Now, the 9 readers that don’t read author information below the title can confuse me with yet another person! I am excited to announce the addition of another member to the Sikkdays.com blogging family! Is it time to balance my sexist comments with a female perspective? No, but let’s do it anyway. Madragoran comes to us from sunny Greece! The last I knew she was finishing up a graduate degree from a university in Scotland, but I couldn’t tell you any more details about that because instead of being serious I asked her the following questions:

#1) Cake or Pie?

Most definitely cake! Especially if you are referring to gâteau which is French for cake and for yummy. My favourite cake is Miss O’Leary’s Irish fruit cake and if you get that you know all about me.

#2) When you were a 3 foot tall child in a jumper you dreamed, “When I grow up I am going to be…”

a lumberjack! Leaping from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia. Heh! Seriously I wanted to be a writer which seems marginally less realistic than being a lumberjack. Though to be honest now I am older I’d prefer to be an axe yielding writer

#3) When one sits down to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle which beverage should they drink?

I think the best approach would be to avoid water or anything that might appear to be water, though I am not opposed to mixing something that might at first glance appear to be water but on second glance appear to be premium vodka with some orange juice.

#4) Pluto, planet or frozen ball of space pudding?

I see you are getting technical on me… Everyone knows that the universe exists about 1.5 km around each of us so in reality anything outside that radius may as well be a chocolate sponge cake with chocolate cream filling and little cherries on top, you know the crunchy ones that’s been soaked in syrup? Oh yeah to answer your question Pluto is what it is, human definitions are a farce.

#5) Favorite word?

Deconstruction. Especially if it is coupled with words like post-modernism and philosophy. You really do not want to hear the rest of this answer.

#7) I feel obligated to ask you a question about Greece, since you live there. Parthenon, preserve it or mow it down for condos since there’s a replica in Nashville? (Yes, Nashville. Apparently, Nashville is the Athens of the South. I am so confused about that and now terribly scared of Athens.)

Mmhmm…. You really want me to answer that? Having never been to Nashville I can’t really comment on whether it resembles Athens… Are there lots of garbage festively strewn around? How about smog? Dog shit? Can you walk around alone after midnight? Meh… I say mow down Athens and move the Parthenon to Nashville.

#8) Carpet bags, should they be back in style or continue to be reserved for mysterious folks & cartoon characters?

Carpet what? [insert furious clicking of keys and intense googling taking place] Oh I see! Sorry no. I am into steampunk as much as the next person … [looks at the actual person sitting next to her] Let me rephrase that. I am into steampunk lots but when I travel I wouldn’t change my trolley case with the water proof casing and the telescopic handle for anything.

#9) Theory on why question #6 is missing?

I would attribute that to either a) the amount of empty beer cans to your left, b) to you keeping a grue as a pet or c) to your loss of concentration due to the long legged blond sex goddess doing a lap dance for you right now; well at least it looks to be blond, vaguely female, somewhat human… Arrrgggh! my eyes!

#10) If Spike went back in time and stepped on a butterfly, how would that affect you, Sikk, and the world?

Well applying a Lorentz transformation

and then calculating the integral of 2x over dx from x equals 10 to x equals 13….. x^2 from 10 to 13, that’s 169 minus 100… ahhh…

Now I see… I just hope there is enough Astroglide to go around.

I look forward to her wisdom and genius gracing this website. I also look forward to her getting more hits than Spike Matthews because he always seems to get more than me!

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.

At the beginning of the month I talked about making some changes here at the site. I have made some decent progress. Now that Sato, Yukie & Miyagi are cheering me on, more cool stuff is bound happen.

Vidz

The video page has been updated to play larger versions of my original videos. I just finished modifying the page to mesh with my blog theme, however it will probably need some tweaks. I need to walk away from it and have a look with fresh eye. Comments are welcome, of course. Also, a few of the videos didn’t come out as nice as I would have liked so I’ll have to re-encode them, again. There’s a swell new intro video I made for fun & I added an experimental video I did 4 years ago. It has a summer theme, so I figured what the hell. I’ve got some ideas and now that I have removed the barrier of ‘oh the video page needs to be fixed,’ hopefully I’ll be adding some new goodies.

Where’s What?

I also improved the search box in the upper right corner. It frustrated me to no end that I couldn’t find things on my own site. There’s well over 600 posts now & I have a bad memory. Sometimes I am not sure if I have posted something or not. Plus, why the hell am I tagging things silly if the search doesn’t even use the tags! Thus, I found a groovy plugin to fix that.

Weekly Posts & Partners

I am still on the fence about weeklies, but I definitely need to get another video blog up, right? I haven’t found anybody as disreputable as myself to join in and post things, but I have approached some people.

*It feels a bit wrong that I used a line from the Matrix Reloaded as the title and a gif from the Karate Kid II.

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?

It looks like my account has been hacked. The clever troublemaker has even found a sexy mask to disguise himself to look like me. However, he gives himself away by being positive and void of any snarky sarcasm. Behold the monotone thank you to all the visitors of Sikkdays & wear sunglasses, you don’t want the muted colors to damage your eyes. In fact, to spice this video up you may want to drink every time he says, “Thank you.”

Of course, there  are loads of other people from the Nethernet, like Chava, Cassandra, Chetyre and those are just the C’s. Thanks to everyone. Tons of tweeps deserve personal thanks for content & comments. I appreciate your contribution and I neglected to mention you because I was in a hotel room minus the internet. Must thank djweso who spans all the categories of RL friend, tweep and Nethernet player.

I was stalking one of my…I mean reading a friend’s blog, Life’s Mystery, when I noticed my name in the recent comments list.  Being narcissistic, or more accurately, curious what one of my other personalities wrote, I clicked on my name.  I read the terribly unwitty remark and then I hovered the mouse over my name wondering what my unmedicated personality left as a link.  It turns out my friend’s blog has a fancy something or other called Snap Shots, check it out:

I became fascinated with the ad links that it came up with about Sikkdays.  Battlestar, Adult Swim, Aqua Teen are fair and make sense.  Kool-aid?  Well, I do recall I that I might have posted a video from Family Guy or Robot Chicken that featured Kool-aid Man, but I only came to that conclusion because of the Adult Swim link.  Scorpions really flew me for a loop.  Regardless of the party of personalities in my brain, I doubt any of them have a strong love for the Scorpions.  Baked Goods are delicious, and I am fat, but if you’ve ever been to this site before you know I don’t exactly share recipes.

Thus, rather than sleeping I decided to fire up the search button and see what I get.  It turns out that Adult Swim Sunday is the culprit for the Scorpions, specifically this post here, scroll down.  Interestingly enough, that is the same post that contains Kool-aid Man too.  I found my post on Cake Wrecks was the guilty party when I searched Baked Goods.

Mystery solved.  I’ve added my friend’s blog, Life’s Mystery to the sidebar here at Sikkdays, along with pfmonaco.  Who, coincidentally, seems to be enjoying marketing links as much as me.  Check this out.

You want me to add your link to my site?  Let me know, I am desperate for friends.  And by desperate, I mean the stay at your house overnight after a party and wake up the next day and ask you ‘what do you want to do today?’, desperate.

You may have noticed that we have avatars in the comments here, now.  Currently, the blog now supports Gravatar out of the box. As much fun as it would be to host your avatar for the 4 of you, instead you can post your favorite pic over at Gravatar and this “global” avatar can be used at loads of web pages and blogs.  You don’t have to sign in here at Sikkdays, as it checks your email address when you post the comment.  That was a lesson I learned myself as I signed into Gravatar with a different email than the one I typed in the comment box here.

Forums?

As it is now, I have not found a sound solution to combining a log in to the blog with a log in to the forum.  In fact, with the addition of Gravatars there isn’t currently a need to log in to the blog.  So, what I am saying?  To comment in the forum you have to sign up and the magical forum robot will determine you are not an evil spamming computer and set you up.  There you can choose an avatar or upload your own, I believe, as it has nothing to do with Gravatar.

Long story short, the forums used to be the hip place to hang out back in the day.  And by hip, I mean 5 people used to share and debate there because there was no blog or comment system.  It seems a bit dead now, but feel free to use it and make suggestions for the blog or whatever there.

Much Love

Or whatever the kids say these days, to Paul over at padizio for finding a major oops in the upgrade and retrofitting of Sikkdays.  I owe him a mini cooper, as he kicks ass.

Arcade?

Where did the Sikkdays arcade, consisting of one measly game go? Nowhere, it is here, if you can find where I not so cleverly hid it.