Exposing my socks to the world

It’s been a while since it happened last, but the Crummysocks.com family of sites was down for about half an hour this evening. Everything seems back up now, but if you see anything out of place, drop me a line.

Ever wondered what it takes to run a website as fabulous as this one? What I do on a regular basis? Or how articles on this site come to be? Well, look no further. I have compiled an account of an actual day behind the scenes here at crummysocks.com to give you, the reader, an insight to my inner workings… and the inner workings of website content creation.

Enjoy!

It’s tough being a paragon of the video game community, it really is. You have to strike a balance between obsessive geekiness, profound dedication to your craft, and then hide all of that underneath a facade of a main-stream ‘totally not a game geek’ persona.

But today I’m going to tear down that persona, and show you the true face behind this video game nexus that stands before you. Well, not so much standing. More like, casually leaning on a telephone pole trying to not act concerned because my shirt is caught on a nail holding a sign that’s offering a free baby stroller if you come pick it up.

My day begins like you would probably imagine. I have a custom built alarm system that awakens me by randomly selecting and playing a song from my vast game music archive. From the time the alarm goes off I have 30 seconds to find the game that the song is from and start it up in its correct system. I then have to play through the game in its entirety before I can have breakfast. If I don’t identify the game in time then I have to spin the ‘wheel of restrictions’ to add a bit of challenge to the playthrough. Occasionally I’ll spin the wheel anyway, just to keep my skills razor sharp. Today’s game, for example, was Final Fantasy VIII, a game that I’ve pounded into submission so many times that I spun the wheel twice, hoping to spice things up a bit. The wheel landed on ‘play while an intern cuts onions in your face’ and ‘control the game by dropping marbles on the controller from a height of at least four feet’ (half a kilometer for my international readers). And challenge me it did! Both of these challenges together added nearly fifteen minutes to my normal play time, bringing the total game time to 43 minutes and 28 seconds. I think I’ve more than earned my breakfast.

For breakfast I typically have something that is equal things nutritious, delicious, and can be eaten from a tube, straw, or other portable food apparatus. And what’s more delicious than pizza? Nothing! So I tossed a few slices from the night before into a blender along with a little bit of chocolate milk (who doesn’t love chocolate milk?). I thoroughly mixed all of that together, poured it into my biggest insulated cup, and jammed a straw in it.

My breakfast needs to leave my hands as unencumbered as possible because any time they’re not playing video games their competitive edge is being dulled considerably. So on the way to the Crummysocks.Com Command Center Console Station (or the C5S, as it’s known around here) I stop by The Vault to choose the four games that will hopefully keep me occupied through lunch. The console side of the C5S has all of the consoles I own set up in a grid pattern on my wall. I have each console on the wall in multiples of four, and all four of those are wired in to one controller on a per system basis. That way I can play four games at once, keeping my reflexes at their world-class best, while keeping my productivity high. The games that I chose today were: Mach Rider, Snake Rattle ‘N’ Roll, Wall Street Kid, and G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor. A bit on the easy side, I know, but my eyes were still burning a bit from the onions.

So, as my left hand began to play the games in question, my right hand began to check out the emails I had received the night before. Since I get such an overwhelming volume of mail every day I’ve devised a system to deal with it all. I only answer every 243rd email that comes into my mailbox with my standard form reply:

“Dear Sir/Madam/Other,

Thank you for writing in to crummysocks.com. I think it’s adorable that since you can’t actually be as great as I am that you’re writing me to ask for tips on how you can at least try. So here is my four step plan for Improving Your Video Gameatude to Achieve Levels You Didn’t Even Know Existed (a.k.a. Life’s Secret Levels)

1.Gather up as many games as you possibly can. Duplicates are OK. We’re looking for sheer quantity.
2.Purchase (for the low, low price of $319.99), download, from this very site, my blueprints for building your very own home out of the games you purchased in step one.
3.Construct your new home. Make sure you keep it clear of useless things like chairs, beds, and toilets. Remember, you’re in training. If you have these things before you’re ready for them your training will be contaminated and you’ll be a soft, saggy, expressionless, spongy, shell of your former self. Lost without direction, motivation, or ambition. And, most importantly, you’d quit visiting my site, drying up my revenue stream, which would be perhaps most detrimental of all.
4.Live in your new house for a period of not less than fourteen years. Let the accumulated gaming that makes up your walls permeate your body, soul, and very being. Once this period is over, you’ll gain a new insight into the world of video games and their culture. You’ll then be ready to take on the world as a fresh-faced Apprentice to the Video Game Arts.

Once you finish the above plan, please contact me again so that we may discuss the next portion of your training. Good luck, we’re all counting on you.

-Basscomm”

Once all of the e-letters have been sent out I can begin my day of news gathering, interpreting, and disseminating. I start by firing up my web browser and hitting the usual places to see what kinds of things that the so-called ‘major blog sites’ think is news for the day and immediately disregard them. Then I hit up the so-called ‘major news sites’ to see what they thought was important and then immediately disregarded those, too. What’s the point of publishing anything if you’re just going to reiterate the same thing that someone else already said? Next I call up my contacts at the various game companies and see what they think I should write about. The first guy I called over at Crystal Dynamics said:

“Ugh, your website again. I don’t care about your website. All you ever want to do is to talk about your website. You’re the only guy I know that has a website and wants to make content available for the masses. I have too many much more important things to do than to talk to you about something that you have an interest in that I don’t. Good day!”

The cool thing is, that’s all in code. His boss was probably behind him, overseeing his work on their new game, so he had to slip me his insider information subtly. The solution is almost idiotic in its simplicity. What you have to do is to take his statement, reverse it, and then read every third word. This yields:

“Don’t in have something to than things much have the content wants a know only website talk do ever website care again, ugh!”

And that obviously means that he wants me to write an article on how game developers can better serve me, my website, and how they can more efficiently send me free goodies. Brilliant! But before I get started, I need to have a lunch break. And since I’ve just managed to finish all four of my NES games at the same time, I think it’s well deserved.

For lunch I have a standing order at the burger place down the street. I used my credit card to pay for it in advance. One year’s worth of lunches, in fact. They do deliver, but I can’t be bothered to sit around waiting for them, so as the delivery driver is driving to my house, I’m driving toward the burger place. Our paths cross at the same intersection every day, so I roll down my window, he rolls down his, and then he tosses my mondo-burger into my waiting hands. It’s a brilliant system, if I might be allowed to toot my own horn briefly.

Toot toot.

Like most of the things I do, the reasoning behind this is twofold. One is so that I get some kind of food into my belly and I don’t collapse from malnutrition, but the other is that around lunch time I make the circuit of my local video game stores to find games on the cheap that I haven’t already beaten, broken, and made my indentured servants.

The pickings are actually getting pretty slim these days. I’m actually finishing games faster than all of the developers combined can push out, so I’m being forced to play the dregs of the dregs. Last week I played Microsoft Streets & Trips, and that wasn’t even fun for a few minutes. And the ending was terrible to boot! I eventually settled on a PC game compilation called Zap!, which is a compilation of knockoffs of good arcade games, all bundled in one seriously overpriced disc, and started back to the C5S.

I’ve actually had my vehicle converted into the Mobile Entertainment Van Center (MEVC, for short). What that means is that the whole back end is filled with various systems for the games that I might find, and that the passenger seat has a monitor and controllers so that I can play what games I do find on the way back to the C5S. I installed Zap!, and then started the trip back. It should probably be noted that the game box says that it has 700 levels spanning across 11 games. I live less than 10 miles from the video game store (10 hectares for my international visitors). I should have done the math. I actually ended up finishing all of the levels three times before pulling back in to my driveway (I would have gotten through it four times, but my computer crashed about halfway back, costing me precious minutes).

Back in the C5S I need to pick out a few more games to play while I craft video game article gold for public consumption, but since I need at least 43% of my total concentration to write an article actually worth reading, I decided to only pick out two games for the Super NES to keep my skills up: Aero the Acro-Bat and Ogre Battle.

Once I was 57% occupied with completing those games simultaneously I set to work. Hammering out paragraph after paragraph of lyrical prose. The sheer magnitude of greatness this article posed began to frighten even me, its creator. After an arduous twenty minutes, my opus was complete. But I had a problem. This article was the best I’d ever written, and possibly the best that anyone had ever written or will ever write. If I post it, what will my readers do? Articles don’t get better than this, so they will stop reading this site at the very least. It wouldn’t stop there, though, I’m afraid. Once you’ve read the best thing ever written, why read anything else at all, ever? Me posting that article would make me responsible for a new epidemic: the population at large would be done with reading.

That would wreak havoc on libraries, newspapers, gum wrappers, and, perhaps most important of all, my sweet sweet ad-generated revenue stream. I just couldn’t let that happen. So I decided to put it in the Archive of Articles Too Awesome to Appear Anywhere (AATAAA, for short).

Now, since my work on the site is complete for the day, I have to think about getting some dinner. A while back I bought and installed a pizza parlor in my back yard. It does enough delivery business to be self-sufficient, so I don’t have to worry about upkeep too much. I had them install one of the pizza ovens so that the ‘exit’ end comes out through the window that’s next to my C5S workstation. It’s a small matter for me, then, to press a button to alert the chef on duty that I need my pizza fix. Ten minutes later I have a fresh pizza sailing through my window and deposited on my waiting stack of serving trays.

I love progress.

Since I have ten minutes to burn and my Super NES games for the day are complete, I decided to pass the time by picking up an old favorite, Crazy Taxi. I’m usually pretty good at this game, but I wanted it to last the whole ten minutes until the pizza got here, so I devised a bit of a fun challenge for myself. I would unplug the video input from my television and play the game only with my right foot. Unfortunately, I overestimated the difficulty of the challenge. I picked up all the customers in the game and still had three minutes to spare. So, leaving the video lead unhooked, I played a few dozen rounds of Sega Swirl to pass the rest of the time.

Finally, my pizza arrived. Pizza eating is pretty much a two-handed event, no good way around that. But I needed to keep my game skills honed to an almost impossibly-sharp edge. Fortunately, I’ve devised a cunning solution to that, too.

I have two DS systems mounted on the back of my chair in the C5S. Each one turned toward the center. I jam a specially made stylus in each ear and am able to keep my skills up while enjoying a reasonably healthy meal.

After getting my fill of pizza, it’s time to think about heading off to get some much deserved rest. I toss the leftovers into my refrigerator for tomorrow’s breakfast and start contemplating what games to play while I’m resting. As I’ve established, I’ve attained a level of game playing so advanced that I can play games while I sleep. There are limits, though. Since I am technically sleeping and don’t have the full use of my faculties I have to make the game relatively easy. Tonight’s game is going to Ninja Gaiden Black, which might be a little too far toward the ‘easy’ side, but I’ve had a long day.

So I bed down, controller in hand, and begin resting. Already thinking about what tomorrow will bring.

I can’t wait!

For a while now I’ve been smacked around the face every few weeks with notices that “OMG there’s a new Zero Punctuation review of <New_Game_Flavor_Of_The_Month>”, but I haven’t really done anything about them other than ignore them. Mostly because absolutely everyone on the face of the planet that’s ever played video games, or know someone that’s ever played video games, or knows someone that’s heard of someone that’s played video games feels the urge to tell the entire world what he thinks of them.

I keep having these announcements snuck into my drinks when I’m not looking, or shoved into my face when I go find some video game twaddle to waste time on. But I resisted. I don’t even really know why. I don’t really seek out game reviews any more, but I don’t think I’m some kind of elitist game review snob, either. But everyone assured me that they are ‘teh funney’ so I broke down and watched one.

I guess the hook for the thing is twofold, the guy doing the review talks real fast, like there isn’t any punctuation in his monologue (clever, eh?), and he’s rapid-firing game information and what are supposed to be jokes at you while some tangentially-related animation plays.

I can only assume that the jokes, which are only tangentially related to the imagery in the video, come in such a ludicrous pace and with such high density that a couple of them are bound to be funny, and even if they’re not there’s another dozen to take their place almost instantaneously. It’s like a bad comedic version of the Law of Large Numbers.

Its ridiculously frenetic pace with absolutely no pauses means that I didn’t really have time to process what in the world is going on in the video, I suffered from a kind of buffer overflow.

I guess if you like run-on sentences that go for upwards of four minutes and you think mediocre jokes are hilarious, then the ‘reviews’ might be for you. Me? I’ll just be sitting over here playing with my commas, periods, and increasingly rare semicolons.

I’ve been spending far far too much time with Super Smash Bros. Brawl lately. I mean, the game’s only been out for five days and some change at this point, and I’ve gotten nearly one full day’s worth of playtime in the thing.

I’ve been feverishly unlocking as many goodies as I could, and I’ve done a pretty good job of it, I think. But I wanted to take the game to a friend’s house who, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, hasn’t quite been following the game as obsessively as I have. The problem was that when I went to take my precious Save Data over, I was greeted with the message that the game save could not be copied.

This is stupid.

One of the huge draws to the series has always been hidden away in the unlockables. And I can kind of understand that Nintendo doesn’t want some random guy on an Internet message board somewhere unlocking everything, copying his game to an SD card, copying it to his computer, and then uploading it for the world to download.

Can you imagine the pandemonium? Kids getting their hands on completed game saves? They get all the reward without any of the effort? To me it just seems like a cheap way to force the people into actually earning all of the goodies. That’s kind of futile. I mean, I’m all for putting challenge back into games but not at the expense of inconveniencing me.

I updated the backend of the site again today. This one was a little hairier than I’m used to, so things might be extra broken for a while.

Working on that.

Yesterday this site was compromised. I won’t go into the gory details, but the hole has been plugged. I had to restore the site from the backups, so most things should be here, but if something seems amiss, drop me a line. Unfortunately, since Push Button B was new, I hadn’t gotten around to making it part of the rotation yet, so what little content I had there is gone. We’ll have to drop back and punt on that one.

You might notice on the far right that there is a new link, Push Button B. This is a side project of mine where I put the content that wouldn’t quite make it as full articles on this site. It’s a lot more off the cuff over there and a little rough around the edges, but so far I’m digging it.

I’ll also remind you to check out The Closeout Warrior, which is entering its 328th consecutive day of updates.

I purchased the Wii Fire Emblem game with the intent on playing it (odd how that works) only to find out that it somehow shipped with a game-breaking, memory card-erasing, nasty bug. The ‘repair’ process is now complete and I can finally start playing the game only a scant 50 days since purchase.

Finding the package on my doorstep was kind of like finding a twenty dollar bill in last Fall’s jacket. Yeah, it was mine to start with, but I kind of forgot that I had it.

At this point, I pretty well stay away from anything that’s a remake of anything in the first Super Mario Bros. Yeah, it was a great game and all, but I’m just sick of seeing remakes and remakes and remakes, especially of the theme song. Occasionally something will slip through my defenses, and this time I actually managed to make it all the way through. This guy took the original Doom and modified it to play the first level of SMB.

Check it out here (spotted at BoingBoing.)

You can see from my ‘live blogging’ experience that the Spike TV Video Game Awards show was the worst show I’ve seen all year. At least one of the presenters, Patton Oswalt, tends to agree.

The producers wanted me to do “a little bit of stand-up” before I presented the award for “Most Addictive Video Game”. Oh wait, I forgot — “The Most Addictive Video Game…Fueled By DEW!” That’s because Mountain Dew was “sponsoring” the award. I had to say “Fueled By Dew”. I will also be saying it on my deathbed, when I’m begging my relatives to unplug by respirator.

I still don’t really know who Patton Oswalt is, and don’t really care about the reasons he did the show. I do find it illuminating that at least one of the people involved in that train wreck of a show stood up and said what I’ve saying all along, but with a little more force behind it.

(Link! via Kotaku via a few more hops)