Is This Thing On?

This is merely a test post. Who knows if this will even be on the final blog. I am just wanting to play around with the formatting on here, but I don't want the usual lorum ipsum stuff.

Just be warned, this might be really "stream-of-consciousness" to fill up the page.

I don't even know why I bought the domain in the first place. It was just sort of a spur of the moment thing that I did. Probably not my best financial decision, but I have been slowly getting in to the idea of web hosting now that I have my own home server. Work also has me doing a lot more web application and security work so I wanted to apply that knowledge for something fun. 

In addition, I want to become better about talking about video games. I just need to actually figure out something to talk about. After seeing Ian Bogost's How to Talk about Video Games, I was really anxious to try and find an outlet to talk about games in a more organized and thoughtful manner. I am currently meeting with a group of mutual friends every month for a Game of the Month club. While I am getting more and more comfortable with the group, I still can't help but feel like my thoughts are more on the surface level of things. For example, a lot of people like to talk about themes, game design, art direction; however, my thoughts are more on things like "I don't like stealth levels because I am impatient" or "I liked the cell shading" and that's the end of it.

While I think there's nothing wrong with that outlook, I think that I can do a bit better with analyzing and getting more out of the games that I play. So, I am challenging myself to read Bogost's book and try and write some here. I am highly doubtful anyone ever will see this. Do people even go out of their way to find blogs? I just see takes on Tumblr or Twitter.

Anyways, in an effort to fill out more and test some formatting stuff, here's a bulleted list of some ideas I had:

• Not sure on a title, but an anthology where I play the original Goldeneye on N64, then document my thoughts, then watch the film, then write about how it affected my enjoyment of the film, then play the remade Goldeneye on Wii, document my thoughts on it, then finally wrap it all together as someone who has always claimed to be a fan and have ties to these game just because so many people talk about them.
• Okami and Shinto Naturalism
• Bioshock and why I don't get the hype
• A Retrospective on Nintendo's casual renaissance
• Neon White and grief
• An obnoxiously contrarian post about why Breath of the Wild should not be the future of Zelda games.

You get the idea.

Anyways, I am supposed to be doing some super important work right now; so, I am going to leave this inaugural post at that.