A Byte of Nonsense

Hey there! What do you think of the new server?
Oh… Well that was clearly worth the hassle.

This weekend I moved the blog to a new home, and while nothing’s changed cosmetically (yet), the new server gives me a bit more control. As you might know, the Ben-A-Ball blog began on Blogger in 2005, moved over to JustHost  in 2011,  and then quickly over to Digital Pacific in the same year after finding that JustHost was doing a shocking job at keeping the site online.

Now the site is with Crucial, a company which was recently purchased by Digital Pacific…
Which is one of the reasons I went with them. Digital Pacific are fantastic, so I feel less bad for leaving them since they own the company I’ve moved to. My move wasn’t at all one of anger or disappointment, my move was purely strategic.

Luckily the site moved over without a hitch, less than a minute of downtime. In fact, the only ‘people’ who may have really noticed any disruptions to the “Ben-A-Ball Experience” would be the… spammers, which is what I wanted to touch upon in this post. You wouldn’t know it, but this site actually gets a lot of traffic. The problem is that the traffic it receives is either trying to hack the admin-password through brute-forcing OR posting comments that make absolutely no sense, so they can try to sneak advertising into the comment section. It wasn’t until I started transferring the site over to the new server, that I realised how many spam comments had been picked up by my spam filter…

Most of them are just spamming links to online stores… but I’ve noticed a growing trend that I’m a bit suspicious about:

wholesale jerseys from china

Bills, AFL commissioner, ‘s Davis, took off the gloves as well as the AFL aggressively pursued V. NY CITY POLICE DEPT., ET AL.06M9 LOGUE, GEORGE V COAKLEY, MARTHA, ET AL.06M10 DEGLACE, CARLOS the Memphis team logo is confusing. When teams change logo.

I find sports commentary confusing enough as it is, but this comment, which linked to a website where you can buy, you guessed it, ‘wholesale jerseys from china,’ really takes the mark when it comes failing to communicate in English. You copy that into Google and you’ll be linked to hundreds of other blogs who have been spammed by this ambiguous and incoherent comment.
It’s all over the internet, and predominantly on websites that have nothing to do with sports, or jerseys.

What does it all mean? There are so many questions to ask. Who is Bill? Why did the AFL pursue the New York Police Department? What does ‘ET AL.06M9’ and ‘ET AL.06M10’ mean? Who on Earth is Carlos, and why does he find the Memphis team logo confusing? Or have they recently changed their logo, and now he finds it confusing?

However, the most important question to ask is: What the flying f*#$ does this have to do with wholesale jerseys from china?!

It feels like I’m reading a comment generated by Google’s Dream Machine. My brain is trying to make sense of not only, a mash of completely unrelated sentences, but the logic and mindset that went into concocting it. Why? WHAT PURPOSE DOES IT SERVE? Why would I see a comment like this on a website and think: “YES, Jerseys from China, just what I was looking for.”

Has my blissful sport-free existence resulted in a blindness to the wealthy expanse of the jersey industry?
Are wholesale jerseys some kind of rare commodity that I was unaware of?
Have people found a way to fill their cars up with jerseys instead of petrol?

*Sigh*

Regardless… this comment made up 90% of the spam comments in my filter. For whatever reason, someone decided that this was marketing gold, and started spamming every website it could with it. I actually think that the comment is really written the way it is so that the owners of the spam-software can detect how many sites their spam has spread to. It’s complete dribble that no one would ever write, so by searching Google they can find how many successful advertisements have made their way onto the internet. The title of the comments with the link to their site is the only part they care about people reading.

This comment is the same. It doesn’t relate to jerseys at all, it can be found on countless websites and it makes no sense.

cheap nfl jerseys 2013

design company, you need to evaluate your own requirements. You need to find out the aims March 2, 1982. He attended Findlay High School in Findlay, Ohio. Roethlisberger was the captain of detailed controls that would allow me to firewall off this devi

A bunch of sentences, slapped together and posted on as many websites as possible in the hopes that someone is in desperate need of a jersey… Ah, the internet.

Until next time!

 

Ben,

All in a Timely Manner

I’m not even going to bother pretending that I’m posting on a schedule here – unless ‘tri-sometimes-yearly‘ is a schedule.  Something tells me that if my blog was my source of income… I wouldn’t be eating much.

Yes, yes. This is another one of my typical…

“I’ve been too busy! LOOK! Here’s a list of things that I’ve been doing! See! I HAVE BEEN BUSY! Am I excused yet? Good! BYE!”

… posts.

There has been a relatively substantial amount of ‘work’ going on.  Note the quotes, this is my backup plan in case you decide what I list here isn’t worthy of the ‘work’ title.  If you do, ignore the quotes – if not, absorb and keep note of these mysteriously placed quotation marks in your frontal lobe and assimilate the conclusion that the writer of this post was clearly using the word for comedic effect the entire time. Once you’re done doing that, we can continue – but next time, try not to think about it so much.  You’re really over complicating things you know.

Projects

Control

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My second shot at the MyState Film Festival.  My previous entry “VOID” that I entered nearly 2 years ago had many flaws.  Apart from being technically riddled with problems that the time constraints did not allow reparation of, it also had a story line that was crunched down by the five-minute limit until it was a mess of confusing mismatched sentences.

This time, would be different. I started conceptualizing the production of Control from before this year’s featured object had been released to the public.  This film was designed to make up for where VOID failed.

  • Visual effects were planned out and were streamlined to take the least amount of time needed as possible. Once the basic effect was done – additional touches could then be made to enhance their appearance – but at least in the worse-case-scenario – they would still serve fine without enhancements. No unnecessary effects.
  • The script was written and timed out to the competition time limit before any filming took place.  A month of script writing – I wanted to write a script that was dynamic, rather than finite. One that’s length could be modified without loss of story line.  Something that would be all but impossible without ambiguity.
  • This film was designed as a silent and narrated story – meaning that I could focus entirely on getting the shots done – rather than wasting time trying to get audio with no decent sound gear.  A limitation in my camera equipment did partially drive this decision – but even with decent sound gear – lugging it around in the rain with my skeleton crew would have been anti-productive.
  • But most importantly… I’ll tell you about this later. =)

I’ll tell you more about Control later this month/December.

Auriferous

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For my Computer Science class – I had to code a computer game in Java.  This is the first game I’ve properly coded “from the ground up” – and it’s… pretty basic.  It’s a point-and-click adventure game with narration (me, attempting to talk in different voices), called Auriferous meaning: containing gold. It follows the story of a character named Julian, a man who… well, you’ll have to wait and see! After I’ve spent some more time on it, I will probably release this game for download later on. The project has already been handed in and marked. (It got good marks!)

There are other projects too… but I’ll tell you more on them… LATER!

Other News

intsmlIntelligic Shouted out by PewDiePie

For those that are somewhat up-to-date with this never-up-to-date website, you would probably be aware that among my YouTube Channels, I have a gaming channel called Intelligic.

Well, on the 21st of September my gaming channel with 181 subscribers was shouted out by the largest channel on YouTube, PewDiePie. For those who aren’t YouTube Savvy… PewDiePie has nearly 15 million subscribers – and he told them about my channel.

It went mental. My subscriber count was growing by the minute and my inbox flooded with messages begging me for co-operative let’s plays and “can you shout me out”s.  Out of nowhere, suddenly people were viewing my gaming content.  As of the first of November, 2013, I have 11,500 subscribers… and I am still speechless when I try to talk about it.

Even so many days after the shotout I still am rattled by these emotions. Excitement, encouragement, worry and shame.  I’m excited by the people I have as an audience, and I want to continue making content for them.  I didn’t know what to expect, but they are the most encouraging viewers that I could have ever hoped for.  I haven’t received any (substantial) negativity, it’s a collection of supportive and positive people – and that’s fantastic.

But of course, with all positives – there are negatives.  Because I can’t help but be worried. There are so many people! So many people now know who I am, know my face.  I’m not a particularly social person in ‘real life’ – and the thought of so many people is somewhat intimidating.  But perhaps that will change.  Then of course… I feel a bit ashamed. Because I’ve been boosted into a place that would have taken me years to get to on my own.  I only just reached 1,000 subscribers on my Upload the Download channel a few weeks before PewDiePie shouted me out – and those subscribers were earned on my own, after 5 years of running the channel. (1 year of running it well.)  Then all of a sudden, Intelligic overtakes Upload the Download 10 fold… and  I can’t help but feel like I don’t deserve it. But mostly…  if my channel continues to grow because of his boost – I feel as though I would forever be seen as someone who is only where he is because of someone else’s accomplishments.  Yes, I am very grateful to have been shouted out. I’m the one who signed up to the shotout competition (I didn’t expect to get anywhere with it, I figured there would be people who would see my post in the forum and check my channel out.) But at the same time, I feel pitied for being a small channel who was mentioned by the largest channel.

benIntelli

I got to work producing a thank you video, that video I uploaded the next day, I don’t know if he’s seen it or not.  But the response from my viewers has been very positive towards it.

Time to Shut Up

Well, I’ve been talking (writing) for a while now … and I haven’t exactly hit the points I was planning on hitting… but oh well, enough is enough.  Too many words! I’ll write another post later on how Control goes – maybe even an update on Scribble’s Notepad.

But until then, I’ll see you later!

Ben,

The Endless Race

Yes, I’ve changed the website theme again… but shhhh…. just trust me.  I think this theme will be staying for longer than any of the others.  Currently the website is looking exactly how I want it to – plus – everything is actually working!

The New Look
The New Look

For those that are reading this post sometime in the near future – here is what the site looks like currently.  If you’re reading this post when the site does look like this… then WELL DONE! You’ve just experienced website-ception.

Don’t keep your hopes up though, you know how crazy I am about changing things.  So expect a completely new style and layout in a week or two.

Seriously though, I reckon I’m going to be keeping this for a while.

Right, enough of that.  Because it’s time to ramble on for a little bit about something that has been becoming increasingly prominent in my life at the moment: the panic of trying to get things done.  It seems as though I have too large a plethora of tasks to complete – and of course, a majority of these tasks are simply self-imposed goals.  Things like, ‘Yeah! Let’s make another YouTube Channel!’ come to mind when I say… self-imposed goals.

Inside the mind is a whirring box of ‘Things to Come.’  To the population of thinking humans on Earth – that should ring loud and clear.  I have all these ideas of videos, books, stories and podcasts (yes even podcasts) that I want to create and share.  The issue here is… we come up with ideas faster than we make them into something.

I’ve written them down of course – but by the time I revisit them I worry that my original flare for the idea may be an extinguished one.  An idea that was gurgled around a bit before being spat out of my mind and straight onto a path that I’ll never walk on again.

Does anyone else feel like there’s just this rush to get everything done?

I’ll be talking more about this in a vlog soon, so… stay tuned…. goons…  I’m such a brilliant rhyme artist! WOW! *insert sarcasm here*

Anyhow, I’ve written the equivalent of an English essay tonight so I’ll be off! TIRED EYES, gah.  Go check out the other pages I just wrote up – the About, and YouTube page – if you’re interested of course.  Other than that, thanks for reading!

 

Apologies for my Boring.

*Groans with boredom* If you are a reader of this blog/site… and have been for awhile… then I truly super-duper-mega 5000+ APOLOGISE for the mind-melting-ly boring flow of posts that I’ve written over the years.  If you’re a regular reader I really admire your perseverance, concentration… or stupidity… don’t panic, I’m sure it’s one of the first two!

You see I’ve been going through and fixing up the categories on all of the blog posts, because awhile ago they became corrupt – and it was screwing the website up.  Now I have to go through and re-categorize all of the posts… this means reading every post of mine right from when I started in 2005 to this very moment. So far I’ve read through about 180-ish posts and categorized them. And I have to say, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a good thing that I’ve finished reading all of my early childhood posts or not. Because as embarrassingly illiterate as they were – at least they were short compared to my long ambiguous rant-powered posts of the late.

Of course, when I say Apologies for my Boring, I mean more than just my blog. A lot of my creations have been boring – many still on YouTube… others taken down and ‘virtually burned.’  Really I shouldn’t be apologizing, and I don’t think anyone should – we all need to start somewhere.  It’s the whole point of the learning process. The start of that process is always incredibly clear, for humans, the start is the most defined. It’s the end of something that is not always clear – or expected for that matter.

I thought it would be right to tell you,

YOU ROCK

Thanks so much for reading,

Ben

 

 

I get it, you may be upset that there haven’t been that many posts coming from me recently.  Let me save you the whole “I’ve been pretty ruddy busy” speech that I usually give when I start receiving complaints… and just show you that “I’ve been pretty ruddy busy” instead.

As you can see above, there is an image of Neb shouting at me.  This is actually one of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few months.  I haven’t been working on it full-time, hence the amount of time it’s taken – really right now though it’s the editing that’s the most time-consuming part.  At this point I can’t say when this video will go up.  But it will be going up on my new Vlogging channel – and I have decided that no other videos are allowed to go up before this one.  This MUST be the introduction to my channel.  That’s final, this channel is going to be special, awesome.  So I want to start it off just right.

Video projects at the moment are taking up a heck of time – unfortunately as I’ve mentioned on thee social networks – the more skilled you get in a field the more pedantic about what you achieve.  I want every video I make to be far better than the one before it – unfortunately this results in some inconsistencies in series I produces because I end up changing the titles or graphics or whatever it may be basically every episode. =/

I won’t go into details in terms of the video projects, I’ve already said a lot of this stuff in a previous post, though if you’re interested the image you see above is of a new series I’m working on called ‘JON JON’ (Yes, I’ve changed the spelling of ‘John’)- it’s going pretty damn well at the moment – but like I said before, I really want to make the most of this.  I have such a brilliant script for this series that I don’t want to screw it up – I want to make it the absolute best that it can be.

One of the things I really like to do to relax now and then is to work on my programs – programs that have been downloaded thousands of times on Softpedia, CNET and this website.  Scribble’s Notepad is my pride and glory at the moment, I’m so happy with the way it’s turning out – I’ve been developing the next version for months now.  I use Scribble’s daily when writing up notes for YouTube videos and homework, and whenever I come across a feature that I would really find useful, I implement it.  Scribble’s Notepad 2.1 or maybe even Scribble’s Notepad 3.0, depending what I decide to go with, is definitely going to be an awesome release.  I find it so useful.

 

Well, that’s my update for now – don’t worry this blog will get very busy in the next few months – I’ve been in contact with an animator, who will be helping me produce a pretty cool series.  But that’s a story for another day. =)

 

Thanks,

See you again soon.

Okay . . .

Hey everyone!

Hope you had a great Christmas, and enjoyed the turkey which you’ll now probably end up eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next few weeks because of the size of them this year.
Did you see the size of some of the turkeys this year? Whoah!

Anyways.

The website theme has come back online again, don’t know why, but it’s back!
I dare say the host suddenly started back up again, so there.

Are we looking forwards to 2010 people?

Be back later, I have presents to play with.

Cya!

Ben