I’ve been with Google Adsense for about 15 years. I started with Youtube, where I had one of my paintball videos get over 14,000 views, and a few others got over 1,000. Then I started IC2S on Blogger and, at one point, my Ang Lee Hulk review somehow ended up as one of the top Google image results for the movie. Sure, I’ve always been a very small fish in a big sea and I am well aware of that. However, I just want to mention this because, in this entire time, my grand total payout from Google Adsense has been…

$101.50.

Right now, there’s $44 in my Adsense account. It has been there all year. Oh, sure, Google tells me that I’ll make a couple dollars per month, but it never actually increases my balance, and I’ve even seen it drop over time for inscrutable reasons.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to see if I could monetize IC2S in order to cover some of the costs of running the site, I’ve had to grit my teeth as Google plastered the entire site with ads, making it fucking ugly and pretty much unreadable. I’m certain that this has negatively affected site traffic, because who the fuck would want to read a site where every paragraph is broken up with huge ads? And all this, in a desperate hope that maybe Google will grant me a $100 pittance sometime this decade?

Nah, fuck that.

As of today, I’ve shut off Adsense for IC2S. Now you can actually enjoy my writing and see it the way it was meant to be seen. I hope that this allows more people to come to enjoy IC2S. I still fondly remember how formative blogs like Head Injury Theater, 11points, and others were for me growing up, and I hope that I can provide that kind of reach for other generations.

All that said… IC2S is a lot of work. I don’t post nearly as often as I used to, just due to the time commitment being untenable with fatherly duties, other hobbies, my mercurial writing burnout, etc. When I do write, it tends to be Retrospective or a Love/Hate series, which can monopolize a month or more of my time, easily, each time I set about writing them. On top of this, it costs me about $90/year to keep the site operating. I can afford this, at least for now, but it sure as hell would be nice to get an acknowledgement that I’m not just pissing my money away and screaming into the void endlessly.

All this to say: I’ve set up a tip jar. If you enjoyed something you read on IC2S and want to show some thanks, the option is there to provide a bit of monetary compensation. This is entirely optional. I’m not holding the site ransom, stopping my writing, or shutting the site down anytime soon (there are too many Resident Evil properties left to do that). I’ll add a little reminder about the tip jar at the end of each post, but that’s a hell of a lot better than getting face-blasted with ads every ten seconds with the old setup.

Anyway, that’s it for this little announcement. I’ve been on a short break from the Resident Evil Love/Hate series, but I’m starting to get the itch to dive back in, so hopefully we can get the final batch of games done and posted in the next few months. Until then, I hope to see you back here soon.

Hey, I just wanted to put out a quick update on the blog since there has been an extended period of radio silence. I know that I long ago committed to writing and updating the blog in my own time, but I do feel bad when I go long periods between posts, so I feel like some sort of excuse is in order. Probably most importantly, at the end of July I had my second child, so I’ve had much less leisure time where I could just sit down and write.

I have had Retrospective series and other posts that I’ve wanted to write for a couple years now, but just have no had the time to dedicate to these. Retrospectives in particular are big undertakings, often taking several hours each in addition to the time needed to actually watch all the media involved, and I just have not been able to justify the time commitment that would require. Love/Hate articles, in contrast, take a fraction of the time and have been much more realistic, plus I enjoy the format so expect to see more of those until I have more time for deeper dives.

For that matter, the Resident Evil Love/Hate series is still underway, I have a couple posts completed already for the next batch of articles, but it will likely be a long time before those are completed. It’s new Pokemon season, so I’ll be dedicating most of my playing time to that before diving into any more Resident Evil games. I do plan on doing the Resident Evil Village DLC in the near future though, so when that’s completed I’ll likely edit the existing article, or I’ll do a new one if the DLC is substantial enough.

All this said, I do still have my usual year-end music and movie poster rankings coming on schedule. I work on these throughout the year in bits and pieces so they should be ready at their usual times in December. I also have put work into a big, only slightly masturbatory writing project through the year and that might see release in the new year. I have no idea if anyone will care about it, but whatever, this is my blog and I like to experiment with what I do here. Anyway, that’s where I’m at for now, hopefully I’m able to dedicate more time to writing in 2023 if life becomes a bit more stable.

Wow, I might have optimistically expected to be writing blog posts 5 years after I started this blog, but considering that I have gone on 2 very long hiatuses (…hiati? Hiateses?) in that time frame, the fact that it has lasted 5 years and has over 200 blog posts is fairly impressive to me. So, as a celebration of 5 years of IC2S, I’m going to use this post to highlight 5 posts which I think you should check out, representing some of the most interesting, funny or enjoyable content on this blog.

1) Extraterrestrial Jesus
How would religion respond to the discovery of alien life? Does alien life instantly refute the narratives of the major religions? This is one of those weird theological posts that I really enjoy writing, where I take something totally theoretical and then try to apply it to the real world. I hope you find it thought-provoking.

2) So… What’s the Point?
Considering that a lot of my longer, better thought-out pieces revolve around sexism, I figure we should have at least one major representative for those posts. This is one of the more recent ones and is largely a culmination of the ideas I have stated previously, and also focuses on social justice in general on a larger scale, and why standing up for it matters. Plus, it links to a lot of other related posts of mine on the subject, so it’s a great starting ground if you want to dive into this rabbit-hole.

3) Video Game Review: Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 – Venus
And speaking of sexism, considering that I went out and imported an embarrassing, Japanese-only video game just for this review, I think that more people need to see it. Those trophies are never leaving my PSN account, after all. And, in retrospect, I definitely feel like I was being too soft on it in this review. I still feel like there’s a relaxing level of enjoyment to be had in DOAX3, but good God this game is awfully designed. Team Ninja needs to stop putting their considerable talents towards this kind of tripe and more towards a Ninja Gaiden reboot or Nioh 2.

4) Gun Control, and Why Partisan Politics Need to Die
I was tempted to put up “Voter Ignorance” here, but this larger article covers the same sorts of issues and has more practical application. Plus, this line still rings true nearly every day in Trump’s America: “It would seem to me that the main reason [Ted Cruz] is [lying about reasonable gun control measures] is because it will rile up potential voters and get them to support him. It doesn’t matter whether what he says is true or not, as long as he gets the votes.”

5) Retrospective: The Howling – New Moon Rising
I have written a lot of reviews on this website since I started it and, while the All the Boys Love Mandy Lane review and the Metal Gear Solid retrospectives are probably my best, I’ll never get over just how much I tore apart The Howling: New Moon Rising… and good God did it ever deserve it. When the only good thing you can say about a movie is that you can usually see the things that they’re filming (and yes, the film is so bad that I had to qualify “usually” about something that basic), you know you have a stinker for the ages. Birdemic seriously did more right than this film, and that movie is practically a home video production.

Thanks for reading. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be posting regularly, but I at least have a few more posts in mind, so look forward to content for the foreseeable future.