dotKenneth.com

Excuses, Excuses

Kenneth Ormandy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:05:25 +0000

I really wish I could stick to blogging, but I’m not particularly fond of writing about things involving people I know. It’s not really my position to talk about them, and even if they wouldn’t care it’s not really something I’d necessarily feel like sharing in a potentially public manner. I think this is why I’ve had such a hard time motivating myself to write; my stories are about people for a change. It has been a nice change of pace for me personally, but it isn’t so good for my blog. Luckily, I sketched a new idea for a blog theme and am nearly done setting up my WordPress dummy install so I can begin crafting my new theme. This one never really got finished, it didn’t get the minimalist feel and there wasn’t a lot of consistency to the design. I’m bringing back the sidebar in the new theme, and keeping the bottom bar but trying to use it just for content navigation. I want to make my Lifestream more prominent, and while I have some cool ideas about that, I don’t think I’d be able to make them myself. I usually manage to find a work-around method to these kind of problems, though, so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Block 2.0

Kenneth Ormandy — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:05:57 +0000

It’s odd that my lack of web inspiration has not resurfaced. Usually I’ll be working on something if not my blog, but for a while now, other than updating some icons I was doing for cherrypie, I haven’t done anything. I’d planned out one personal site for someone that I’d barley started, and I still need to talk over the frequently postponed project of SupremeSonic’s blog. Music has inspired me to get a bit more serious with my drum practicing, and I may even go back to the piano soon to try and come up with something for fun. The same method isn’t seeming to work for web design, though, even when it’s all casual projects. I have a hard time making something without just feeling like I’m ripping it off. Any suggestions? I suppose setting a date where I want this or that done by and simply better communication with SupremeSonic would be a start.

Digital Foot-Shooting

Kenneth Ormandy — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:56:18 +0000

So, I went to Best Buy and some other places to see if I wanted to spend any of the masses of gift cards I got over the holidays. I only ended up spending a little a Best Buy, namely because they are shooting themselves in the foot by having internet access on all their computers on display. I was carrying Shoot ‘Em Up around most of the time I was there. I didn’t see many good movies this year (I saw lots of movies, most of them just sucked) and I really enjoyed seeing Shoot ‘Em Up. My friends are all mindless action junkies, so that was a pretty crazy experience. The writing is intentionally cheesy, but I see it as a kind of What if Smokin’ Aces was good. However, checking the price at HMV.ca at Best Buy since I knew I was going to an HMV later, I saw it was cheaper there. I also ended up looking at Half-Life 1 Anthology for PC. Having The Orange Box now really makes me want to have as much as the series I can and, as much as I wish it, I don’t think Half-Life 1 is going to be coming to Xbox Live Arcade. I thought this would be the perfect thing to get. I figured I’d check the price of the package on Steam before buying it and, lo and behold, it was half the price Best Buy had it for. I ended up getting the third and fourth Futurama seasons on DVD since they were the best price I’d seen them so far. I ended up saving at least twenty dollars just because I could connect to the internet while at the store. Unfortunately that’s about as exciting as my shopping trip got, I don’t have a story about something stupid a Best Buy employee did or anything. I’m kinda boring. On the plus side, Rock Band.

Year in Review 2007 - Video Games

Kenneth Ormandy — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 01:58:27 +0000

This list is much longer than I intended, but I do play a lot of games. I was supposed to have one list for everything that happened this year, music movies, games, websites, and so on. I have to do the other things later, though, so here’s the long games list. Let me know what you think of my picks, the full list is after the jump.

Downloadable Game of the Year

Band of Bugs (XBLA)
Band of Bugs is still my top-played Xbox Live Arcade game. I have really enjoyed Fire Emblem in the past, but it is a pretty heavy game. Band of Bugs is the perfect casual turn-based tactical game. It’s colourful and has wonderful variety, a great selection of multiplayer modes and a stellar level designer. Band of Bugs was also the first game to fully utilize the Gamescore policy and add an extra three Achievements with downloadable campaigns, which were also great.

Honourable Mention
Carcassone (XBLA), Super Metroid (VC)
Carcassone is the perfect port of a board game to a video game. Super Metroid finally getting re-released was also a great gaming experience for me, as now my Metroid collection is complete.

(more…)

There’s a Difference Between Minimalist and Boring

Kenneth Ormandy — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:44:11 +0000

It’s coming up on a year since I got a domain for the site and actually started using a real version of WordPress. My theme has gone through many small edits, but everything remained more or less the same. I don’t really like the theme, I’m caught somewhere between wanting to use someone else’s theme but I don’t like having things on my site not done by me. I’m going to try doing a complete overhaul on the header and bottom bar and try out some new stuff with my Lifestream. I’ve kept the same sort of styling for the posts and meta since what I had on my Blogsome blog, and I like that, so I don’t think I’ll change it. The rest of the theme needs some real flare (and I don’t mean just some Web 2.0 gloss or something) as the design never really became what I wanted it to be. I’ve been especially lazy recently, in terms of updates and in terms of tweaking the styling. Hopefully actually posting this will remind me to work on this.

I don’t really have anything exciting to write about (or, rather, I don’t have the desire to sit here and type for that long right now) so I’ll say happy New Year’s, though hopefully I’ll come back and write about some of the cool new games I got before then.