The Mighty 500

This post is 8 years in the making. It has taken me 4 moves, a separation, a divorce, and 4 gaming consoles to get here. It has seen me play hours of games, watch days worth of movies and TV, buy a TV or two, damn near lose an Eye, break a tooth, and get contacts a few times. I have joined, left, and forgotten who knows how many social media sites in the last 8 years, to which INITIALLY I was going to make this post about that journey.

But then, This blog was here for that journey. I mean you can go back and see all the Essays, bad poems, reviews, opinions, rants, anecdotes, ups and downs. I was about to spend a lot of time basically repeating myself when I could just thank everyone who has come by FOR coming by. I will admit it has not always been easy to write, and no it has nothing to do with the state of my relationship. I enjoy interaction so at times when no one responds my mind wanders elsewhere, not because I have nothing to say but because while I don't mind being somebody who is on their own side in a conversation I prefer it to be a conversation not speech prep if you know what I mean.

Whoa, look what snuck up on me

For those reading (if any of you are left) this is my 499th post on THIS blog. I remember when I did my hundredth on wordpress and of course I did something silly(but it was worth it) because it allowed me to get it out of the way without too much fanfare but 500 is different, 500 is special it has taken me YEARS to get here. Mainly because I keep taking long hiatuses. Which I will try not to do to commemorate this occasion. I mean 500 should somehow someway reflect my "Journey as a Blogger " right, I mean anybody who has written off and on long enough to accumulate 500 posts in one place HAS to be different now then he was before right? I would hope so. I doubt it will get done tomorrow though, because I have a long trip ahead of me and my mind isn't going to be in it. So when I get back we will start planning the 500th post. It's hilarious it was almost a movie review(that I still owe) which would have been awkward because then I couldn't have done this warning post if I would have  noticed it. Lucky I guess that I looked at my posts today.

As we all know, blogging is a rhythm thing for me. I get in a mindset, my fingers hit the keys and out pops who knows what. Hilarity, insanity, mundanity, and yes I just started rhyming out of nowhere but I was running with it like a Vogon with a form that needs stamping. It's crazy I usually make a big deal about views(which I haven't paid attention to lately. Mainly cause I miss all the awesome numbers. 50,000 is coming up soon, I think), I would make a big deal about comments but there would have to be some. Maybe because I don't really say anything TOO controversial over here, I think, folks either just say "you crazy primal" and move on or maybe I didn't leave too much room on the subject for commentary except for those few random posts. And commenters I appreciate all of you.

The fun part about E3 Sunday

Is that Microsoft does their thing in the mid afternoon and I am trying to blog that(and as they dropped goo gobs of games it ain easy this year) and then of course I have to get ready for Bethesda. For the quick and dirty, Microsoft dropped the name of Project Scorpio Xbox One X, the release date 11/7/17 and the price 499.99. Yeah Microsoft got on it, they also dropped 42 games 20+ that were Xbox exclusives and many with Xbox One X enhancement.

So when I tell you I am hauling booty to try and put all the trailers some mini descriptions as well as some of my thoughts on all this graphical goodness I am. The problem is, I have laundry to do and Bethesda starts in about 20 minutes. And if you watched Bethesda's show last year you already know that when Microsoft goes ham, so do they. Like this is an all hands on deck situation, EA had to be nice on Saturday they couldn't spill any beans, but Bethesda is the school gossip who was just on the toilet when the head cheerleader admitted to how she passed her last class. It's about to go down.

So I hope everyone had a good weekend and I am typing as fast as I can, of course you can find all this over on Wonderful World

Happy Friday all

The Power Rangers review just dropped. It is a stuffy day, with heavy sneezing, and light tearing(my folks with allergies will understand) it's mildly sunny and cool actually. I will TRY and get into what I was talking about yesterday afternoon with my post about anime and the slight westernization of the characters, I may have to head to Barnes and Noble first to do a little bit of research into how characters are drawn in Mangas, because I am not much of a manga reader. I understand HOW to read Manga, at the moment I just don't want to read that way fucks with my immersion I am not saying anything against Manga readers Eikichi loves Manga, I am just not with that "wave" at the moment.

But yes as an Anime fan and a fan of Super Hero movies it is an exciting time, it is also time to take a good look at our favorite characters/stories/franchises/media and critique them honestly when they tell bad stories, make bad casting decisions, make obvious cash grab movies, or possibly tell less than fulfilling stories with our favorite formerly counter and now popular culture icons.

Dear Readers

Hey, this week has been a bear. Finishing up a large site at my day job so the Power Rangers review is coming. It's just gonna be a couple of days late, it was basically get home, fire up my laptop type a few sentences and crash, yes even the night owl is human. For those who want a quick synopsis: Go see it. It's a fun movie, it takes great care to balance the weight of the responsibility with the fun of first finding out you have super powers.

Yes there is teenage angst, yes THIS is the Power Rangers team Zordon ORIGINALLY asked for in the show. They aren't you perfect paragons, they are basically the breakfast club with super powers(yes that will be in the review). Some people had a problem with the Megazord (Eikichi, BUT I will back my youngest brother on this it's not exactly the classic) but the team was fun and the actors did an awesome job.

Next up SHOULD be Ghost in the Shell, I don't know if Smooth will be there, he kind of flaked on us last weekend(work related though) but we are all anime fans and Westernizing anime characters aside it will hopefully be a fun romp. And I may get into that in a later blog, because it does beg for a certain amount of discussion because if you have ever WATCHED an anime, characters tend to be Racially Ambiguous or else have features not regularly seen in Asians(Blond Hair, Blue eyes, Orange hair, Red Hair) but again that will be discussed later.

An Apology is owed

If you have come by my blog the last few days you may have seen an odd, out of place ad. It used to be my "Social Media Bar" where you could share things to reddit, google+, facebook, and a bunch of other sites well now it was a bunch of Porn ads. Livejasmin, some kind of cute blondes ad, date hot chicks ad or something. Every once in a while in this blogging game the widgets or apps you use either expire, go old, or just get hacked. I had one expire(that was my Shelfari app) and the social media widget up there was either expired or hacked. So what did I do, I just got rid of them it appears that BOTH of those apps have been turned into redirects.

Redirects to where: one seemed to constantly send you to porn. Which I have no problem with porn, but if it is a porn redirect there is probably a virus attached. Again, I have no issue with porn but if you weren't actually searching for porn and got sent there unexpectedly you would be pretty upset right? Yeah me too, and as I try to keep THIS blog PG-13 for somebody to redirect folks to porn apps from here kind of slaps the rules in the face. Plus you are in essence STEALING TRAFFIC. It would be one thing if people clicked on the add to get to the porn, but since it was an automatic redirect that ended up hiding in a widget that I innocently left up because it still appeared to work you weren't giving folks a choice. And no I don't get any credit for those redirects hell they count as bounces IE people leaving my site because they don't like what they see. So if I am looking at the numbers for the night I might think you didn't like my layout, or you weren't interested in the articles this month when really somebody was stealing traffic most likely to get themselves ad money.

okay, it took a minute but I got the first attempt of a paginated marked up post fixed

I don't know where I screwed up, I don't know where I missed a piece of code. For whatever reason, you ONLY went to the first page of the post about the coffee when you clicked on the NEXT or number links. I haven't checked the number links at the button(nor have I figured out how to make them line up next to each other but meh it works lets just leave it that way) but finally if you hit the next button you go to page two, and then page three. I mean it's now 8 pm and I posted that bad boy at 10 am. Granted until I looked at the post I didn't realize that there was anything wrong. I wanted to see what would happen if I removed a page(because if I can remove a page, I can add a page) so looks like I am going to have to take my time and go through and thoroughly check a post which is a little more difficult without the option to "preview" said post.

Yes I am going to have to keep working at it, but that is now two posts paginated. We might have a pattern here, I can be wordy and talkative but now you don't have to see a giant wall of text. Huzzah we have walked through a whole new door

I decided to do a little reorganizing

If you noticed I put some tabs up top, unfortunately I am now going to have to edit everything so that first the tabs fit better, and second I am going to have to go back through a whole lot of posts and figure out what I want to call everything. I do some housekeeping every once in a while anyway but I think this little bit of navigational reorganization will help folks find what they are looking for when they come by. Yes those tabs used to be on the side, but since I was adding so many of them I decided to move it up top like pretty much everyone else.

Mainly because they look better up there. You want to put two or three things on the side fine but once you get above 3 drag it to the top boyo. I'm not guaranteeing that the current names will always be the names, some of them are already making me feel some kind of way but the tabs WILL be up there for the foreseeable future. some of you are probably cheering I don't know why I didn't do this before but now yeah I want to go ahead and add these sections. The funny thing is I already had labels on MOST of the posts(the editing will be to go back and add them to the posts that will help to organize them where I think they belong), just not all. Sometimes I do a post and forget to add the labels, not maliciously(though it does feel like it when I have to go back through a few hundred posts to clean up after myself) just because at the time I might not have known WHAT I wanted to add as a label yet.

Slowly sneaking up on 500 posts

In the 8 year journey that has been the creation, maintenance and writing of Primal's Ponderings I don't know if I ever expected to reach this point. I mean 8 years is a long time and this isn't my first nor my only blog. I have had blogs on Yahoo360(now gone), Multiply(also gone), of course Wordpress is still around, and this one, I have a presence on G+(though not the one attached to this page, IJS), and of course if you have read any of my gaming posts here or on the press know that I have a PSN and an XBL name as well. I don't own a wii or wiiu(the wii I had is with the ex), so no I am not on whatever Nintendo calls it's online gaming network(if they even have one) who knows if I will get a Switch(later blog) but this has been a long and interesting ride.

I have written essays, movie reviews, books reviews, rants(lots and lots of rants), and I have had quite a bit of fun with it, yes I would love a little more interaction but I am willing to wait and work for it. I always have, because if I am going to have a conversation I want it to be organic, I want you to really be engaged and care about whatever the subject matter is. Counting this one I will be at 460, there are also some throwbacks scheduled so I should be somewhere near 470 by the time Friday rolls around which gives me a good 30 blogs to get to the big 500. That's a nice milestone no where near one a day, not even one a day for the lifetime on the blog but for one person writing by themselves and trying to stay inspired I think it's pretty good, I'm sure others are like lazy, hey do what you do, I'll do what I do.

2 years in the making(4/3/11)

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I made it a double(2/22/12)

Tuesday night since I had access to a vehicle, was off work on the early side and had a few shekels to rub together decided to hit the movies. This won't seem to new or out of the ordinary for most folks who read in 2010 or 2011 since I went to the movies almost every week. Unfortunately my normal movie viewing destination has closed and my old Friday habit of hoofing it the 10-15 minutes it was to make it there for the last show is no more.

So I went to the Paradiso, a Malco Theater(one of these days I'll take a pic of the sign) and decided to take in Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance. And as I got out around 9:30 I decided "hey why not go ahead and watch Safe House too, just in case my brothers Welch on movie outings again."  I wasn't paying attention but GR was in 3D and I don't know about the rest of the glasses wearing movie public but the glasses over my glasses always give me mild eyestrain and a slight head ache. It was much worse during the old "blue and red paper throw aways" days, now its not every but a few GR falling into the few category. So i forked over my 12 buck(my poor wallet) and sat through the flick, got 5 trailers, that blog coming soon, and watched the movie. Review MAY be coming later, afterwards since a showing of Safe House was coming up within a few minutes I hopped back in line a paid for my ticket(don't give me that*yeah right* look I actually have the stubs to prove it) and enjoyed the 9:30ish showing of Safe House. I got 5 trailers with each movie I'll try and get those in today and possibly clean my review slate up for at least 2012.

If you aren't having a good week so far, hey it's Thursday tomorrow night begins the weekend

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I know Spirit of Vengeance pretty much buried the series, I forget if I did a review for it or not but I hated how they just tossed aside the Penance Stare it was awesome in GR. I understand that they wanted to show a little more conflict in SoV but you don't change what works. Safehouse was interesting, Ryan and Denzel put in good performances. I am cleaning out my drafts folder and this is turning out to be pretty fun. As I go through and show off either old blogs or old "blogs in the making" you will get a better idea of where I start or how I go about writing, I can tell you most of it is chaos, I will ask you to forgive my spelling errors in these throw back posts because I do that at the end and of course these are as is(thus why you got the blank "we are the core" Blog)

Something new

It's Thursday, and while I'm not a huge fan of posting old pictures(mainly because a younger me was not too fond of taking them) I figure I could do something equally crazy, I could go through and post old drafts from this blog, as is. A few will pop up today

Whoop dee, who cares about a few posts that didn't make the cut right. Well that isn't really how writing works with me, sometimes it isn't that an idea didn't make the cut it's more that: I got busy, lost my train of thought, swore I would get back to it, and then a bunch of weeks passed and whoops you are forever languishing in the drafts folder.

I don't know what you heard about me

But ya can't get a

I'm not actually listening to PIMP by fiddy but it is going through my mind right now. New year, same ol me, same attitude, same stable convictions, and damn sure the same guy who used to run his mouth a lot on this here blog. Things I don't do though are New years resolutions, I mean if you ask me I can whip up a list of things and CALL them new years resolutions but they are really just plans that I already had in the works. I am not downing anybody who makes new years resolution, I have plenty of friends who do and they seem to be pretty good at keeping up with them.

My thing is since I do tend to thing to much I always go along with the whole "if plan a-d or whatever letter I got to didn't work let's start with the next one." I feel that each new year is a new chapter in your old book, not a completely new book and as such I were to completely start over I would get lost. I mean how the hell did I get to where I currently am? Am I lost, or am I late for some appointment, how did the last book end? So yeah new chapter and whats up with this chapter hmm let's see

My favorites of the 29

Can you read a book, watch a movie or even hear a story and not immediately come up with "your favorite character", it may not even be the main character nor have some long ranging part but if you fall for him you fall for him. While yes many of us loved good ol Han Solo the dashing rogue in Star Wars is there not a huge fan club for Boba Fett(or the Fett as many of his disciples call him), I think he had maybe 8 scenes through both movies and yet people love Boba. While I love the Harry Potter stories, I would love the actor who plays Ron Weasley to be the first Ginger Doctor Who, why because I think he would be hilarious in the role somewhere between Matt Smith and David Tennant. Great Facial expression and wild flights with the dialogue, so with that said my favorite "Mistakes" from the 29 Most Common Writing Mistakes by Judy Delton and how I will in the future try much harder to avoid them.

1. Don't Procrastinate


Ouch, that one stings hard I am notorious for procrastination, or maybe I should call it spontaneous boredom. I might start something get halfway through and either forget where I was heading or else just let something else catch my attention. As many will probably see from my breaks in writing from time to time I go til I get tired of going and then I pop up again later. No it isn't because "Oh well it's the beginning of the month I better write something", it's more "hmm I wonder, meh well let me go head and put it other so I can think on it again later".

Basically I am trying to get myself to look at some blog somewhere and just write something. I don't care if its read by 2 people or 1000 just talk let my mind roam and allow any who wish to follow.

Fast Approaching 8,000 hits

As has been the trend since I have been regularly posting here on the ponderings we seem to have hit a nice steady clip of about 700 viewers a month sometimes it spikes to 1,000 if I post a lot other times it hovers between 650-735. As always I'm ecstatic about this, while yes I do advertise this blog now in my various social networking haunts and keep the link posted in my twitstream(not so much in my tumblog as I haven't been there as often lately) just because you see a link doesn't mean you will click on it, trust me I am weary of links on peoples pages too. While sometimes it's something nice usually its a link to something less than healthy for your computer, and I don't mean extra sprinkles on your soft serve cone less than healthy either extra sprinkles at least give you a good taste before they help to give you cavities. Oh no, some of these links lead to malware, pop ups and viruses. So just because I have something linked to my page doesn't mean they will come.

Of course just like before the majority of my visitors seem to find me from Google, looking up either my various reviews or accidently looking up some other subject that I have either title my blog similar too or they have just misspelled. Some stay and read on others just disappear as quick as they came, to date The Warriors Way review still seems to get the most hits. Kind of burned out on movie reviews right now, maybe in the future but as of today everything past The Hangover 2 way back in June has gone unreviewed, I started one for both X-men and Green Lantern I just never finished them and have thus not even started any others though I have gone to the movies for most of the summer(as my trailer blogs will show). And the Hangover 2 was of course reviewed on WordPress because well most of what was done and said in that movie would be hard to describe here, it would almost be like trying to review a porno on this blog no bueno.

I should be ashamed

I who read either ""Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(870 pages) or ""Harry Potter and the half blood Prince(672 pages) in one night, a perfectly happy passenger in J.K. Rowlings latest installment of what was to be her 7 part epic(obviously it is over now, the final movie coming out within the next 30 days) took the better part of a week to finish The Elements of Style (95 pages including all introductions, forwards, prologues and acknowledgements).  Now some might say I deserve a little forgiveness because of course Elements is more of a text book than it is some sort of fanciful tale geared to grab my imagination, I say that is cold comfort. I selected the book, I checked it out, I read a few pages realizing it was more grammatically intense than it was comical lecture or humorous chiding and I still picked it up.


It was a case of not being able to get the book I wanted so I took a book it had recommended,  29 Common Writing Mistakes, I went into the library with hopes of borrowing the title so that I might finish it and do some of the exercises. Within the first 34 pages two titles stuck out at me the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (which my brother still owned a copy of from high school and it was readily available) and the previously mentioned Elements of style. As I would like to become a better writer I decided hey the first step in ANY journey is always the most important, if you would like to write better read about writing(granted writing at all would also help but I will chastise myself about that later). Anyone who knows me personally (especially my tumultuous time from 4th to 12th grade, my my my how many times was I stuck at the front of the class) knows how much I LOATHE HOMEWORK, to say I think it evil is somewhat overstated, I think it's unnecessary. I tend to learn things quickly or not at all so if in my initial reading of the textbook I didn't get everything I needed, I wasn't going to get anything. And as my test scores would often show, I tend to retain a lot I just can't stand repetitively doing it over and over and over, practice may make perfect but if you continuously stir the bowl you will either beat out all texture or else create so much gluten as to make it a chewy inedible mess. So for me to be basically signing up for *groan* homework would probably make some check the temperature in hell, hold on there bessy I'm not sitting here doing exercises I'm reading something I actually like to do.

Upon first blush it seems me and Elements are going to be at odds, it is a book built upon the foundation of BREVITY and me be brief, do I not extole on how I will say what I want for as long as I want and to the extent that I want? I warn people at least a few times a year about the fact that I will ramble on, randomisity train isn't this what I call my fine friend here. So to ask me to be brief, why I should put it down immediately shouldn't I and yet I was intrigued by the challenge. And to make matters worse why this book suggest I don't add words to the English language, THE UNMITIGATED NERVE. How dare some dusty tome from a bygone age tell me NOT to amend the English language as I see fit, though to be fair I don't do it as often as I would claim so honestly that one isn't that hard to go along with, brevity though yeah thats gonna stick in my craw. It also suggested breaking long sentences up into shorter ones and abstaining from heavy handed prose, now see that last bit I do need to work on. It suggested making sentences stronger by removing unnecessary qualifiers for example:why say something is LIKE a thing, if you feel it's a thing take a stand and call it a thing(you may have noticed that if I did a cloud of this blog over the last week or so the word LIKE is showing up a lot less). See I may be stubborn, bullheaded, and set in my ways but I don't mind a good well intentioned debate or discussion on a topic or technique. And like I said I always want to get better, being less timid in my language is actually something that I want to do, the fact that I have banned "Colorful Metaphors" from this blog means at times I have rambled on to say something that a quick two word sentence might have been employed for on wordpress or multiply.

Now of course this would not be a book on grammar or writing if punctuation did not rear it's vile head, what can I say I BARELY put my commas in the right place, and if I really wanted to be better I would let a more grammatically gifted friend edit me before I posted. That is what I wanted though: ideas, suggestions and directions upon which to better improve the quality of my writing and thus the presentation of my blog. And the Elements of Style while stern in its call for less digital diarrhea isn't so cruel as to say it's his way or the highway, just that when you look at a few well chosen examples isn't less more? Isn't being direct and forthright with your imagery and thoughts a better usage of your time and page space. I say yes, so while I will still write long and lengthy blogs they will be long not because I wasted 10 words to figure out how to say 5 but because I found the right  5 words to get my point across and expounded upon that thought in a more connected nature.






































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I'm thinking of doing a dump

Yes all of these posts that I have sitting in draft collecting dust, I'm thinking of either posting them all or else thinking of going back to edit them into something that while it encapsulates the original post it allows it to be more relevant to the present. I mean the post I did on black ops, as of now I haven't played black ops in a few weeks(ever since the debacle with the internet after the storm and then Playstation network went down), the review for Tron:Legacy, thats been languishing since December, hell it's about to hit cable if it hasn't already. I actually did a post about being halfway done with a few movie reviews that somehow got flushed. Wait I remember now that was when I found out that the blogger app was saving the posts to my blog but no longer allowing me to edit them, yeah it was weird but it happens.

The downside of course to just posting random items with no future editing or work is that if they were a mess(which anything I have yet to post usually is since, while I will never claim to be king editor, I felt it obviously needed more work or changes before I posted it.) and I prefer to post blogs that people actually like to read. Yes I know some of my posts may be a little long in the tooth for some, but hey my blog and I will be as detailed or as flighty as I like. I do appreciate all who have slogged through my posts in the past, and for those who felt compelled to comment thank you, your input has been greatly appreciated. The more thought I give this dump I probably will go with the latter, find a way to rewrite them so that while it's still say a review of Tron:legacy or me talking about my further endeavors in Black Ops it not only brings forth my original thoughts but also shows how my feelings about said items has grown or waned with the passage of time.

*Pssst* Hey this ain sports whats with all the drafts

Argh, I'm doing it again I'm becoming a draft machine. I start posts but get busy so I can't finish them and than they LANGUISH in the ether just waiting for me to come back, my brand new puppy sitting at the door, looking forlorn, waiting for me to walk in and play with him. This is of course not on purpose, long work days and unfocused nights. I mean it's almost the end of June and I don't even have half a months worth of posts done. I should be ashamed, how could I neglect two blogs like this(won't even talk about multiply, though to be fair most of my connects seem to be gone from there anyway) and there is no satisfactory answer. These introspective pieces, while they technically count as blogging, are just me tapping on the keys as a mental place holder, me saying "see I did write something today" but not really putting in the mental effort to actually follow a topic to its finale.

I went to the library yesterday, now while this isn't some "OMG you went to a library" moment I did something I haven't done going on a good 15 years, hell maybe 20, I signed up for a library card and actually checked out a few books. I had been a bookstore whore for a while running in to buy the latest Harry Potter, Jason Bourne, Percy Jackson, Star Wars, et al release but then times got hard and my personal life got crazy. Yes I will still buy a book here or there but not like I used too, it used to be an almost every pay period addiction, I don't even buy comic books like I used to my momentary escapes from reality so I can set my mind free. I forgot my old friend the library those well worn and tattered tomes for those of us with active imaginations and bigger literary appetites that we had money in our pockets or space for on our shelves. Now my trip to the library wasn't perfect, the main book I was looking for wasn't there, "29 writing mistakes", it was something I found on a trip to the library a few weeks ago.

The one downside to blogging on a cell

No autosave so if your droid freezes, or your blogging program force closes Ooooooh Nooooooo, yup every keystroke, picture and anecdote is gone. Which is okay if you hadn't hit your stride yet, but sucks if you're say in the 3rd or 4th paragragh. I think the basic rule of the computer age has been "save early and save often", because if something goes wrong its better to lose a line or two than the whole blog.

Luckily it was just a flight of fancy, nothing major I was basically gonna write it and "publish" it as a draft to smooth the rough edges later on tonight. As its el flusho now, I gotta start from scratch(and yes as annoying as the go in and out may being I'm saving this one every few sentences) so blogger-droid, official blogger app either way ya still gotta save early and often, cause the bad boys don't include "autosave"