Four Island

It's January 1st once again! And before we go anywhere, let me wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR YAYS! :P I like the repetition thing. So, anyway, exactly 1 year ago, I wrote a post about my 2009 goals. I'm going to write a list of goals for this year as well, but first, let's see if I successfully completed last year's goals!

• Increase RSS subscribers to 10 - Yes! This is surprising, but I've been noticing all year that my RSS subscriber count has been around my goal level. I requested at least 10 subscribers and the count has been flucuating between 9 and 11 for a while. Currently, it's at 11, so I consider this a pass!
• Write popular posts - I don't know exactly how to grade this one. For one thing, I barely posted last year (poll posts don't count!), but I did write some posts which were long....ish. Some inspirations such as Kirby Week and The Bet helped me to do so. The goal, however, quotes the Popular Posts module, and as you may have noticed, there is a 2009 post in the list: The Mystery Of The Ancient Fountain Of Dreams. Odd. :P So, for this one, I'm just going to say NEUTRAL and I'll make this year's goals clearer. :)
• Average around 1 comment per post - Comments? There were 68 comments posted by people other than me last year. How many posts did I post last year? 92. That's right, even with my dismal posting frequency last year, there were less comments than posts. Sad.
• Update the POTW on time - Wow, I seriously failed the late poll posting goal. For a while in the last quater of 2009, I was updating the POTW on a bi-weekly basis. Fail.
• Don't post random polls - Yes, I made random polls. I really need to come up with some good ideas for this year. Fail.
• The final goal was a joke, if no one noticed. :P

So, I passed 1 of 5 goals and failed 3 of 5. Wow, I did really badly last year. I hope I can do better this year. So, without further ado, here's my 2010 goals!

• Increase my RSS subscriber count to approx. 15 subscribers.
• Write at least one non-poll post every week. This is important because I am ashamed at my non-postiness in 2009. In 2008, I posted nearly every day!
• On that note, don't neglect to update the Poll Of The Week! It must be updated once a week on Saturday.
• Try not to post random poll posts. Make a list of upcoming polls if you have to.
• Get people to comment! Once again, I'm aiming for, on average, 1 comment per post. This allows for unpopular posts because people may comment frequently on popular posts.
• Revive The Fourm! Get people posting! I'm aiming for us to pass the 9000th post sometime this year. I mean, it's definitely possible. We had around 6000 posts posted in 2008. I think we can manage 700.
• Revive Fouripedia! There's a lot of new content that hasn't been added yet. I expect to see at least 10 new non-stub articles on Fouripedia by the end of the year. I know, it's not that big of a goal, but I was seriously lazy last year.
• Revive True Falsities! True Falsities was actually a 2009 project, so I can't compare it to 2008, but in the first half of the year we had so many people writing stories. Nowadays, there's one or two stories a month. I want at least two stories every month on True Falsities this year!
• Omg. Freaking. Revive. Pillowcase. I've been promising Season 3 for so long now and I've postponed it many times. Finish the season and post the comics! 2009 saw two seasons of Pillowcase, and I expect the same this year. And no cop-outs!

Wow, I'm really being harsh with myself this year. Well, I was incredibly lazy last year and I didn't get anything done. Anyway, 2009 is over and it is now 2010! Welcome to the new decade! I hope you all had a wonderful New Year and I hope 2010 is a good year for everyone!

It's New Years Eve! OMG! This is so exciting, soon it'll be 2010 and Four Island will be different yet again! Does anyone remember last year when all of the blog posts had red calendars next to them? Lol, we've been looking at blue calendars for so long.... And tomorrow it will change again.... to purple! :)

So, last year on New Years Eve, I posted a list of random/cynical predictions of what was to occur in 2009. Did any of them come true? Well, I did make a seventh layout, but not until September. :P And I did reinstall my operating system once, but on my personal computer (because I had somehow deleted the contents of /sbin.... :P) not my server.

This year, because I like the whole annual tradition thing, I will also be writing a list of predictions. But not in list form. I wrote an extremely strange song! :P

In the year oh-ten No-thing would hap-pen Because everyone will be busy typing "Greetings :)" into Yaplet!

Starla will change her site Into an Imogen Heap fan...site And then she'll realize she's pronouncing "Imogen" wrong and change it back like that!

TimTam'll make a wiki About a witch in Helsinki Then we'll all mob him from stealing a joke from Sabrina!

And Drifty, she will write A hundred stories in one night Then she'll post them all to FourFiction and my server will explode!

And Smiley, he will post Exactly one post, about toast And he will receive a medal for not posting about com-pu-ters!

And Sammi, she will draw All over her grand-maw Then she'll get grounded for so long that she'll actually write on her blog!

Then Bluemonkey and I Will collab on Layout 9 Until I realize he's trying to write it in ASP and I m-fire him and he m-quits and I realize that I skipped Layout 8! phew

And Pyro will perform A hostile-takeover of the town Jorm Then every day and every night will be a national holiday!

And Ozzyfrog, he will fly Right up in to the Sky And then receive a ticket for flying into a cable company!

And maybe J-A-L Will invent some sort of smell That makes iguanas want to eat toast and he becomes very rich!

And Timbo.... (oh, right, he discontinued his blog) will breathe air!

And True Falsities Will run another story About New Years being redirected to /dev/null and nobody knows what that means!

My router will explode (again) My website will be hacked (again) And Google will be acquired by Soy Products Ltd!

"2010 In Song"

Ummm.... that was weird. :P It.... sort of follows the melody of the first verse of Different Town. :P Anyway, have a very Happy New Year and I will see you tomorrow for my annual goals post!

Lol, this poll was a no-brainer.

YES!!1!!!1!!ONE - 12 vote(s)! No - 0 vote(s)! What's..... Chistmas? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

And YAY! More people seem to be voting now that I've fixed the logged in problem. :P Anyway, I hope you had a very merry christmas/happy other holiday! And now we're so close to 2010! Hey, I feel a cynical prediction article coming up again! :P

It's the last day of Kirby Week and some people said to me: "OMG ITS KIRBY WEEK!!!!" It's sad that Kirby Week's nearly over, but the poll results are in! :)

OMG ITS KIRBY WEEK!!!! - 4 vote(s)! **** you. - 0 vote(s)! What the pfargtl is Kirby Week? - 0 vote(s)! INDIFFERENT, OKAY?!?!?!? - 2 vote(s)!

Sew.... about yesterday.... :P I'm sorry I didn't write a post! It's just that I was really tired and I had been out all night and more excuses oh whatever, just throw those bottles of wine at your computer screen. Sorry!

Though I guess you could say that it's a Kirby Week tradition to not complete weekly specials :P . Anyway, Kirby Week is nearly over, but Christmas is very close by! Happiness! :D

On the fourth day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A deeper insight on the true meaningful nudules of randomness.

Randomness is a trait. It's also a blog, but we're talking about the characteristic here. So, what is randomness. WLEll of carser oiyoar know RANODMES S I shyperactivity!!!!!!! pbuttu!!!! Well.... no, not necessarily. You don't have to be a radioactively hyper sheep to be random. Randomness comes from within. Yeah right. :P

Randomness isn't really anything. You want to be random, go run outside and pull a tube-sock over your head. Write a story about someone's brain falling out. Oh dear, I do believe I feel a list coming out!

• Write a poem on a banana peel and then place it in front of your bedroom door.
• Exclaim your love for Russian mashed potatoes.
• Learn how to do the Macarana.... backwards.... twice as fast.
• Eat a computer.
• Radioactively reproduce Shakespeare's complete body of work. (This one requires fourteen lifetimes of practicing, so we don't expect you to complete it)
• Write a post about random stuff as a cop-out because you have a deadline in 12 minutes.
• Throw one of your favorite belongings into an empty trash bag, dance with it and make sure it knows how to spell "marfsky".
• Try new things. I've heard catfood is tasty.
• WRITE WRITE WRITE. Writing a random story is seriously fun and easy. Just think about the stupidest possible thing that could happen AND MAKE IT HAPPEN TO GEORGE WASHINGTON!!!! It never fails.
• Moderate comments.
• Listen to the collected works of Ludwig von Beethoven. Backwards. With each song logarithmically faster than the previous one.
• Download 200 pictures of lolcats, print them out and decorate your favorite mausoleum with them.
• Sing. Lady GaGa songs. Of course, it has to be backwards.
• Read a book on advanced physics and apply it to garbage collection in modern programming languages.
• Write a book outlining THE INTERNAL REOCCUPATIONS AND FLAGRATOINS OF USING ELLIPSES TOO FREQUENTLY.
• Make a website about something you enjoy. Such as dust-mite finding. You like finding dust-mites, amrite?
• EAT A MOOSE. Fine, it can be dead.
• Using red litmus paper, test various household objects for acidity and alkalinity and then throw them out the window and watch Spongebob Squarepants.

As you can see, there are many ways to be random. INVENT YOUR OWN, DUDE. See? That was random. Be random, spread happiness and try to ignore the fact that this post is so obviously a cop-out. Comment! :P

On the third day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A review of a random web-service.

HI. Welcome to Wednesday. Kirby Week is halfway over, how sad is that? Anyway, today's post is not as late and not as completely insane as yesterday's. Today, I'm reviewing Google Wave!

Okay. I'm not usually the first to know about something and this is no exception. I only found out about Google Wave about two months before it was released and that was only because Bluemonkey was ranting about it for some reason that I can't be bothered to check my chat-logs for. :P I wasn't really that interested.... that is, until I saw the features.

Google Wave boasts equal parts conversation and document. I didn't really understand that at first. Perhaps I still don't. All I did know was that it looked cool and people were apparently going nuts over it.

I finally received an invite from Bluemonkey and got to discovering. Google Wave seems to be a way to communicate and collaborate efficiently and quickly (in real-time, in fact). The thing is, however, I don't really know what I'd use Google Wave for. If I want to chat with someone, I'll use GTalk or Skype or Yaplet (which we are bringing back! :P). There isn't really anything compelling me to continue logging in and checking for new waves.

Not to say that my feelings toward Google Wave are completely negative. Wave seems to have some pretty neat applications. It's just that I haven't really found a need for any of them.

To end off this post, I'm going to present you with a surprise! I finally received my Google Wave invites today! So, if any of you still don't have Google Wave and would like to join in, please comment and I'll send you one! :D

On the second day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A short story about nothing in particular.

It was the first day of Christmas.

"Wait," a voice yelled, "Christmas only lasts one day! By saying the 'first' day of Christmas, you're implying that there is more than one day!"

For the sake of continuity, can we simply assume that there are more than one days of Christmas?

"That sounded really grammatically incorrect, you know."

Shut up. Just.... shut up. Anyway, it was the first day of Christmas. The snow had blanketed the beach house and everything around it so everything looked peaceful and-

"....snow? At a beach house? As in, on the beach? Not likely. And when you say that it blanketed everything around it, you're implying that it also blanketed the ocean. You know, the one adjacent to the beach the beach house is doubtlessly on?"

You don't have to take everything so seriously, you know. It's just a simple story. And a beach house doesn't necessarily have to be next to a beach.

"Yeah, well, stereotypically, you will find beach houses on the beach."

My beach house is in Iceland, okay? Moving on....

"You do know that Iceland is the one with the green, right?"

Don't make me come out of here.

"You're just a narrative device used to tell the reader of the story what is going on without using dialogue. You can't hurt me!"

I'm best friends with the writer of this story. She'll erase you if you don't qwazam.

"Seriously? You're making up words now?"

That's it! I QUIT. STARLA, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A NEW NARRATOR NOW BECAUSE THIS CHARACTER IS REALLY UNCOOPERATIVE.

"Hi there! Guess who I am."

O_O

"Yes, I like to write confusing stories. Good luck with that whole multiple personality disorder thing."

She walked away laughing, leaving the narrator very confused. Soon, however, the story was over and everything vanished.

Yes, okay, that story was very odd. But, well, that's what you get when you promise PROMISE to write a blog post and then fall asleep and laze about until you are only three hours away from your deadline. Tomorrow's post should.... make more sense. :P

On the first day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: An extremely weird rant on what Starla did last weekend.

Hi peoples, and welcome to the first day of Kirby Week. I'm sure you're all super-spectacularly excited for the upcoming holiday, yes? Well, today, I'm rewinding a bit to the weekend when Advent 2 ended and Kirby Week started. Some weirdly cool things happened that I fell like talking about.

First, on Saturday, I was bored. I didn't know why I was bored because I had plenty of things to do: work on Pillowcase, work on FourSearch, implement many of the pending renovations currently required around Four Island, work on the HKRPG site, work on one of my games, or anything else listed in The Bet. But, instead, I continued to be the queen of procrastination, and did nothing.

So, it was with boredom that I opened Google Reader. Oh yes, that's right, it's Saturday, none of my usual humor blogs had updated. I did notice, however, that TimTam's feed had over a hundred unread items in it. I decided to work that number down to a reasonable (0) amount.

That totally didn't work. The first post I read was a list of Lifehacker's best posts during 2009. Among that list was an article on how to install the Homebrew Channel on the Wii without needing the Twilight Princess hack. I had previously found out about the Homebrew Channel (it was The Daily WTF, actually) but was always annoyed because I didn't have, nor had any intention of getting, Twilight Prinecss.

Excitedly, I fetched my SD card from my broken camera and followed the instructions. Amazingly (because cool things that I want to do never work), it worked perfectly. The Homebrew Channel sat peacefully in the Wii system menu and I was ecstatically excited.

If you know me, you may not know that, among my normal programming, I also like to indulge in some homebrew programming. I've written for the GBA and the DS (both required special cartridges to put the homebrew games on and both have been lost by my evil siblings) but now I could possibly write something for the Wii! And as I was pondering this, the perfect training exercise that would get me into programming for the Wii popped into my head: I would port Maze Of Life to the Wii!

For now, however, I just wanted to play something fun. I ran back to my computer and looked through the list of homebrew applications to find something cool to play. As I was scrolling through the list of games, one caught my eye. POWDER. I sort of freaked out at that. POWDER is an extremely fun roguelike that I (during my DS homebrew days) had previously playing on my DS. I remember it to be an extremely fun game. I don't, however, remember being any good at it. :P

So I downloaded it (and a few other games including a super-cool looking port of SuperTux) and loaded it onto the Wii. I immediately became hooked. Yes, obsessively so. I played that game for two hours straight today, and many more not in succession. I even found the Linux version of POWDER and started compulsively playing it on my computer. I was even.... doing well, occasionally! :P If you've never played POWDER, you must do so. Seriously.

One other cool thing I did on the Wii was downloading the port of Visual Boy Advance (a GBA emulator). I had this emulator on my computer and (during my GBA homebrew days) used it to test my GBA games. However, it was difficult to play actual games on it because the keyboard isn't the intended controller for these games. So, I couldn't enjoy my Kirby Amazing Mirror ROM (I had lost the physical copy of this game years ago and really wanted to enjoy its amazing funness again). So, my grand idea was to use the Wii, VBA and the Classic Controller to play the game in its full greatness. And what do you know, it totally worked. Yippie for me. :)

So, I hope you've enjoyed this randomly long post. I'm off to play POWDER now.

Wow. Nobody even attempted to misguide me into thinking The Fourm was alive and well. And I'm pretty sure I voted "LADY GAGA IS AWESOME" three times. So there. :P

SADLY YES CRY O_O FSDSF - 3 vote(s)! Um.... whut? It's a series of electrical impulses, it cannot die. - 0 vote(s)! LADY GAGA IS AWESOME - 3 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

Sorry I updated late again, but yesterday I was having this weird problem where I wasn't able to log in. I tried logging in and it wouldn't even give me an error message. I eventually figured restarted Google Chrome and it worked, oddly, and that leaves me with no excuse as to why I didn't update the poll yesterday. Oh. :P

Anyway, has anyone realized what today is? Yes, it's Kirby Week! For those who can't be bothered to follow the link and find out, Kirby Week is the third week of advent, the week in which is candle is pink. I know, I know, I'm hilarious, right? :P

Anyways, it's become a bit of a tradition (how can I say that? I started it last year!) to do something special for the week on Four Island. Last year I wrote a series on how to write a blog system (and yes, that series was a total failure :P), but with my dismal posting rate this year, I don't think I can. This year, my Kirby Week goal is to publish one post everyday this week. Yes, you heard me, I'm going to post.

I can hear you all gasping.

I've prepared (okay, that's a lie, read: I'm going to prepare) 5 posts, one for each day of the week. They probably will not be related, but my goal is to ensure that there is at least one post in pending queue by 12:30 every day this week. Be prepared. Be prepared.... to throw things at me if I don't live up to this goal. Seriously, if I fail, throw full bottles of wine at your computer screen. Thank you.

And if you've noticed, yes, I'm continuing another Kirby Week tradition that even extends back to Kirby Week 2007, the Kirby Week poll. :P

PEOPLE VOTED! Well, I think they did. I can't see how many people voted (only the percentage of votes on each option) without looking in the database, so for all I know, as I had voted for the first option, that someone simply voted for the last one and no one else voted. :P Well, we'll soon find out! :P

Will I ever fall in love? I have, with this album! - 1 vote(s)! No, I don't want a sip of Up & Go - 0 vote(s)! What? - 0 vote(s)! I might be wrong, so indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

Oh.... um, ahem. Nothing to see here, move along! :P Btw, I FINALLY MANAGED TO UPDATE THE POTW ON TIME!!!! PARTEH!!!!! :P