It’s Been Six Years Already?!

Every year the anniversary for the relaunch of Asteroid G comes around and it always feels like barely any time has passed. “Six years have gone by already? Holy hell.” And yet it has, with the site officially restarting (after, in fairness, a variety of failed starts over the years before that) back in 2018. The fact that this site has been going, continuously, over that time span is really cool, but also kind of weird since, yeah, I was so bad about keeping it going in the past. I got a schedule, I stick to it, and the articles come out.

Now on that front, I will note that sometimes the updates to the site are a little less frequent just due to life and other concerns. I might have to save up a few articles I write (dating them for when I write them even if not when I post them) because other commitments get in the way of me being able to do the coding work and uploading needed. It’s not a quick process to actually maintain this site and, depending on how many articles I have in the queue, it’s sometimes a couple of hours of work just getting the site ready for update. When stuff is late, that’s part of the reason why.

That comes, in part, to the change in how I do the articles. It used to be that I’d write them in Notepad++, code formatting as I went, which made setting the articles up pretty easy, but it also meant that they never touched a word processor. I’d run them through Dreamweaver after, just for basic spell checking, which was nice, but Dreamweaver’s spell-checker wasn’t all that intelligent. It’s dictionary didn’t have a lot of common (or, at least, common to me) words (which really were English words) and it couldn’t do grammar checking at all. If I used the wrong word, but it was still technically a word, Dreamweaver wouldn’t flag it. It cut down on the number of typos I was making, in fairness, but it didn’t eliminate them entirely. That had to eventually change.

Now, instead, I write all my articles in a word processor, which is great because it flags typos and grammar issues as I go (the little colored underlines are so nice to see, and I recognize I was being an idiot for not doing this sooner). If I use the wrong version of a word, the program knows it, points it out, and then drags my face to the screen and says, “bruh, fix this or we’ll call Little Tony on you. He’s got a crowbar, you’ve got kneecaps. It sure would be a pity if something were to happen to those kneecaps because you didn’t fix your word mistakes.” Apparently I needed that.

Downside for this process is that I have to go in and do all the code formatting for my articles after they’re written, instead of during the process. It’s not just bold and italics that I need to add, but all the cross-linking for the site that I like to maintain. There are 2,400 articles on this site, not counting the hideously old archives, and when I talk about something we’ve previously discussed or reviewed on the site, I like to be able to link over and reference that. It gets people deeper into the archives and encourages more reading. That’s good for Asteroid G. It does take more work, though, so that’s a little sad. Still, I prefer this to the old way because I think it makes the articles better.

Anyway, long story short (too late), sometimes I have stuff come up and when I have to then sit down for an hour or two (or more) and do all the coding for the site, there are days where I choose sleep instead and figure I’ll come back and do a large upload the next day with more content as I write it. And then a few days go by, and suddenly (like last week) I have a week’s worth of stuff queued up and none of it is on the site. That’s my bad, honestly. It’s all written, just not posted, and then I have to scramble. It happens, but at least you know I’m still hard at work over here.

So speaking of things that get in the way, part of the reason why last week’s updates were so late in posting is that, along with doing all my normal writing, I wrote a 50-plus page guide for learning and playing Final Fantasy Randomizer (look, I did the cross linking thing we just discussed). I’m one of the leaders of the FFR community and when discussion came up that we needed to go over and revise some of our old links and old guides, I took the lead and wrote (fresh from scratch) a whole new guide to try and incorporate all the old information and guidance we had into a tidy package. It was a fun undertaking but also time consuming. It was a lot.

And now that I think about it, I really need to get a fresh update done for my other site, Castlevania: The Inverted Dungeon, since I worked so hard on FFR it delayed my Asteroid G updates, and that as, in turn, now delayed my Dungeon updates. Wow, I feel really behind.

Anyway, the point was that I’m almost always busy and there’s usually stuff going on for me even when stuff seems idle on one of my sites. If you’re ever curious, just give me a few days and I’m sure you’ll see something pop up about what I was just doing and what was going on. And for that FFR guide, it’ll be up in a few days, officially on the FFR Wiki. Not to toot my own horn (but I’m totally gonna), I think the guide is really good. It hopefully will help people learn the game and get them in easier.

Which, speaking of, if you’ve ever had the desire to pick up a randomizer and start playing, I happen to know a community that will have a really comprehensive guide very soon…

I love how this site has grown over the years, and it’s really cool to think that after six years I have no desire to stop working on it. I don’t get bored of doing stuff for this site. It’s a nice release for me, to just sit down, do some writing, and let my brain focus on stuff other than work and life. Everyone needs some kind of release and I’ve learned that writing random articles for my own websites is my way to relax. It helps me find my chill. And, in the process, I get to review a bunch of movies I have on my shelves, justifying owning so many damn movies.

Seriously, my collection is up over 3,330 discs. When home video sales finally die off completely I’m going to be so sad. Like, I don’t know what I’m going to collect after that. This has been my thing for so many years now (getting on three decades) that I’ve become the movie guy to all my friends and family. They joke that I have a Blockbuster in my house, which is both inaccurate (since I don’t have the depth of repeat copies on my wall, and my “core” movie collection is larger than the average store ever reached) and also sad (since Blockbuster is basically a relic of a bygone era now). I will weep when physical media dies.

But until then, I’ll just keep reviewing. I’ve managed to get through over a third of the collection in six years, even with continuing to buy stuff to add to the collection, so… maybe one day I’ll reach the end and review everything. I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, the site continues. It will keep on keeping on, and I hope that when we do this check in again next year you all are still hear, reading the articles and listening to the podcasts and keeping this from being a site where I just scream out into the void and no one notices. It’s better if someone is here with me. Otherwise I’m that weird hermit no one talks to. I don’t have the power beard for that lifestyle.

Until next year! Here’s to another great year for Asteroid G.