BlogNerds

I finished A Clash of Kings last night. I’ll be picking up A Storm of Swords tonight after work. I haven’t touched the Wii in about a week. Is that weird?

Yes. Indeed it is.

On Lifehacker’s recommendation, I’ve been playing with the RSS mixer tool, xFruits, lately. My goal was to create what I call a LifeFeed, which is a combination of (a lot of, but not nearly all) pieces of content that I am producing/tracking on the internet. This is essentially an aggregated RSS feed containing the following contributions:

• Nerdflood (this blog)
• Flickr photos
• diggs
• Link blog
• Game tracking updates
• Ficlets

I really like working with xFruits so far, although, admittedly, I haven’t done much except play around with the RSS aggregator. It’s fairly quick and easy to use, but I have just one complaint. I can’t label my feed sources. I’d like to see in the feed the ability to label the individual content feeds as “Nerdflood”, “Flickr”, “Ficlets”, etc. so it’s obvious where each entry in the feed was generated. But this is a quibbling nuisance, as you can see the sources in the URL when you hover over the links. It’s a “nice to have”, not a “must have” feature.

All in all, it’s a fun product, and I look forward to seeing new features added as time goes on. I plan to create a few more xFruits in the next few days, including one based on the Evil Avatar network content.

Oh, and can someone please tell me what you would use “RSS –> PDF” for? I can’t think of a reason for its existence, and it’s driving me nuts because I KNOW it has to be there to serve some purpose.

It’s TV turn-off week, and though it isn’t affecting us greatly, it is having an influence. We aren’t overly dependent upon the televisions in our home, but it is nice to take this opportunity to unplug and show our boys that every now and then, you have to have something else be the focus and/or background of your life. It’s both rewarding and painful, but mainly rewarding, and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

There’s several consequences to TV turn-off week. One, it means I’m also not playing games. Which isn’t necessarily bad, especially given the fact that I played through a couple hours of TMNT over the weekend and came away less than impressed. Although Super Paper Mario is sitting on the shelf begging me to begin chapter four, and that’s difficult. The draw of Nintendo properties is still as powerful as it ever has been.

But, this week has also afforded me an opportunity to rip through A Clash of Kings, the second Song of Ice and Fire novel by George R. R. Martin. It’s a phenomenal book, and a quick read if you’re already deep into the story. I’m nearing the end, likely I’ll be able to finish in time for a quick trip to the city with the family on the weekend to pick up book three.

Of course, it also means I have to miss this week’s Thank God You’re Here! That will be a testament to pure willpower.

But Caleb is learning something valuable: that TV isn’t the center of the living room. It is an object of entertainment that is no more or less important than other objects of entertainment in our home, such as our library of books, mountain of toys, and plethora of art projects. He’s well entertained, that one is. Alex seems, as always, largely unmoved by the whole thing. He prefers to toddle about the house pretending to dance to silent music anyways. The lack of TV doesn’t appear to have affected him in that regard.

There’s probably a bit more detail to go into than to just simply say I’m cleaning house on side-projects. There’s more to it than that. I’ve recently discovered that I have high blood pressure. My doctor has been monitoring my stats over the past few weeks, and it hasn’t dropped below 130/90 (normal pressure is 120/80). It’s not overly worrying, but it is elevated, and I’ll probably have to go on medication.

Today, though, was a worrying day. The doc scheduled me for a morning ultrasound of my kidneys. Not knowing how long I’ve been dealing with my problem, we had no way of knowing if there had been any damage done to my kidneys through long-term high blood pressure.

While the situation certainly isn’t Virginia Tech bad, this is the only body I’ve got, and I’d like to make sure it lasts a while longer.

Turns out the kidneys are fine, and I’m due to go on some meds sometime early next week. Everything should be working out all right. It’s just been a trying time since I have no control over this particular aspect of my health, and I’d really like to continue living. I want to do anything I can to reduce stress and minimize the possibility of an unhealthy lifestyle. I’ve got a family that needs a healthy dad and husband.

Back to the “cleaning house” thing. It’s two things, really. It’s reducing stress and clearing off the plate. In one way, I’m taking away the things where I don’t need undue pressure from imaginary deadlines. In another, I’m cleaning up time that can be spent on family, friends, and hobbies that bring me enjoyment and value.

So, there you have it. Not really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but a big deal to me.

Maybe “cleaning house” isn’t the right term. Streamlining? Attempting to be more efficient with my free time? Making myself “scalable”? Well, whatever terminology could be used to describe it, the fact of the matter is I’m cutting away some side-projects.

I’ve realized recently that I spend a lot of time doing things that I no longer enjoy, and the time I spend on those things takes away from the time I spend with my family or doing things I DO enjoy. I also have a lot of things on my plate that I just haven’t been doing anything with, and just need to be swept away. At least for a while.

So, starting this Friday, I’ll be ending my relationship with Evil Avatar Webcomics. That’s right, I’ll no longer be drawing the comic that only EvAv members can understand. But that should be all right, because soon we’ll be seeing more work from our two new resident artists, Tricky Thumb and joshkdmw. And their stuff is solid, so I have no worries leaving that establishment behind.

On a related note, also on the chopping block is webcomics in general. I’m no longer going to spend my lunch breaks perusing a hundred webcomics every day. I’m going to pick a handful to check up on periodically (such as PvP, Penny Arcade, Starslip Crisis, Sheldon, and a few other personal favorites). I’ll probably also still keep Fleen and Comixpedia in my RSS feeds and check on them every once in a while. This removal of webcomics from my cerebral cortex also has the unfortunate side-effect of displacing my involvement in Zoinks! Magazine. I loved working with Bill Charbonneau, and writing about webcomics was a sincere love of mine. But these things need to just get out of the way. I need to refocus, and pushing webcomics to the back are a big part of moving forward.

I’ve also removed links to such projects as the Nerdblog Network (which is one of those things I never really did anything with), and my dusty sketchblog (also something I did nothing with). I might get back to the sketchblog, but since I’m really not doing any drawing these days, it really makes no sense to maintain it.

So, for now, I’m left with gaming and writing. I’ll be forcing myself to get back to doing some serious writing, not just some snippets of content over at Ficlets. As I get more stuff generated, I’ll be pointing it out over here.

And that’s pretty much where my life is at the moment! Well, that, and playing Super Paper Mario.