Good morning everyone and welcome to another lovely day in Pandemia. This time I am actually talking about my Animal Crossing island and not the world of chaos surrounding us. I’ve talked about this being my first Animal Crossing game before, but also that in truth I played a bit of Pocket Camp. During my brief time playing that I did manage to bond with a few of the Campers, one specifically was Cherry the Goth Death Metal Dog. So when I found out that you could summon specific Villagers and get them to move in via Amiibo Cards, I had a goal. I always do a certain amount of nonsense to finish my goals but this one was considerably more than normal. The whole process of faking out an Amiibo Card is something I might get into in a later post, but for now I am going to focus on the actual process of getting someone you summon to move in because like many things in this game it is clear as mud.
The entire process becomes available when you build the campsite on your Island. You unlock the ability to build a campsite shortly after you have upgraded Resident Services from a tent to a proper building the comes complete with a nifty brickwork town square. If I am correct the sequence of events to get to this point looks a little something like this:
Pay off your first loan and upgrade tent to a house
Invite three new villagers to your island via island adventures
Build Nook’s Cranny Store
Place a Bridge
Designate land and craft random nonsense for the three villagers
Wait for them all to move in
Upgrade Resident Services
So much of the things that happen in this game happen on a very strict schedule and I am sure someone out there has a flowchart of all of it. After you get your campsite however you need to wait a full day, and then the next day a random camper will show up. You need to recruit this first random camper to your Island and wait for them to move in and clear out the campgrounds. Upon returning to Resident services you will get the ability through the ATM machine to summon an Amiibo to your campsite.
So the rules appear to be that you can use an Amiibo or an Amiibo Card, of which there are 400 of them release in 4 different 100 card series. The prices on cards vary wildly and you can pick up a Cherry card on Ebay for everything between $15 to $50 depending on the seller. Sealed packs of cards are now going for around $20 each because we are in the crush of the release of a popular Animal Crossing game. I “acquired” Cherry and was ready to begin the process. I scanned the card in and got a screen that looks a little like this where you invite her to your campsite.
Almost immediately she shows up in the campsite and you can begin the process of interacting with whomever you scanned. You have to talk to them a few times before they give you a dialog that asks you to craft a souvenir for them. If it is something that you don’t have the pattern for they will supply that as well. I thought to myself that surely once I handed off the item I would get a prompt to invite them, and for the most part that is the sequence of events that played out. However after the first time inviting them they said that they weren’t quite sure and would like me to invite them back some other time.
This process played out three more times. The next morning I would summon Cherry to the island first thing and after a throw away dialog she would give me one asking for an item. I would go off and craft said item and once again on the second day I got the “invite me back again” prompt. However finally on the third day I got one where I managed to convince them to move to the island. They state that they will go talk to resident services, but immediately returns telling you that Tom Nook says the island is full. So here is where I did things in the wrong order for a bit. I thought okay… I will go make a new campsite which costs 10,000 bells and then when I invite her back the next day she will move in. However the next morning I wake to find a random islander had purchased my fresh new spot.
So once again I summoned forth Amiibo Card Cherry and after doing some research and following down a handful of Reddit and YouTube Rabbit trails, I found the error in my sequencing. Upon inviting your Amiibo and getting the dialog about the Island being full, you need to go ahead and make a new plot of land like I was originally thinking. However the thing I did wrong is you then need to go right back to your Amiibo and talk to them again. They will talk to Resident Services and this time around Tom Nook will tell them that they can move in immediately. The very next day you should see your Amiibo moving in and you have successfully jumped through all of the stupid hoops it takes to recruit someone.
So to summarize the sequence of events in list form:
Build Campsite
Recruit First Random Camper
Get the ability to Summon Amiibos to Campsite
Summon Amiibo – Day One
Craft Random Souvenir
Get Shot Down
Summon Amiibo – Day Two
Craft Random Souvenir
Get Shot Down Again
Summon Amiibo – Day Three
Craft Random Souvenir
Get Move In/Island Full Dialog
Pay Tom Nook 10,000 Bells to Make a New Plot
Talk to Amiibo Again and get successful Move In Dialog
Why yes I do have a yellow diner seat on my beach… thanks for noticing. The other interesting thing that I have learned through this entire nonsense process is that you can use this trick of summoning campers to kick Villagers off your island once you have reached the point of being full. Apparently the entire process follows as normal, but when you have finally convinced the person and get the move in dialog, it asks you if you have heard of anyone who wants to leave the island. You then get a prompt to choose one of your Islanders that you want to swap for the newcomer. Upon doing this the Amiibo goes off and talks to this Islander and the next day they begin moving out and a few days later your new Amiibo arrives. This is in part why I am considering talking through the nonsense process of acquiring Amiibo cards through other means, so that you too can punt annoying islanders. However that is a discussion for another day.
One last thing… I have a sign up sheet for an Animal Crossing Info exchange. If you sign up, I will end up dumping the relevant information into another google sheet and then sharing it back with you. The idea being that it tracks pertinent information like type of fruit, flowers and what stores you have access to. Feel free to add your info.
I think I might be fresh out of general advice when it comes to blogging, at least for this first week of Blapril. Instead this morning you are going to get a brain dump of something I have been thinking about at length but have been uncertain of when or where exactly to throw it out for open discussion. I’ve been using the term Pandemia to refer to this time we are living in and I even probably shortsightedly named my Island in Animal Crossing after this. In my mind it made sense given that ACNH has been helping a lot to keep me calm in a time of crisis. However one of the things that I have been devoting a decent amount of my mental processing to is trying to think about what the world looks like after this.
The previous event for me that has had any relevance in explaining the changes that are rapidly happening in the world is that of 9/11 when airplanes were used as suicide bombs to attack key targets in the United States. After that event there were sweeping changes that rapidly went into place in a failed attempt to help us feel like we had some control in the world. Now this might not be true for everyone, but I live in flyover country and as a result we are pretty slow to adopt things and as a result of these events metal detectors were installed in pretty much every public building as well as a good number of retail stores. This is somewhat ironic given that we are also an open carry site and you don’t need a license to carry a firearm. However it was a noticeable change that sorta happened over night.
random FLIR photo I found on google
I am wondering if after the events of this pandemic if we are going to see Thermal Imaging like FLIR installed much like those metal detectors at the entrance of public buildings. Will we effectively begin screening individuals with higher than normal body temperatures as a sign of infection? How is this going to change sick leave policies across the board? Traditionally we have been a country that has frowned upon taking off time from work when you are feeling a little under the weather because we have to make sure productivity stays high. Where I work has some fairly draconian policies surrounding sick leave where you accrue it at a staggering rate but can only use a certain amount each year without getting into trouble. Will we see restrictions like that eased as an entire generation is reminded of the dangers of communal spread?
random cube farm I found on wikipedia
The other change I wonder about is how exactly the workplace is going to shift over time. In flyover country we are still very much traditionally a “butts in seats” economy. This is driven by the fact that most of the management are still in the baby boomer generation, and feel that they need to physically see a person sitting at their desk in order to feel like they are doing a good job. As managers go, I’ve always been a “judge progress on projects” type of person because I know LOTS of people who occupy space with perfect attendance but are otherwise useless. This event has rapidly proven that we can in fact keep the lights on and keep business moving forward with literally the entire office working remotely. Does that begin to shift what the office means as far as culture goes? Do see a shrinking of office space and a widespread shift away from the soulless cube farms? In theory there isn’t much of a reason for my team to ever return to the office because all of the systems we work on were remote in the first place.
I feel like this also is going to be a huge boon for the disabled individuals that need to work from home in order to fit their schedule or medical requirements. For years employers have come up with excuses as to why this would not work, or invented reasons why someone had to be physically located in the office. The last month has proven without a doubt that we can keep carrying on business as usual through the use of technology that we have had access to for years. Those of us who were already savvy in such things have been using it for the better part of two decades. I just wish that business teleconferencing software was half as evolved as Discord or Teamspeak, because I am constantly frustrated by the fact that everyone has a damned open mic all of the time. Years of gaming and talking with strangers on voice chat have taught me an etiquette that I wish I could force upon the coworkers that are not directly in my team.
random wooded house I found on google
The other thing that I’ve been wondering about is how this shift in working conditions is going to effect the distribution of the population. Over the last several decades there has been a migration away from rural areas into larger cities, and even within that a sub trend of migration away from the suburbs back into the central core of the city. In the time of pandemic it feels inherently more dangerous to be in more populated areas. I know personally as much as I love QuikTrip we have been avoiding them because they are always busy, and instead seeking out those gas stations that never have anyone at them. Similarly we have been avoiding Walmart or Target and getting whatever we can at Dollar General which has significantly less volume than the bigger stores. However we live on the outskirts of a larger city because that is where the jobs require us to be.
The biggest challenge is infrastructure, but I am wondering if a migration trend would drive investment in higher speed internet in rural america. I could see myself living out in the middle of nowhere because the main case against that used to be the lack of access to goods. Amazon however has acted for years as the great equalizer of access to material things for those who are isolated, because they seemingly ship to anywhere. With decent internet, I could absolutely see a case made for moving away from the big cities and buying cheap property in the more rural communities. Our 1800 home sq/ft in suburbia can be purchased in the tiny town of 2000 people that I grew up in for just a bit over half what it currently appraises for. So the question is will living in such close proximity of other people start to feel more dangerous than it did prior to Covid-19? Will we see a trend of moving away from these cities and repopulating the relatively neglected rural corridors of our states?
Ultimately these are the questions that I have been pondering. I don’t know what the world looks like after this, but I doubt it looks the same. Things are going to change in weird and interesting ways. Some are going to be for the better and others are going to be likely problematic. However I don’t think we return to business as usual after having effectively shut down the world for several months. I am bracing for the financial impact of these events, which are likely to be extreme. I know this post is a bit of a divergence from the sort of thing that I normally write about in the mornings, but these are things that I have been pondering while sitting at home in isolation and social distancing mode. Once we go forth and can populate the earth once again… what is that earth going to look like? Tomorrow I am sure we will return to posts about the games I am playing or blogging advice as part of Blapril, but today I just wanted to dump all of these thoughts onto the digital page and walk away. You know the whole blogs as self therapy thing and all.
Hey Folks! It’s that time again, time for another Blapril post. Monday I talked about the challenges of figuring out a name, and yesterday was a dive into various free hosting options. This morning I am going to talk about what I consider to be the third most important thing about blogging… making room in your life for writing. Best intentions are exactly that right up until the point you actually set forth with a plan to make them happen. If you are going to be writing more often then you need to figure out when exactly you are going to do this thing. “Whenever I get around to it” generally means that you are going to post any time you have a burning idea and then extremely intermittently in the times in between those moments of genius. This is an extremely relevant message coming from me who has had a wild ride as far as posting regularity goes.
The Grand Experiment
If you look at the early days of this blog you will find that I had no semblance of a schedule. I might post three days in a row and then it could be a month or two until my next post. The problem with this sporadic nature is that you are setting yourself up for frustrations. Firstly your readers won’t know when to expect new content and as a result folks will turn up when they happen to think about it… which is essentially never. If you are waiting for a moment of genius before you put keys to virtual paper, then there is the thought that surely some other more regular site would be talking about it. I would have torrents of readers when something of mine got elevated to Massively or WoW Insider but the rest of the time it was pretty much crickets because I was doing nothing to keep regular readers.
As a point of reference there are 152 posts that occurred during the first four years of my blog or an average of 38 posts per year during 2009-2013. In the time since then I have written 2150 averaging 307 posts a year in the seven years in between. What changed is that on April 26th of 2013 I wrote a post entitled The Grand Experiment, in which I pledged to write something every single day and change the way I interacted with my blog. I had created this false assumption about my blog and blogging in general that every single post had to be important. So to get me over this I just started writing anything that came to my mind every single day and continued this for roughly three and a half years. There were days when it was harder than others but I kept at it and kept pushing forward and making new posts until I became numb to the constant nagging sense of doubt, disillusionment and feelings of complete and total inadequacy.
Making Room for Writing
The only way this ever worked is because I set forth and made space in my life for it to happen. I had gotten into the habit of hanging out each morning upstairs in my office while I drank my morning cup of coffee. During this time I would either fall down a youtube hole or log into whatever my MMORPG of choice at the time was and grind out a few dailies. It was completely frivolous time that could be used for other purposes but I ultimately never did anything with it. I decided that I could sacrifice this hour of time and instead focus on writing a blog post every single morning. Clearing this space in my life for usually uninterrupted writing time gave me the room that I needed to write every single day and honestly I found that this unnatural time boxing actually made me more productive.
I knew that I could not screw around because from the time I planted my butt in my chair at 6 am, that come 7 am I had to publish whatever I managed to cobble together during that time. Often times the actual writing of the post happened from about 6:30 am to 7 am because I would inevitably spend some time trying to “find my muse” for the morning and checking in on what was going on in the world. So not only could I pull a post out of thin air, I could in theory do it in about thirty minutes. The process actually began way earlier than that at 5:30 when I pulled myself out of bed and hopped in the shower. While warm water cascaded over my body waking me up, I would start thinking about what I was going to write that morning. My ENTIRE morning started revolving around what I could do to make sure I met my deadline and got some new piece of content out that morning. One simple act set this all in motion, and that was clearing some space for the writing itself to happen.
Figuring out Your Schedule
Blaugust and Blapril as well is at its core an examination of what it takes to create regularly serialized content. Readers love predictability and I don’t mean predictable themes or topics, but the ability to predict the arrival of new content. If you set a schedule to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday then your readers will return on those days because they know there is new content to consume. If your schedule is instead whenever you feel like it, then you have given your readers no queues as to how often they should be prepared to receive new content. Sure RSS readers are a way of getting around this but after the death of Google Reader this is less and less of a reliable source of traffic. Most of your readers are coming in either organically through search or arriving deliberately. The later of those is made up through those hitting your site directly or from your various syndication efforts on social media (which is why I stressed the importance of camping those names on various platforms in day one).
Blaugust was never about trying to get people to adopt the nonsense rigor that I kept for three years of posting every single day. Instead it was an attempt to show them that after having posted every single day in a month that they could easily maintain a more rational schedule of every week day, every other day or something similar. It was a celebration of being able to do something really hard which in turn made doing something less difficult seem easier. However I am not really sure if this has ever worked quite in the way I wanted it to. All of that aside the best way to build a regularly community of readers is to post your content on a reliable and predictable schedule. There are folks that have been concerned about me in the few cases when I didn’t get a post out before 8 am, because most days you could almost set your watch based on when I was going to publish content.
Give Yourself Room to Fail
Ultimately I backed off of the posting every single day thing because it seemed extremely oppressive to never let the ball touch the ground. Like I said some days were extremely easy, and the content flowed through my fingertips into the keyboard like someone else was writing it. There were other days when everything went wrong and I felt a growing sense of dread as the clock ticked closer and closer to seven and I still didn’t have anything workable. Those are the days now when I post a quick note to twitter and apologize that there won’t be a post that day and the move on with my life. I have given myself permission to fail and then dust myself off the next morning and keep going like nothing happened.
In the early days of the blog it felt like each time I had a major absence, that I needed to come up with some great post as a way of saying sorry to the people who were still reading me. Either that or I felt like I needed to write a treatise on what exactly happened that kept me from actually churning out content. When you are posting regularly it becomes easier to just note that new content won’t be coming and move on with whatever real world tragedy has kept you from dedicating the time needed that day. Your readers are also more forgiving because they know this single lapse is the exception rather than the rule and they know they will be able to expect fresh content the next day. You have to find the rhythm of content creation that fits the pace of your life and when you do… after a few months you will find it becomes second nature.
Blogging as Therapy
One last bit that I am going to talk about this morning is something I have hinted at before. On most days it feels like I am sitting down and writing to an empty room. I occasionally am shocked when someone reaches out to me that they read something I wrote, or when one of my posts gets picked up by another website. The secret of my blog is that I am doing this as much for my benefit as I am for yours. Sitting down and dumping my thoughts to the digital page each morning is in many ways a form of therapy as I order my thoughts and arrange them into a neat little pile that forms a paragraph. I appreciate that you the reader exists as part of this, because it gives me a reason to keep doing this. However if tomorrow I decided to stop blogging entirely, I would probably turn around and start a private journal to fill this apparently needed role in my life.
There are going to be people who arrive on your doorstep because of some grand content that you created. There are going to be people who arrive because they happen to love whatever it is that you are into at a time. However if someone stays with you for years, or in my case over a decade… they are going to do so because they are interested in you as a human being. When you transition to that phase in your blog you have a lot of freedom to talk about whatever happens to be bothering you regardless if it happens to fit neatly into your theme. I’ve always tried to be open to my readers and share a lot of my life with them, albeit often times anonymized to protect friends and family. I want to be fundamentally honest and in that honesty comes expected truth that spills out between the cracks. There are times when I am working through a thought process and come to some fundamental realization about myself that I had never landed upon before. So if you allow it your blog can operate on levels that your readers may never quite glean, but can at the same time help you immensely.
Welcome to the second day of Blapril postings and with it comes a batch of new sign-ups to join in this process. I really should probably stop even jokingly referring to them as victims, because we really want this to be a joyful experience for all involved. At the time of writing this we are up to 38 members of this giant band of adventurers and I couldn’t be happier to share the journey. If you want to keep tabs on all of the new sign-ups I am intermittently updating the list that can be found on the Blaugust Media Kit page. I decided yesterday that this makes a lot more sense than trying to post a new list every single day.
Free as in Beer
Yesterday I talked at length about what I consider to be the most important step of creating a blog, which is figuring out what to call it. Today I am going to focus on carving out some real estate for you to hang out a shingle and start writing. Essentially you can divide your options into two clear camps, those that you are hosting yourself and those that you are having someone else host for you. Even that I guess is a little less than clear because technically if you rent server space and install your own site on it, you are technically getting someone else to host it. However for the sake of this discussion today I am going to focus on the options that are completely free and allow you to be writing within minutes of signing up.
WordPress
WordPress is effectively the 500 pound juggernaut in the blogging world. It is fast and easy to get signed up and comes with a pretty solid blog reader as well. If you manage multiple sites it also allows you to set up a scenario where you can manage and update all of them through a single interface. The negative however is that all of the freedom to be gained through using WordPress comes with the self hosted version which can be found at WordPress.org. WordPress.com is the turnkey solution that allows you to push all of the hassle onto someone else, but in order to get many of the features you might want it requires a paid plan. However in the free version you get a <yournamehere>.wordpress.com domain name and the ability to start posting instantly.
I’ve been a proponent of WordPress.com for years as a first blogging experience in part because you are going to out grow whatever first platform you start on. I personally started on Blogger and migrated to self hosted WordPress because I was limited in my ability to do the things I wanted to do. Knowing this the transition between WordPress.com to self hosting the software from WordPress.org is extremely smooth and there are lots of tools baked into the default software to ease this transition. I am a big fan of starting with the free version of WordPress because it is going to give you a lot of flexibility moving forward when you decide that your free site isn’t enough for your current tastes.
Blogger
Next up I introduce you to Blogger.com the blogging application hosted and maintained by Google. The nice bit about this tool is that if you are already a denizen of google, you can just pick up and start integrating with the various google tools immediately using an account you are already familiar logging into and is hopefully protected by two factor authentication. The negative for me at least is that it is hosted by Google and has essentially been in “maintenance mode” for years with the last features being added in 2017 and a bunch of things slowly deprecated and removed in 2019. The killer feature of this blogging platform is the way that it manages your blogroll, and this used to be even more killer when it integrated with Google Reader, which was unfortunately sunset in 2013 which was a dark time for the blogosphere.
The folks that love blogger really seem to love it, and like I said I started out my blogging life with a small blogger that will never see the light of day. What I found frustrating about it is that it seemed like I lacked the level of granular control that I personally wanted from a blogging experience. I think for others that is more of a positive because they ultimately place those design decisions in the hands of a limited selection of prebuilt themes and just get to the business of writing. My biggest concern is that Google loves to cancel its products, and I feel like they have been gunning for Blogger for quite some time originally trying to turn Google Plus into the new blogging platform. It has not happened but given that it does not seem that they are actively working on the platform, I am not sure that the future does not see this site closing down.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a strange platform but one that bears mentioning. It is among the most straightforward platforms for just getting in and writing about something and offers a lot of clean mobile options if you want to blog on the go. It is also an excellent platform if you want to do a picture blog or post your artwork, because it is very image forward in the way that people consume content. I personally find it a bit lacking when it comes to writing anything long form, and while I syndicate to the platform I think it does a generally horrible job at actually conveying my posts. I think Tumblr works best when you are wanting to use it like a Long form Instagram.
The main reason I bring it up however is its sheer simplicity and its wide adoption by a number of specific subcultures of the blogosphere (and fandom). Much of what was formerly the Live Journal community found its sea legs over on Tumblr, and if your voice is targeted towards one of those communities then you are going to find a lot of traction and support (as well as a fair amount of drama) on Tumblr. Other than just syndicating my blog with WordPress tools to Tumblr, the only time I really use it is to log in and look at interesting pictures. I use it mostly to look at comic art and other fandom art, and Ammo from AggroChat and the creator of most of the artwork you see adorning this blog has a great Tumblr. It is definitely an option worth exploring if your vision is extremely image heavy.
Medium
Based on my understanding, Medium was created by one of the twitter co-founders and started its life as a way of sharing a longer form post on the micro-blogging platform similar to TwitLonger but with more “bloggerly” sensibilities. What it has morphed into over the years is a pretty solid blogging platform that is more focused on sharing articles than sharing an entire website with the public. Its content aggregation platform is focused on the type of content being shared and less on the author, but this allows for more organic discovery of your posts so long as people are searching on one of the various things you have tagged on. You don’t so much have a “site” with its own name, but you do have the ability to link to your Author page and that then links to all of the posts you have written.
I include this as an option because it has a really good writing platform with a bunch of very nice features. The end result is a very pretty and legible article, but you have to accept that you have very little control over the look at feel of it. You can insert images, create headers and even create those little call out snippets to drive interest in the piece, but you won’t be able to change font and formatting or shift away from anything other than the stark black on white theme. If you just want to write however and want your ideas to percolate among other peers that you may or may not know about then this might be a platform for you. That said it is really hard to actually create a brand that is anything other than you as a person on a platform like medium.
Get in and Get Writing
I am sure as soon as I post this, folks will chime in about other options. I largely focused on what I consider to be the four easiest options for getting up and running and blogging this afternoon. All of the above have options for getting started in minutes, and if you are late starting with Blapril they can serve as a bit of a jumpstart into blogging. As I said before you are likely going to outgrow your very first attempt at blogging, and like talking about an escape clause yesterday, my personal choice is WordPress just for the flexibility and ease of migrating elsewhere. However all of the above can serve you nicely as you begin this journey.
