After months of being down, the Idol Bat is finally back online! Our first issue of the year was published Sept. 3rd, and although it is only comprised of three articles, they’re three darn good articles. Check it out at www.idolbat.com.

In sadder news, I probably won’t have much time to update Dirt Man this semester. I’ll see if I can’t whip out an episode or two, but I can’t promise anything. Hopefully I’ll be able to start doing commentary more often, though. I keep having things I want to throw up there, but forgetting to do it. Grah!

Wow; who’d have thought this could happen twice in one summer? Turns out my host once again died on me, and I’ve had to seek yet another new host for my website. However, I am now back online (mostly; still getting email working again), and hopefully this will be the last extended outage for Beckism.com for a while.

Other than that, there isn’t much news. Check back!

Well, who’d have thought this would ever happen? Turns out Beckism.com once more has a forum, currently entitled BeckTalk in a nostalgic nod to the past. Will anyone use it? Beats me. But it’s there if you feel the need.

The new forum is based off of a very slimmed-down piece of forum software called Phorum. No flashy graphics with this one; just a simple text-based interface that integrates seamlessly (assuming that I indeed quashed all the bugs) with the Beckism.com template.

Anyone can view the forum, but if you want to post you’ll need to register via the link in the sidebar. User accounts are handled primarily through the WordPress interface, although you’ll have to define your signature (if you want one) through the forum itself.

There are some things that aren’t as user-friendly as other forums (such as no easy way to insert BB code if you don’t know it), but I’m working on the functionality as best I can. Let me know via the contact page or the forum itself if you run into any bugs or things that just don’t make much sense!

Although it’s kind of ridiculous, I actually have too much to write here right now. Normally of course, that wouldn’t stop me, but for one thing I absolutely have to get to bed (been getting less than six hours of sleep a night thanks to having to get up early for my work orientation but still having my college sleep cycles) and I’ve actually done a surprising amount in the past week or so.

However, since there are time restraints, I’ll give the brief run-down:

I have a new job (not sure if I posted about it before) working with developmentally disabled adults in their homes to help them in day-to-day tasks, ideally helping them live more independently. Orientation: long and boring. Job: looking to be both incredibly challenging/frightening, and likely very rewarding, or at least good for me in the long run.

Valerie is back across the state. We had a fun five days (although I only saw her in the evenings and mornings, thanks to the dang orientation going on), but sadly she had to go try to join the rat race.

I have a new bike, which is enabling me to get around Walla Walla much more easily than before. I like it a lot, although I still need to take it to the bike shop and have the handlebars adjusted (they just feel a little weird as close to my body as they are).

Windows is finally installed on my computer, although still with minor problems (sound doesn’t work quite right thanks to faulty drivers). I have been playing Half-Life (the original, to be followed by Half-Life 2, and then all the non-Valve designed Half-Life things) and Heroes of Might and Magic V quite a bit. Half-Life is of course an amazing game, and Heroes V is beautiful, although the campaign has been somewhat slow (read: not at all challenging) so far. It is phenomenally satisfying to know that I can run virtually any software that I want to, although every experience that I have with Windows merely reinforces my knowledge that Mac OS X is the way for me.

I finally had an idea for a plot that I’d like to turn into a novel for my Sociology thesis. The problem is that it’s a fantasy novel, and I’m not sure if I can get that to fly. I get the feeling that there aren’t many lovers of fantasy in the Soc department, and to date fantasy is a pretty un-analytical genre in the extreme (escapism, anyone?).

On the topic of fantasy, my visit to home resulted in my buying a whole lot more books. I hadn’t been planning to do so, but it reminded me that I’m addicted to books, even if Whitman served as rehab of a sorts (if only by not allowing me time to read for pleasure). My job, though, has shifts that are usually 10-16 hours long, though, and look to have a fair amount of time that might be best used reading (since I’m not a big fan of TV). End result is that having tasted book buying once again (ah, for the days of Scholastic) and looking forward to a future with a need for reading and money to fund it, I’m in a book buying mood. I was up too late last night making an Amazon order. Not healthy.

I recently finished the Bartimeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, and it was phenomenal. The ending was a total surprise, and both satisfying and disappointing because it flew in the face of standard fantasy practice. I think I’ll need to emulate Stroud in my own writing. He did just about everything right.

Wow. For what I intended to be something akin to a bullet list, this has turned huge. I better just cut myself off and go to bed. At least I can get seven hours of sleep, even if I’d been hoping for eight.

Well, I had an unexpectedly good day today. I had thought I was going to have to work on websites all day, but instead I got an email from Valerie, who was pining away from boredom at home, and after a couple emails and a phone call she and Vanessa both came to Mom’s house and we went to see Nacho Libre with Jack Black. It was pretty hilarious. Then again, I have a soft spot in my heart for utter losers. What was extra special good was that before that all happened Mom and I went to Borders and I got a couple of books. So today was a day of buying books and seeing Valerie, which is a five-star day in my opinion.

I also did a bit of IMG work, updated the Whitman OP Scrambles page, and mostly got done what was most pressingly needing to be done.

And here I thought today was going to be a fiasco after my terrible showering experience (got in, found out there was no soap; rinsed off, found I’d forgotten to put the shampoo in the shower; rinsed off the hair, got out, dried off, discovered I didn’t have any clothes…grah!). What a pleasant surprise.

Tomorrow I’m off to Seattle with Kristin to participate in whatever crazy Father’s Day shenanigans Dad has dreamt up. A couple of years ago, he decided that the only thing he wanted on Father’s Day was for his children to do something with him without complaining too much, and generally putting a happy face on things.

As long as we don’t end up paddling madly across the Seattle shipping lanes again, I think that it will probably be fun.

Man, I am not at all happy with my domain name registrar for Beckism.net. My websites have all been down for the last few days (or longer, my memory is fuzzy) thanks to the fact that the damn host didn’t give me any way to update my custom DNS entry (for those of you who might understand that). Since Beckism.net is the host for all of my other websites it meant they were all down. Granted, Beckism.com is the only one that I’ve set up properly since the last outage, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

Since I wasn’t able to post this before (stupid freaking website outages!) I am currently on the West side of the state, at the moment of this entry sitting in my mom’s house. Thanks to the terribly spotty wireless internet (and the fact that I got wrapped up in a book) I’ve not been doing much computer work the past few days; a fact that is very, very bad, since I’m woefully behind on a couple things. Looks like I’ll be spending tomorrow working on website stuff.

On the positive side, my orientation for my new job got pushed back a couple days, so I don’t have to leave as quickly as I thought I did. Mainly this will be nice for Dad, since he was hoping to do something with all of his kids Father’s Day and was sad I was going to be out of town driving across the state.

The reason that I’m over here is all thanks to Valerie, wonderful person that she is, who let me hitch a ride with her and her mom back across the state and is graciously taking me back to Walla Walla when the time comes. Hopefully she will stick around (she has something to do in Walla Walla the next weekend), although I am granted not all that exciting a host. I mostly sit and stare at things all day (be those things books, computers, walls, or whatever else I can find).

I haven’t done much the last few days. I’d been hanging around in Seattle with Dad, and he’s one of those people who needs to be doing something (Mom is much more of the welcome-home-I’m-fine-if-you-sit-on-the-couch-all-day types, although she would probably be happier if I did something with her, too; might have to try and convince her to go to Borders with me, she mentioned she had a gift card). In Seattle I did various fun things like eat fry bread (I don’t know if it was being born in a place with fry bread in the air, or what, but I live for fry bread, and you just can’t get it most places in the Pacific Northwest), watch X-Men 3 (Valerie came and saw it, too!), watch Thank You For Smoking (hilarious, but I’m still not sure what the message was, and if I approve of how light it made of serious issues or not), go to Half-Price Books (where I bought an absolutely fantastic book on a whim–can’t argue with a $6 hardback), and so forth.

So far at Mom’s I’ve set up my eMac for Kristin–which she was very happy about since while it is slow like molasses it’s still faster than the laptop she was using–sneezed a lot (I think I may be allergic to the rabbit in a big way), and read Wizard’s First Rule again. I might need to obtain a copy of the second book in the series and reread it, too. I’d forgotten how good they are. Maybe I’ll try to reach the later books again. I’ve given it a shot once or twice, and given up both times around book four. However, if I remember correctly the first time I gave up it was because I got disgusted with the explicit sex and violence (of which there is sometimes quite a lot; it’s hard for me to get through some portions even in the first book) and while my tolerance for violence is possibly lower than it has been in the past, I’m less put off by sex. I was such an uptight little kid. I probably owe most of my integrity to the damned Disciples of Christ church, but the repressive sexual legacy the church left me royally pisses me off in retrospect. Can’t recall why I stopped the second time through. It might just be that the series gets old by then (the books are huge, 600+ pages). Perchance I will have to try and see.

Then again, I should probably just forget it and work on my way-backed-up web work. Bah. Responsibility is annoying.

Speaking of responsibility, my dad asked me what my plans were after college, and was pretty disapproving when he found out I don’t have any. While I like to think of it as “keeping my options open” he seemed to think it was more like “denial.” Just watch; I’ll graduate, have some percussion gig drop into my lap, and that’ll show him.

And worst case scenario, I can always move in with Mom and start actually writing for a change. That would be nice, too. I just wish that I could find a way to make money with the writing that I do online without selling my soul in advertising to do it. I love Beckism.com and Idol Bat and all, but they just aren’t money-makers.

On the other hand, it is possible that I will be getting a very sizable check from CafePress soon. I’m not holding too much hope for it, because it seems a little too good to be true, but somehow I got over $120 in affiliate earnings. The reason I’m thinking there has to be some sort of mistake and fate is playing a cruel joke on me is because it’s the result of one phenomenally big order (over $600!), the order was placed on my birthday, of all days, and as far as I know I don’t have any affiliate ads out that people would click through, anyway. Plus even if I did, I’m pretty sure that my website was down during that time. I can’t figure it out.

Of course, if CafePress sends me a check that large, I won’t turn it down. It would mean that, against all of my expectations, the shop had paid for itself for the first time since ever. And during the year that I received free. How rich is that?

I just realized that this post is ludicrously long. Many apologies to anyone on LJ whose friend page got cluttered up by it. I would put things behind a cut, but thanks to the cross-posting nature of this thing, I don’t know if I can. So many apologies. Hopefully in future my damned website won’t be down and I will be able to post smaller incremental posts.

Because I do that normally. Right. Oh well; it’s a nice thought.

Ian out.

Just when I think things are up and running perfectly, something else goes wrong. The recent site outages for Beckism.com (and all of my other sites for that matter) were due to an issue that I had trouble resolving with my domain name registrar. Thankfully, I have finally gotten into contact with them, and although there may be a brief outage within the next few days the problem should be fixed.

In other news, now that I finally have a site up again I will be trying to update the Commentary page (and other parts of the site) more often. There’s a couple things that I’ve been meaning to post, so I will hopefully get those online soon. Check back, or subscribe to the RSS feed (HTML link, may not be formatted correctly depending on your browser) for notification in your favorite RSS client whenever there’s an update.