My Little Pony... Really? Bronies, Kids' TV and Fandom.

So, in the last few years, there's been a heck of a lot of talk about the My Little Pony cartoon, and not all of it is from parents or young girls.  All over the internet, there's a young male demographic talking about friendship, kindness, magic and ponies with "cutie marks" stamped on them.  At first, when I encountered the phenomenon, I assumed that it was guys trolling the internet. Professing love for a show that is clearly marketed to little girls, I found MLP references all over the internet, and ran across the term "Brony" (a teen or adult male fan of the show.) My reaction was simple, at first. What. The. Hell. The pervasiveness of the male fanbase and its persistence led me to believe that these guys, at least some of them, weren't kidding. So, I pride myself on being an open minded sort of fellow, I decided to do whenever I encounter something I don't understand. Research, analyze and experience.

It was time for me to enter: The world of the Brony.

See, this is where I could have re-used that Diablo 3 Whimsyshire Screenshot.

First off, I learned that the full title of the series was My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, frequently abbreviated MLP or MLP:FiM.  Then, I noticed something interesting. A name I recognized. A lady by the name of Lauren Faust. I'm not huge into cartoons, but I appreciated the work behind Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and was aware that Lauren Faust was involved in both. Intrigued, I looked deeper. The pedigree of the animators, writers and producers read like an animation Dream Team.  You've got folks who worked on Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Johnny Bravo, Ren and Stimpy, and the list went on and on... Virtually every cartoon show I'd appreciated as clever enough to be watched by adults had someone involved who went on to work on this show about happiness and ponies. There was definitely something going on here.

I learned that Faust originally had no interest in working on the project, familiar with earlier offerings as a show where ponies resolve differences "primarily through tea parties and crying." She only agreed to produce the show if she could do it her way, with strongly developed characters and a genuine adventure story tied in to the plot for the series. Now, we were getting somewhere. I fondly remember another cartoon that took a licensed product and put honest-to-goodness Fantasy Adventure into it, making it way better than it had to be. That show was Gummi Bears, and it was one of my very favorite cartoons from when I watched them every Saturday morning with cereal. I understood the appeal of the series in theory, now all I had to do was disregard how silly I felt, and actually watch... My Little Pony.

Fans of the show annoyed certain online communities so much that
references to ponies in any way were ban-worthy.

The hype I'd encountered made sense. I've seen a few episodes and the writing is good, clear characterizations and solid plots throughout each episode. The series focuses on an over-serious student of magic named Twilight Sparkle who cannot complete her studies by staying where she'd prefer, poring over tomes and scrolls. Dark threats menace the Kingdom, and in order to master her powers, she would have to do one thing she never learned about in all her books. She'd have to figure out how to make friends, and how to be one.  Simple lessons about treating people kindly and being a good friend are told with humor and, occasionally action or adventure sequences that could have stepped out of any fantasy roleplaying game suitable for younger children.  The dialogue and storytelling really is sophisticated enough for an adult to appreciate, while remaining simple enough for very young children to follow.

Once I understood the appeal of the show, I started noticing the community of fans of the series, and their impact on social media and things I already had an interest in around the internet.  Now, I'm not ready to don a Rainbow Dash T-shirt and start a collection of plastic ponies, but with all the low-brow, immature, racist and homophobic teens and young adults on the internet, there's gotta be something great about a group of people of that same age/gender group who honest-to-god believe in love and tolerance.  I noticed that for the last few Humble Indie Bundles, the top spot in terms of overall donations, narrowly beating out Minecraft creator Notch is a group called @HumbleBrony. I've written about the bundles before, and think they are one of the best things that has happened to gaming in years. The last bundle, the Brony community donated a combined $13,167.84 and the friendly competition brought Notch's own contribution up to $12,345.67

Internet favorite minor character "Derpy Hooves" was named by
bronies, and the name and assumed personality was made official in Season 2.

For me, the questions.. "What the hell?" and "Are they serious?" were pretty adequately answered. My wife still giggles if she catches me watching an episode of the show on Netflix, but I don't care. For a show that could have gotten away with being another shallow 30-minute toy commercial, MLP and its fans have created something pretty awesome. I suspect that some of the fans started out "ironically" liking ponies and magical lessons about sharing and kindness, and lost track of when they stopped pretending to be fans and actually became fans. I might not self-identify as one of you, Bronies, but you have my respect.

Minecraft: HCFactions and Mine-Z, plus - Interview with Lead Admin HighlifeTTU!

I clutch my pick in hand, creeping beneath the earth searching for diamonds. I started with nothing but a fishing pole, and now I've carved out a small base with a working farm, resources to keep me stocked, and I know at any moment, if I'm not careful enough, someone could break into my less-than-secure spot and kill me, and I'd lose everything. I'd also be locked out of the server for three days. Death comes at a high price. Some days later, I work in a faction base. The land is secure, as people can't use our doors or break our walls unless they manage to kill one or more of us.  The call goes out to everyone online, hostiles in diamond armor have appeared at our walls, looking for a way to get in, even a small hole could mean a well-thrown Ender Pearl could teleport the raiders inside. We grab potions and equip diamond swords, and prepare to fight.

Me, in glorious diamond armor, in the little room deep underground,
where I would be brutally murdered less than a day later.

If this doesn't sound like the Minecraft you've been playing, that's not unusual. HCFactions, a server with loads of custom-programmed tweaks and plugins is a special and unique place. Players contend with the usual difficulties of monsters, lava and starvation, plus hostile other players and the three-day "deathban" that enforces the "hardcore" nature of the server.  The stories above are both an actual part of my last week on HCFactions, and the drama, shifting alliances and betrayals of Factions (organizations that can purchase and defend land) have been detailed on Reddit for well over a year now.  Run by Matt Sundberg, better known as HighlifeTTU, the server can take up to 175 people at once, and there are usually between 50-100 playing at any given time, struggling and banding together to survive.

Recently, HighlifeTTU and his Administration and programming team announced their second server concept, called Mine-Z, a cooperative/competitive Zombie Survival server that takes direct inspiration from the popular fan-created Day Z mod to the game ARMA. I had a chance to speak with several members of the Admin team in the last few days, and I asked HighlifeTTU if he'd answer a few questions. Here's what he had to say.

----------------

- Tell us a little bit about yourself and your coding/Admin Team.

I go by "HighlifeTTU".  In the real world I work the standard 8 to 5 grind in the finance industry, so Minecraft server hosting is my after work hobby.  It has quickly exploded into something I never imagined! I have been lucky to find a very talented team of individuals. Almost all of them work in the technology industry in some fashion, so we tend to get on at night after we've all slaved away for the man and put our heads together to create new plugins and ultimately craft new experiences for players.  I am about to turn 29 years old, so I regularly tell my player base to get off my lawn.

The HCFactions Shop, where iron and gold can be sold by players who wish to purchase
land, potion materials or rare blocks for customizing their base.

- How would you describe HCFactions and MineZ to someone who is familiar with  Minecraft, but ignorant to the larger Bukkit/Factions community?

HCFactions is a hardcore PvP oriented factions server.  It basically allows groups of players to band together, claim land on an expansive map, and then battle it out against each other.  The uniqueness comes from the death ban we use.  When a player is killed, he is banned from the server for three days.  For someone unfamiliar with a hardcore experience, they would probably say there is no way that could be fun.  But the magic of a hardcore server is the change in how people act. In a normal game where you respawn instantly, you don't have a fear of death, and ultimately you see players grow bored since their actions have little meaning.  With death ban, many people actually get an adrenalin rush.  You know every mistake could be your last. defeats are brutal, but the victories are that much sweeter.

We've expanded on the normal factions experience by adding a number of things.  We have PvE oriented events, a King of the Hill event that has players fighting over a location for a chance of good loot, and my lead developer (lazertester) recently rolled out the Factions Arena, which is a fully automated arena plugin featuring loadouts, multiple arenas, and a comprehensive stats page for bragging rights.  Recently we added an Archer, Bard, and Rogue class that is in the spirit of vanilla minecraft, as it requires no slash commands, and you activate it by simply wearing a full set of a different armor.  Our most challenging change has been re-coding some of the craftbukkit code to balance enchantments and make them more intuitive, which we plan to roll out in the next couple of weeks.

The extensive Arena, as seen from the glassed-in Spectator Area, where players can
practice their PvP skills without risking their hard-won equipment.

We now have had 15,000 unique visits to the server, and average about 6,000 unique players a month.  It has been a very big success, and has motivated the team to work on side projects.

MineZ was inspired by DayZ.  DayZ proved that as a developer you can try to ruthlessly murder your player base, and they like it.  MineZ is basically a zombie survival mod, where zombies use advanced AI and fast movement to hunt you down.  Players must manage limited inventory, find loot at key locations, all while managing their hunger, thirst, and health.  There is open PvP, so players can be as much of a threat as zombies.  The world is expansive and built by hand.  There are large distances with no loot to be found, meaning any amount of travel requires preparation.

- What are your short and long term goals for HCFactions and MineZ?

For HCFactions, we are currently doing an enchantment balance and are then starting on our own fork of Factions.  We plan to add a finite power source that can be gained at events, which can be used to gain small bonuses to combat.  After that, we want to add some RTS style features, letting players "power" chunks outside their main land, and build specific structures to take advantage of these bonuses.

MineZ?  Well.  I have a very firm grasp of the short term vision, but I want to see how the players react once I finally let them loose on the world.  For one though, I want to add a story to the game that is gathered in pieces via signs and eventually written books.  I also want to add a special bandit NPC type, that has advanced group AI. The bandits will only spawn at the hardest places on the map, and will require teamwork and high tier items to defeat.  Honestly though, outside of that, I think the player base will dictate what the development team ultimately works on.  We've already received some great ideas from the community.

A desperate band of players fights a small horde of aggressive zombies in MineZ.

- A lot of custom code has gone into your servers, making them unique. Are there any ideas that you've really wanted to incorporate, but haven't yet been able to make a reality in code?

Anything interface related.  We always build our plugins to use the vanilla client, as we feel the client modding process isn't intuitive to all players.  I am hoping the new mod API allows us to add new interface elements and more easily disseminate information to the players.  This will open up more possibilities, since some plugins just won't work with slash commands.

- Minecraft has been criticized for being an excellent building "toy" but without a whole lot of traditional gameplay mechanics, objectives or metrics for victory. Your servers have clear "game" elements with careful thought given to balance and progression over the course of a particular map. Are there particular games or designers (aside from the obvious ARMA/Day Z for MineZ) that have inspired or influenced the systems that have been integrated into the servers?

Ultima Online.  It was the first game I fell in love with, and for the first two years it existed it was something special.  The sad thing is they ultimately changed the game to cater to a wider player base, which makes sense financially, but hurt the gritty, hardcore experience it once was.  I find myself looking back at those experiences and it is a clear influence on how I balance things on HCFactions and how I look at the design elements of MineZ.

A look at HCFactions' Spawn area, where players can safely fish, shop, and when they are ready
to leave, be fired from a cannon 600 blocks away in a random direction.

- The type of gameplay found on HCFactions lends itself well to stories of drama, betrayal, heroism and sacrifice re-told by players. Do you have a favorite "story moment" from the playerbase on your servers?

Likely Greysoul. [Note: full story of Greysoul can be found here and here.]  On the second map of the server I saw a large group of new players venturing off together.  I followed them around and documented their experience.  They ended up being the first faction to slay the ender dragon, and then they went on to conquer and destroy the largest and most dominate faction on the server.  It surprised me that a group of players with no experience on HCFactions grew from nothing into the most powerful force on the server.  Well, at least for a couple weeks. :)

- If you could tell your community one thing about your time on these projects that isn't already widely known, what would it be?

I'd have to say that the most surprising thing is I have no background in programming or game design.  I took a C++ class in high school, but that is the extent of my experience.  For HCFactions, I had to teach myself how to use linux, bash scripting, some php/mysql for the first stats page, and basic java to understand the plugins I was having developed.  It has been a very long ride, but very well worth it. Having done it for a few months now, I still enjoy it as much, if not more, than I did the very first day I started doing it.

----------------

I'd like to thank HighlifeTTU for his time, and for a gameplay experience that has matched or exceeded the play experience I've found in a lot of $60 titles, all for free. Server donations keep the project from being exceedingly expensive, and players who donate are rewarded with "free lives" to get around the 3-day ban on death.  Notoriously cheap about F2P gaming, and suspicious of most games featuring microtransactions, my experience on these servers is a testament to the hard work these folks have put into the experience their players have. Within days of my first time on HCFactions I purchased a spare life, which is, to date, the only real cash I've spent for something extra in a game since purchasing a basic starter kit in my time playing Team Fortress 2. I eagerly await the opportunity to try MineZ, and also to get back to base-building with my faction. That is, once the brave souls we lost in last night's raid have served their three-day deathban.

Zombies, Run! For Android and ZombieLink – A Review

When I first read about the Zombies, Run! Application, I thought it was a great idea. A fitness/gaming application where the player is a scavenger for a base of survivors in the zombie apocalypse, running to grab supplies and away from zombies.  It was first developed for the iPhone, and, well, I don't have one of those. However, one of the positives in my period of re-employment recently is that I did get an Android phone,and last week (6/14/12) Zombies, Run! Was released for my phone, and I've given it a few test runs (pun intended,) since an injury has me out of the weight room at the moment anyway.  The launch is not without its hiccups, but overall I like the application a lot, and will continue using it. I hate running, but this has motivated me enough to give it a serious try.

I used to joke when asked if I ran "Only when chased." Be careful what you wish for.

Zombies, Run! has a fairly simple interface. There is the base door, which lists Abel Township's (the settlement) population, and allows a quick swipe to open the door and start a mission. There's the mission menu, that displays all unlocked scenarios as well as criteria to unlock certain missions that have requirements. Next is the base upgrade menu, where each of the critical structures in the town are shown, and after each mission, collected items can be allocated to upgrade facilities with a simple drag and drop. There is an options screen with a help system, the ability to choose distance units (miles/km,) credits and the ZombieLink synch settings.  Each mission is a series of audio files telling the developing story, introducing characters, announcing when items have been picked up and cueing sprint sequences with a warning and the groans of approaching undead. Get away, and you keep your loot... get caught and you must drop an item to distract the horde. The game plays without needing to interact with the screen while running, using it to build the base and look at collected supplies later.

The Good

The voice acting in this game is spectacular, on par or better than that found in top-quality animation and AAA-video games. The story is immediately engaging, and finding out what happens next is a great motivator for getting back out there and running around a bit. The zombie chases also motivate a burst of speed, as I found myself not wanting to surrender any items even when my body was protesting that I'm built to lift weights, not sprint. I've always appreciated games that allow you to do some base/city building, and though that aspect is simple, I'm glad it is there. ZombieLink automatically tracks your progress, distance, and story events that happen along each workout for later viewing, as well as tracking in other fitness programs/sites like RunKeeper or Fitocracy. Getting to see the base's population increase as it is made more secure reinforces the idea that the player is assisting a desperate community while going out for a jog/run.

When finding that pack of underwear in the wilds, do you
allocate it to the residential facility... or the Armory?

The Bad

The application is far from perfect, and I've found a few frustrating things, especially considering the relatively steep price tag of $7.99 in an Android market packed with free or $0.99 apps. I think it is worth the price, but the flaws are a little less forgivable than they would be in a cheap/free product. There is an option to use your own music while running, but at launch, it was frustrating to use and sometimes interfered with playing the game.  Though supposedly compatible with WinAmp (though not the default music player on my phone,) the music wouldn't play through Zombies, Run!during my first two workouts. When manually starting a playlist, the music frequently drowns out some of the narration, marring the experience. It is worth mentioning that with today's update and a swap to Android Music Player, these issues seem to be resolved. ZombieLink is great, but seems unfinished, with no maps of my runs, a feature the website suggests should be live. Finally, the zombie chases are great, but they start randomly, so I find myself moving slowly when not being chased, not wanting to be worn out should a sudden chase start up.

I have great hopes for ZombieLink, but it isn't quite there.. yet. And yes, I run slow. Shut up.

The Future

Today's update, in addition to resolving the audio issues I experienced, added a shuffle feature which greatly improved the experience with each story clip or "transmission" playing as an intro/outro to random songs from a custom playlist I made for running. Various stability issues were also addressed, and my experience with the third time playing the game takes my recommendation from a cautious "Yes, but..." to an emphatic "Oh, definitely." There are currently 23 missions available, with a total of 30 promised for the first "season," as well as 5k and marathon training expansions (as I'd like someday to try the "couch to 5k" program, I look forward to this.) The team seems committed to supporting the project, so I am confident that an already great app will only get even better with time. As an experienced gamer, fan of the zombie genre and novice fitness enthusiast, this game hits the right notes. As the application is patched and refined, I think it'll be a great tool for my quest for  being more physically fit. After all, ZombieLand taught us that Rule #1 is: Cardio.

Diablo 3... My take, now that the Real Money Auction House is live – A Review.

Well, I teased this more than enough as my re-introduction to geeky subjects, and I have rather a lot to say about this game.  A look back through my articles in the past would probably earn me the label "Blizzard Fanboy" (especially from those who disagree with me.) Okay, I'll own that. I genuinely like Blizzard's games, and especially like that they improve them based on fan feedback until the game is improved based on those suggestions to a place where someone might call it "done." Not that gamers are happy with those changes, mind you. The constant in the current culture of gamer entitlement (which is a whole other article and another can of worms,) is whining on internet forums. That said, there are a lot of issues that displease a whole lot of people, which bother me more, less or not at all, and I'm prepared to address them now. Server issues, required internet connection, real money auction house, and the rarity of really great loot drops are frequently debated. Other issues, like class balance and a huge jump in difficulty at Hell and again in Inferno (especially Act II) are issues that can and will be addressed by patches, so I won't get into them here.

My current highest level character, a Witch Doctor.

Let's start with the one for which there is the weakest possible defense. Blizzard's servers weren't ready in launch week, and there are still latency issues. The answer for this one is an unpleasant truth. Blizzard knew that a certain portion of the folks who bought Diablo on launch, or who got it free with their WoW subscription extension (a LOT more on this later) will hate the game and stop playing it within a few weeks, if not immediately. Buying, maintaining, configuring all the hardware to handle a base that will massively shrink within a few weeks is a waste of money. It sucks that the consumer has to suffer for this, and it is mildly ironic that some of the base shrinking will be due precisely to the servers being overloaded, crashing or laggy.  There is, however, a series of linked issues which are the real things making people mad.

The servers wouldn't be an issue if you weren't required to stay connected to them in order to play at all. This is accepted in an MMORPG, but Diablo isn't really one of those, and I heard a TON of folks talking about how they couldn't play their single player game because they couldn't connect to a server.  Time for a hard truth. Diablo as a single player game where you pay $50-60 to "beat" the game by going to the last boss on normal difficulty and defeating him, and then you're done... well, that is something that doesn't exist anymore. Some might argue it never did, but in this incarnation in particular, Diablo is a cooperative action/rpg with randomized dungeons and loot that you are meant to play with friends through a series of ever-increasing difficulties on the way to Inferno and Level 60. You are allowed to solo, just like you can in an MMO, but this is not the way the game was designed to be played by default. I'll get into why and what it all means in a moment.

Posted this on FaceBook, friends who play Diablo
but never played WoW weren't amused.

A lot of people have figured out the basics of why a persistent connection is required. For the first time, there is an auction house where extra gear can be sold, and this time around you can choose to buy and sell items for hard-earned gold coins... or real money.  This economy doesn't work at all if there is an offline mode where items can be duplicated, and it doesn't work as well if the playerbase is given an option that doesn't include it. In an offline Diablo 3, items and gold could be duplicated, statistics that are valuable could be hacked in, changed, etc. You can't build an economy that anyone has any faith in with that as a very real possibility.  Drop rates, randomized stats on loot and how rare it is to find a truly awesome item are design decisions all impacted by the fact of an auction house where you are connected to every other player who may want to sell items to you, or buy your extras.

The most common response to all this is "I don't care about all that! I just want to play single player and I want the game I pad for to work!"  Time for another hard truth, and I'm going to say it in a way that may offend some people. If that is how you feel about Diablo, Blizzard doesn't care about you.  The gamer that wants to pay their $60, play single player until they've beaten the game and put it down, never looking back, isn't a valuable customer to them any more.  How do I know this?  They chose to not charge that $60 at all to a large base of folks used to using an auction house, used to needing to deal with server outages and maintenance, and who have already been exposed to micropayments for in-game items.  Blizzard had a problem. Subscription numbers for World of Warcraft were in decline, and Diablo was going to eat away at that base even more, taking away a bunch of monthly subscription fees.  The entire design of Diablo 3's online connection, auction house, and focus on multiplayer interaction is based on addressing this.

Also, Ponies. Gotta love how Blizzard responded to haters who complained
that the new art direction was to colorful and cartoony. (Most of the game isn't like this.)

Diablo 3 was FREE to anyone willing to extend their WoW account for 12 months. Why do that? Well, not only does Blizzard get to collect another year of fees from players, some of whom likely would have cancelled subscriptions in that time (some of them specifically because they knew they'd play Diablo,) but that is just the cherry on the top. The full dessert is in the Real Money Auction House (RMAH.) RMAH transactions have a fee, in the US, that's $1.00 to Blizzard off the top of each item sold.  Blizzard knew that a very, very small percentage of their players would use the RMAH at all, and an even smaller percentage would use it enough for those fees to add up.  The solution? Make the userbase as large as possible, attracting the very type of player most likely to use the system.  The millions of folks playing World of Warcraft are exactly that sort of player, and I experimented with the RMAH since it went live 2 days ago.  With $1.00 from every successful transaction, Blizzard has figured out how to monetize the farmers and get a consistent source of additonal money without charging a monthly fee.

I'm not going to tell anyone not to be mad about all this. By all means, if this isn't what you want out of your gaming, be mad.  It doesn't bother me, because I recognize that in the post-WoW world, a game like Diablo 1/2 isn't realistic as a way for Blizzard to make the kind of money they are used to.  They have to justify the decade and millions spent in development, the time and money spent patching and maintaining the game and servers... and the inevitable expansion(s) to their Board of Directors. Getting another Diablo to play (and I've had a blast so far) is worth all that to me. Of course, I'm exactly the target market for this game, and I played Diablo 1&2, and don't see those games with rose-tinted glasses... I remember how much worse they were for multiplayer one month after release.  Guess that makes me a fanboy.

Since We Last Spoke...

So, around the time my updating got spotty, and then stopped entirely, I'd gone back to work. Back, in fact, to the very job I'd lost when I made the first post to this blog well over a year ago. I said I wouldn't go back to that company, and I said that when I started working again that I wouldn't stop blogging. Amazing what a couple doses of perspective will do on both of those fronts.  I'm not going to make excuses, but anyone who still turns up to see if I'm updating after months of nothing deserves a few words of explanation.

Did I say early June? The 13th is "early," right?

Simply put, this blog isn't interesting (for those who find it interesting at all) just because I write it. I have my own writing style, and folks seem to like it, but I won't delude myself into thinking that I'm a special enough snowflake that people will turn up just to hear what I have to say. There are plenty of folks who can do that on the internet with nothing but their name and personality, but I'm not there yet.  The geeky content of my articles sure helped define my niche, but that didn't get me all the way there either. There are literally thousands of places someone can go if they want to read a review of the latest comic book film or video game, and a lot of those have been around longer than me, too. So why did so many folks (300,000 hits worth) turn up to read what I post here? It sure wasn't my disastrous experiment with the "magazine" dynamic template that genericized the look of the whole site.

I think there are still a lot of people who are struggling with the economy, they are out of work, or maybe recently were, or fear they may soon be.  The perspective of someone coming from those same struggles talking about great horror movies and Star Wars and Game of Thrones provides something special. That, or people just like page and a half articles with 3-4 pictures with sarcastic captions (something else that didn't work with dynamic views.) When my readership started to drop off when I went back to work, this blog went from something I needed to do, and wanted to do, to something that I felt I had to do. It was a second job. To make matters worse, my mind was on fitness, since I spent the last seven months dropping over 80 pounds and lifting heavy weights.  To write about what I was really interested in at the time would be further deviating from the interests of my core audience.

And really, who wouldn't rather be writing about stuff like the Battle of Blackwater,
instead of blogging about picking up heavy stuff, anyway?

Now, I'm once again out of work. The Foreign Service Office didn't call me up, and I'll keep plugging away at that, but I'm back to my original question of what to do next.  Well, a part of what I'd like to do is to get back to writing, and to take advantage of my additional free time to have a little bit of a life outside of gainful employment and the weight room at the local YMCA. I've seen a ton of movies, read some great books and played many, many video games that I hadn't had the time to write about if I wanted to keep enjoying them in these last few months.  Now, I want to catch up on the archives of the folks whose blogs I used to read daily and get back into the swing of things.  I have all these ideas for new articles, and I'd like to get back to putting them out there for folks to read. Might not be 5 days a week at first, but I'll be putting up new stuff regularly.

Do me a favor? If you just discovered this site, or are a loyal fan that didn't give up and came back to check and are happy to see new content here, drop an occasional comment here and there. It helps a lot doing this if I know that somewhere, someone is still reading. Thanks.