El Progeso Del Peregrino Has Moved!

Hello everyone; today is the big day. Today is the final time I’ll be publishing on this website. For weeks I’ve been working on my new website and it’s clear that it is now time to bring the Blogger era to an end. This website will continue to exist for the indefinite future, but baring extreme circumstances there will be no more future updates to it. Going forward, all of my online writings will be published on my new website, which is:

www.ricardopedia.com

I hope you’ve all enjoyed the journey of El Progreso Del Peregrino. As you might remember, the name of this website translates to “the pilgrim’s progress.” For almost six years we’ve been on a pilgrimage together, through travel blogging, gaming commentaries, life stories, political opinions, writing adventures, random thoughts, and so much more. Every pilgrimage eventually comes to an end, however, and today the pilgrim that is this website crosses his own finish line, handing off the baton to the next pilgrim.

See you all on the new website!

-Ricardo

Backing up older posts

While working on my new website I realized that I don’t have backups for the text of my older posts. It was only in February 2016 that I started saving copies of what I wrote online, so should something catastrophic happen to my website I’d lose all the words I had published before then. Thus I have taken on the tasks of making copies of those older posts and saving them onto my hard drive. Copying one post is a simple enough task, but copying over 200 is going to take some time.

Post #700 was last Friday

Last Friday I published my 700th post to this website and I’m pleased to say that it was none other than the birth of the next generation of my flagship gaming series, Late to the Party. I do believe a gif is in order for an occasion such as this. Join me today in celebrating this accomplishment, and let’s all look forward to the next 100 posts!

Let's keep running towards Post #800!

2018: Late to the Party, Season 2

If there’s one thing I’m excited for regarding this year’s writings, it’s the second season of Late to the Party. I’ve got a lot of games lined up for playing and writing about, and next week I think I’ll be publishing a more extensive post with both the games that are currently on the list as well as some thoughts on how Season 2 will compare with Season 1. I hope you’re looking forward to this new season as much as I am.

2018: The Topics

At the moment I’m content for my 2018 writings to be on same topics that were common in 2017. Gaming will remain the most frequent thing I write about, with life stories, travel-related writings, and various musings also being prominent. For better or for worse political posts are bound to show up from time to time, though I don’t know yet if 2018 will see me dive deeper into the political ocean or try to wade my way back to the shore.

2018: Changing the publishing schedule

Since 2016 I’ve kept to my commitment to publish on this website five times a week, Monday through Friday. In 2018 that schedule might change. While I certainly could keep to the current schedule for 2018, for the last few months I’ve had this nagging feeling that it’s been slowing me down in other areas of my life that I want focus more on. I don’t want to stop publishing on this website, but I might need to scale things back a little. What I’m thinking of doing is adjusting the schedule to publishing three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll give this a try for a few weeks later this year (probably February or March) and see how it goes. Whether I go to a new publishing schedule or stick with the old one, I’ll make an announcement so that everyone knows what to expect.

2018: Changing the publishing time

Some of you might have noticed that in 2017 I started regularly publishing my writing pieces at 6:00pm Mountain Time. This was done in an effort to increase my professionalism by forcing me to have posts ready before an exact deadline, and it also was meant to give the audience a sense of stability in that they could always count on having something to read at the same time every day. For 2018 I’m thinking that I ought to move the publishing time forward to somewhere in the morning. Maybe 7:00am or 8:00am. You might have noticed I did that last week. Another idea I had was maybe setting the publishing time to noon. You might have noticed that I’m doing that this week. I’ll give both morning and noon a try for several weeks, and by sometime in February it should be clear which one I’ve settled on.

2018: Where is the new website?

It’s coming, I promise. I hope to have an announcement on that later this month.

Catching up on news and events

I’ve been writing exclusively about my trip to Asia since September and a lot has happened in the world since that time. Originally I had planned on devoting a single week to writing about topics of interest to me that have transpired in the last two to three months but I think I’m going to need a little more than a week to do that, so I’m not placing any sort of time restrictions on these catch-up writing pieces. Starting tomorrow I’ll be publishing on things I missed while writing about Asia and I’ll stop when I feel satisfied.

Back on Schedule

A week ago I flew from Tokyo back to America, and last Saturday I finally returned to Colorado. Originally I had planned on resuming my normal publishing schedule yesterday, however when I looked at my current number of published writing pieces I realized that if I waited until today I could keep myself on the track that I was before departure, wherein every Friday post brings the total number of published posts to a number evenly divisible by five. Yes, I’m that obsessive about trivial things like that. Anyways, I’ve got a decent number of small stories related to my Asia trip. They should occupy the next two weeks of this website’s content, and maybe a little more if I think up more things worth sharing. Hopefully you enjoy them.

Post #600 was on 8/4/17

I don’t know how it skipped my mind, but somehow I surpassed 600 published posts over a week ago and forgot to commemorate it. Post #600 was published on 8/4/17 and I should have at minimum given all of you a gif to celebrate. Well, today I’m rectifying that error. Enjoy this gif from The Blues Brothers.

Hat Trick Tomorrow

Tomorrow evening I fly out for an extended weekend in New York City. Tempting as it may be to take the next three days off from writing, I’ve decided instead that what I’m going to do is publish three posts on the same day, thus keeping to my commitment of five published writing pieces per week. It’ll be the writing version of a hat trick from the world of sports. Next week I’ll be back on my normal publishing schedule, but the week after that I’ll need to publish two writing pieces on Thursday, June 1, since I’ll be gone on Friday, June 2.

It exists

Just after the publishing of my 400th post, I set a goal of registering the domain of a new website for my writings before the publishing of my 500th post. In today’s post, which happens to be #496, I am pleased to announced that the goal has been met, and the new website domain exists. At the moment there’s nothing there, but I’m one step closer to migrating off of Blogger and onto something a bit more distinctive and that I can call my own. It will be some time before I’m able to fully construct the new website and transplant all the content from Blogger over to it, but whenever that happens I’ll have a big announcement for you.

Videos added to four commentaries

When I finished Diablo 3 at the end of last year, it marked the end of Season 1 of Late to the Party, but I still had some time before my Gamefly account was to be closed, so I took the opportunity to rent again some of the games I played early in Season 1 that I didn’t have gameplay footage from. Maybe this wasn’t the best usage of my time, but I wanted to bring those older commentaries closer into line with the later ones in terms of the media viewable in them, so I put in the time to capture the footage, upload it to Youtube, and add it in on Blogger. Anyone who’s already read these updated commentaries won’t need to reread them, as the words haven’t changed, but if you’re curious to see videos of these games by all means check them out. Below are the four commentaries that have been updated with videos. Clicking on their names will take you to them.

Call of Duty: Ghosts

The Order: 1886

Killzone Shadow Fall

Watch Dogs (this one did have a single video already—I added three more)

2017 Preview Finished

Today marks the end of the series of 2017 preview writing pieces. There’s a lot to look forward to in 2017, but now it’s time to stop writing about what will be done, and start actually doing it. On Monday the normal publishing schedule will resume, and I’ve already got a few short writing pieces lined up that have accumulated over the past month. Hope you enjoyed a full month of first looking back and then looking forward.

The New Website

This will be the year that I launch my new website. The content will largely be same, at least at first, but I will finally leave Blogger and start publishing on a service with fewer restrictions on what I can do. I’m not sure when this new website will launch, but its existence will soon be real. The name is more or less settled at this point. Thankfully the name is also not taken at the time of the publishing of this piece. Right now I’m trying to figure out which service to register and host the new website, and what platform to use for publishing content to the website. Expect a big announcement sometime this year when the new website is ready.

2017 Publishing Schedule

The rules for writing online in 2017 are going to remain unchanged from what they were at the end of 2016. Five writing pieces will be published each week on a Monday through Friday schedule, with the goal of one writing piece per week being a longer entry of about 1,000 words or more. Most of the time Fridays will be the days that those longer pieces go up. Exceptions to the aforementioned rules can and will be made for special occasions, unusual circumstances, and bad cases of Writers Block, but otherwise for the rest of the year that this website is active you can count on a regular publishing schedule. The new website, which will go live at some point this year, will follow the same rules as laid out here. Any changes to the rules will be publicly proclaimed, and whenever I know about a publishing gap beforehand I will also announce it (this would most likely happen whenever I travel). My name is Ricardo, and I have committed to these rules, so help me God.

Looking forward to 2017

From the start of the year up until now I’ve been doing a variety of posts looking back at 2016. While I could continue this retrospective theme for awhile longer, I think it’s time I transition now to spending a few days looking forward to what 2017 has in store for me, both personally and in terms of writing. Ideally I would have started doing the retrospective writing pieces back in the second half of December so that I could doing these forward looking writing pieces about two weeks ago, but that wasn’t possible due to what was going on in my life at the time. Plus I have a reputation of being late and I wouldn’t want to tarnish it by having things done on time. Anyways, look forward to the coming days as I lay out some possibilities for the rest of the year. Once those posts are wrapped up this website will return to its normal schedule of publishing the inane thoughts of a delusional recluse who isn’t anywhere near as smart as he likes to think he is.

2016 Total Word Count

This is it—the reveal of the grand total of words I published in the calendar year 2016. The day after I published my final post of the year I sat down and added up the word counts of each post from last year and now I’m ready to share the number with you. To be clear, I’m only counting the words from the actual bodies of each writing piece and not the words in the titles (if I did that the total would be a little higher). Take a seat and hold on to something, for the total count is…

154,458!

Now it’s become a tradition to include a gif with any word count announcement, and I’m not one to break with a good tradition. Today’s gif is one that will be recognizable to anyone who, like me, grew up watching Godzilla movies. Behold, the Godzilla Dance!

154,458 words, spaced out over 270 posts. Not too shabby if I do say so myself. True, there are lots of people out there who publish exceedingly greater volumes of work than I do, but today is not the day for playing the comparison game. No, today is a day to commemorate what’s been achieved.

Happy New Year 2017!

Yesterday the calendar rolled over and we all bid farewell to 2016 and welcomed in 2017. One year is done and in the books, while another awaits us, full of possibilities. I personally spent much of this past weekend slaving away for my job, but I also got a little bit of thinking and writing in, and I wanted to share with you what I’ve got in mind for much of this month.

The time of year around late December and early January is a great time for both retrospection and anticipation, and I’ve decided to do exactly that for the next three to four weeks. Granted, I missed the late December window due to various life circumstances, and it really would have been better to start writing and publishing these pieces two weeks ago, but on the other hand doing these writing pieces now does keep with the general theme of tardiness that pervades this website. What you can expect are some short to mid-length writing pieces looking back at the work I did in 2016, followed by a small number of writing pieces detailing some of the ideas I have for work to do in 2017. Among other things, I’ll announce the total word count from 2016, highlight some of my favorite writing pieces from last years, spend a whole week on my Game of the Year pick, and do a retrospective series on Season 1 of Late to the Party. Along the way I may intersperse a few posts related to other things (for example, I might do one more political post on Inauguration Day) but they will be few and far between during this period.

Thanks for joining me during my journey through the world of writing in 2016. Hopefully many more adventures await us in 2017.