blakerson.com

I wanted to build my own web app as a learning exercise, and it's certainly been that. I also wanted to build something that I'd really find useful. 

That became the beginning of BlakeyTV, a not-very-creatively-named video player that will let me keep up with everything I want to watch on YouTube. I just enter a list of YouTube user names that I want to follow (similar to your YouTube subscriber list, just manually entered), and every 24 hours that person's newest videos are added to the front of a never-ending queue of videos that will play back-to-back with no ads.

Here's a list of people currently in the rotation:

Theshadowloo (Street Fighter IV)

bigirpall (Battlefield 3 trolling)

XboxAhoy (In-depth Call of Duty analysis)

OldSpice (POWERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR)

Bungie (Makers of Halo)

Mega64 (Gaming comedy)

Day9 (Pro StarCraft II)

TeamSpooky (Street Fighter IV, MVC3, Tekken X Street Fighter)

Freddie Wong (Mostly gaming-related comedy)

It brings to YouTube what it's missing as it tries to get taken seriously as a media delivery service: a completely passive option that requires no user action.

For all of you, people who are not me, I hope there are two possibilities:

1) With time and suggestions, it becomes a generally well-curated site with consistently good videos that lots of people like

2) I keep working on it and create the ability for people to create their own channels

I think those two aren't mutually exclusive. If you're a programmer who can handle Python, Django and Heroku, please let me know! I'd love a little advice in building up the backbone necessary for new features.

I've been blogging for ten years. In Internet Dog Years, that's a full lifetime. When I first started:

-I was 16

-I had crushes on girls on the internet. (At least they were fellow bloggers!)

-I was playing Quake for roughly 10-15 hours a week and my clan was my life

-I posted totally silly inside jokes based on conversations with my best friends at the time. Interestingly, Aroon and Eric (both of whom I quoted extensively) are still in my life.

If you want to know what I was like as a teenager, or an early 20-something, the archives can be found below, or in the sidebar, based on whatever this site's design is like at the moment. The short version, though, is that I've changed very little. You can ask Aroon, Eric, or anyone else who's been in my life for that long.

So, I've come across some free time since I graduated back in June. But I haven't been prolific here. What gives?

Well, I'm in a state of transition. I've thought for a while I'd be starting on the next big phase of life, and at that point I'd start writing again. But here I am, one month and counting in flux. No sense in staying radio silent.

I uprooted myself from a comfy and happy life in San Diego, threw all my worldly possessions in the back of my car, and drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to Silicon Valley. That drive may have been the very first thing to go on my Bucket List way back when, so it was cool to accomplish something and cross it off the list. 

So now I'm in Palo Alto, crashing on Aroon's couch and job searching. 

I've talked to people privately about the job search, and a few have said that I should blog about my experiences. I wish I could. Unfortunately, blogging about these things publicly is an invitation out the door of the selection process. Even if I were to disguise companies or whatever, most HR 'drones' (my favorite word for low-level recruiters, courtesy an IR/PS alum) would find it distasteful of me to say that some anonymous recruiter was a total idiot or that some VP was a total dick, and it wouldn't be very informative to all of you.

An alternative would be to get a job and then spill the beans, but back in college I saw a good friend lose a summer internship over simply criticizing a product from the company that hired him. Internship rescinded via email. He hasn't blogged since, and that's a shame.

Like blogging about girls you have crushes on when you're 16, blogging about jobs you do or don't want is really nothing more than a way to jinx yourself.

But if you're curious about what's up, definitely drop me a line! I've had some really cool experiences alongside the 'blah' ones, so it's not all whining and lameness. Update: following a suggestion from the wonderous Katherine Fan, I've set up a Google+ circle to fill people in on everything: the good, the bad, and the tips.

Anyway! It's now 10 years and I've gone from high school to real world. Curiosity to cynicism, crushes to actual relationships. PC to Xbox 360, by way of the Gamecube. Depths of the South to my motherland of California. From quirky nerd who loves to laugh, to, well, quirky nerd who still loves to laugh.

It's been a fantastic 10 years! Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll stay with me for 10 more.

For readers on the real deal, welcome to the summer design! I wanted to brighten things up a bit, plus I've always wanted to play with blue.

This could be a big shift: For years upon years I kept the design consistent, because I felt that was the right thing to do. But posterous has added a ton of really great designs lately and they've shown no sign of letting up. So I just might be able to change the design on a seasonal basis, which would be pretty snazzy. 

In the meantime, enjoy some blue.

Dear Blogger,

You have been utterly fantastic for the last 8 years - that's beyond an eternity in Internet Time - but our time together is coming to an end.

While your service was groundbreaking back in 2001 - "a free service that lets you make your own news site!?" the times have changed, blogging has become its own monster, and the art and science of writing your own ramblings have greatly moved forward. You, unfortunately, have not.

Which is why I've moved to posterous, a wonderful new blog provider that automates everything. I'm writing this post just by sending an email to post@posterous.com - brilliant, right? It even does cool things with video, audio, and photos, like automatically embedding video links, turning recorded audio into a podcast feed, and making galleries out of photos. I'm attaching a few recent fun pics from California out of principle. I've been exposed to the genius of the whole thing by Aroon, who has suddenly gotten back into the blogging biz because of it.

For readers, the move gives you more options to see my silliness. Facebook, as always, will get my newest posts, and the 'old' Blogger site will continue to be fed the posts from the 'new' site for as long as it's feasible. Twitter, as well, will get some love. Long story short: you don't have to update your bookmarks if you don't want to, but just entering snagger.org in your browser will ensure that you see what I intend for you to see.

I also want to thank Emily, whose flawless design work has stayed standing on my Blogger-based site for at least half an eternity (again, measured in Internet Time) - and will for half an eternity more.

As for me, I've felt the need to spruce things up on my own blog for a while now, but as Emily's talents have made her too busy in recent times I was left in a bind. With this move, I get a simple and clean new look, the technical things get easier, and more people get these posts in more ways.

It's a win-win-win, unless you're Blogger. In any case, here's to 8 more years of sharing and theorizing.

Love,

Blake