Announcement: Hello

Dear Internet,

         Hello, Internet.  How have you been?  I have been well.  Busy, but well.  Today marks the one year anniversary since I started to write to you.  One whole year.  Of course it also marks the general point of five months without any sort of correspondence.  I apologize for that.  Like I have said, I have been busy.

         In the end, my little experiment was something of a success and also a failure.  It succeeded in scraping away a few layers of my Backlog, but it failed when I gave myself a little breathing room.  Because of this breathing room, I have not reviewed a single thing in the last five months.  My true displayable productivity halted to zero for the most part.  With this announcement post, however, I will try to rectify this.
  
         Taking this one year anniversary as a catalyst, I will take up the Backlog, again.  This time I will not make the ambiguous statement,or lack thereof, concerning the frequency of entries.  From here on out, I will be making one entry post for the Backlog each week, usually Friday.  It may be of the usual types of media: games, shows, music, movies, and books.  I will review them in a similar fashion as before, but will only be dedicating a minimum of five hours per week to the item.  This is a huge reduction as compared to before where I was doing twenty-five hours per week, but I cannot allocate more time than this.  Please understand this, Internet.  This is only half of what I plan on doing with my time for site.

          At the same time, I will be beginning a project for you, Internet, and for myself.  The act of reviewing is a one sided thing in some regards.  When I review something, I am taking a work that has been completed and finished (usually) and breaking it down to the point where it can be analyzed or inspected.  I then hand it off to you to read whatever little musings that have popped up in my head.  I get nothing from this little endeavor short of a little joy seeing my view counter crawl along.  But in the end, I am not making much of anything new.  I am making a review, yes, but all reviews require something to review.  They require a work made from outside the person doing the reviewing.  There is of course the instances where someone reviews their own work, but outside of self criticism for the sake of improvement this usually leads to a revolving door policy where the reviewer is the criticizer and is just patting themselves on the back.

         Instead of only creating secondary works that come from examining someone else's work, I wanted to make something of my own from scratch.  With this in mind, I chose to start making a kinetic visual novel.  I have always admired video games and their mechanics, but knew that I was more of a writer than a programmer.  The visual novel is the closest I can probably get to such a goal or is in the very least the first step toward such aspirations.  The kinetic novel is even more basic than that, with the varying choices that usually come from a visual novel not existing.  I chose to pursue the kinetic novel less to do with the artistic choice of negating player and reader choices and more with the practical reason that I am fairly new to the act of making a visual novel.

        The kinetic visual novel, that I will be detailing the progression of and eventual release here on the Backlog, is a reworking of an old writing exercise that I had done a few years back.  I do not hope or want accolades or praise for the final product.  Let me say that outright.  This project is for my own benefit.  I want to use this as a means of refining a few skills that I have into making a novel with the hopes of eventually going the next step, which would be to make a fully fledged visual novel with diverging paths and intertwining narratives.  That is my goal, and a small kinetic novel is the first few baby steps that I can make towards that goal.  Considering that as I stand now, I'll be doing the writing, coding, art, music and sound effects, it is enough of a small goal for me to aim for.  Expect to hear more information about once every week from here on out.

        So, there you have it, Internet.  The revival of the Backlog and the start of an amateur kinetic visual novel.  Both will fall into obscurity soon enough amiss the tidal waves of data that sweep through your servers every day.  But it means something to me at least.  Like a polished button or a colored rock being kept in an old cigar box under a bed belonging to a small child, this means something to someone, no matter it's worldly value.

Yours in digital,
BeepBoop

P.S. Next to be reviewed is "Spriggan," the  1998 film.