I had some good times playing the game formerly known as PMOG and I will miss it, to be sure. What’s the Nethernet? It was an MMO that we played all over the web. The Internet was our game board and a toolbar on Firefox was how we interacted. The game developers are turning out the lights and moving on to other projects.

I started playing around the same time that I joined Twitter. Last night during a chat with a close friend from The Nethernet on IRC,  we realized that PMOG/TNN was the first time we took a chance and joined a social game. We let our walls down and made some real connections. I remember several months ago, the developers posted in the forum asking what parts of the game the players really enjoyed. I would guess, 99% of us said, “The community.”

Bean counters & marketing gurus are all about numbers. If you get the players/users, then you have a base number which you can use to estimate your all mighty profits from ads, subscriptions and the like. The formula is practically a law in the Internet business world. So, the developers of The Nethernet did what any start up company would do, they went out looking for numbers. Instead of numbers, they got us. We are a community.

We may not have a home, but I have hope to keep the connections that I have made. I humbly offer a refugee camp for those of you interested in remaining in contact. Snocrsh has also made a Ning for lost souls. You can also find many of us on freenode. You can connect through the web using their webchat or you can download xchat, pidgin, colloquy and a number of other free IRC clients. You’ll find your Nethernet friends in the channels #pmog, #thenethernet.com.

Share your own experiences, ideas for a new home or questions about IRC in the comments or the refugee camp. We’ll do our best to keep on jaunting.

Great news! I’ve managed to capture another blogger for sikkdays.com! Honestly I didn’t capture him, he offered to help out. Plus, he doesn’t have my address so he won’t be able to bill me for his work.

Anyway, Mr. burdenday was the community manager at the game formerly known as PMOG and now he is a community manager/designer at Rise & Ruin. You can also find him at burdenday.com where he shares his experiences managing online communities.  burdenday is just about finished with his English major, so this will be a definite upgrade for those of you that don’t just come here for the pics and videos.

Some of you may be familiar with burdenday, but for those of you that do not know him below are some questions I emailed him along with his answers:

#1) Cake or Pie?

Beefcake!  No seriously though, I’ve never been one much for sweets, but I do appreciate some yellow cake when appropriate.

#2) Do you think it is fair to the other colors of the spectrum to pick a favorite?

Look – here in America we’ve had a long standing tradition of choosing a favorite color and alienating the rest of the spectrum with our “favorite color exceptionalism.”  I’m here to change that 20th century carryover thinking from the past eight years.

#3) Buddy Holly was obviously a star, but if the plane crash of February 3, 1959 never happened who would have had a bigger career, Ritchie Valens or The Big Bopper?

Kurt Cobain.

#4) Automobile of the future: Electric or Hydrogen powered?

So close your eyes for a moment and begin to imagine pictures of the most horrific accidents in the world’s history. Begin to recall those involving air vehicles… Good!  Now I am going to say a word and we’ll do some free association: Hindenburg.

Electric – I’ve been shocked by 120V wires a few times and survived.  I am pretty sure I won’t survive a hydrogen engine explosion though.

#6) We are our jobs, what was your first job ever?

My very first job ever was as a receptionist for my aunt’s Law Firm.  It is considered “very professional” to have a male receptionist, I was told.  I enjoyed it because mostly I surfed the Internet aimlessly and just put people through to voicemail – those were the days!

#7) Theory on why question #5 is missing?

Wow, I didn’t even notice.  I’m adding this to the list of possible drug interactions for Vicodin. (I should note that burdenday just had a minor surgery and is not a junkie that I pulled off the street.)

#8) Favorite childhood game? (video, board, handheld, sport-like activity)

I played EverQuest for far, far too many years.  If I had to choose a favorite, that would be it.  There is nothing quite so satisfying as spending months of your life chopping away at virtual animals and monsters with swords.

#9) If you were stranded on a desert Island, what is the first thing you would build yourself?

A library, so I could begin writing enough books to fill it and then long after my death someone would discover it and they’d all be “classics.”  That’s how it works, isn’t it?

Wow, I thought that last question was weak, but that is an excellent answer. All I could think of was building a bowling alley. Hanging out at the beach is great, but if you lived there I have to imagine you’d get bored of it.

Sikkdays.com hasn’t really had any sort of real focus aside from ‘look what I found on the Interwebs’ & my passion for animation. Therefore, I see no need to constrain burdenday to report on a single subject. I am just happy to have his contribution as long as he doesn’t post anything about Kevin Costner.

So my 3 other blog readers, give a big sikkdays’ welcome to burdenday.

you saw the pretty picture, now skip to the short version below

Video

I always talk about making my own videos and animation but that is an uphill battle. I am a perfectionist & I don’t like leaving things unfinished. So if I think I can’t dedicate the time or resources to something, I don’t want to start it. Obviously, without the resources and time it will not be perfect. Also, I am very skilled at making excuses.

Anyway, in the near future I think it is time to revamp the video page. I made it over 2 years ago and now those videos look tiny. Hopefully, that will inspire me to create some more.

Grassy Knoll

There seems to be a slight increase in traffic here at sikkdays. As I have stated before, traffic is not everything. However, I have been thinking of taking on some additional authors so that you don’t have to solely depend on me for your daily fix of animation, memes and snarky comments. I am not sure if I should remain the lone gunman here.

I certainly have some friends that are more than capable of putting together additional material for the blog & I continue to meet a number of clever individuals online. Of course, a decision like that would mean I give up some of the control of my baby and that’s probably the reason I have not acted on this thought before. Bringing in new blood would also give this page a bit more diversity. Though, I am sure I could find someone just as jaded as me.

Weekly Features

Speaking of jaded, I am also toying with the idea of returning the weekly posts of Adult Swim Sunday & PMOG Link Monday. I quit Adult Swim Sunday for the simple fact that I had exhausted the clips on their site. Furthermore, the newer shows on that network hold little interest for me. I can only watch so many shows pretending to be a poorly produced public access show. Recently, it looks like they have added more clips of older shows. Yet, I could quickly get through those too.

PMOG Link Monday presents a different set of challenges. For one, it is not called PMOG any longer. Nethernet Link Monday doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it. The weekly posts containing links that I learned about through the game community were no different than the other posts here on the blog. I simply wanted to share the groovy-ness. Yet, making it a weekly addition to sikkdays turned it into a chore. I was spending large amounts of time looking for things to share, rather than stumbling onto it naturally through game play. Thus, I am hesitant to start that up again.

The Short Version

• Upgrading the video page soon.
• As much fun as it is to have weekly features, I think I talked myself out of it above.
• Should I add some more authors to the site?

Questions? Comments? Non sequiturs?

Straight from my fellow tweep and Nethernet ally tone_def comes this cinematic masterpiece:

This is why those breads your mom makes in the bread machine she got for Christmas just aren’t as good as the ones at the bakery. Never fear, I am sure the next run of bread machines will have a damn iPod dock on them so you can add the secret ingredient of dance.

In yet another step towards becoming a ukulele fan blog, here’s more jams brought to you by Julia Nunes.

This is Keep Fishin, a Weezer cover:

An original called Balloons:

I have been meaning to post this for 3 days. Yet, each time I sat down and opened up her youtube channel to pick a video to throw on sikkdays I spent the night rocking out and falling in love all over again.

Julia is talented, adorable and fun. I think that is the part I really enjoy, she is having fun.  She’s not a pretentious artist or a diva posing for the camera, she’s someone enjoying what she is doing, smiling and laughing. I was gushing about her for the last couple days and it seemed like there was more that I wanted to add, but you don’t want to hear me spilling romantic dribble about us being married and me doing her audio and video for her.  I’ll let her speak for herself in the videos.

Thanks to Chetyre for the heads up on this one. That’s 2 scoops provided by him, I am glad I pay him in DP(PMOG currency) to be my friend.

I apologize if this post made it appear as if I have a heart. I am sure I will resort back to the narcisistic, sarcastic blog formula in the next post.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend recently. He says he is tired of the bitter, sarcastic voice that is ripe in TV sitcoms. He doesn’t think it is funny anymore and that got me thinking that I have taken the low road, like many bloggers. It is easy to pick something apart rather than find something redeeming about it. Of course, my last two posts were shinning reviews of beautiful animations so I’ll just try to convince myself that sikkdays is more balanced than bitter.

Anyway, the following links are from the man, shyiskhar. He posted these on the official PMOG IRC. As the internet is full of bullies, it can be a bad idea to post just about anything online.

First off, Yahoo Answers is ridiculously unhelpful. Trolls looking for attention and people who want to spark political debates have all but made the service worthless. Someone at SomethingAwful.com decided to use one of the questions and answers as a short script for an animation.

How is babby formed?

Next, the man sent the chat channel a dramatic reading of a break up letter. I can’t help it, I am a sucker for dramatic readings.  This one, like the link above, comes complete with the attempted pronunciation of misspelled words.

YTMND-Breakup Letter

We could use this time to discuss the decline of writing skills thanks to email and text messages, like old people. However, I never wrote letters or had a pen pal because I am lazy. Ask anyone, my Native American name is Lazy Three Legs.

LATE!

I blame the #pmog channel on IRC for this post being late.  Chatting and being taunted by fellow players distracted me from posting.  Thus, I’ve decided to share some funny links with you that other players posted in #pmog.

Fail

I love me some Fail blog and bunni3burn shared the following with the channel.

PUPPIES!

So, this live video feed of puppies has been going around the last couple of days and lehall posted a link to the puppies’ newly created Twitter account.  So, if you want to try and translate your cutesy, animal baby talk to say something to the critters, go for it.

Musical Accompaniment

skawesome dropped the Sad Trombone on the #pmog channel when I was in there.  A great link to pass onto someone deserving. Later, zous also brought out the Sad Trombone, probably to one of my lame comments.  In response masteraramil mentioned Instant Rim Shot, sorry it’s a musical link too you perv.

Dramatic Lemur

pixielo introduced me to the dramatic lemur.

Fortune Cookies

At some point our conversation turned to fortune cookies and chetyre gave us a link to the following Upright Citizen’s Brigade skit.