November is once again upon us and that means just one thing, to those who are internet savvy:

National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo.

Every year, people attempt to write a 50,000 word book inside of one month.  It averages out to writing more than 1500 words a day for 30 days.  It’s meant to charge up your creative juices, give you the excuse you need to produce, and teach a valuable lesson about productivity over editorial high-mindedness.

I don’t have enough of a focus or a commitment to prose work to do such a thing, though I’ve admired those who’ve attempted it.  So I’m coming up with my own November challenge:

National Blog Writing Month.  NaBloWriMo.  “Blow” might be an unfortunate choice of syllables in the middle of that, but it’s catchy and fits in well.

Less link dumps, more writing. More storytelling, more opinions, more reviews, more essays.

I’m not about to promise 50,000 words.  I’m already writing 2000 plus words a week for Pipeline.  But I’m going to try writing more.

I may cheat, though.  I have some stuff written I’ve been meaning to post up here for months.

This month isn’t about writing, per se.  It’s about producing, any way you may need to.  No mandatory word count. Just a commitment to produce.

So blog more!  Tell the world what you think of anything and everything.  Write, write, write.  Create content unique to your blog, don’t just echo others.

And link to Amazon like there’s no tomorrow!

Good luck to you all!

(Personally, I give it a week before life gets in the way.)

Is the sidebar for this blog located anywhere other than along the right side of the page, and aligned just below the header area?  Has it always been in that same spot? Please advise.

Thanks.  This ends posting for today.  Be back tomorrow with a picture.

The Akismet comment spam filter that comes standard with the WordPress blogging engine these days recently blocked the 50,000th spam comment from this blog.

I installed it at the beginning of the year.

It’s time like this that I feel truly popular. If I can attract 50,000 spam comments, surely I’m attracting 50 readers. =)

Every day, I sorted through dozens of feeds with the help of Google Reader. Thankfully, GR lets you share what you’re reading with the rest of the world.

Here is my Google Reader Shared Items page.

A couple dozen stories a day are tagged there, of interest to those who like the video game, tech, and TV topics we discuss here at VandS every day. You might even find a few comic-related posts.  You’ll see lots of stories from the occasional link dumps showing up on there first. It’s my first research file for this blog, and I think carries a lot of great information, as filtered through my warped worldview.

I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I thought I’d give you all the link now.

I’m selling off a chunk of my DVD collection on the Amazon Marketplace. It’s easy to use. It makes financial sense. And stuff actually sells there, unlike on eBay.

Click here to see what I’m getting rid of. You won’t get free shipping with your order over $25, but you can apply Amazon gift certificates to your purchase.

This has been yet another depressingly commercial message for an otherwise fun slice of pop culture blog.

I woke up this morning and realized that this is a special day.

Today, September 17th, is the Five Year Anniversary of the blog at VariousAndSundry.com. So momentous, it is, that it needed both extra capitalization and bold-faced fonting!

It all started with the excitement of a DVD release of Looney Tunes animated shorts.

It’s been updated on a daily basis for the last couple of years, at least. I can’t remember the last time I missed a day. Before that, it was near-daily. It’s definitely filled its function in life to let me talk about all the non-comics things I want to get off my chest.

For the comics stuff, there’s still Pipeline Commentary and Review, now past its tenth anniversary.

I feel old again.

Thanks, all, for reading.

Working on a couple of larger posts. In the meantime, let me buy some time with some things that grabbed my attention:

• Video of the year: At last! YouTube video to show how similar AIRPLANE! (the funniest movie of all time) is to ZERO HOUR. It’s a dead-on copy, played so straight that it’s hilarious. Someone needs to do a picture-in-picture DVD of both movies together.
• Here’s my Google Reader Feed, if you want to see the things I find most interesting on a daily basis. Many of the stories you’ll see here start there. It’s a free-flowing feed, too. LOTS of stuff passes through there. You can view it as a web page, too.
• A four port HDMI switch? Kewl.
• Linux Torvalds thinks kernel maintenance procedures does not inhibit desktop development, thankyouverymuch.
• The famed CBR Photo Parade from San Diego has begun.
• 10 rules for writing numbers.
• If AT&T ran the roads. . . Don’tcha just hate telecomm companies? Very funny stuff.
• An XBox 360 price drop? Don’t worry — Microsoft will still cover it for a number of years while it breaks constantly. . . It only cost them a billion dollars to do so.
  Mario Strikers Charged looks like a really really cool game. The original game for the GameCube was spectacular, as well, even if I couldn’t beat the danged thing.

I stopped at Best Buy last week, where I found their Harmony Remote display endcap.  I got to look and touch both the 550 and the 880.  Just my luck - I like the more expensive 880 much better than the 500.  For starters, it doesn’t use the rubbery chiclet buttons that the 550 includes in its center section.  It also has a full color screen with more options on it.  And, also handy, it has a recharging base station.  While that does mean Yet Another Thing to plug in, it saves on battery recharges and we have a place hidden neatly away to plug that in to handle the problem.

So it looks like I need even more Amazon Associates points!  Seriously, I’m humbled by just how much you’ve all ordered in the last couple of weeks since I asked you to consider clicking through VandS before purchasing.  Whether your purchases were large — go, Play Station 3s! — or small, they all added up very quickly.  Please continue to do so, especially if you want the goodness of a Blu Ray player combined with a gaming console. I highly recommend the PS3, if only out of enlightened self interestr.  Heh heh.  I’m almost all the way there to the points I need for the remote.

The only problem is that I’ve just read the small print and realized there’s one major gotcha.  Amazon only calculates the points at the end of the month, from which they send you the gift certificate.  And then they don’t send the money out until 60 days after the end of the month.  In other words, I won’t have the points on hand to buy the remote until, quite possibly, October 1st.

That sucks.

This is your weekly reminder that the Various and Sundry Amazon Store is available for some of your shopping needs. I just massively updated it today. It includes direct links to Amazon to purchase various CDs, books, and DVDs we’ve talked about on this blog this year, and then some. And, best of all, a small percentage of those purchases comes back to me. =)

It’s been a good week so far. I’m jealous of the person — and very grateful, also — who bought a Harmony remote through this blog in the past few days, and doubly so to whoever the lucky devil is who just picked up a PS3 and a bunch of Blu Ray movies. =)   Both made a nice dent in my race to get to Amazon profitability. Thanks!

Like every other blog out there, this one carries ads. I don’t hard sell them, but you’ll see them at the top of the page, along the right column, and in a few other scattered places. Hopefully, they’re not too obtrusive. And if you’re really annoyed by them, you’ve likely already installed a plug-in to Firefox to block them.

If you haven’t done that — lots of them are Amazon links. And every time you click through one of those graphics (or one of the cover scans you see on the weekly DVD release list or the occasional book or CD cover) and buy something, I get a wee tiny bit back. You buy what you were going to buy and pay the same price; I get credit for referring you.

It’s a lovely little system that’s helped me pay for, oh, one or two hardcover comic book collections.

Now, I’m upping the ante. I want to buy the lovely Harmony 550 universal remote controller (pictured at right). And I want to finance it partly through Amazon Associate points. I’m half way there already, but I need to earn one more Amazon reward certificate to seal the deal.

So I need your help. I’m not asking you to spend any extra money on my account or send me cash or anything like that. (I still can’t bring myself to put up a PayPal tip jar. That still seems a bit too much.) All I ask is that the next time you order something through Amazon and get that delicious free shipping over $25, just click on an Amazon link of any kind on this blog first. You’ll get what you need; I’ll look like a marketing genius by Amazon, who will reward me for all my incessant whining about home theaters, reality TV shows, and Apple computers.

What a system!

And I’ll even toss in a review of the thing once I get there.

If you’re looking for something additional to buy at Amazon, there’s a tiny link at the top of the page above the Amazon banner ad to the Various And Sundry Store, which has a bunch of links to DVDs, books, CDs, etc. that we’ve discussed on this blog over the last few months.  It’s also there in the right column, inconspicuous and lost in the masses of links.
Thanks in advance. I’ll let you know how this goes.

(And once this is over, I’ll beg you to click through someone else’s links for a little while. I believe in sharing.)

I have a plug-in on the backend of this blog that tracks what search terms are entered most on the search section you see to the right.  It’s always been handy to see what people are looking for, what older pages still get hits, etc.

It’s now functionally useless. The spammers have taken it over, too.  Nevermind that it does them no good, but their robots see a text box they can type their terms into, and so they do.

Sometimes, the internet doesn’t really feel worth it, you know?

I’m taking today off.

Have a nice day off, America. Have a nice Wednesday, everyone else.

VariousandSundry.com will reopen for business on Thursday.

There’s no ROCK STAR in the CBS schedule anymore.  I have Big Brother, and I imagine we’ll discuss some of that around here, but –

Dangit, I miss ROCK STAR already!

I’m so proud of you all. Check out these stats from the VariousAndSundry.com logs:

More people are using Firefox than IE.    I’m so proud. Nearly half of all people browsing this site use Firefox or Mozilla.  IE is at 39%.

There’s some talk out there that web browser records such as this one are picking up activities from an Apple iPhone web browser type.  No such luck for this site just yet, though we are getting 8% Safari stats.

It’s still going strong:

The VandS Tumblr

This could be the home of all future link dumps.  It’s wonderfully easy to use.