NaNuPoMo

[Nate the Great]

And what does "NaNuPoMo" mean, exactly? Is there some sort of "vision" or "mission statement" to this event?

[evay]

National News Post Month (with "Nu" standing for News; I guess the U is so that it sounds right). As in, every day this month he will post something in the News section.

Nate, do you have a site of your own? Not a page on someone else's site, or contributing to an existing wiki, but your very own, started from scratch, chose a name, bought a domain, completely Nate's content website? Because you have very clear ideas about The Right Way and The Wrong Way for this site to be run, so why don't you put those ideas into practice on a site of your own? Then you can show Zeke, and everyone else, how it's done.

I can't speak for anyone else here, but I for one would be delighted to see you launch such an endeavor.

[Nate the Great]

No, I do not own my own domain. I had a page on the h2g2 site, and I contribute to TvTropes, but never my own site.

How it's done? You mean, setting aside a certain amount of time every week to be devoted to adding material to a site? Actually keeping promises regarding updates and NOT making them when I know I won't be able to keep them? Refusing to start a multi-day event without setting aside the time to actually HAVE it?

I fully realize that I sound like one of those childless people with lots of opinions about childrearing, but sometimes a person CAN pick up the basics without direct experience. It's the same here.

If I had the skills to update the site, I'd have asked for Marc or Kira's job years ago, but I don't. Nor is it likely.

[evay]

You can run a site very easily on WordPress. Absolutely zero programming skills required; it's one of their selling points. Free themes (that means designs) galore.

I'm actually not being sarcastic. I think launching and maintaining your own site would be a great thing for you.

[Nate the Great]

About what? Another five-minute sister site? Unlikely. A personal blog? Too much personal information, and who'd be interested? I've tried bouts of writing my own short stories, both of the original and fanfiction variety, but it doesn't work. I don't have the drawing skills to make a webcomic. I don't have a camera adequate for a video review series.

In the end the only thing I've considered seriously is doing my own fan DVD commentaries. I don't suppose any of you would like to partner with me through Skype or whatever and launch such a site?

[Zeke]

November 9

(see thread)

[Zeke]

November 10

Today's link... let's say 8 Bit Horse. It's a nifty site dedicated to 2D gaming, from the NES days to modern examples like the Mega Man ZX games.

And that's ten! You know, I bet some people doubted I could do a whole month of daily updates. But who's laughing now? Here we are on November 10, and I'm making my tenth update of NaNuPoMo right on schedule.

...What?

[Zeke]

November 11

In honour of Remembrance Day, I have two things to link today. The first is a serious post I made back in '08 for the occasion, which I don't think I've linked here yet. Second, on the lighter side, I recently discovered the comics of Angus McLeod on deviantArt. His most popular to date are "Simple Versions" of various wars -- sort of like the historical fivers we've sometimes seen at the forums. McLeod did World War II first, then World War I, and then the Cold War. Each one's better than the last.

[Zeke]

November 12

Ever heard of the Atari game Necromancer? I never had before I read this article at the blog Electron Dance, but when you read it, you'll wonder why not. It's at once an explanation of the game, a biography of its creator (Bill Williams, who died at just 38 of cystic fibrosis), and an eloquent, almost poetic blending of the two. Well worth a read.

[Zeke]

November 13

Bisqwit is an interesting guy. I know him best as the founder of TASvideos.org, home of the tool-assisted speedrun. (I won't go into the difference between tool-assisted speedruns and the regular kind, but ask me sometime and I'll write you a short thesis on the subject.) He's also an expert programmer and general videogame hobbyist. Today's link is to a particularly interesting video of his.

On YouTube, one popular genre of gaming video is the "blind" playthrough, where the player is trying the game for the first time. Bisqwit recently tried a blind playthrough of his own... but a very different kind. He literally played a game with his eyes closed. To have half a chance, he chose the first test chamber of Portal, a very simple level that he knows inside out. He calls the resulting video boring, but I disagree -- with his commentary to explain what he was thinking at each point, it's one of the most interesting gameplay videos I've ever seen. Check it out.

[Zeke]

November 14

(see thread)

[Zeke]

November 15

Smallish but important update today. With the (ahem) long silences this site is prone to, I've been meaning for some time to create an RSS feed people can follow so they know when we have something new. (We used to have something similar, a mailing list, but handling it manually was a nuisance. RSS is basically how mailing lists are done now anyway.)

The other day I realized I don't need to make a feed, because we already have one! A surprisingly obscure feature of LiveJournal is that every account has an RSS feed; it's not linked by default for some reason, but you can find it by adding /data/rss to the URL. I update our LJ studiously with each newspost, so that feed might as well be coming directly from here. I dub it The Five-Minute RSS, and I encourage you all to follow it.

Follow it! Follow it.

[Zeke]

November 16

Today, some interesting sci-fi news for those who haven't already heard. A new BSG prequel movie has been made with the impressively generic title of Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome. For some reason, instead of airing on TV, it's first being serialized on YouTube in 12-minute segments. It's set in the first Cylon war and has a character we actually care about (Adama in his Viper pilot days), so there's more reason to watch this one than Caprica. Ron Moore isn't involved, but several other BSG staffers and fellow Trek veterans are, most notably Michael Taylor.

Should be worth checking out. It's nice at least to get something new from one of the big sci-fi franchises. A lot of them are lying fallow at the moment. I still can't believe they didn't capitalize on the success of Abrams' Trek reboot with a TV show -- that should've been a no-brainer.

[Zeke]

November 17

(see thread)

[Zeke]

November 18

Here's a goofy link to round out the week. The US and Canada have their share of sensationalist papers (USA Today, various Suns), but none that quite compare to the UK's Daily Mail. One Paul Battley has helpfully compiled a list of everything the Mail has identified over the years as either causing or preventing cancer... and yes, there's overlap. Check it out. Just don't do it over wi-fi.

[Zeke]

November 19

Party hats! This is the tenth update of NaNuPoMo 2012, which means I've officially done better than last year (when I vanished after the ninth one). Time to take a step back.

So what did happen last year, anyway? You may recall that I was being taken over by Samara from The Ring (and I'm tempted to just say she killed me for a year or something). This was meant to build up to the long-delayed publication of Five-Minute The Ring 2, which I've been trying to do for Hallowe'en every year since '05. But I just couldn't seem to finish the damn thing, and once again I'd newsposted myself into a corner. I'm not yet immune to being embarrassed about backing out of an event, but there are only so many times I can interrupt a newspost with [kssh], so I stopped, intending to come back spectacularly with the fiver done. Guess how that went!

Anyway, we're back to normal now. Several of the regular forumgoers have shown up, so hopefully we can get some interesting discussions going. (We also have an RSS feed now, if you missed that update.) I've got plenty of good updates in progress -- schoolwork permitting, as always.

And I've almost stopped seeing Samara's reflection in stuff and coughing up electric centipedes. Turns out the Ring Virus is much less dangerous if you stay away from video cassettes. It's been hard, but somehow I've managed...

[MaverickZer0]

Psst, Zeke, the link tagged to 'interesting discussions' is broken both on the newspost and the LJ post. It should be http://www.fiveminute.net/forums/sho...newpost&t=1631

(Would you believe, I actually wouldn't be able to manage staying away from video tapes? I still have a bunch of tapes and an actual factual VCR. They're right next to my NES and N64 I'm not even kidding.)

[Zeke]

Thanks. Relative-linking accident. I replaced the site URL with ".." as usual, but was overzealous and removed /forums too.

[Zeke]

November 20

Today's link is another of my deviantArt finds. Take a look at this picture. Looks like a pretty good photo, eh? Now look at it again, this time knowing that it's drawn with ballpoint pen.

What you're seeing is the unique art of Samuel Silva, a.k.a. VianaArts. He reproduces photos with what must be a million colours of ballpoint pen, and he does it astonishingly well. (For my money, the animal pictures are the best.) The latest one is NSFW, but otherwise go nuts.

[Zeke]

November 21

Quick link today to a pretty self-explanatory site: Search of the Day.