need all of these old files, but file storage is cheap and they don’t take up a lot of space.

Lameazoid Rebuild

I started off with this as the first topic but rambled off into other areas, so I’ve moved it down here. As part of my organizing, I’ve been republishing, with, approximate original dates, a LOT of old content to Lameazoid.com. I pushed up like 100 old Video Game reviews. I have a few more movie and book write ups I’ve done on deck to do next. I am going to dig into old Toy content next, but I think there is less of that missing than other content.

Some of them are kind of trash they are so old, but honestly, despite calling them “reviews”, they are more just a “write up and record of my thoughts on whatever”. They are just, “Fancy journal entries with pictures”.

It’s all mostly for my reference.

Also, several of them are literal jokes. The Zero Wing review is written entirely in “broken English” like the Zero Wing game uses. I actually scrapped it, but I wrote a review of Morrowind once that was actually just bitching about how shitty the game’s performance was and all of the images were from Counter Strike, not Morrowind. Several are just an excuse to throw a bunch of funny screenshots on a webpage surrounded by text.

Things I WANT to Do

I also have a small list of things I want to do, that I’ve been mostly just, collecting resources for these potential projects. I’ve been increasingly looking into building some sort of simple games. Specifically, games for the NES or PICO-8. Throwing back to my “archive all the old things” writing above, I once made a Breakout Clone in Pico 8 on one my my CHIP computers but I can’t find it anywhere. And yes, I checked on the CHIP boards. It may still just be buried somewhere, I’ve actually found at least one large document project I had started on while sorting old files.

I also really want to do some Solo RPGs. This has been a bit of a growing trend I think online, or maybe I am just seeing it more since I gained some interest in it. A lot of these seem to amount to “Dice based story writing”, which is fine. I’ve actually done one or two of them, though a least one I decided was not for me and archived it off. I have a huge pile of Solo RPGs available through some ITCH.io bundles I’ve bought. I actually plan to blog about these once I do some that seem worth blogging about.

Things I Want to Do…. But I’m Not Doing Them

Just for the sake of throwing it out there, I also have other things I WANT to do that I have not been doing at all. I have a nice sketchbook that’s been sitting on a shelf nearby collecting dust because I really want to start drawing again. I used to draw a LOT but I have not at all, in years.

I still really want to learn to play the Piano, which I sort of started doing back in 2020 for a few months. But since then, the keyboard has just say dormant, next to my PC, as a silent reminder that I should be learning to play it.

I also still want to start cycling. I really need some sort of actual exercise outlet. I actually have an ok road bike I got a deal on at an auction, back in like, 2015 or something. I’ve ridden it like, twice, ever. I really need to get a proper helmet first. Which has been my excuse for not doing it. Another part of my hang up has always been that looking into online communities for cycling, it’s a group that is full of snobs, and that’s a huge fucking turn off. If you aren’t riding some $2000+ super bike then you’re completely wasting time and WILL get killed when it shatters into a zillion pieces after 3 rides. Like yo, you’re driving away anyone just trying to get into a new hobby.

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