#1 Reason Why...

Here we go...! I saw this floating around on twitter yesterday but didn't want to touch the topic, but after an article over on CNN (and the irritating comments left) I feel compelled to say something about it.

First of all, here is the article: 'Lady game creators' meet up on Twitter'. The article talks about the issue in the detached tone, blanket generalization that most big media articles on gaming (and even worse, women in gaming) tend to take. Never touching on the REAL issue or really understanding what is going on.

CNN asks for those involved in the topic to share and so I threw my two-cents in answering this call: "Are you a female interested in the video game industry, or do you know someone who is?"

Now, I may not be involved directly in the development side of things, I don't have the education level developing requires, but I do have a passion for video games. I also gave up on being more professionally involved in other ways some time ago (for multiple reasons which I will not get into here); but that doesn't mean I don't have an inkling of a clue of what I'm talking about either. More so than the random CNN correspondent that knows nothing of video games or women in gaming anyway (no offense to CNN, and not including some of their gaming journalists).

What irritated me the most with this article wasn't really the article itself which offers no real opinion or substance simply because they don't have the knowledge or background to do so anyway, but the comments. Scroll through them and you will find the cliché stereotypical things you always hear about women and video games. From your trolling "get back to the kitchen" to the, "women just want attention" comments.

Malyce: My Second Skyrim Character

As you may (or may not) remember, I have been slowly working on completing all the achievements for Skyrim on xbox 360. To make keeping track of that a bit easier through my blog, I have especially created a tab that directs to my Skyrim: All Achievements post which is updated as needed.

Because I destroyed the Dark Brotherhood on my first/primary character long before I even thought I might care about the achievements (which require you to follow through the entire DB chain) and because I had cured myself of Lycanthropy and didn't want to reinfect myself AND because I also denied becoming a vampire lord and completed the chain from the Dawnguard side, I needed to create a secondary character in order to get those achievements.

I really like Skyrim, so I wasn't bothered by the fact that I needed to create another character. In fact, I had intended to do so eventually on my own anyway to see some quests from another side, especially from Dawnguard. I had only previously hesitated creating a second because I was unsure how to keep track of my saves and not lose my primary, but once I discovered I could save another character on another media device (memory card in my case, yes I had one..) without hassle or fear of mixing them up, I dove right in.

A Necessary Facelift

Unecessary Blogage got a necessary facelift today! Hopefully you like it as much as I do compared to the old look.

Updating my blog is really something I have been meaning to do for a long time now but never got around to.  I'm not so great with graphics, nor with HTML etc, so I kept trying to take the lazy way out and download templates. Everything I looked through though was either really ugly, really specific (specific video games etc), or just plain full of advertisement for the site I was looking at. So then I thought to just transfer everything over to WordPress as there were far more customization options, but while blog titles transferred the content of the blogs didn't. -_-  Then there was the problem of youtube videos not displaying properly without addons (I forgot about this when I used to admin a WP site before) and everything costing money to do anything. Eventually I just abandoned that idea (for now anyway).

After much frustration with downloadable templates I just decided to try Blogger's new customization tools and make a holder until I could work on something. But as I started working, I started seeing that I could do most of what I wanted to do anyway and just did it. I always wanted to make a real header for my blog but never got around to it either and today I just sat there and did it. Again, I'm not great with graphics and manipulation or anything, but I'm satisfied with the result and happy to find a new use for my Rock Band 2 avatar of myself (too bad Rock Band 3 doesn't give the hair style I need to pull it off again & there is no photomaker tool anymore).

I've also added Disqus comments! Yay! I'm hoping this will encourage more blog comments since Blogger's system is really primitive. We will see.

Anyway, I'm happy to have something a bit more to my style and a bit more original than the old template I had before.. everyone and their dog had that same look. I hope Unnecessary Blogage will be clear and easy to read while also being a little more pleasing on the eye. :)