Benie's General Blog

I’ve been going over my latest emails. And before I continue, I thank you all for your opinions. Be them helpful… to downright toxic and not helpful at all. I still do respect all of your opinions, and shall do my best to work with them (the helpful ones, of course).

With that said, there’s about four different (yet similar) emails that most people are responding with(that are mainly constructive criticism). Do to so many of similar emails, I’ll be going over and addressing them with my reasons for your questions and concerns.

Here’s the first one;
“Dear Benie,
I’ve been reading your latest “review” posts and videos, and it has forced me to say this. You really have no business doing reviews, because you don’t play the game to completion; nor do you give the game enough time to grow on you. Because of this, your reviews feel very bias. Plus you keep comparing them to games most of us never even heard of.
Please refrain from doing these type of reviews in the future, or you will likely get no more people reading them.”

Let’s go over that first email, who claims I “have no business” doing videos. The reason I don’t play to completion, is the same as Steam’s limited time to possibly give you your money back for a bad purchase.
They give you up to two hours to play the game. Any more, and they feel you like it; even though you might not. They feel that two hours is enough for the game to ‘grow’ on you (as the email stated. Or in my case, to “blow my mind”). And if it hasn’t by then, it’s likely you’re not going to like this game.
Just as I said, this is the exact same for my reviews. If they don’t ‘wow’ me within the first 30 minutes to an hour after sitting down and trying to understand the story, the mechanics(difficulty/combat/skills/etc), the tutorials, and the pretty graphics… then it’s likely I’m going to give a mixed/bad review.

I hope that answers the first part of the concerns. As for the second of being ‘bias’ and ‘comparing them to other games we never heard of’, I do this because… well, no critic can be un-bias. I mean, look at NerdCubed. Look at Angry Joe. Hell, even look at Yahtzee! We all have an opinion. All of our opinions are bias! That’s what makes us human.
And about the whole ‘comparing them to other games we never heard of’ thing, I do that to (try to) make developers wake up and STOP cloning ideas from eachother! It’s NOT cool! One of the greatest offenders was my just released review of Dragon Age Inquisition. The quest timers on the War Table, reminding me EXACTLY like the Garrison Command Table in Warlords of Draenor! What’s worse, both those games were released last year.
If it was truly a copy, or eachother didn’t know what eachother’s game mechanics were at the time(and I just assumed)…., I know what I saw.
And also, it’s perfectly OK to compare a game from the previous series, developer, or engine.

So yeah. I cannot help from being bias. Every human is bias about something. From a game… even from what topping of pizza they want. But I’ll be damn if I’m ever going to defend a game/system(aka be a fanboy). Everyone has their opinion. It’s what makes us human. To take that away… would be boring.
And the whole ‘comparing them to other games we never heard of’ thing, I’ve already explained that in so many words. I do thank you for your emails.

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Moving on, the second email that I received. This has been repeated in so many ways by you guys. But here’s one of them that really caught my attention;
“Dear Benie,

I like reading your reviews and watching your review videos. But there’s a repeating thing I keep seeing, and I wish you would change for the new year. You keep giving a report on the games you play, which in turn tends to spoil it for us. We don’t need to know what happens during the intro.
At least mention when you do your videos, that you’ll be showing spoilers of the game’s beginning. And also, to try to base your written review by just explaining the key elements instead of a report of what’s good and bad about it.”

So, emails like this clearly indicate that there is a problem I really need to address. First off, I have no intent of spoiling the game, and even do my best to warn when I show spoilers. And about my videos showing spoilers… yes, I guess I should say that there’s spoilers in these videos.

The ‘you make a report’ thing is… well… kind of hard not to do. Why? Well.. it’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. I like explaining the game to my viewers. But to hear it’s actually going more harm than good… I guess I should approach this from a different angle.
First, list what games I’m going to be referencing, and then try my best to base my reviews of things like “Plot”, “Character Development”, “Scenery”, … things like this. It will be harder, but at least it would be spoiler-free.

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The 3rd and 4th emails are similar to eachother. Both I can’t really do anything about.
The 3rd email was about people having to turn up their volume to hear me/the game. Blame SHAREfactory for this, not me. Though it might have to do with the fact I have to keep the audio (when recording) as quiet as possible(as to not cause echoing during playback of the PS4’s capture card, capturing the audio twice(from the game, and from my computer’s speakers)).
I can try to raise the audio on playback. But the fact is, getting the video released ASAP is more important to me, than making sure you guys can clearly hear it. But seeing how this is a problem, I’ll try to do something about it. But no promises.

The 4th and final email has to do with how laggy the Videos blog (and the homepage) is. This is especially true for people with low bandwidth. Unfortunately, this is something beyond my control. The reason why it lags is because it needs time to fetch the data from their servers.
My only suggestion to you is to… what’s that term that teenagers often use? Oh yeah. “Get better internet”. Being a ‘last gen’ human, the internet is not a thing that you can ‘get better’. It’s your connection.. your ISP that needs to ‘get better’.
If that is not an option, then.. again, I can’t do anything about it.

I do want to thank all of you so much for your videos! Keep them coming! Your comments and questions will help benies-blogs.com be what it was designed for; for the viewers.

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EDIT: An update to the “video is too quiet” concern. Got some suggestions to buy some headphones or earbuds. I happen to have some iPod earbuds that I use for my phone of when I want to listen to my music.
Anyway, the suggestion, and I can’t believe I overlooked this for MANY months, is to plug in my earbuds to my speakers, so the speakers will not play sound when recording. Instead, the game sound will be coming through my earbuds, allowing me to record without any risk of recording the game sound twice (aka echo).
Not only that, but with this setup… I’ll be able to turn up the game sound to hear what’s going on and respond to it better!

This is possibly the best suggestion I’ve ever gotten. Thank you guys so much for that! This will make recording future videos SO much better for me. I actually wish I thought of it sooner!!
THIS is why most Let’s Players use headphones when doing their videos! I.. wow. Whatever. Thank you, so much. I will be doing this for now on.

Want to give holiday cheer to everyone this Christmas Eve from Benie’s-Blogs.com. Though this is the time to spend with family and loved ones, let us not forget the true meaning of Christmas; the birth of Jesus Christ.

But let us also not forget the ones lost by violence, wars, and by the evil side of Mother Nature. Especially the three that were lost in Holly Springs, Mississippi yesterday, when a monster EF4 tornado went through the south side of their town.
It’s especially tragic when it happens on the week of Christmas, when you expect to just enjoy life and then have it threatened by monster storms like these.

I ask all of you when you sit down infront of the dinner table to say grace, to also pray for Holly Springs and all other towns that are damaged by severe weather. Though you may not live there, we’re still humans.

Another week of dealing with Arvixe. Still haven’t gotten an email update from their “senior tech” of the first issue (the website sluggishness/downtime).
Not to mention, I’ve waited over a week and no human response to my second ‘no email notifications’ ticket.
The reason I say ‘no human responses’.. is because I’ve gotten two “We would like to know how you think we’re doing”. The first time I got the email….. woo boy did I have a lot to say to them, such as “Here’s a suggestion: ANSWER MY FUCKING TICKET, DUMBASSES!!!”

Today I got another one. Exact same robot response. This was the last straw for me. So this time, I decided to call them instead of fucking with their live chat. Actually spoke to someone that sounds American for once! Though he had some trouble pronouncing my domain name and reachable email address.
Unlike the “we’ll have one of our people get back to you ‘soon'” responses I’ve been getting with Live Chat, this guy is actually going beyond that by talking to his supervisor over this. This feels (to me) that Arvixe does care for my business and is willing to help me.

After an over 2 hour and 30 minute conversation that had my phone’s battery nearly dead, I believe I got all of my issues fixed. All of this time, I was actually receiving all of my test emails, but they weren’t going into the right folder. There was another ‘webmaster’ email that had all of them.

And the forwarding issue? At the time it was a real problem. It felt like I was forced to use their email program. But I found a better way. I finally used my brain and told Thunderbird to show the emails. Now both my gmail and webmaster emails are here in Thunderbird. No more guesswork.
With this (and you guys really need to pay attention to this as it’s important), I made some new emails. Four new “department” emails (sections).
If you have an issue with a blog post, you may now reach me at ‘blog-post-opinions [at] benies-blogs [dot] com. And for issues with my videos, use ‘video-opinions [at] benies-blogs.com.
The last two, is a general chat email for if you wish to talk to me and it’s not really related to the website. It’s called ‘general-chat [at] benies-blogs [dot] com’.
And the final one, I removed ‘webmaster@’ and replaced it with ‘website-mail [at] benies-blogs [dot] com’. This last one will be the new contact email for Arvixe to send me email notifications (when I get them).
It’s also where all the other emails will be forwarded to.

After 24 hours of unexplained downtime, my website is finally back up(as you can see from this post here). Thank god for that.
All day yesterday was hell. Three times I called Arvixe’s Live Chat. Everytime, I got the same generic “Ohh, our senior admins know about the issue and will fix it soon!”. ‘Soon’. What is ‘soon’ to them? What is ‘soon’ to anyone nowadays?
Let’s look up the term ‘soon’ on Urban Dictionary here. ………. Ah, here we go. Yep. This describes perfectly of what I went through yesterday.
I’ve always hated it when companies overuse the word ‘soon’, because it’s never what you’re expecting; especially a company that hosts your website.

Anyway, going back to bitc– err, I mean talking about what happened. To tell me their senior admins “know about the issue”. Yet, they’re either too busy or too lazy to even TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG with my website. Though if you were like my ex-friend, angry, you would say something like “I dare you to maintain a server, see if you can keep it going 24/7”. And my answer would be… I wouldn’t be able to. But being kept in the dark is no fun.
On top of it, and this is the really good part, they showed on their Service Status page, two issues related to the Dallas122 server(the one my website is hosted on), and both were listed as “Resolved”… yet my website still remained inaccessible.
What was even more hilarious, the second time they tried to “fix” the problem, instead of just my blogs not responding… it took the entire website down.

The 3rd and final time (after talking to them this 3rd time and even mentioning of going to another web hosting provider), I believe they finally narrowed down the culprit of the problem affecting my website. They had to do “dome disk space maintenance”… whatever the hell that is. Nothing is telling me what that is.
They also were all “we’re sooo so sorry it’s affected our customers.. actually, no. We don’t actually care. Just don’t cut off your stream of money!”

On top of that, no email stating “We got your website back online!” when I was promised the ticket would be updated.
And even on top of everything that has happened to me, they did maintenance last night on the billing page… more like completely redesigning it for no reason at all (there was nothing wrong with it).
Now I can no longer check my Past Notifications, as the link is gone. Even the Server Alert link is gone. That’s just dandy. Going to have to go bitch about THIS now. 😛

Since a few weeks ago, I’ve been noticing issues with my website. Normally, I’d ask angry to look into it. But with him not around anymore, I’m forced to look into this matter on my own.
Yesterday was really bad. I was trying to edit one of my posts to post a video link. Started getting 502’d all over the place.
Because of this, I was forced to have a chat with Arvixe of what’s going on with my website. They have a new chat system, yet even more idiot tech people. Chat rep told me to clear my cache and cookies. Tried. Didn’t help. … How would a 502 Bad Gateway be my problem? It’s an issue with a server (or servers) not communicating with my website.
Anyway, the sluggish performance doesn’t seem to be related to people flooding the General Blog’s comments section with spam. The comment disabler seems to be holding back the wolves there.
Can’t say that’s a good thing (as this is unrelated). What’s even worse, they never even once notified me with a server alert of any sluggish issues (back then, and now). I went over the Past Notifications area in my billing panel to check. It’s possible I may have them disabled somehow.

They then made me an email ticket and the ticket number. The email ticket somehow went in the Spam folder of Thunderbird instead of the Inbox. Thankfully that’s not as bad as the other problem I’m still having.

And that problem, is I still haven’t gotten any emails from Arvixe (the notifications they send) since the domain name switch. Not even in October, when they took the $60 out early. I never got that primary email thing fixed (and I doubt I ever will, as I believe the domain name itself is keeping it from working properly. Not supposed to have a hyphen in a domain name.)

But I’ve went on and sent them another email ticket about the above issue. In the past, I’ve tried everything I can to figure it out, but with no luck. Maybe by listing them as notifications instead of “I get no emails from you all”, they’ll be able to help me this time.

Due to tomorrow being Halloween, I wanted to say something here.
The past two weeks of doing my “Benie Fails At” series 1 videos, I really wanted to do a special Halloween video. Record a PC game, like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Left 4 Dead, or something like that.
My original idea, when I was strongly considering doing videos, was using a Livestream service where I can have a copy of it to link to my website. But these sites want money. Plus, they don’t do that anymore. They will remove your video after a month, even if people view it. I can’t have this. I have to have something that will stay.

I had asked around if it’s possible with my hardware to even do videos. Some say to use Windows Movie Maker. I have used it in the past. But… I can’t seem to find the damned thing anywhere on my computer. Even attempting to install it from Microsoft’s website is futile.
Another one said to use Bandicam with Fraps. Yet I don’t know how in the hell those two will work, and I haven’t had time to practice with them.
Even with this, I still need editing software. Windows Movie Maker was the only thing I knew how to use. And without knowing where in the hell it is…

This is why I’ve been unable to do any Halloween-themed videos. I did think about doing a Halloween edition for the site (like I did back with my old one), but those childish days are pretty much dead to me.

This is such a great thing to wake up to….
So NVIDIA seems to be pushing their ‘GeForce Experience” software down our throats, to compete with AMD. And because of this, they’re now blocking all future ‘Game Ready Drivers'(as they call them) behind an account. A free account, mind you.

So yeah, just what I need. Another Username/Password to remember. And if that’s not bad enough, other people are saying this could potentially be another breach in our privacy. Meaning, companies that depend on these ‘Game Ready Drivers’ to make these games as compatible as possible with your computer, will have access to what you like and stuff.
Also, some people don’t like this ‘GeForce Experience’ software, calling it “bloatware”. I personally, have no issue with it. It doesn’t seem to bog down my system that much more.

But what I’m worried about is, first they force you to make an account… what’s next? Forcing you to pay for these GPU drivers? Installing adware or microtransactions on your computer, to where it shows ads while you’re just letting your computer idle?
If this is the case, it might be time to finally say goodbye to Nvidia, and hello to AMD. As in, to swap my Geforce GTX for an AMD Radon.

Personally, I don’t like these “Game Ready” drivers. I liked it in the past, when the drivers are numbered instead of it feeling like “This driver is for this game”. It makes me feel “But I don’t have this game. So… why do I need to update my drivers?” It’s so confusing now.
Back then, when driver updating had more of a need, there was “33% faster with XYZ”, and then showing a list of compatible GPUs(graphics cards). This? This only explains how you can get better speed with THIS specific game. It never mentions OTHER games it can make faster. This is what makes it confusing.

Why some games are a pain to record
I’m still mad at myself (and at my PS4) for the day-long delay of my latest ‘Benie Fails At’ video series of Killzone Shadow Fall. I seriously wish I had a better mic to do this (and one that would be compatible with my PS4), that I can set its own mic volume, instead of having to flip through several menus and set it there.
And I even read it’s possible to use any computer mic as your PS4’s mic, according to this Reddit article.
The reason I want a new mic, is because I’ve tried… 20+ times, to record my voice in the demo of Lego Jurassic World. Nearly every time, the audio was louder than my voice. I tried turning the game audio down. The thing is, this demo has no way of saving your settings, when you quit and restart the game (it is a Demo, afterall).

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My sleeping issues
And now for something, a bit more serious (why it’s here instead of my Games blog). For the past three nights, I’ve been unable to sleep fully. Then again, maybe there’s really nothing wrong with me and it just happened that one time. But on night 1, I didn’t get ANY sleep at all. And that day, I felt.. dead. Just… UGH!
For the past two, I managed to sleep 6 hours. Much better than before. Though I should be sleeping for at least 7-8 hours.

I bought some Tylenol PM and Nexium. Also going to go to bed much earlier than normal (more like at the usual normal time people go to bed). I just hope these two pills work for me, and I finally get some restful sleep.
I got two weeks. If I don’t see an improvement by then… then it’ll be time to see the doctor.

Two days ago, I had posted of a snag with the future new homepage. Since then, a lot of nothing has happened. Mainly me going “Ugh… should I really go that way?! FUCK!! I need an honest second opinion or this is going to drive me up the wall!”
That and I was also forced to ask around for anyone that knows of a KompoZer replacement. Most of the people had no idea what the hell I was talking about, while some others offered a few suggestions to try out. One was called “Seahorse”, and the other was called “WebPlus Starter Edition”.

I tried ‘Seahorse’ first, and within 5 minutes, it was uninstalled. Why? This pretty, slidy(yes, that’s a word I totally didn’t make up) program was based around templates. Forced templates. As in, no option to create a blank template. On top of that, it refused to load up a standard .html file. So it went in the trash can.
I then “tried” out ‘WebPlus Starter Edition’… more like I said “FUCK YOU!!” to being forced to make an account, JUST to download the damn thing! I HATE websites that do this! It was bad enough for it to ask for my email, and then having to fill out a form, just to download a program… oy. Fuck that. I got too many websites already with all randomized passwords, to remember. I don’t need another.

So, I’m still stuck with KompoZer. The trusted and true, still working with HTML.. offline visual webpage editor.

Anyway, I did finally try to use Weebly, but not for the reason of just giving up. It was another reason that I will go over later. It was similar to Seahorse. As in, it had templates. And no way of creating a blank one and playing around with it.
And now the reason why I was using it. I was on the MRT Server, on my island, in my house, relaxing and thinking about if I should go with Weebly or not. And remembering the nearly forced reason.
And then something hit me…

“Wait.. wait… what if instead of Youtube videos, I can take a picture of my video and use it on th— THAT’S IT!!! THAT will solve the error!!! HOLY FUCK THAT’S BRILLIANT!!! 😀 ” I never felt so happy over figuring something out on my own in my life. And this is also a way how they make thumbnails for Youtube videos!

And so, I did. And it worked as expected! Check out the new and improved homepage! Still cleaning it up, though. But there will be two brand new pages; ‘About’ and ‘Blog Portal’. The ‘About’ page will go over the history of the era of beniesbuilds/benies-blogs, and the ‘Blog Portal'(which I’m still trying to think of a proper, shit-free design), would have the links and descriptions of all three of my blogs.
And also, it’ll have a hand-updated news ticker of the latest blog posts of the three blogs. That is, if a ticker still exists that one can put in their website. I haven’t used a news ticker since TheBeaverDam.com.

Going back to that whole Weebly thing, I wanted an Image Dump (similar to the one that angry had set up on our site when I still had beniesbuilds.com) to put all the images of my videos into. My search results to try to find a free code I can download and use…. nope. So I thought that Weebly might be a good canidate. Then I saw the same thing with Seahorse and was all “fuck that”, then thought of using my semi-old favorite thing that I used as an image dump; tinypic.
No problem whatsoever using it to host my images. So that covers my Image Dump.

There’s been an unfortunate snag of having that shiny new homepage. But before I get to that, I managed to talk to Ismael, my contact, who is doing the work for me (about the whole “I’ll do the editing” thing).
It was actually the way I had assumed. He would do a javascript thing where I can edit the page, just by drag and drop.
But this is the problem. It’s not secure. Anyone who goes on the new homepage, would be allowed to mess with it. And I cannot take that risk (especially if someone manages to get a keylogger in).

His suggestion, is to move my domain away from Arvixe. The reason why he can’t even do another script to act as an override (to allow a username/password thing), is because of cPanel. So he suggested that I move to a service called ‘Weebly‘. The reason, is because they have an interactive website builder(drag and drop right onto your pages). I will no longer have to use KompoZer because of it. He also mentioned that they have outstanding service, and protection from DDoS attacks.
This sounds really, really nice, right? But as we all know, folks… of what happens when something “sounds too good to be true”, yes?

Well, all of that really nice and freakin’ awesome stuff, isn’t cheap. Infact, if I was to do this… it will cost $30 more a year than what I’m paying currently. As most of you know, even paying $60/yr to Arvixe was (and still is) questionable. It’s just three blogs, and a homepage. That’s it. And… it just feels a waste of money to pay $90/yr for this new hoster. Yes, that’s how much it’ll cost me. Yes, it would be awesome to just drag and drop images (or even Youtube videos) right on my homepage, and not need to use KompoZer anymore. It would save me a lot of time, and it would fling my web experience into the future.

BUT AGAIN… I don’t use this website for the potential of what it could be used for. I keep reaching out for “then why are you doing it?”, and my answer would be… “I have no choice, because there’s no cheap, but good hoster out there that will do what I want.”

What I really need, is a replacement for KompoZer; one that supports embedded things like Youtube videos. Yet, it also needs to be a visual webpage editor, and have a user friendly interface.
Years ago when I had TheBeaverDam.com, I used a program called Visual Page. I got a copy of it from my aunt, and I loved that program to bits. Sadly, it supports up to HTML4 (which was the HTML format of the late 90’s to the early 2000’s). Now it’s HTML5. Also, it doesn’t work now (if that’s not obvious enough).
So I’m stuck with KompoZer for the time being.

Ismael did suggest that I at least try out weebly for free (there is a free option) and see if I like it. I will do this, but I still doubt I’ll favor this for paying $90/yr. I will let you guys know one of these days, of what I think about Weebly.

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EDIT: I didn’t even bother making an account. Screw Weebly. Using a visual webpage editor to change the links and then upload via FileZilla, isn’t that big of an issue.
I’m NOT…repeat…NOT paying that much a year. That’s too much, for how little content this site has. If it was a business site? If it was a store? Then yes! Yes I would! Because it would have a purpose then.
I’ve shifted to just finding a replacement KompoZer. I’m not moving away from Arvixe. There’s no reason to. My site is up pretty much every day. No complaints at all, compared to back before the server move (and angry was my co-owner).
I actually wish I could ask angry (since he’s the one that suggested I use KompoZer). Unfortunately, goppend, his friend, hasn’t been on Steam for three days.

I asked the Minecraft Forum for help. Maybe they’ll be nice and lend me a hand.