Year One of Nocturnalfrolicking Around – a very long rambling
The first year anniversary of writing something
This is my second longest running blog in the history… so far. My first blog, created way back in my college days, which is already deleted and thrown somewhere by the gods of Blogspot, packed with a lot of emotional nonsensical nonsense and unmentionables… it was horrible and the only one viewing are my ex girlfriend and some ex classmates.
Just like what I wrote before, one of the primary reasons why I blog is to improve my brain, because I have a short-term memory loss of some sort and I tend to forget things easily. I read in some articles to improve memory is just simply read and write a lot. Right now, I think writing to this time waster blog really helped me a lot. It improved my memory and voilà, I can remember things easier today. As I write this, I now remembered that I really love to write stuff ever since the first time I wrote something on our wall with a marker pen.
Writing: The Early Years
Looking back way back in elementary, one of my favorite things to aside from illustrating, drooling all over the place and defending why Sega Megadrive kicks more ass over Super Nintendo is to write. I just write anything and doodling some stuff on top part of every page of my notebook. My classmates called it as patalastas or in English, commercials. Back in my Grade 5 days, I actually wrote and drew a comic series entitled Deadly Planet, a play on Superman’s Daily Planet. Packed with forgettable visuals, horrible storylines, it’s just hodge-podge of every pop culture back then.
I think I made around 10 comics back then, all written and drawn in newsprint, stapled and given to some of my classmates. I just treated it nothing as a time passer, which in a way, planted the seeds to the future version of me wasting reader’s time by writing time-wasting articles.
When I hit high school and being acquainted with good music, I started writing poetry, even song lyrics on my spare, non videogame time. I think I filled 2 notebooks that I still carried over in college. Currently, I have no idea where the hell were those 2 notebooks, maybe they are somewhere in my room. Speaking of writing song lyrics, me and some of old classmates even thought of starting a band named “Nocturnal Frolic” but never pushed through, I was the designated drummer.
College time, aside from poem writing, I became more interested on reading books, especially thriller novels by Lawrence Block and Tom Clancy, and graphic novels by Marvel and DC Comics. I start buying and collecting novelty books like The Simpsons Guide and High Score: The History of Videogames. I think there are some books left somewhere in my room that I haven’t finished reading.
During my fourth year in college and I was in the middle of one of the most dreaded phases in college life, to write and create a big ass freaking thesis. After presenting and receiving rejections to a number of proposals, I ran out of ideas to present. Later I just decided since I love to play Grand Theft Auto games in the old PS2, I made a proposal of an interactive graphic novel with a premise of GTA style storyline and called it as The Misinformed.
Fortunately, I got my well seek approval for my proposal, and my first big challenge is to write the main story, oh boy, that was hard and I have a week to finish. In the end, after completing the first story it was the time to make it into a workable interactive graphic novel. Nitpicking with Flash, Photoshop, Soundforge and Director, I finished the thesis, defended it for 2 freaking hellish hours, and I got a 2.5 grade or 85%. I only made 2 copies of the project, one is safely locked in my old alma mater and the other one… was missing.
Since I already have the Misinformed short story, I decided to expand it to a very long novel that after almost 10 years of writing, it is still not finished and locked away somewhere inside of my computer. The title was also changed to “The Memoirs of the Warman”. Right now, I hope I can finish the novel and hopefully have it published.
The Content
One of the most challenging aspects on creating and maintaining a blog is what will be the blog’s overall content. Originally, I wanted the blog focuses solely on graphic design but with the great amount of graphic design blogs out there and have potential limited content ideas because a lot of them were already using it, I might run out of topics immediately.
My second choice is to make it as a blog about the soap opera for men, wrestling. Sadly, wrestling, the fixed kind is still a minority here locally and the market over here consists mostly of gossip addicts and fad exploiters.
One of my old plans have a Youtube channel, and start ripping horrible Filipino movies ala Nostalgia Critic especially the comedy ones that have nonsensical dance numbers and climaxes always end up in an abandoned warehouses. Fortunately it didn’t happen because foremost I suck on acting, second I have a terrible stage fright and third, I realized I love watching old Filipino movies for its sheer absurdity and awesomeness.
Since Internet and social media is already a norm today and I, myself, an Internet addict and participating to many message boards that deals with a lot of things for years, I just say effed it and just write anything under the sun. My main inspiration of this approach is of course, one of my favorite websites of all time, Cracked.com, which covers a lot of interesting topics. I just emulated some of their writing style and treats all the topics as collections of ramblings. Granted, Cracked.com have a number of writers under their wing and this blog is a one man writing time killing contents just to please on whoever reads my ramblings.
Most of the time I can’t think anything to write, even if I have a topic on my mind, the creative juices betrays me to write something coherent from the idea. I threw a lot of topics and some of them were already 80% photo finish because I felt I can write something better.
Marketing it as a time waster blog
Since most of my writings are not actually help save the world in any way and basically just waste your time, I christened this site’s secondary designation, as THE BEST TIME WASTER BLOG EVER… of course, self-proclaimed and not endorsed even known by the elites around the local blogosphere.
A bottom of the barrel time waster blog with real traffic?
This little blog in a way, was a success. I never expected that this little part-time stuff is actually getting traffic, even though there are only a few comments, but the important thing is someone is actually reading all the things I wrote for the past year.
The Gods of WordPress sent me the following:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 61 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 110 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 76 megabytes. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was November 8th with 73 views. The most popular post that day was Rest in Peace Nu107, Our Rock and Roll Haven.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were pinoyexchange.com, gamefaqs.com, baguioautoforums.com, en.wordpress.com, and facebook.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for nu107, combatron characters, music the offspring the kids aren’t alright weight:+10, combatron, and combatron ending.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Well, what can I say.. the blog had a successful run in 2010, I hope the blog will do better this year of 2011.
Moving on and what the hell is a Nocturnalfrolic?
As I celebrate in a way the first year of my blog, I want to say thank you and yes, I will explain where and how the hell I got the Nocturnalfrolic moniker. Nocturnalfrolic is simply an insomniac guy having fun. Well, today, I prefer to catch more zzzs than bum around during the ungodly hours. I originally got the name from my older brother, the name of his “posse”. I remembered seeing a very old 80s style sticker with the words Nocturnalfrolic on it, placed it in their vintage 80s DJ equipment.
They were into disco and euphoric music that guarantees that can make any sleepyhead awake. I just unofficially inherited the name and used as a moniker since I, during my teenage and college days, is always awake and doing something, productive or not, till a hint of sunrise appears.
There you go, I am celebrating the blog’s first years anniversary by doing what I do best when I am not doing anything productive, just watching TV or DVD with Rein, while munching heavenly unhealthy foods while drinking sugar powered drinks.
Thank you for visiting my blog and I will write more time-wasting ramblings, movie reviews and graphic design topics for you loyal readers in the future. MARAMING SALAMAT PO SA PAGBABASA NG AKING BLOG
The Nocturnalfrolic 
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