Midnight Ryder’s Blog has been abused and ignored for too long now. Â One of my New Years resolutions is to start updating this at least every two weeks. Â Not only am I going to update it, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the podcasting ring – every update will have an associated podcast with it. Â Or at least that’s the plan at the moment. Â If I don’t like the podcasting quality, or just plain get bored with it, I might quit doing it. Â I won’t know until I’ve tried it for a while.
Since this is now a sort of “new” blog because I’m revamping it and adding the podcast, I’ll give a little bit of information about it. Â It’s the usual random “whatever the hell I feel like blogging about” thing, though it focuses mainly on technology, how technology ends up creating new sub cultures, game development, all the little projects I’ve got going on like writing books, developing new games, and eventually will cover the development of my next online only show. Â As soon as I get around making the show work.
Not that you care, but, it’s recorded on my MacMini using Garage Band and a nice Logitech headset. Â About as low tech as you can get – but since it’s an experimental thing for me at the moment, I just grabbed whatever I had laying around rather than spending money on good equipment for it. Â If it ever made me money, well, I might consider investing in a better setup. Â And the theme music? Â Well, that’s just a quick loop from Garage Band. Â I was going to invest some time in writing new music for it but I haven’t quite gotten the “feel” for what it should sound like. Â
I also avoided using any of the text to speech type setups. Â When researching the idea of doing a podcast, I ran across a number of articles about automated publishing of computer narrated versions of your blog. Â Oh man, how friggin’ boring can you get? Â Text already looses all the nuances of communication. Â Having a computer read it isn’t going to improve that any. Â And since I wrote the content on here I know exactly how it should be said 😉
I already have partially done articles in the queue at the moment, so I’m not going to run out of content for a bit. Â But when life gets hectic like the last couple of months, the thing that always gets dropped is this blog. Â Pity, too, since this is a sort of outlet for people who want to keep up with my projects, and an outlet for me to talk about geeky topics like the effects of Twitter and how it mirrors some old BBS concepts. Â Most people’s eyes just glaze over when I talk about things like that – here, people show up to read (or listen to) subjects like that.
Of course, when you get down to it, Midnight Ryder’s Blog is really just another marketing tool. Â It helps increase my exposure as a writer, a software developer, and a web designer. Â So you’ll hear me pimp things like The Story of Gamer Zone when it’s released in print. Â Don’t worry – I won’t be pushing those projects too hard. Â
I’ll end this one rather short compared to what most of my blog entries are like.  Next time I’ll be talking about Twitter, tweetups, the people I’ve met in the WichiTweeps community, and how much it reminds me of the old BBS days on services like Elysian Fields here in Wichita, Kansas.  It’s interesting how much Twitter feels like having a non-stop drip of BBS chat rooms. Â
So, uh, yeah… until next time, I’m outta here!