Well, this past month has been more or less the same as the previous month. Life is comfortably routine, and I'm trying not to fall into any ruts. I have more in-real-life friends at the moment than before, what with the roleplay group. Turtle nesting season is shifting into the part where they hatch, so that'll be some upcoming excitement (I hope). Still sucked into Battle Pirates, really need to cut down on that by a lot.

On the writing front... well I finished the Battle Pirates guide series with articles about offense and defense:

Battle Pirates Offense Strategy
Battle Pirates Defense Strategy (Base Layout)

The latter turned out to be the jackpot I was looking for. It went up last, and a large number of keyword hits on the first three were looking for "base layout", so I'm glad I managed to provide some info for people. :)

Aside from that, I didn't do anything of note. No fiction. But I'm saving it for next month (which starts Monday o.o) when Camp Nanowrimo starts their August run. So far I don't really know what I'm doing. The goal is 50k new words toward one story by the end of the month. The only thing I really feel like working on at the moment is the Vengeance stories, and the one I most want to work on can't be done during a marathon. So, maybe I'll try one of the other stories in that series.

Or I could take a stab at Cosmic Potato. It's a space fantasy idea that came up while I was writing all the astronomy articles last spring. I was thinking to save it up for Labor Day Novel but might do it next month instead. Guess I'll have to figure something out pretty soon...

Pork colon soup. It tasted strongly of the way pig asses smell. Which was my clue that they weren't mushrooms. Apparently it's a delicacy to certain native ethnicities of Taiwan.

I ate two slices, asked what it was, and after that tried to pass them off to other people at the table - who also didn't want them. It was definitely a character-building experience that I'm not in a hurry to try again.

Life has gotten comfortably routine.

I work 40 hours a week. I walk a beach looking for turtle nests one morning a week - I tried doing more mornings but man that just kills me. I'm looking forward to the second half of nesting season which involves staying up really late at night instead.

I have one yoga class a week, and one tabletop game a week - Savage Worlds system, BPRD setting. Plus random get-togethers with my tabletop group for movies and such.

For some reason I'm still playing too many Facebook games, even with major cutting down after the move. I'm seriously sucked into Battle Pirates right now, because it has such a large social component to it. I'm a reasonably well-liked member of my sector's biggest alliance, and a lot of times even when I have nothing in-game to do I'll just sit around reading the chat.

A few years back, that above paragraph would've been about how I was overcommitted on RPoL games. And before RPoL, it was Battlenet, playing Starcraft and Diablo 2 with Clan [Wolf] and "we're not a clan!" Brap. I guess some things just don't change, even when the details do. For the most part I've given up beating myself up on "pointless procrastination" activities like that, because if I didn't do them I'd just replace them with something else, so I might as well accept and enjoy.

All of which takes away time from fiction writing, alas. I did get a few hundred words in on the park scene for Vengeance, and finally found how to introduce Craig to Katrina in a way that makes sense and that I really like. Next up, introducing Craig to Robert, then Simon. Meanwhile, rumor has it that there will be a Nanowrimo in August, so I should probably figure out what I want to do for that. Followed by Labor Day Novel right after. o.o

As for non-fiction writing, I wrote half a series for Battle Pirates. There will eventually be four articles, and the first two are up:

Battle Pirates Resources Guide
Battle Pirates Map (which also includes social commentary about alliances and sector wars)

Then there's a Backyard Monsters article I forgot to mention earlier, from early May:

Backyard Monsters Outposts Guide

For the most part, I'm kind of "retired" from content site writing. Or at least trying to be. I imagine I'll continue to put out the occasional Facebook game article because those are relatively fast and easy and I'm playing the games anyway, but there probably won't be any new science articles in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, one of my oldest writing-related friends is trying to move from Arkansas to San Francisco. He's selling off art to help pay for it (currently for sale), and also taking donations. If you've got some spare cash to give someone a hand up, or want some art, go have a look. :)

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there's a phrase among the Bajorans: "the path that the Prophets have laid out for me." I'm not Bajoran, and I don't worship their Prophets, but I do have a path.

The one major event where I chose to step off the path and go somewhere else instead, it took nearly ten years to go around the long way and get back to where I needed to be again.

If I could go back and change one event, I would not have gotten married.

But then, if that hadn't happened, I also don't know who I'd be today. Either way, I did make it to all the key points in the path at the moments when I was to be at them.

I'm settling in pretty comfortably at the moment. So comfortably in fact that I forgot to write about it here (until now). ;)

Work is going well. I'm at two down, one to go, on big Matlab scripts for my primary job. After that I have plans to make a SQL database. I also attended a conference where I met back up with someone I knew ten years ago, and who wondered if I was interested in processing some of her data too. That'll be up to my boss, but I'm all for it. After that, I think I'm supposed to take over tracking the sensors - keeping them calibrated and etc., hopefully going on cruises. After that, I wonder if I'll be allowed to do anything with fish.

The workplace is also going well. I get a lot of free rein to do whatever I want, and just last week I was told to pick out and order my own office chair and a new computer. This sure beats having someone just hand me stuff without asking me what I need or want.

Roleplaying is going well. I'm happy to have found a local group that even thinks about playing something besides D&D - way more than I was hoping for. I almost got into a Star Trek game starting up pretty soon, but the time conflicts with the only yoga class I can realistically attend, and I'm not about to drop yoga. Meanwhile, the BPRD game (Savage Worlds system) is going pretty well overall, at least for me. Plus a new person just joined the meetup group that expressed an interest in running WoD.

Roleplaying on RPoL consisted of me cleaning out my Dark Ages game and deleting it. In the process I reread big chunks of it. Man, that was an awesome game. There's no way I can recapture it now, though - those moments are past and everyone involved has moved on. Although I did seriously consider starting up a new game. Probably won't do it though - I've got a lot of other stuff on my plate and roleplaying in real life, so play-by-post isn't as high a priority.

Writing ... still nothing on the fiction front. On the bright side though, inspiration suddenly came back a couple days ago, and I've been musing on Vengeance again. I am looking at writing the same park scene yet again, in yet another completely different way, which would make it something like the 6th version or so. One of these days I'll get it right.

As for nonfiction. Stuff hit the fan. :p Bright Hub has had a (mostly) transparent response to the Google algorithm change (called Panda; what I took to be two separate changes was actually the same thing, only broken down by nationally vs. internationally). There've been a ton of changes recently in quality guidelines, and I think it made sense when the top people came up with them, but a lot of the spirit still gets lost in translation when the freelance editors try to apply the letter of them. So I've basically been watching other people mutilate my articles, without the usual email notifications on a lot of them, so I'm slowly finding and fixing stuff as I stumble into them. They also finally did raise the pay, but not enough for me to get back into writing as much as I did before.

Meanwhile, eHow's response to the Panda smack was to tell all of us that we were getting evicted, and that they were going to stop paying for their use of our articles as of Right Now (while keeping them up on their site until the end of the month), but that a select few "lucky" people had the opportunity to sell all rights to our articles to them. I would've seriously considered selling some of my articles to them, assuming that the offer was at least five times the article's lifetime earnings. The offer I got was to buy the whole lot at an insulting price. So, needless to say, I spent an enormous amount of time last month moving all my articles off the site, all of which had to be done within two weeks (around my day job at that), because no way was I going to trust them to not screw me over somehow if I took too long. Their track record for that sort of thing is, shall we say, not good.

About a third of them ended up in Bright Hub's hubfolio section - the ones I think will do well there - and the rest got moved into my Misc Answers blog where they're very slowly being posted back up at the rate of one every other day (with plugs of Bright Hub articles alternating). I have no illusions of earning any more money off these but I still like them.

So, to sum up ... now the only content site where I have any articles up is Bright Hub. Everywhere else has been consolidated into there, or moved to that blog. I suppose it's simpler to keep track of only one. At the same time, I'm back to being full-time gainfully employed, so it's not that big a deal anymore. It's nice to get the trickle of pocket change but I don't feel any urgency in making it grow.

I think that pretty much covers the last month. Hopefully this month some fiction will ensue!

I've been at the new job for a month now, and life is very good. :) It's very nice to go back to doing whatever I want in the process of getting stuff done, as that's how I do my best work. Hopefully the new boss will agree. He's about as disorganized and absentminded as my previous boss, which is just fine with me.

Other things I'm doing... well, I found a local yoga place similar to the one in Savannah, so I'm back to doing that once a week or so. I found a local tabletop group, and now I'm in a weekly Savage Worlds game. :D Roleplayers are the world's most awesomest people. I also signed up to volunteer for helping sea turtles nest on the beaches next to where I work. Looking forward to it; I'm signed up to do my first beach walk on Friday morning. We'll see how it goes.

In writing news, well, let's just say that Google's mid-April algorithm change had exactly the opposite effect of the algorithm change they did in March. Bright Hub saw some crashing and burning. Mayhem ensued. Lots of panic and flailing and site-self-scrutiny. Lots of motivation suddenly to clear out all the crappy articles and ramp way up on quality control. Woot.

Aside from watching my articles lose views, I wasn't really affected. I'd guess that my total viewcounts for April are probably what they would've been if neither of the last two algorithm changes had happened. Everything on my list is still in roughly the same order as they've always been. I've got one article slated for deletion and one under review. In both cases, the keywords were picked by the editors, and they were bad picks. Other people are losing dozens. I'm glad they're finally raising the quality standards to something approaching my standards for my own articles.

So what did I do, aside from watching other people panic and flail? Not a whole lot. I spent the month settling into my new life. :) But I did write an intro blurb about Biological Science, and I just submitted a new Backyard Monsters article to go with the first one (it's not up yet).

Meanwhile, no progress whatsoever on the fiction front, alas. Now that I've got stuff scheduled out though, what with work, yoga, tabletop, sea turtles, and Bright Hub tinkering, I'll hopefully manage to fit it in somewhere. SFFMuse used to do a lengthy event called Summer Fun Run intended as a warmup for Nanowrimo that happens over the summer. SFFMuse is kind of dead at the moment, but I might try to coerce a couple other people into doing a Summer Fun Run anyhow.

It has been quite a month. Summing it up: I got the job that I didn't apply for, and now I'm in Mobile, Alabama. :D

So basically I went from being completely dissatisfied with my lot in life, living in half a bedroom in someone else's house, no clue what to do next, and also suffering from extreme writer's block ... to being back to working at the job I originally loved in Savannah - before it all turned to rubbish. And in 1100 square feet with all of my own stuff arranged the way I like it.

Mobile turns out to be a lot friendlier than I was expecting, given how covertly hostile Savannah had become after the 2008 election. People look me in the eye while talking to me, pay attention while I'm talking to them, and respond specifically to stuff I've said instead of with vague stock generalities. Random passersby notice my existence and do basic courtesy things like move out of my way, hold open doors, and occasionally even say something about the weather. All in all, I'm impressed and glad to be here.

The job itself is almost exactly like how things were for me in 2006ish. My new boss doesn't care what my hours are as long as they aren't completely unreasonable and I get the work done. The drive in to work is even more scenic than the view on the way to work in Savannah (though also twice as long - gas is going to be interesting). As far as I can tell, the IT Dept. will not be locking me out of my own computer and I'll be able to install stuff and run it however I need. I won't have a window unfortunately, but the office space is quite large with three long tables. The place itself is surrounded by hiking trails and beaches including a bird sanctuary.

I'll be processing cruise data, and the lab's postdoc is highly interested in seeing me go back to doing satellite images stuff. So the work will basically be exactly what I was doing before. I feel like I've gotten a workplace upgrade. :)

On the writing front... err. Basically there wasn't any. I spent the whole month moving and didn't get internet back until last night. It turns out to be possible to browse the internet on an iPhone, but not get any serious work done.

For Bright Hub, the only thing I managed was to finish off my RotMK series with an article about trade (Complete Guide to Trade in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom). It's doing surprisingly well for a game that is several years old. I guess there must be some diehard players out there who are happy to have a strategy guide, which I'm of course happy to provide. ;)

I have a todo list for other things that need doing, chief among them moving my Bloons Tower Defense guides off of eHow, then writing some new articles to bring in traffic for them. (Google doesn't like when an article moves to a different site.) There are also several adoptees and stale articles that need tweaking. On the whole, I don't think I'm going to be doing many more new articles anytime soon. First priority now is getting settled into the new fulltime job. ;) But even after that... there have been a few recent changes that don't sit too well with me, so I don't know what I'm going to do in response yet.

Even without writing anything new though, the recent Google algorithm adjustment (to rank high-quality sites higher up the list and move crappy sites down to the bottom) has been extremely beneficial for both Bright Hub as a whole and my articles in particular. I'm looking at at least $40 of ad revshare this month on about a hundred pieces (about half are the 100-word guide blurbs), which is pretty cool for not doing anything at all. Not a living of course, but *will* pay a monthly utility bill now, and still way better than bank interest. I'm also expecting around $20 for eHow (it was a low month there) so all in all... I think I'm doing pretty good with it.

As for fiction. Lots of worldbuilding type thoughts floating around in my head, mostly for Fortress Launne, but I haven't had time to pin them down or do anything useful yet. The biggest piece is where I have been trying to rearrange the local geology so that the three major rivers aren't actually flowing uphill. >.> Hopefully I'll have time this month to mess with it in more detail.

I didn't do a whole lot this month. Three Bright Hub articles written, tinkered with my vampire story a lot, and otherwise wondered whether I'm still employed and whether it's time to find a new job or something else to do.

Basically the cruises aren't happening much in March, either, and now they're talking about April. And I might end up doing some tromping around in a marsh instead of an open ocean cruise - for less pay. (Not that I mind marshes, I'm the masochist kind of field scientist.)

On the other hand, I got phone interviewed for a job I didn't apply for. Basically, I applied for a job back in September right before finding the cruises job - and then heard nothing at all after the phone interview. Then I got an email from a colleague of the guy who was hiring, saying he had a position that resembled my resume. So now I'm waiting to hear back on a yea or nay for it in mid-March. If it's a go, I'll be moving to Alabama in late March. Really hoping this one pans out, and the chances are higher if they called me first, right?

If it's not a go, well, I guess I'll be sending out more apps. Because even if there will be cruises this spring and summer, it's too intermittent to pay bills on. I'm still going to need an actual 40-hr per week job. Preferably one that will let me go on the cruises too, but that's really secondary at this point.

And if I'm back to basically being unemployed again, I might go get a degree in statistics while I'm waiting around. Since I'm right next to an excellent university and all. Of course, that means taking the GRE and finding financial aid and other mounds of paperwork, and the earliest I'd be able to start is Fall 2012.

I guess we'll see what the fallout looks like by mid-March.

Meanwhile, I only wrote three articles for Bright Hub this month:

What is Soil Made Of? - this one I couldn't not pick up after I'd adopted Mechanical Weathering and Chemical Weathering last month. After all, rocks + weathering = soil, so of course it needed to be the third article in my series. :)

Dragons of Atlantis Guide for Beginners - 174 views in its first day. I think, now that I have three big hits all on the theme of "guide to a Facebook mmorts for beginners", that maybe possibly I should focus on writing strategy guides for Facebook mmorts's. ;) As for DoA, it's basically the same thing as Kingdoms of Camelot. And while the viewcount is starting to die on my article about it (it's not even going to pass 2k this month! noes!!), it's still at the top of my list.

How to be a good neighbor in Ravenwood Fair - basically I just wanted to write down some things that people could do on their fairs to help their neighbors get loot and complete quests. Naturally, since I'm prone to blather, it somehow ended up being two pages long... no idea yet how it'll do. It just went up earlier today.

Also, a couple new guides: Native Americans and yoga.

In general, I'm starting to lose motivation to write for Bright Hub. The pay breakdown seemed fair while I was learning how it all worked, but now that I'm pretty good at this SEO thing, and for a lot of articles I'm pulling basically all of the weight on writing, editting, SEO research, etc., I feel I should get a larger share of the pot. Maybe the editors are helping with promotion like they're supposed to be, but I can't really tell if they are.

<rant>
In one case I wish I could actually fire the CE, who was basically not there at all when I needed her to push something simple through her queue. -.- Eventually I had to get the ME involved, and lo and behold my SEO tweaking made a BIG difference to the article which should've started weeks earlier than it did, no thanks to it being held up in someone else's queue who was clearly doing nothing at all for the article and hadn't done anything editlike the first time either (why yes, I *AM* just that good!!). And I should also point out that I was not the one who had picked the original SEO for the article, the person who did pick it is crappy at picking good SEO.

There, got that out of my system.
</rant>

Anyhoo... overall I need to find bigger fish to work for, I think.

On the fiction front...

Well, my plan in January was to get a lot of work done on my Fortress Launne series, which is the one I work on during Nanowrimo. For some reason I have a lot of trouble focusing on it the rest of the year though. Instead I have other stories that insist on being written first. In particular, there's a vampire story that originally started in an RPoL game, that I've now got about 9 chapters planned. The first few are actually done, then there's rough draft versions of the next few, and the 9th is still basically an outline. At least it has a viable roadmap? I've been very very slowly writing this thing since 2007 or so and have no idea how long it'll be when it's done. It'll be whatever length it is when I get there, and I'll figure out what I want to do with it after that.

When my siblings and I were kids, we had a planet. It was called Siram. Which was basically Mars spelled backwards and then fiddled with to turn it into a useable word. :)

My life seems to have become increasingly pointless lately.

I haven't been out on any more cruises since October. Not because there haven't been any, but because for the few that have happened, apparently my employer's employers keep choosing staff based on who would cost them the least in salary. -.- That's the great joy of being in my field. At the moment I'm either underqualified because I don't have a PhD or any kind of career interest in Academia... or I'm overqualified because they want entry-level people who are on their way to getting a PhD and a career in Academia... or I'm qualified, which means I "deserve" a pay rate that nobody can afford.

This had better turn around in March like everyone keeps saying it will, when spring sampling starts up and there are lots and lots of cruises, and they need everyone they can get. I don't know what I'll do if that doesn't materialize. Get another job, I guess. Back to last year's grind of sending out apps and collecting rejections. Woot. Except I'll be doing it while living in half a room in someone else's house. Soooo very tired of not having my own place.

I'm really hoping the above is just the three months of sitting around twiddling my thumbs talking.

But I really don't know what else I'd do with life. I'm having a good time at Bright Hub, but I don't write fast enough to make a living there, which makes it hard to justify writing more there when I could be doing something else that makes me more money in less time. I'm also getting increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of pay I do get, to the point where I tried the freelance equivalent of asking for a raise a month ago, which I haven't heard anything about since.

And, as much as I enjoy it, a life that consists of writing intro science articles for a content site in exchange for ad revshare just sounds ... pointless. Like I should be doing something more ambitious than that.

But unless the worst-case scenario does happen in March, which it darn well better not, I don't want to commit to any other jobs that require me to have specific hours per week either. So I guess I'm still going to twiddle my thumbs through all of February.

Moving on to the writing update...

Well, fiction happened a little bit this past month. I got started on the second draft of my Fortress Launne series. I basically know what I need to do, I just need to get going. It's more about edits and revision than new writing.

I also outlined out an idea for a sci-fi story of undetermined length. The plan is to try to make it short (I don't need any more series-sized WIPs o.o). It's basically ready for the "start writing" phase of the proceedings, so I need to get going on that, too.

I was hoping to spend more time on fiction this month than I did, but then Bright Hub introduced article adoption. Basically, abandoned articles from past writers who have left the site and closed out their accounts. If the articles are good, they bring in quite a bit of extra revshare money with minimal work on the part of the adopter. If the articles are bad, well, basically it's the same as writing a new article in that slot without the upfront pay - but if the slot was created before 2010, the revshare rate is higher. The other big downside is that the adopter's name goes at the top of the article. I'm not actually sure how copyright works for these, but it most definitely feels like plagiarism that way.

Naturally, because I easily succumb to temptation, I picked up a bunch of them on topics I actually knew something about or was interested in, regardless of the above considerations. :p There doesn't seem to be any kind of formalized deadline for getting the adoptees up to my standards (my standards are a lot higher than base Bright Hub standards, and by golly anything with my name on it is going to be up to my standards, yes I don't care if it's a fake name), which is probably a good thing, because I picked up a lot. The ones I'm done fiddling with are:

The Genetic Code

... which coincidentally appeared right while I was in the middle of writing The Degeneracy of the Genetic Code. Yay for some easy links back and forth.

Mechanical Weathering
Chemical Weathering

... at a guess, these were originally by the same guy whose native language is probably Indian. I made moderate edits to the former, heavily revised the latter, and linked them together into a series. If all goes according to plan, next month there will be a third article about soils to go with them too.

That's actually it for stuff I consider "done." There are others. The main reason the "not quite done" ones are already up in my name is because I needed to see the keyword reports to figure out what direction I should be going.

Autosomal Dominant Inheritance
Autosomal Recessive Inheritance

... so far I've made minimal changes to these. They read like they were written by an American black woman. I'm planning to broaden their focus away from genetic diseases at some point, but they seemed to fit in well with a basic inheritance series I wrote this month:

Mendel's Law of Segregation
Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment

What is Marine Biology? - How could I not pick that one up? T.T Unfortunately, whoever wrote the original (my guess: American white woman) has clearly never actually set foot on a boat. I made a few moderate changes (got rid of the worst omg embarrassment section, added a blurb that seems kind of extremely essential and omg how can you have an article about this without mentioning nets!) and will have to go back and heavily revise it later.

Phylogenetic Trees - This was one of several equally abysmal articles that were all obviously written by the same guy, because whole swaths are copy-pasted between them. Upon close scrutiny he sounds like he does know what he's talking about, but he's just incredibly bad at organizing his thoughts into clear writing. I've done nothing so far but break it into sections - it was originally one big block of text. The others are also like that, and although I've made initial noises about claiming the whole lot and making a four-part series out of them, I haven't actually done it yet. It's near the bottom of the to-do list because it would take an enormous amount of work for no upfront pay. It's only on the to-do list at all because they're dated 2008. I can't imagine that anyone else is going to steal these though, especially since they're classified under Homework.

Speaking of which. You have no idea how depressing it is to me that half the basic science articles are classified under Homework. T.T Astronomy is under Space, which makes sense. Geology is under Environmental Science, which quasi-makes sense. Biology is half in Environmental Science and half in Genetics (which is under Health). Chemistry and physics are in ... Homework. T.T I mean, I knew that the only people who actually look up science on the web are students (half of whom are probably trying to cheat), but actually having it explicitly in my face like that is really depressing. I'm kind of hoping advanced math is scattered amongst the various Engineering channels, but they probably aren't.

Then there's a couple more that aren't in my name yet, one about sloths that was reasonably good, one about El Nino that needs a lot of work. I'll probably mention them again next month, or whenever they're up.

Also, a couple new space articles this month:
Rotation and Revolution
Causes of Seasons

Pretty basic stuff, and I have a couple more planned, which would make a nice series. I guess I'm big into making series lately, even though it doesn't seem to have much effect on anything - each individual article still has to sink or swim on its own merits with Google.

The other big thing that happened this month was Bukisa. A month ago they decided to go with Google Adsense as the main revenue source for writers. Well, that's bad news for gaming articles, which tend to get lots of views but don't make much in ad revshare. Worse news, the default is to make every article CC-A-SA, and toward that end they'd installed a button to allow people to just steal any article they wanted off the site and republish somewhere else. I'd set mine to full copyright, but at some point last year they'd gotten changed to CC-A-SA. How the hell am I supposed to make money under those conditions? -.-

Anyway, I only had two up, so I moved them both over to Bright Hub in the Hubfolio section. New locations are:
How to Plan Your City in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
How to Set Up Housing in Emperor: RotMK

I added a bunch of pictures to them, and also wrote a third article to continue the series:
The Palace Menagerie in RotMK

I'd originally planned to do a 4-part series but never gotten around to finishing it. So there's one more in the works about trade and resource management that'll eventually be up. I wasn't expecting them to do much - the game is several years old - but surprisingly they seem to have an established readership, because when I pointed to them from their Bukisa slots, the viewcounts started jumping way up. Hopefully that means they've been successfully transplanted and will keep doing that after I remove the Bukisa slots later.

There are other gaming articles I want to move off eHow at some point, but at the moment it doesn't make as much sense to. Bukisa is a lightweight in the Google rankings at only half a million visitors per month. Bright Hub is rapidly gaining weight with about 8 million per month and was almost into the Top 300 sites last I looked. eHow, meanwhile, is an 800 lb gorilla that gets something like 17 million per month and has a ranking in the low double digits (at one point they were #4). Even so, eHow doesn't pay by viewcount, so the gaming articles aren't making a whole lot. I just need to get around to it. There's also the fact that fiddling with eHow might be a bad idea all around, considering all the transgressions they've done to the WCP writers in the past few years. Most of the time I think it's best not to touch anything and hope they keep paying me, because the money is still pretty good overall.

Okay, done rambling. Hope I didn't bore everyone to tears, if anyone made it all the way to the bottom. ;)