My old blog, Waves, which used to be at the old domain of randomfury.co.uk, is no more. All the posts have been folded into this blog.
It was a lovely place, if a bit quiet. I feel like I’ve written this a lot recently, but it was always more for me to cathartically write than for people to read. I’d like that to change with this blog. I’m going to be advertising my writing a bit more, pushing for subscriptions and generally being more social. There was a period in 2013/2014 when I tried this, the writing was about web-based videogames, and I figured I would be able to live off the ad revenue of my writing and the YouTube videos I was making. I was wrong. I think the problems I have with people trying to make a living off of YouTube deserves it’s own post, one which I will tackle in due course.
Here is the old “About Waves” page that was on the old blog.
Waves, this right here, is my personal blog.
Topics range from reviews and commentaries on videogames, music, books and movies to visits to the zoo, arcade day-trips and yearly holidays, from deep existential thinking, to lamentations over my youth, from insightful things I notice going about my day-to-day business to waffly ramblings about nothing in particular. It’s mostly just me waffling about random trivial insignificancies to be fair. Once I have written something down then I feel I can forget about it, which obviously frees up space in my mind for cool new thoughts, or shitty rubbish depressing thoughts sometimes.
There used to be a category for LOLcats, which eventually evolved into LOLs in general, or as they became known, memes. They became broken links over time when the Cheezburger network changed their URLs around – 120 posts down the toilet.
We have a forum here too, just around the corner at zone.randomfury.co.uk (now defunct). While conversation naturally revolves around videogames as that was the focus of the forum for so long, you could quite easily chat about football or comics or strip clubs or what fridge magnets you have. I’m proud to say that on an internet full of trolls and hate, our forum is a pretty laid back place where getting to know people is easy – if a little quiet these days.
Some history, for those that are interested
Back in the summer of 2004, when Rainbow Six 3 was all the rage, I decided to make a clan for me and my real-life friends. Trying to decide upon a name was the hardest bit, I wanted something Japanese sounding, a bit kooky, a bit badly translated, something like Team Golden Fury, Hyper Random Squad or Super Mega Kill, but the clan names in RS3 could only be quite short, so in the end I settled on Random Fury! Yes, that includes the exclamation mark.
As time went on more and more people expressed an interest in the upcoming Halo 2, and as an effort to build a community of like-minded gamers, I opened up the clan to my internet friends on the (now defunct) Gamesradar forums, a move which to this day, is one of the most significant events in the short history of RF. Over the course of our life, at one point or another, over 70 people have fought under the Random Fury flag. We’ve even been featured in a couple of Xbox magazines (back when magazines were relevant).
The games changed, some people moved on, new people moved in, but it undoubtedly became quieter. To save the website from a slow and painful death, I’m trying to steer the website in a new and exciting direction – which brings us to today. All this from an innocuous little thread on a mildly popular gaming forum 10 (yes, TEN) years ago. Amazing, eh?
I think I’ll keep the history of RF away from the history of this site. It is the series of events that catalysed the creation of Random Fury, and yes, they were a hugely important aspect of my life, and they shaped me to some extent, but they bear no relation to the creation of iaindstewart.net.
This blog, from here on out, serves a different purpose than Waves ever did.
It is about me moving forwards in ways the old site could never keep up with.
