You know, whenever I post one of these “I won’t be posting a lot” posts, I wind up posting a lot. But be prepared for a lack of such ironies – for a cold, hard, earnest absence of posts. Milady and I have purchased a house, and there are a lot of house-related-type-stuff things to do, and I don’t think they will be particularly fascinating to write about. (Also, the internets aren’t hooked up in the house yet.)

See y’all in a bit.

Let this just be a teaser for something I’ll share with you next week.

So, a redesign. It’s been a while. More about that, in case you care.

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Mo’ feeds, mo’ problems. I guess the links aren’t showing up very well in the feeds. The URL they are associated with is going to a permalink on this site instead of the link URL, and then half of the time that throws up a 404. Needless to say, this is not the intended behaviour, and if I had minions, they would be slaving away in 36-hour shifts. However, there’s only me, and I barely know what I’m doing.

There is this attitude in film and television, completely antithetical to the general position of the blogosphere, that you do not talk about your ideas. A great deal of this is the fear of others stealing them. It’s easy to say that the important thing – and the hard part – is execution, but unfortunately in film and other industries with more money than ideas this is not the case. Someone can take your idea, pay people to execute it, and even if the end result is shoddy, prevent you from executing YOUR vision of it. “Oh, the film about the leper fashion show?” the financier will say as he thumbs his blackberry, “we already did that. It bombed.”

This partially explains how projects that are important to me, and take some substantial portion of my time, find no representation on this blog.

I will attempt to remedy this shortly.

To those following the site via RSS – I’ve temporarily botched the AngryRobotAll feed, that normally would give you a list of both blog entries and links posted to the site. Right now it’s only showing blog entries. I’m definitely going to fix it, but I don’t know how quickly – might be a couple days. In the meantime, you could subscribe to the new links feed on pinboard, which is where I’m posting my links now, or manually check the site, or (more reasonably) enjoy a refreshing break from notifications of internet trivialities.

Here comes some serious under the hood talk, so unless you’re into making websites, feel free to skip this shit.

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Dear Robot Readers,

I could use your help with something. I have a film in this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. (I admit it, I’m a huge nerd.) It’s called “Bad Day For Vader”, and I’d love it if you voted for it. It’s only a minute long so that part ain’t hard, but you may have to register on atom first – not sure. You should be done in a couple minutes regardless.

Those of you with weblogs, newspapers, megaphones and/or skywriting businesses, I’d also appreciate your help spreading the word.

Voting stops at noon on friday, so if you could, make haste!

Here’s the link

Thanks and I owe you one.

I just finished importing most of the archives of d/blog. It was my blog before this one. My personal publishing history goes like this:

• April 2001, start Bloggus Caesari
• July 2001, start d/blog, begin d/blog glory months
• Sept 2001, combination of 9/11 and full-time employment ends d/blog glory months, alienates readership, wrecks shit (not really)
• July 2004, move from Movable Type to Textpattern
• for a while, nothing happens. (At least that I have archives of… working on that)
• Feb 2007, start Angry Robot, as new personal blog; sankey.ca now just a portfolio site, and archives taken offline for reasons now not entirely clear (Human error? Shyness? Epistemological quandary?)
• July 2007: caught up in the enthusiasm of others, Angry Robot becomes video games blog
• Sept 2008: Angry Robot returns to its roots, grand commitment to excellence &c.
• Present: in powerful act of healing, d/blog archives added to Angry Robot.
• Future: robot stomps on enemies, kicks them into sun; A.I. remake symbolically returns shitty Spielberg film to Kubrick; 3D camera perfected, sold at massive profits; plonkism established as viable philosophical school; moment of imminent nostalgia reached; Maggo’s Secret Blog: The Restaurant opens to great acclaim; gristle-sack bird finally found, tranqued, tagged, tamed. Dreams become reality.

Until then, I’m certainly happy to have the archives back. It’s really more for personal symbolic reasons than an expectation that people will find them useful. I know there are tons of dead links and so forth, and the lack of an archive page makes navigation challenging. But this is where it starts, or this – in the backwards logic of weblogs, on page 126.

Jesus Christ, I’ve written a book.

I’ve had to turn off comments. I’m totally bombarded by spam comment notifications, and it’s driving me insane. At the same time, no humans are commenting, so there’s not much of a loss.

I’m of two minds about comments in general: while I like the democratic ideal of everyone being able to weigh in, I also admire sites that concentrate on doing the thing they want to do, without too much concern for other people’s opinions. We’ll see how this thing shakes out, I guess.

So you will have noticed some posts from Matt over the past week, pointing out some great stuff. Matt’s a good friend, bidne$$ associate, and all around Chief of Awesome. He’ll be continuing to post things, which I’m looking forward to greatly.

I’ve also got a couple interesting posts from my friend Duiker, the first of which I’ll post shortly.

That should be pretty obvious to all except feed-followers.

I loved the old design, but it was really suited for what the site used to be, and not what it is now. I returned to this site’s original design, which was based on Phu Ly’s Simpla theme, and then took it from there. And here we are: a simple, 2-column blog design that hopefully doesn’t spit in your eyes and is displaying okay in your browser (let me know if it ain’t, okay?). I’ll gradually add things back in when I have the time, but it seemed baked enough to let it out of the oven.

That leaves the question: what is this site now? I’m reluctant to answer that; I’d rather find out gradually. There’s an aphorism about butts cashing cheques that applies to mission statements from people with full-time jobs. But the general idea is to write about things I’m doing and things I love. Which hopefully will overlap somewhat.

So yeah, sorry for the radio silence there. I was away, but that’s only really part of it. What has this site been for the past year or so? It’s been a video game commentary site, with a handful of contributors, fancy podcasts, videos etc, and the intention of profitability at some point, access to review copies, etc, even a planned TV show. What is it now? Certainly not that; and I have no interest in returning it to that state. In fact, what I plan on returning to is what this site started as: YAN personal site, maybe a little self-involved in that regard, but of value to at least one of us, and owing nothing to the ‘marketplace’ or ‘audience’ or any other semi-imaginary external group.

I’ve got lots of things I want to do in this world, and while playing video games is one of them, it can’t be the only thing, the thing that eats up all my time so I can no longer make films, record music, take bike rides, chill with my lady, or go get drunk. (Yeah, it was really cutting into my drinking time.)

So, dear reader, what can you expect? Better things, more kinds of them, albeit fewer in total number. Stick around, or don’t, and I wish you well. Here’s to all of us making better things.

I will be up north in Canada’s great northern northlands for the next week, and completely off the internets – all of them. So have fun everyone, and the site will return in August!

If you are reading this… you are very patient. There are brutal server issues again, resulting in long page load times. I have no time to migrate servers, which is what it would take to resolve these problems. I apologize, and hopefully all this will be a faint memory in a couple weeks. In the meantime, I can suggest you do not purchase hosting from Joyent.

File under site news: as you can tell, this site is now back to a blog format. The idea behind the reshuffling we did when we redesigned was to make sure the in-depth stuff wasn’t getting bumped down by less significant blog posts, and thereby ignored. What the logs tell us now though is that the blog posts themselves are now getting less love than before, as they were bumped down and often ‘below the fold’. Man, just can’t win, huh? Anyway the new solution we are trying is: back to a blog (all content, newest first) on the front page with anything ‘featured’ still above the fold, in one of the sidebars.

Oh, while I’m at it with the site news….

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Ouch. As you may have noticed, the site was down for a couple days there. Which is bad. And yes, you may also notice that it’s now up, which is good. Anyway there were disk problems at our host Joyent and the entire server went down and couldn’t get back up. Some files were lost, which is even worse, but I’m thinking I’ve got most things back up now. You may notice some missing images here and there though.

Hey, shit could get weird around here. We’re rolling out a new design, so some things might break or look wrong. Bear with us though, it will be sorted shortly.

(Actually, I think I mostly posted this out of desire to use a shitty old “under construction” animated GIF. Of which there are many on this page.)

The Master Chief Challenge site is now live, and the 3-minute special segment airs as part of Space’s Hypaspace Weekly show tonight at 5:30et and tomorrow (october 6th) at 4:30et. It’s a game from a mini-tournament between us and the Space team, and the bulk of the footage is in-game action via Halo 3’s innovative ‘saved films’ feature. The segment will find its way to the website over the next couple of days, and there will be two more following it. Enjoy!

UPDATE: The video is now on the site, you can see it here
UP-UPDATE: A writeup from Kris Abel of Tech Life, who played on Team Space. Props, Mindslinger!

We are ignoring you but we don’t mean to. We’re doing that Master Chief Challenge, the halo tournament, which keeps us busy into the night. But that’s okay, right? Since you and your readers will get to see it really soon. There’s a lot I’ve meant to write for you, just not a lot of time. And the podcast, I know. Sorry. I swear we’ll do it soon.

Please don’t get angry.

Hopefully you noticed some new voices around here, with the recent articles by Nigel, GigerHR and Mark. Nigel’s piece is a personal history of a favourite videogame, set against the decline of the arcade. GigerHR comes at Halo 2 from a different angle than, say, Nadine and I take, but argues his points well and definitely provokes thought. And Mark examines moral choice in videogames through the lens of Bioshock. We’re really happy with all their first writings for the robot, and hope to see much more soon.

Stephen Tolito plays the entire Halo trilogy. Retronauts writes up Halo and Halo 2 and even the entire Marathon trilogy.

Clearly, Bungie retrospectives are in the air. And we’re getting in on that.

The weekend before Halo 3’s release, Nadine and I are going to rock the preceding Halos co-op style. We’ll ‘cover’ that as best we can… (air quotes because hell, we’re not in Darfur or Kabul, we’re playing videogames. But whatever.) And then onto the third big ring. For which we also have big plans, but more on that later.

And oh yeah… I lied about the podcast. I forgot the mic, so we just played games instead. Tee hee!

Extremely sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been across the pond in Ireland and the UK eating bangers and rashers. Anyway we have stuff in the works, notably a podcast tomorrow night, the first of as many as three this week. I may write up some trash about Bioshock and I know Nadine has some stuff she’s going to post. After all, she has to make up for not feeding the robot for the past seven days.

Ah, there’s nothing like a good public shaming!

I just want to apologize to everyone who commented recently – the comments were being held in a moderation queue, but no one was being notified that they were there. I just looked and saw a bunch and approved them, and the issue is now resolved. Aka I ticked the right checkbox this time.

So now we have articles from Nadine and Mark going on, the podcast. Quite clearly, the common thread here is games, so we’re going to run with that. To keep the site focused, I’m going to move some of the kinds of things I’d occasionally post over to Smooth Music. I’ll still post “digital culture” stuff here, so writing about facebook etc., but film, politics, and random bullshit will live over there.

As if that’s perfectly clear, there’s still some confusion with the feeds. The links you now see on the sidebar (which are links tagged with angryrobot) are no longer the links you’d get in the combined feed. And if you were to visit Smooth Music, there’d be some duplicates. I’m going to poke around and see if there’s a way to streamline all of this, so that you don’t all get pissed off and stop showing up.

The robot only gets angrier.

Nah, basically I wanted to say what the plans are for the site. I’m opening it up to other writers, notably Nadine and Mark. I’m not expecting daily posts from them, but at least we will expand the gaming coverage beyond the 360, a weakness of the site at the moment since that’s the only console I have. That said, I will get a DS before year’s end and a PS3 when the price drops. But I mean Nadine has every console.

The podcast will continue at some point, although we’ll have to do it a bit more live. The biggest constraint on the site, of course, is time. I’d love to make multiple posts a day, do a video podcast, etc. but life and other projects get in the way. But I’ll continue to post about whatever interests me, and at least the links will come fast and hard, like angry robot sex.

So the sidebar thing is fixed. Also, because I’m so sick of spam comment issues on other sites in the past, I’ve turned off comments on this baby. This is far from a final decision, and if you have something you want to say about anything here, please send it in via the contact form, and I’ll add it. Cheerz.

So I should just say hi and welcome to the new readers. Also, those of you using Firefox on windows may notice that the right side column sometimes gets shunted down below the main column. It’s a problem with the design I adapted for the site, and I’m finding out more and trying to figure out how to fix it. In the meantime, a reload will usually fix it. So bear with me here, and although I’ll be pretty busy over the next week with other stuff, I’ve got lots to post here whenever I get the chance.

It’s been a while, maybe a year and a half, since I banged out a TXP site. The new version is swee-eet. The whole site runs on basically one page template and one stylesheet, which is nice. (The horrors of updating an MT site and having to sift through hundreds of little templates…) I’m glad to see the TXP community hasn’t faded away at all – they’re still making bitchin’ plugins of all sorts. I’d love to install tons of them, but the name of the game for AngRob – must never call site that again – is simplicity. My last site had too much shit going down, hence the “spinoff” and “rebranding”. There’s this bizarre bit of blogger psychology where you get turned off by your own design if it gets stale, or maybe you never really liked it but were afraid to tweak it for fear of breaking it and having it display all janky in Internet Explorer. Anyway, I had a bit of that going down, so I decided to make a new site, but a nice, clean, simple one. I’m loving it so far, I must say. Hopefully I will not be the only one.

Rambling! That wasn’t really about Textpattern at all. So back on point: I am building this up from a very basic place, step-by-step, being careful all the while. Not sure yet how to approach archives, whether to use tags or categories, but we’ll get there.

Rockin’ that shit, doin’ it, really doin’ it. The old tweakin’ and massagin’ of HTML and CSS, aaah, nothing like it! Nothing like the smell of burning divs!

So, yeah, new site. Brand new baby robot. Still a lot of things to fix, and the logo will probably take some time, but we’ll be rockin’ soon enough.

So come knockin’.