My brother and I flew to Kansas yesterday to visit my mom for her birthday/Thanksgiving and I won't be making any substantial updates until December 1st. I will still be playing video games, however, as on the 22nd I had my Wii U shipped to her house so we could all play this:
Thanks, Hastings! (I'll buy it when I'm back home sometime.)
Last December we all played through New Super Mario Bros. U. Sounds like a good tradition to me!
I've created a new page titled "Ask Me Anything" where anyone can easily submit questions for me to answer. The questions can be about anything, and once I get enough I'll make a video answering them. I already have 10+ questions regarding my trip to Japan with which I'll make a video for later in the year, but feel free to send questions about it anyway. No names or email addresses required!
Back in April I mentioned I was redesigning my site. It's now far enough along that I feel comfortable releasing it to the public. It's a total conversion from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6, and I moved over everything individually as opposed to using the import feature to make sure everything is as optimized as possible. There are many changes, but very few people will know what they are as I didn't advertise my site previously. Here are the big ones you should know about:
1. Responsive Design - The site will automatically adjust its look based on what resolution and device you're using. It can look a little wonky if you're using a smaller resolution, and it's not possible to account for every possible size and device out there, but overall it works pretty well. I designed it mainly around 1920x1080 as that's what I use on my primary monitor.
2. The Front Page - I now have a proper front page. Before, my site took you straight to the blog page where all the content was displayed at once and you had to scroll down to see it all. With the front page, I can more easily feature specific pieces of content without worrying about it being drowned out by smaller, less significant posts (which means I can post more stupid stuff). The old way is still there if you're into that, however.
The first section of the front page is the most important and is used to highlight whatever I want people to see first. This can be the latest video I've uploaded or post I've written, though it will often be an embedded livestream from Twitch when I'm playing a game.
The second section will often be where I showcase the latest posts, though I will also feature more important content from time to time. I will also have an ad in this section. I know. If you use an ad blocker and like my content, please consider whitelisting my site. My ads will never have audio or be obnoxious.
I may have more sections, as well. Whatever section is at the very bottom is where I will share content from elsewhere. These will be things I think you should check out from other sites and may also be used to promote content from people I know.
3. The Header - The tagline in this section will act as a real-time status update for whatever I am doing. "Charles is livestreaming The Last of Us" could be one example of something you'd see there.
And those are the most important updates. Feel free to look around, and if you find any issues with the site or have suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know! I may not get around to any issues right away, however; today's my 25th birthday.
Thank you.
Art by Kat Smith of Whiskey Media
It was exactly one year ago to this day that I started this site and wrote my first post, and since then, I've written a total of... ten posts, including this one. I'll try to write a bit more this year!
2010 was an interesting year, and I'll be writing about some of the stuff I did during it like my trip to Japan and such. This website hasn't changed much, but here's what's different:
The header has changed from the white text saying, "Charles Alan Ratliff" to the picture you see at the top of this post. I hired Kat Smith of Whiskey Media (who you probably know best as the person who does all the art for the quest icons for Whiskey Media's various sites, or as Turbo_Toaster of Giant Bomb) to do a happy image of me surrounded by all the current main gaming platforms, and I got the awesome art above!
I've also added a link to my Twitter profile using the icon to the right, and I've also made it so subcategories appear when you click/hover over the category names in the header.
And that's it! Let's make 2011 an awesome year.
Luigi, Pikachu, Banjo and Kazooie wishing you a Happy New Year.
January 1st, 2010. It will be a while before we have a year that sounds this cool again. I figured the first day of the New Year would be perfect for the first post of a new blog!
My name is Charles Alan Ratliff. As you might have already inferred, this is my website. This means I will be writing about whatever I wish. I'm really into video games, so that will be the primary topic written here, but instead of creating a blog with "game" somewhere in the title, I opted to go with my name instead. This way, if I ever feel like writing something unrelated to video games, I don't have to ponder as to whether or not I really should. I won't have some nagging feeling that instead of posting about this unrelated topic on something that calls itself a video game blog, that I should just make a separate blog for such a thing. Going with my name gives me the ultimate freedom to write about what I want without feeling like it's "wrong".
I created this site for one simple reason: I like to write. That is it. DONE. I like to write where things can be read, and I figured a public site on the Internet is a pretty good place for that. This site has no specific aspirations, no specific goals. It is merely an outlet for myself. If people like to read it, cool. If not, cool.
This site is a major work-in-progress. Depending on when you're reading this, there's a good chance everything you see is going to be changed dramatically. For now, I have started with something basic as I wanted to get a post out on January 1st, 2010 at midnight. I could easily fake the timestamp on this post, but I didn't want to start my site out with a lie.