A milestone of sorts

A few years of muttering by myself

Oh my... This blog of mine turns three right about now. Of course the time I've used (and will keep using) completely irrelevant, I just happened to notice the event a few days ago. That's why I'm commenting on this occasion in my usual weird way. I guess I should warn already that there may be some ramblign ahead, even more than usually.

The insufferable difficulty of prediction

When I started the whole blog, I said something like this: "Sometimes I get a fuckton of stuff done in a rapid pace and sometimes a fifteen minute task ends up being delayed for six monhts. Based on that, I assume that my posting will follow a similar pattern". Apparently I was partially correct: my projects still advance at an unsteady pace, but the text I've managed to keep churning out at a steady pace and maybe even at a consistent, if low quality.

[ORIGINAL IMAGE MISSING AFTER n+1 YEARS]

As I was preparing myself and my improbable readers (I really didn't expect anyone to actually read anything) for a more or less slow fading away of the blog. In my first post, no less! "Of course you can try to guess if I manage to make more than ten posts". I guess I was keeping true to the "you can't always win, but you can, however, always lose"-approach. At least I wasn't loading too much pressure or expectations that most likely would've killed my excitement at blogging.

The style

My writing style or the lack of it hasn't changed much over the years, I believe. Either it means that I'm already perfect or as retarded as before. Of course it's possible that I've managed to improve on myself over time, but I feel that the text is and has been like myself from the beginning. I'm afraid that I keep overusing the same words and phrases from post to post and title to title and I work to avoid it. I just can't go and crosscheck all the existing content before I hit the publish-button.

The theme

The Blogspot style or layout hasn't really changed at all. Pretty early on I realized that I could actually use the html-headers and mostly I've done so to avoid the problem of a mountain of unformatted plaintext. The theme has been this way and I thought of customizing it a bit, at least to make a proper title image. Being totally incapable of drawing anything by hand or 'puter I just haven't got to it really. Once I tried an idea of merging a blueprint-style picture with a photo of a model of mine, but that didn't go far as my attempt at vectorizing a pic from the Sturmpanzer's instructions got ruined somehow. Maybe I'll get to restart and actually even finish that kind of a project one of these days.
Something like this is what I envisioned, somehow. At least I liked the idea.

"Content"

Avoiding insane walls of text has at least been one of my goals. As well as using at least one pic per post, as Jussi Linkola's reference once said somewheere - if I remember correctly. Even if I haven't had a perfectly fitting image to offer. I haven't always been able to do that for a reason or another, but hey, that's life again.

Scale models

Most of the projects I've documented have, of course, been related to scale models. That's what this heap of weirdness started from: I started writing down my thoughts with "work in progress" photos in here so I maybe wouldn't bother my family members and coworkers with crap they couldn't care less about. Based on the taglist I've apparently completed nine models in three years. It could've been way worse and hey, I've done other things, too.

 

[ Sturmpanzer | FlaK | T-65C | SdkFz | MAD | WHM | Königstiger | Jagdpanther | M-10 ]

Miniatures

Remembering old models aside, in the last five years I've accomplished shamefully little in the miniature front. Besides the BattleTech introbox I haven't had the time to touch my 'Mechs. Many a year ago I ordered a Star of OmniMechs, some 30 Elementals and ended up with a missent BattleMech for my Warrior's targeting practises. The Hellbringer and Summoner variants I had started, at least one of them had the feet dremeled open for better posing and I guess I had basecoated something. I think.

An intro-Omni

Attacking these long-forgotten and long-ignored metal miniatures is the next thing I'll go for. My newest two tank models can wait for a while, I believe. I really can't comprehend how my 'Mech processes ended up starving but I can always claim that my Scheduler was in the interruptible mode... cough.

Games

There hasn't been much about games here, earlier more than lately, I think. With my way of gaming there's absolutely no way I could keep a gaming blog up and alive, but that hasn't been the point, anyway. Playing through a game is a project among others. Most likely I'll keep this sort of posts on the sidelines, as a rarity, like before, depending on what I play and when. Of course that applies to everything else in my hobby blog: depends on how I feel at any given moment.

Other, please specify?

Clearly the most different of my projects is the super-awesome spacegame prototype, or whatever the hell you want to call it. At the same time it's the most irregularly worked on and even more irregularly reported about.

As I've said before, making a game has been an idea for who knows how long and I work on this beast more or less randomly. Sometimes I work a bit on a bunch of consecutive days, sometimes for long runs at a time (especially if there's an interesting problem or just plenty of progress), sometimes I don't even remember its existence for months. I trust I end up writing something about it soonish, depending on how that QuadTree implementation of mine progresses and becomes useful. Maybe.

A lie, a bigger lie, ...

According to the Blogger's stats ProjectMumblings has been red about 5k times, it has 173 posts (10 comments) and one official follower. It's absolutely shocking! Mostly I'm wondering where the hell did all these pageviews come from to a silly blog that I've never advertised or even mentioned much anywhere...

There you see, generally there's an upgoing red trend (from the beginning) but lately it's diving pretty steeply, as the blue line shows. Where does that traffic come from, anyway? I haven't the foggiest, except that some visits are from different image searches, as the Traffic Sources list claims. Strangeness.