tempest in a teacup

One of my favourite sites is Stephen Fry’s blog, where he often posts essays and podcasts about various interesting subjects. His most recent podcast is about the important role of public broadcasting in the media, and I found a lot to agree with in it, so I thought I’d link it here for everyone else to listen to.

http://stephenfry.com/podcasts/

You’ll need iTunes to listen to it. Alternatively, you can read it in written form here:

http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=44

You have been warned. :P

Kotaku covered an interesting interview on Gamasutra with CD Projekt’s VP of PR and marketing. For those not in the know, CD Projekt developed The Witcher, one of the standout PC games of last year. Click here to read the interview.

All in all he pretty much chimes in with what Stardock’s CEO mentioned in that interview I linked a while back (although honestly I think the whole “PC Gaming Alliance” thing is basically hot air until real initiatives to popularise PC gaming are proposed). He does raise one point which from my experience is pretty much correct, though:

As time goes on, sites that don’t offer any unique perspective will probably watch their readership dwindle. There are a lot of great sites out there that are worth visiting just for the quality of writing; so while they might not provide a lot of in-depth editorials, it’s just entertaining to read their takes on the day’s news. As someone who has predominantly worked on PC games in recent years, I have a different gripe: most of the major blogs just don’t really cover the platform very much.

This is pretty much spot on, I think. My experience with the major gaming blogs has been that PC gaming news, be it related to games or new hardware, doesn’t really show up that much outside of the occasional small piece on PC games sales charts (always accompanied by those “lol PC gaming is dying” comments that I loathe so much). I cannot give credit to any of the major gaming news websites for discovering gems like Sins of a Solar Empire (I discovered it from a review I read on technology enthusiast site Ars Technica), or The Witcher for that matter (I have Penny-Arcade to thank for that one).

I know the audience for PC gaming is relatively small compared to the combined market for consoles, but why can’t my platform of choice be treated with equal regard as the others? It’s not as if the major sites shirked PSP titles when the platform was doing poorly.

Another rhetorical question, I suppose.

(On a side note, a handy site I discovered from that Gamasutra article was Rock, Paper, Shotgun - a blog devoted to PC gaming. Needless to say, it has been added to my RSS feed aggregator)

I took one of the existing themes and reworked it to suit my needs. I think it turned out alright. :)

In case you’re curious, the banner picture is from a photograph I took when it snowed here last December - my first real experience with snow in quite some time.

I’m not sure I want to migrate 5 years worth of posts given how tedious it is, but I’ll need to keep my Livejournal account for other things, so it shouldn’t be a problem. For now I’ve just imported all my recent blog posts up until the start of 2008.

So…welcome, everyone! Stay a while and listen. :)

…from LiveJournal. I didn’t even know Wordpress had a feature like that…

There are some caveats, though…embedded items don’t show up (those are stored on LJ servers for some reason), and LJ cuts aren’t translated properly. In addition, all the LJ user tags which I used to link to other people’s blogs are missing. And on top of that, the comments and tags don’t carry over either.

Looks like I’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Another peeve - LiveJournal only lets you export your posts one month at a time. Seeing how my LJ post history goes all the way back to 2004, this may be more of a pain than it’s worth.