{"id":889,"date":"2009-05-26T15:41:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T21:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nerdflood.com\/2009\/05\/26\/what-have-i-been-up-to\/"},"modified":"2009-05-26T15:41:02","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T21:41:02","slug":"what-have-i-been-up-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/what-have-i-been-up-to\/","title":{"rendered":"What have I been up to?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My regular blog readers have probably noticed the silence these past couple of months. I&#8217;ve been extremely busy, both at work and at home. At some point within the past few months, I slightly altered the sidebar description of this blog to denote that it is reserved for &#8220;larger more encompassing thoughts, essays, concepts, and arguments&#8221; in an attempt to at least partially dissuade the fictional constructs in my mind that incessantly harp on the fact that I don&#8217;t update the blog very often. However, I don&#8217;t feel comfortable leaving the site empty for weeks at a time. I <i>also<\/i> don&#8217;t just want to throw together one of those boring &#8220;Wow, it&#8217;s been a long time, hey blog?! Hurr, hurr&#8221; kind of posts. So I thought that I would rather assemble a bulleted listing of things that have been occupying my time lately.<\/p>\n<p><b>Online<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Working on my Nintendo-centric blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/itsdangeroustogoalone.com\">It&#8217;s Dangerous to Go Alone<\/a>. It&#8217;s a bit exhausting having two blogs, but I like the dichotomy. This is still my one true home online, but my long-form essays on how pathetic Nintendo has been lately need to go <i>somewhere<\/i>. <a href=\"http:\/\/itsdangeroustogoalone.com\">IDTGA<\/a> has been a good outlet for those rants.<\/li>\n<li>Being fairly active on both <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Nathaniel_Payne\/501415487\">Facebook<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/nathanielpayne\">Twitter<\/a>. Facebook more than Twitter, to be perfectly honest. I see the value in Twitter, but I can&#8217;t spend hours there sifting through hundreds of tweets and engaging in every imaginable conversation. I tend to pick up on trending topics amongst my various peer groups, add a morsel of insight here and there, and scamper back into the shadows when someone points out the errors of my logic. I think it&#8217;s exactly how Kant would handle Twitter, had he not died in the 1800&#8217;s.<\/li>\n<li>Writing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colonyofgamers.com\/cogforums\/showthread.php?t=8177\">some<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colonyofgamers.com\/cogforums\/showthread.php?t=7364\">reviews<\/a> for <a href=\"http:\/\/colonyofgamers.com\">Colony of Gamers<\/a>. It pays the bills. Actually, it doesn&#8217;t, because I don&#8217;t get paid for that. Drat.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Offline<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spending lots of time with family. I need to make sure I give everyone as much time as possible while we&#8217;re still just a family of <i>four<\/i>. In another couple of months, our new addition will make our lives more complicated (but <i>far<\/i> more rewarding).<\/li>\n<li>Working on completing a major project for work that will go live this weekend. After that, breathing should come much more naturally.<\/li>\n<li>Working on a <a href=\"http:\/\/nerdflood.com\/2008\/11\/21\/about-that-whole-novel-thing\/\">novel late last year<\/a> completely burned me out on writing, but I&#8217;ve now been getting the itch to write again. I spent some this weekend putting together notes on a couple of short story ideas and fleshing out a new young adult novel concept I came up with a few weeks ago.<\/li>\n<li>The only gaming I&#8217;ve been doing lately is some intermittent bouts with PopCap&#8217;s new drug, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.popcap.com\/games\/pvz\/\">Plants vs. Zombies<\/a>. I think I&#8217;m finally over the addiction, but it was really touch and go there for a while.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s pretty much it. I ate and slept in there a bit, every now and again. I also caught up on the first season of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hulu.com\/dollhouse\">Dollhouse through the magic of Hulu<\/a> and I&#8217;m marginally pleased that it was renewed for a follow-up season. But those are moments pest saved for tweets, don&#8217;t you think?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not promising that this post means that &#8220;I&#8217;m back!&#8221; or any such nonsense. I&#8217;m standing by the idea that I will only post if I have something nascently substantial upon which to soliloquize (sorry, my thesaurus was handy). And even then, I can&#8217;t promise that it will be something worth <i>reading<\/i>. Only that it&#8217;s something <i>I<\/i> felt necessary to <i>talk about<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s just all agree to disagree on that particular aspect, shall we? Yes. Let&#8217;s shall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My regular blog readers have probably noticed the silence these past couple of months. I&#8217;ve been extremely busy, both at work and at home. At some point within the past few months, I slightly altered the sidebar description of this blog to denote that it is reserved for &#8220;larger more encompassing thoughts, essays, concepts, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252],"tags":[322,480,65,289,364,465],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-blogging","tag-facebook","tag-family","tag-happenings","tag-social-networking","tag-twitter","last-post"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}