Another Year Gone

As I sit here pondering on what to type about in my last blog entry of the year 2006, I realize that the beginning of a new year is nothing too exciting and isn't worth to celebrate, but is rather a time where I feel the most depressed about life. Why is that? A new year, to me, symbolizes that old times have ended and new times are about to begin in the single fact that we work up the trail which are the months of the year, and then we start right back over on a new calendar within a single day. Also it's depressing because we go back to school the day after tomorrow. Why would we have to go back to school the day after we stay up well past midnight and celebrate? But it's just not the fact of going back to school that bothers me but rather what awaits us when we return. First we're going to have fifty tests sarcastically saying, a paper or two to write, and then starting a week after we go back, midterms. What's even worse is that you can hardly remember much after Christmas break -- the second largest break from school that we have in a year, and for us it's only a week! The first largest is, of course, summer vacation. So after having our memories brainwashed on an overdose of eggnog and ham, we're expected to go back to school early in the morning on January 2nd, 2007 with our heads in thinking mode and the useless knowledge of factoring polynomials, Spanish vocabulary, and a story about some girl who likes leather jackets still known well. Teachers are funny. I actually want to go for a degree in education and if I was a teacher at my school, I would at least go easy on the kids when we got back, reviewing some things for about three to four days nice and slowly, and then start back up as if Christmas vacation never happened, but at least the kids would be on the same page as me. That's the problem with most teachers. They have a degree in what they're teaching, therefore they know the material like they know their first name. But us teenagers who are lacking the knowledge are expected to know the material as well as the teacher who probably took a whole college course on a single chapter that we're doing in the book. I'm just going to stop right there with my rant and move on to a happier note.

#Foote_Chat, the official forum of Buddy Foote's Blog v.2, is doing pretty well with only ten members and out of those ten, four active ones. We have Aeron (you may know him as Dante when I refer to him on this blog), Botanreaper2 (a good friend of mine on Runescape and is into helping the forum a lot), Caydalyn (Caitlin, of course, from the blog), and myself (BuddyFoote). The other six, as of this very minute, are inactive, but we hope for a change there, and I hope for a change in the size of the forum's members. That is why I'm so eager on the forum, posting in the Forum News board, about going around and getting the word out about #Foote_Chat. Caitlin made a button (very well designed) and I then posted it on friend's comments on MySpace, hopefully for a small population of the forum from there. I got nothing so far. Caitlin's actually having more luck than me grabbing new members. I'm not a man who can advertise well. Also I made two special boards for Chase on there for his clan, Squad 4. So far there's no activity on them. If you're interested in the forum, then please click the button that was made by Caitlin:

What a year in terms of unique visitors though. If you haven't read a post I made a while ago about unique visitors, then I'll copy and paste this short explanation of what they are taken from StatCounter.com:

Unique Visitor - Based purely on a cookie, this is the total of the returning visitors and first time visitors - all your visitors.

Actually that's a different definition than what I go by, but that's okay. Anyway, this year was an amazing year when it comes to unique visitors of this blog. There were so many shifts and changes and ups and downs that it truly goes to show the hardships of the blog and the evolution of it too. For example, the "February depression" and the "HTML Error Times" that followed the birthday and layout change of the blog -- July 24. [Speaking of layout changes, the next one is being postponed to the early summer.] I'm now going to paste a bunch of numbers for reference of the unique visitors for every month of the year, up to the current one of today. Each number will represent a month, starting from January of this year to today.

612-302-485-647-685-1,095-1,771-778-749-1,051-1,469-1,623

Now for the year in total, we have had 11,268 unique visitors.

For me and most of us here at BFBv.2, that's a grand accomplishment right there. Last year from August to December, we only had 1,016 uniques. Hopefully the following year we'll have many more, and hopefully the blog will be in a better state with more activity and more original ideas. And hopefully the forum, #Foote_Chat, won't fall down a well but will instead flourish into a beautiful flower. Yes, me and my similes and metaphors.

I had a lot more planned out to write about, but I'm being rushed off to go to a dinner at my brother's house. What a shame though because I wanted to write a whole novel expressing my love of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Craig and I were on the phone for four hours last night, from about ten to two in the morning, mostly talking about LoZ, Runescape, and watching this show on the Discovery Channel about caveman and mocking them. Yes, the cavemen from the insurance commercials would be quite angry at us. That was about the first time I watched a television show since I was sick a few weeks ago and was forced to just lay down and watch TV. What torture that was.

Well, I hope you have a happy New Year, but first I just want to comment a keyword before the year ends.

"Comment That Keyword!"

"pretend your runescape guy is amazing"

Why should I pretend when I can just log into the game, look at my guy, and see that he's amazing the way he is? Why should you pretend that your Runescape avatar is amazing when he should already be amazing to you? Why should you care what others think about you when you should be happy about who you are in-game and what you have accomplished? Why shouldn't you think getting magic to 10 is an accomplishment, even when others think, "Oh, big deal noob!"? Don't pretend your Runescape guy is amazing when he already is to you.

That's why beggars should stop begging in the game and realize that having 2 gp is amazing to them, and to rather make that 2 gp multiple themselves rather than depending off of others and annoying them badly. Just ask Botanreaper2 on #Foote_Chat. We were hanging out together on f2p the other day because I felt like reporting rule breakers as I wanted to take a break from slayer (I have 63 slayer now) and everywhere we went, people were begging their brains out following me around. We would teleport and go stand in a deserted place in the woods, and yet some guy would still follow us around, begging. Just please do stuff yourself people, and don't go macro either! Do you think that I got the way I am today by begging, stealing, scamming, etc.? No! I raised skills and got money that way! Go chop trees, fish, runecraft, etc. or something for money and sell the products! Just don't waste your time begging. Like Botanreaper2 said to a bunch of beggars in Falador the other day -- "You could've made 15k in the time that you were begging." And that is the truth. But then the beggars asked "How?" and we just gave up and teleported away.

Sigh on that one. Have a good day and have a good year and I hope you had a good year and I hope you have a future good year and I hope every year that you live out is a good year and I hope you have a taco because I'm hungry.