Living With a Nerd

These are some really exciting times.  Despite its unbelievable use of SecuROM and (cripes) GAMESPY of all things for its multiplayer, Borderlands on the PC is awesome.  I instantly saw the appeal and potential addictive qualities.  I love Diablo, I love FPS, I love MMO’s, and I’m a loot whore…Borderlands is a perfect amalgamation of all of those things.  The not-quite-cell-shaded visual style is great as well, even if the textures are lacking a bit in the refinement department.  This is still a fantastic looking game, and details like a massive draw distance, having to lead your targets when they are a certain distance or further away, and seeing the reflection of what is behind you in the scope on your rifle make the world seem more alive.  I’m slightly confused about what is happening on a macro scale in the game’s storyline, but then again I’m only about 3 hours into it or so.  I’m not sure if this one is going to warrant a replay after I’m finished with it, but I’m definitely taking it to the end at least once.  I would like it if the difficulty were slightly higher, but that may come as I delve deeper into its offerings.

The big news, obviously, is that Dragon Age comes out in a mere few days.  I’ve already written about why you should be excited about it (http://livingwithanerd.com/6-reasons-to-be-excited-about-dragon-age-origins/), but still…not even the largest article to date on Living With a Nerd can convey just how much I am looking forward to its release.  Knowing that Bioware is going back to this genre, and knowing that a full-blown SDK is going to be unleashed into the community has me literally losing sleep thinking about it.  The last great party-based RPG I played was Drakensang (which was absolutely AMAZING), but prior to that, you would have to go back to the Neverwinter Nights/Baldur’s Gate series.  No one does this genre like Bioware, and their return has reawakened the gamer in me.

In other news, I plan on seeing Paranormal Activity (finally!) on Sunday, so I will hopefully have a review up on the main site by Monday.

My comic binge continues…I just got Asterios Polyp in the mail yesterday, and plowed through it in one night.  I couldn’t put it down! Very unique, both in dialogue and in drawing style.  Highly recommended.  You can check out my full review of it here.

In addition to Asterios Polyp, I also got I Kill Giants and Desolation Jones in the mail.  Desolation Jones pisses me off though…I didn’t realize that the singles were released so infrequently, and they are still at least three singles away from releasing another trade…oh well.  It still looks awesome.  I Kill Giants was one that I knew I had to have though.  You can read my full review of that one here.

Currently, however, I am going back through Y: The Last Man.  I only read the first five trades, and since the series has been finished for a fair bit of time and there are plans to bring it to the big screen, I figured now was as good a time as any to read through the whole thing.

In light of the soon to be released “Left 4 Dead:  2″ (11/18/09),  the XBOX 360 achievements has been released.  Now some of you are probably still steaming at the fact that you bought “Left 4 Dead” just a year ago.  Some of you are steaming that after buying “L4D” you were promised DLC, and instead are being given a FULL game, at a full 60 dollar price tag.  However some of you are achievement whores and can’t help yourselves, so here’s the list. http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2009/10/12/Left-4-Dead-2-Achievements-Detailed.aspx

Traffic on the main site has positively exploded in the past week.  For the past four days, we have gotten over 120 visitors per day…for the last two days, we have been nearing the 200 mark per day.  Considering up to last week we were getting only 75-100 per week, this is obviously a vast improvement.

Unfortunately, having the main site do so well and requiring more attention has left me fishing for what to write about in this space…after all, what I would normally write about here in a couple hundred words, I now write about on the main page with a few hundred words and more pictures.

Here is a fairly recent graph showing the effect that the new Living With a Nerd layout has had (click for full size):

I use statcounter.com to keep track of visitors.  It works extremely well, and is entirely invisible to people viewing the website/blogs.  I might end up doing a weekly “visitation numbers” post…I know I’m always interested in how many visitors the websites that I visit are getting, so I think this would be a good way to connect to new readers.

I’ve been on something of a comic binge lately…For the past couple of paychecks, I have been buying and reading a couple trades of The Walking Dead (I just finished Volume 9 last night), I’ve been reading Crossed by Garth Ennis, I’m about to start Clover (a manga from CLAMP), and I’m toying with the idea of reading Cerebus.

For the holidays, I’m considering buying (or asking for) the Punisher Compendium…a massive, 1100+ page hardcover collection of Punisher issues that has a sewn binding.  It is an absolutely beautiful piece of work, and is the size of a coffee table book.  Due to the sewn binding, pages lay completely flat, so no artwork is lost in the “dip” created by adhesive binding.  Sewn binding is also aesthetically pleasing and very durable.  From what I’ve been told by people that already own the Compendium, it is quite possibly the sturdiest book they have ever held.  Awesome.

I have been following Ben Templesmith’s forays into FIQ, a big art convention down in Brazil.  His stories and artwork have always been stunning, and he is definitely one of my favourites.  While very different in style, Templesmith’s artwork reminds me of Glenn Fabry:  When you look at a piece of work done by Fabry, you KNOW that it was drawn by him without even being told.  Ben Templesmith is the same way…his art style is very distinctive, and lends itself to creepy, violent, and mature stories.  While Fabry’s art style is extremely detailed, with individual muscles showing through clothing and individual wrinkles visible on faces, Templesmith’s style is more “artificial”; everything he creates looks very comic bookish, although it looks like nothing else out there.  Welcome to Hoxford and Singularity 7 are excellent examples of Templesmith’s skills, both with art and with words.  Below is my favourite piece of work I have seen by Templesmith:

Hoxford

Amazing, isn’t it?

Instead of redesigning Living With a Nerd, I decided to just move it to the same publishing software used for this blog.  I can now upload new articles easily no matter where I am, and the amount of time and effort required to do so has been greatly reduced.  In addition, the overall layout is much improved, and articles seem to be generally easier to read and manage.  We have lost the mid-90’s nostalgic feel, but I believe that what was nostalgic for us was part of the reason why no one was visiting the site.  We have only averaged between 75-100 visitors per week…however, since the redesign, we have been averaging between 30-50 visitors per day.  My eventual goal is around 250-300 per day.  While it would be awesome to become some huge thing, I would really prefer it if we managed to maintain a small but loyal group of readers.

Obviously, the quality of the articles and the frequency that they are posted makes a huge difference as well.  I’ve been working on not sounding like a pompous ass when I write (which, in my opinion, I have failed miserably so far).  I have some ideas for interesting articles, I just need to get them put together and up on the site.  Luckily, with the shift to the same publishing software as this blog, creating and uploading new articles is SUPER easy.  I do work full time and have interests which take up a fair amount of my non-work time, but I still want to make sure that there is at least ONE new post per day in there.  There is no way we will get the numbers we are looking for without keeping the content fresh and new.

I think once more articles are posted and there is more history for people to scroll through, more and more people will start coming here on a regular basis.  I’ve also started submitting the “good” articles to Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.  The amount of traffic we get from these submissions isn’t much, but there is definitely an increase in our overall numbers when social bookmarking sites are utilized.  Even though both the main site and these blogs are now using the same software, they will be kept seperate from each other.  Our blogs will remain as they are…a place for personal thoughts or experiences.  However, any movie reviews, opinions about games, etc. that you would normally see on this page, you will instead see on the main site.

Please spread the word about livingwithanerd.com, either by word of mouth, facebook/twitter, digg…any way that you can.  We really want to try to get an active community going, and we need your help to do so.  Also, if you have any suggestions for articles or topics for us to cover, you can reach me here: pojut@livingwithanerd.com  I am also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pojut

Thanks!

Up until now, Living With a Nerd (excluding the blogs) has been entirely hard coded in notepad.  I believe this is part of the reason for the long delay in between each update…making sure everything lined up properly and was spaced evenly was an absolute nightmare.  I know there are many WYSIWYG editors out there, but I really wanted to hard code everything to fit in with the site’s nostalgia theme.

Well, no more.

I recently was given a copy of Frontpage 2003.  While the overall layout of Living With a Nerd is going to stay the same, it will become much easier to read and navigate.  Over the next week or so, I will be implementing some small tweaks that make things look and run a bit better.  You may encounter some screwy errors or out-of-whack tables in that time, so please bear with us.  The newest article currently posted was written by Brittnie, and although it is short, it marks the beginning of more frequent updates.

While I will definitely miss the challenge of hard-coding the website, using Frontpage instead of “the old fashioned way” should result in a much more fun place to visit.

Dubstep has gained massive popularity over the past few years.  The wub-wub basslines, driving beat, and endless variety seem to be the driving force behind this musical revolution.  Fair warning: for anyone that is even remotely able to produce Dubstep, this is going to be a very obvious post…so apologies in advance.

The basic wub-wub bassline is fairly easy to create for anyone that knows their way around a synth.  It takes less than a minute to get a standard, simple sound.  Getting it to sound unique, mind blowing, and hard hitting however…that is another matter entirely.  The different number of settings that must be tweaked is immense, and changing the value of a setting by only one or two units has a massive impact on the overall sound.  My reasons for enjoying dubstep go beyond it’s audible qualities… I have a deep appreciation for the expertise and skill required to create it.

To explain it in very simplistic terms, Dubstep is a product of multiple oscillators and LFO settings.  The rate of the oscillators and the LFO are the driving forces behind the familiar “wub wub” sound associated with Dubstep.  Matched oscillators, offset by a single octave and a few cents, combined with adjusting the rate of an LFO and a distortion effect unit are all it takes to obtain a basic Dubstep wubbity…but from there, things become far more complicated. 

I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to producing Dubstep, but I have a couple of very good tips for you:  Instead of creating a wubby bassline with one synth, use two synth patches (or two synths, if you are using software).  Have one set as a high-pass and one as a low-pass.  In your sequencer, copy the MIDI instructions from one track to the other (I suggest high-pass copied to low-pass).  This will enable you to tweak both parts of the wub independent of each other, while still allowing them to sound like a single “note”, not to mention “fattening” up the sound.  If you REALLY want your wub lines to sound huge, make a copy of every synth patch (or, again, synth if you are working just with software), assign it the same MIDI instructions, set one copy for the left channel and one for the right channel.  This will make your wubs sound massive, and cause your bass to be truly universe shattering.

I know it’s becoming the electronica flavor of the day, but if you have ever wondered what it would be like to combine UK Garage, Drum and Bass, and Grime, …check out some Dubstep.  Reso is a good place to start, in my opinion.