ESullNet

            Endings are hard. Just ask Stephen King, or Benioff and Weiss. There are plenty of names I could’ve listed there, too. J.J Abrams is famous for his “mystery box” method of telling a story: write an incredible open-ended introduction, but find what it all leads to as you write the rest of the story. Both The Force Awakens and Lost had the problem of great starts that simply couldn’t be followed up, because they had to find where it was all heading.

            Enough about bad endings, though. This is not the time for bad endings, this is the time for my ending, damn it! This is the end of the summer “daily” blogs; I want to be leaving space open for something to build off for the school year, but I really don’t know if that’ll mean monthly, biweekly, weekly, or biweekly as in twice a week posts. I do think that’s a fun challenge for me on the school year—learning from what did and didn’t work on this era of a blog, and try to build something better.

“Funeral for a Friend” (or: why this blog died!)

            Ironically, if you look close enough you could’ve seen a sign of this coming. I tried to do daily blogs when I setup my site, and got as far as day 3. Sure, I was a little busy with the end of the school year, but I also got lazy; if that’s not a microcosm of this whole experiment, I’m not sure what is. Sure, the real blog went to day 27 (sort of, I filled some missing days in), but the same thing happened; as I said, I got bored, lazy, and busy. So is the moral of the story not to be busy? No, that is unavoidable, but laziness is certainly avoidable. That would be the way to target a more active blog during the school year; it’s not hard to just tell myself to write instead of do nothing, and it’s not much harder to take the step and actually do it! So why not do that?

            I talked more on the failings of the blog in Post #28, so I will leave this there, but it is good to review the last few details at the end of a story and keep it fresh in the reader’s mind, so that’s one of two reasons why I brought it up. The second was just so I can title this section in reference to a song in my summer playlist as I did the first week of this blog.

The Second Part

            OK now for the second part of the blog, where I bring up how much of a masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon is. I have it on in the background right now, and what an incredible album. I’m convinced I could’ve finished this blog post by now if I didn’t stop every few minutes to appreciate just how good a part of a song is, whether that be the reprise of “Breathe” in “Time,” the general vibe of “The Great Gig in the Sky,” or the absolutely killer sax solo in “Money.”

            Maybe one thing I could try to do in the future is use blog posts to write more in depth album reviews. I did it once with a short review on Phil Collins’ Face Value, but even then it was a paragraph long. I’d like to try to write, because I always find it fun to just yap away into the void about things you love. If that is what my blog could always be, I’d always want it to be that. So why isn’t it? I don’t know honestly, probably just I haven’t thought of this, because smart ideas and my brain in the summer never mix.

And In the End…

            Currently we are at 650 words deep into a blog post meant to end the summer blogs I failed to do to the extent I wanted. But I did not fail. I didn’t write as much as I wanted sure, but what I did write I would almost entirely call a success. Every last word I typed onto my laptop was some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing, and my biggest regret was the procrastinator in me not wanting to start a post until I was already tired and just giving up for a day, because then one day became two, two three, and so on.

            That last paragraph is basically what I’ve spent three blog posts across three days reconciling with. If anything, my summer blog became something of a learning experience, which is certainly contradictory, based on the fact that everyone knows summer break to be the three months where absolutely nothing gets done.

            So here’s to the new school year! It’ll be a fun one, and that I know. If every last thing comes out well, it’ll be one I’ll have a blog to remember it by, but even so, I expect it to be one of the most fun years of my life. Thank you for reading this last post, despite how much of a mess it was, and have a fantastic rest of your day.

            Hello again! One thing I’ve always found interesting in films, especially blockbusters, because they very commonly have this, is the random details added during the closing action of a film. Usually they serve the plot purpose of setting up for a sequel. Now, as funny as it is when a film has some fairly obvious sequel bait but in fact gets no sequel, it is nice when done well; in fairness, even the funny ones are usually done alright enough. It’s only when you watch a film years later you realize that whatever they were setting up just didn’t happen. Remember how The Last Jedi fully established a trilogy’s identity and left a place to go in Episode IX, but all of it was reversed due to fan reception when they tried something new? But that detracts from the point, the point is this blog post is my sequel bait: things I want to try in the coming days, weeks, and months, and blog throughout the fall.

            The first thing I want to try is a bit of a lifestyle one, but I would like to see just how it goes: I want to try waking up earlier. One thing I hate about school is waking up at 5:30 and then getting ready for school. Now, why then would I wake up earlier? Once I’m actually at school, around 2^nd or 3^rd period, I’m actually awake! I don’t mind it anymore! It is possible that waking up earlier, and giving myself more time beforehand could mean I mentally wake up earlier in the school day, and that may help the start of the day feel a bit easier. There are two main downsides to this plot, though: I have to go to bed earlier as a consequence, and I have no idea if it would actually work in practice. The first is a logistical issue; obviously, as I don’t know exactly how late my days will go, and even further I also don’t know how much I can adapt by doing earlier in the day to offset that. I don’t want to have life work in a way where I do things until 22:00 or 23:00 and then have to wake up at 3:30. It would just be losing sleep for virtually nothing. The latter is obviously the risk with any idea: maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t! It’s not a stop to the idea by any means, just a note on ideas as a whole almost.

            The second idea is also a lifestyle one: the end of social media. It’s time to kill off Twitter. Whenever I use it, I get nothing out of it and I waste away two to three hours on nothing productive. Why bother with it? I would like to replace that time spent with a slightly more purposeful method to doing things—just using my time on stuff I say I want to do! It’s easier to just scroll Twitter, sure, but writing a blog post or making progress on a game is infinitely more rewarding. So I would like to cut social media out and see the effects.

            Thirdly, I want to try experimenting more with computers. Linux has been monumental in this: it’s given me things to try. I can compare open source apps to their Microsoft or Adobe competitors, or figure out how to run them in Wine. Yesterday I learned to run Word 2010 in Wine, as I do tend to prefer Microsoft’s offerings to LibreOffice, and it was a fun task that I think helped me learn a little more on how Wine works. It too can create little stories to write about and possibly help out ending social media, by giving me a sense of motivation. If I try something, I’ve just given my blog a purpose, and just by trying and writing I feel I would have spent much better for those 2 hours than scrolling Twitter and getting nothing out of it at the end to show for it.

Of course, I could go on forever about all these little things I want to try: listening to new music and writing reviews, focusing on my video game backlog, spending less time procrastinating, trying to somewhat frequently go to the gym, and I do hope to do all of these things as well. They’re just less interesting to write about in my opinion, although all four of these things would lead to longer and more interesting blog posts, which is possibly a greater reward than the three I went into more detail with. You have to first squeeze an orange to get juice, and those are the oranges.

            I hope my sequel bait didn’t seem too insane and this post doesn’t read as an equivalent to the post-credits scenes of the movie Eternals, but I think even so it is good. If I overloaded myself with a few too many ideas and can only get to half of the 7 I listed, that’s still 3 or 4, all of which I think will be fun to try. It would be worst if I got none of it done, and this post really resembled Eternals: insane, and irrelevant! But I shall do my best to avoid so, for my own sake. Thank you for reading, and have a fantastic rest of your day.

            Hello again! It’s been a while, and for someone with a decent sense of how to read a calendar you may notice that my daily blog skipped 35 days. Now, this could mean one of two things: I was lazy and didn’t write any posts, or in fact this was part of my master plan, as I’ve been up consecutively all 35 days to set a world record, hence this is the next day’s blog post. I think you can tell which one it is.

            So let’s examine this failure! And hey, let’s begin a multi-day wrap up to my summer blog. This should leave me at 30 blog posts even, giving me 2 days off before school starts and I “begin” my weekly blog that has nothing to do with this one at all. Just kidding, this and that will be the same, but I won’t be sorting posts into my summer 2026 category, and this is a huge difference I swear.

Failure Point 1: Not Giving Myself a Standard for a Post

            This is both the blessing and curse of this blog: I let a post be anything. On one hand, this theoretically made it a lot easier for me to squeeze in a post every day, even if it’s just 50 words and a link to a cool video I found. I also was definitely a bit too relaxed on this at the same time; I let myself miss a day and just do a make-up post the next day. The second I did that, my fun daily blog turned into every 3 days I post two YouTube videos and write a post saying how I was very sleepy because I went on another college tour (that’s another failing point, this is foreshadowing. Be ready.)

            I really do think I should’ve been tighter on myself. Now this is a little unfair considering this was a blog I wanted to do just for myself as a little task to do over the summer, but I let the great procrastinator take over, which was obviously not a fun time. I know I planned to do a Rock Band 1, 4, and Riffmaster review, and got to none of them! I easily had the time on all three to have a good review, but by that point I had just lost interest. If  I was on myself a little more, I feel like I could’ve had a fun challenge in trying to make the mundane interesting, or paying attention to the little moments throughout this summer, and it would’ve been a fun blog to write due to that.

Failure Point 2: College Tours

            I hesitate to call this a failing point, because at the same time this was a great part of my summer. It was very nice to see different colleges and find what I like and dislike in them, because college is important! The tours themselves were worthwhile! But the tours are something of what Pet Sounds and Smile are to the Beach Boys: fantastic times that also doomed it in the long run. Whereas the Beach Boys released some of their best work, and had to reconcile studio experimentation and what was more popular, I had to reckon paying attention to my future and not being too tired for writing silly blog posts. I think you can see why I went with college tours, even if I know it doomed the blog, because this is where I started doing skip-a-day blog posts.

            So is it really a failing point for my summer? No! I actually wouldn’t say I have one of those! It’s just a failing point for my abandoned silly summer blog posts, which I wanted to be a bigger part of my summer at the start.

Failure Point 3: Not Finding My Own Niche

            You have to be yourself! Obviously there’s a lot to a person, but writing about everything led to this insane focus of my blog. If I tried to narrow it in more I could’ve probably had a great motivation to write. I say this because just like in how I could’ve forced myself to learn to make the mundane interesting, I could’ve tried finding some new knowledge to write on: whether that be a fun bit of technology or even just my ever-evolving thoughts on film as I watch more of them. Maybe even gains at the gym, as I started going there this summer. But regardless, trying to write about everything was fun, but led to me not really knowing what to do next. Instead of having something to write every day, I hesitated to find something to write about; this meant for every day I had something to write, I had three without.

So, do I regret trying to write summer blog posts? Hell no! It was fun when I did it, and it’s fun now in this semi-post-mortem, and I guarantee it’ll be fun for the next few days as I wrap up the summer. It was also nice to somewhat try and keep up my writing quality throughout the summer, despite how many days I wrote 50 words or less on how I didn’t want to write today actually.

            Even so, it’s almost something of a learning lesson. I now know what did and didn’t work for the summer, and I’ll probably keep writing as a hobby throughout the school year. It’s better than doomscrolling Twitter, and I know that for certain! Thank you for reading this one, and have a fantastic rest of your day.

Hey again! After yesterday, where I just said “no post today” as a bit, today my post is another vaguely comedic bit! Now I usually start my posts with what I did today, so here’s what I did today. Today I played some LA Noire, and then Rock Band 1. I finished the first disc of LA Noire, so my assumption is that I am 1/3 of the way through seeing as it is 3 discs on Xbox 360, but who knows? It’s probably less.

My playing of Rock Band 1 was the real meat of the day, though. I opened the game and I had a thought: “I always put in the cheat code to unlock all songs, why don’t I just play through the career and get the songs I want?” So I did. Now one of the songs I really adore in that game is “Tom Sawyer” by the band Rush. It’s a great prog song. Now the song is one of, if not the hardest on drums, and I wanted to unlock it quick, so I played through the game on guitar. The song isn’t too difficult, so I expected it to not be a long affair. Rock Band sorts songs by tiers of difficulty, with the first game having 9. I had already completed the first tier, so I figured it could be no more than 4 tiers, as I think it’s about medium-difficulty for the game. It was at tier 7 of 9 where I realized that this was not the case! The song is in tier 8! I played the tiers 2 to 8 all back-to-back! That is 35 consecutive songs! My hand hurts!

It was fun. I’m not gonna lie, I love Rock Band. But it is a funny little story, regardless of that aspect, which is why I told you it. I hope you get as much of a kick out of it as I did, and have a fantastic rest of your day.

no post today! Thank you for reading, have a fantastic rest of your day.

Hello again! Today, an order I purchased from GameStop came in, so my day was just playing “new” video games and watching the FIFA World Cup final. I’ll briefly speak on the cup. It was an entertaining game, although I do wish it was closer, as Argentina really couldn’t keep up with Spain, and I think that hurt the game to the point where it went from what would’ve been a great game to simply an OK or good one.

In terms of the games I got, I got Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 4, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Star Wars Battlefront (2015), Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017), Persona 5 Strikers, LA Noire, Metal Gear Solid V, and Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. I have tried a bit of Halo 1, the Battlefronts, COD 4, and LA Noire today. Halo 1 I got mostly to play locally when I have friends over, so I just played through the first campaign mission for fun. The Battlefronts, while I have played on Xbox One, I got on PS4 due to that platforms larger playerbase, as I am a fan of those games. I had never actually played Call of Duty 4, and after trying the multiplayer, I really like this one. I will play it more. LA Noire I started as my first big singleplayer game I want to play through during the summer, which I’ll mix in with the other 3 singleplayer games and a few from my backlog. The investigations are very fun in that game. I look forward to the rest of it, and will write on my thoughts as I go.

That’s all for today. Thank you for reading this one, which is short yet again. I’m realizing the amount of time I want to sink into my Rock Band 4 review, for example, means it’ll take a lot more time than I originally thought. Not that this is an issue, but I’ll probably have to adjust my plan on “bridging the gap” until then with only a few short posts. Have a fantastic rest of your day.

Hello again! In a way, today was one of my more productive days, as I read a book vs. doomscrolling for hours upon hours. I was intending on reading a chapter or two of Project Hail Mary, but got so into it that I read the entire second half (Chapter 15 to the end) in a single sitting. So here’s a few thoughts I have had on the book.

One thing I adored about the book is the tension at the book’s climax. While I think it has a climax a little early (happening around Chapters 19 and 20), those two chapters are so intense that they are some of the finest parts of the book. It feels like everything is going wrong, and Grace and Rocky are frantically doing everything they can to get out of it. Speaking of Grace and Rocky, the buddy dynamic the two characters they have is another element of the book that I love. It both adds an emotional core to the book and allows for the occasionally comedic relief of tension, which I think really helped the book.

I will for sure write a much fuller review in the coming few days once I’ve had a bit more to sit on it, but I did really enjoy the book! You should read it! Have a fantastic rest of your day.