Previously, I mentioned that I planned to investigate the Pico and Grav blogging platforms first, since they are both PHP-based, database-less platforms that operate on Markdown flat files, which sounds like the perfect place to start for my mission goals. Incidentally this is exactly the kind of post I wouldn't normally put on this blog. First I’d like to mention that it’s really hard to find alternate blogging platforms. Any sort of Googling will get you information on: WordPress, Blogger, possibly SquareSpace, and maybe a mention about Medium. Anything other than those platforms requires a great deal of digging. If you tailor your search to .NET solutions, you’ll invariably end up at DotNetNuke (gag), BlogEngine.NET, or Orchard (Microsoft’s thing). (1569 words.)

Game Of Thrones, the game from 2012, not to be confused with all of the other Game Of Thrones games, was next on my Steam Backlog Bonanza. I bought it in 2013 in a $10 bundle with … I don’t even know what else. I played it for the first time yesterday. This is not a Nazgul, but in fact the character that you play at the beginning. It’s actually surprising that this game has been sitting here for almost six years. 2013 seems like a lifetime ago. Never occurred to me to try playing this game until I forced myself to. (458 words.)

Blaugust has inspired me to write a lot more, and to think about my blog, so I thought I would start writing an open-ended series of posts about a very long-term, often-neglected project of mine: Migrating to a new blogging platform. The generic "this is a post about blogging" image. Over the years, I’ve made a bunch of web sites. I’ve been with a bunch of different web hosts. I currently have four different web sites that I “maintain” (with varying degrees of updates, from none to frequent): A real-name site, a writing site, a music site, and a gaming site. They all have different domain names. Only one of those actually gets any traffic, and that’s the gaming site (ie. this one). My real-name site used to get some traffic when I wrote about politics and stuff, but I haven’t written anything there in years. I’m quite sure my family thinks I’m dead. (1491 words.)

Back in 2013 I bought Shadow Warrior for $10, and it came with a free “mini-game” called Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior. That’s what came up on the schedule for yesterday’s stream, so I finally tried it out. I had heard about Viscera Cleanup Detail before but I don’t own it. It’s a physics game where you take on the role of a janitor who “cleans up” after the heroic gamer has gone through and slaughtered all the bad guys, exploding them into gibs or whatever. (554 words.)

Yesterday I played a game called Kholat for the 12th day of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, which I got in 2016 for about $9. For some reason, most of the literature puts it in all caps so it’s KHOLAT! Not just Kholat. KHOLAT!!! One of the main attractions is Sean Bean voicing some of the narration. It’s a really interesting game, in a certain kind of way. It’s basically a walking simulator at its heart, but it’s a very intense walking simulator. The game does a very good job of simulating a winter landscape with howling wind in your ears and blinding snow storms. It’s a game that doesn’t really do much, but what it does is very well-made. (839 words.)

Yesterday on the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I tried out a survival game from 2016 called Vortex: The Gateway which I got for $9 in a sale. (I think it’s probably a universal constant that all of the games in everyone’s backlog are games from a sale.) Surviving on an alien planet that looks like a nice camping trip. I only played for about 40 minutes because of a looming thunderstorm, but I tried the two different game modes. The first one is called the “story mode” where it plops you down on an alien planet and asks you to survive. It’s got all the standard survival mechanics; eating, drinking, chopping, gathering, building, and wandering monsters. The building mechanics are styled after The Forest, where you plop down a blueprint and then feed the materials into the blueprint one at a time to make a finished product. (That is my favorite method of building in survival games so far.) (709 words.)

Lurking over in the Blaugust Discord today, I noticed a conversation about the details of precise formatting in blog posts. Someone was having some trouble trying to get the WordPress editor to format their post exactly the way they wanted it to be seen. It inspired me to throw out a bit of unsolicited blogging advice related to this topic. First of all, I think we can all agree that the newest WordPress editor is terrible. Okay, well I don’t like it. I routinely have difficulties with it, that basically boil down to “it’s just weird and you just have to learn how it’s weird and work around it.” My biggest problem is that it routinely deletes an entire paragraph whenever I try to delete the last sentence in a paragraph. (811 words.)

Yesterday I played NEO Scavenger for the 10th day of the Steam Backlog Death March I mean Bonanza. It was released in 2014, and I bought it in 2016 for $5. (Coincidentally it’s actually on sale today for less than that.) Waking up from cryosleep. I goofed with this one. I have, in fact, played it before. But for some reason, Steam didn’t think I had. I know I played it because I found a video I recorded of it in 2016. Of course I didn’t remember a single second of it, but the game looked vaguely familiar when I played it, and that explains why. (750 words.)

I bought 2010’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for $8 in a Winter sale in 2014, and yesterday I installed and played it for the first time. I believe this was the ninth game in the Backlog Bonanza so far, with a depressingly huge list of games left to get through. Every frame of every race looks exactly like this. I’ve always liked racing games. They’re simpler games from a simpler time. I remember playing a Need For Speed game somewhere around the late 90s or early 2000s. I even bought a steering wheel and pedals for it (now long gone). (848 words.)

For undoubtedly many of the same reasons as the rest of the United States, I wasn’t in a very good mood yesterday, so I called an audible and substituted Brütal Legend instead of the game I *planned* to play. I remember enjoying a demo of Brütal Legend on the PS3 years ago, so when I saw a PC version in a Steam sale for $5 in 2013 I had to get it. (399 words.)