"What's your favorite flavor of e-cig juice?" "Creamed corn!"
I played ME1 for so long yesterday, I am actually dreading the number of side quests I'm going to find when I open up the game again. I did Feros, Noveria, and Therum - in that order, because I've never gotten the dialogue where Liara thinks you're a hallucination. It's hilarious, as well as goddamn adorable, but I don't think I'll do that for future playthroughs. The more I change up the way I play the games, the more I start to realize I think I did it the best way the first time around. Mostly.
Also, I got an email yesterday that sent me on a full-tilt nostalgia trip.To supply a bit of context, I used to run with a pretty small group of industry bloggers in college. We were the kind of people who would do review pieces where we'd get the item for free in exchange for the blog post. Some of us would also have affiliate links that paid us commission, and the really popular people had ad space for sale.
It was unbelievably helpful to me as a college student who couldn't afford any of it otherwise, but oh my sweet Jennifer, the drama. Both bloggers and retailers would start it, but it would catch like lighter fluid across the entire scene. Within a matter of days, the wank-fest would begin. Sometimes it was just a twitter fight, but on at least three separate occasions, there were all-out smear campaigns against retailers, manufacturers, or program organizers. (Full disclosure: participating in them got me literally nintey percent of my blog's traffic, and was likely the only reason I was so successful.) It was fuckin' bonkers, your ethics were called into question if you didn't participate, and it was mostly facilitated by one person.
She ran the main community sites for the reviewing scene, and while her intentions were usually good (usually), her methods were eye-rollingly obnoxious. (I'm linking to that because I don't want to have to post it twice, the part about convention drama specifically is about her.) My least favorite part is one of the titles she gives herself in her site header is "fearless blogger". Yeah, no. Fearless people don't hide behind password protected blog entries and invite-only forums.
Anyway, the point of this is I got an email saying the communities she's in charge of are closing down, again. According to another blogger, she did this a few years before I joined because she didn't feel like people were paying enough attention to it (or to her). I'm honestly really surprised it lasted this long, because the programs all died in late 2011, and the only people who still run a review blog are at least semi-professional.
Even when I first signed up, I never once thought I'd do it full-time. I was in as long as the river still flowed, and by the time it dried up, I was out of college and had a job that paid enough for me to not need it anymore. I'm not sorry, because there's no reason for me to be. I did exactly what was asked of me, and I did it well. My reviews were timely and thorough, I knew enough HTML to have a readable site, and I was good enough at feigning outrage to ride the wave of the drama bombs.
I did well enough, in fact, that by the time I quit I'd collected about ninety dollars in affiliate sales and eighteen hundred dollars' worth of product. My total time on the scene was about a year and a half. I didn't steal a thing, but it feels like I got away with murder. The Seven of Swords isn't supposed to be a card you identify with, right?
Near the end, one of the other bloggers told me she was disappointed to hear I wasn't going to move my blog to my own domain and try to go professional. I still wonder if she understood that by that point, I was making more money than eighty-three percent of people my age. Now it's ninety-four. I'm not sorry I didn't quit nursing school and try to blog full-time.
(You may have noticed I haven't said what specifically I used to review. This is because the community is so small, I'd probably give my former identity away by doing so. Even on a friendless livejournal in the abandoned end of the internet, I'd rather not tickle that sleeping dragon. I'm not joking; there were maybe thirty blogs total in the heyday of the reviewing programs, and their lifespans were not long.)
Aside from all that nonsense, I got a little graphic novel the other day called Long Red Hair by Meags Fitzgerald. Holy gosh, I did not expect to have so much in common with the author. It's a short but effective memoir about the author's childhood, growing up fascinated with witches, coming to terms with being bisexual, and dealing with the idea of celibacy - in terms of not looking for a romantic relationship.
It struck a much harder chord than I thought it would, especially when she talks about her first kiss. (She vomits almost immediately afterward, because it felt like part of his body had invaded hers, and it couldn't be undone. I had very similar feelings last year about a different situation, but I thought I was insane.)
Also, I got an email yesterday that sent me on a full-tilt nostalgia trip.To supply a bit of context, I used to run with a pretty small group of industry bloggers in college. We were the kind of people who would do review pieces where we'd get the item for free in exchange for the blog post. Some of us would also have affiliate links that paid us commission, and the really popular people had ad space for sale.
It was unbelievably helpful to me as a college student who couldn't afford any of it otherwise, but oh my sweet Jennifer, the drama. Both bloggers and retailers would start it, but it would catch like lighter fluid across the entire scene. Within a matter of days, the wank-fest would begin. Sometimes it was just a twitter fight, but on at least three separate occasions, there were all-out smear campaigns against retailers, manufacturers, or program organizers. (Full disclosure: participating in them got me literally nintey percent of my blog's traffic, and was likely the only reason I was so successful.) It was fuckin' bonkers, your ethics were called into question if you didn't participate, and it was mostly facilitated by one person.
She ran the main community sites for the reviewing scene, and while her intentions were usually good (usually), her methods were eye-rollingly obnoxious. (I'm linking to that because I don't want to have to post it twice, the part about convention drama specifically is about her.) My least favorite part is one of the titles she gives herself in her site header is "fearless blogger". Yeah, no. Fearless people don't hide behind password protected blog entries and invite-only forums.
Anyway, the point of this is I got an email saying the communities she's in charge of are closing down, again. According to another blogger, she did this a few years before I joined because she didn't feel like people were paying enough attention to it (or to her). I'm honestly really surprised it lasted this long, because the programs all died in late 2011, and the only people who still run a review blog are at least semi-professional.
Even when I first signed up, I never once thought I'd do it full-time. I was in as long as the river still flowed, and by the time it dried up, I was out of college and had a job that paid enough for me to not need it anymore. I'm not sorry, because there's no reason for me to be. I did exactly what was asked of me, and I did it well. My reviews were timely and thorough, I knew enough HTML to have a readable site, and I was good enough at feigning outrage to ride the wave of the drama bombs.
I did well enough, in fact, that by the time I quit I'd collected about ninety dollars in affiliate sales and eighteen hundred dollars' worth of product. My total time on the scene was about a year and a half. I didn't steal a thing, but it feels like I got away with murder. The Seven of Swords isn't supposed to be a card you identify with, right?
Near the end, one of the other bloggers told me she was disappointed to hear I wasn't going to move my blog to my own domain and try to go professional. I still wonder if she understood that by that point, I was making more money than eighty-three percent of people my age. Now it's ninety-four. I'm not sorry I didn't quit nursing school and try to blog full-time.
(You may have noticed I haven't said what specifically I used to review. This is because the community is so small, I'd probably give my former identity away by doing so. Even on a friendless livejournal in the abandoned end of the internet, I'd rather not tickle that sleeping dragon. I'm not joking; there were maybe thirty blogs total in the heyday of the reviewing programs, and their lifespans were not long.)
Aside from all that nonsense, I got a little graphic novel the other day called Long Red Hair by Meags Fitzgerald. Holy gosh, I did not expect to have so much in common with the author. It's a short but effective memoir about the author's childhood, growing up fascinated with witches, coming to terms with being bisexual, and dealing with the idea of celibacy - in terms of not looking for a romantic relationship.
It struck a much harder chord than I thought it would, especially when she talks about her first kiss. (She vomits almost immediately afterward, because it felt like part of his body had invaded hers, and it couldn't be undone. I had very similar feelings last year about a different situation, but I thought I was insane.)