Welcome to Embrace the Deception

Hey. It's certainly been a while. The last time you read anything on this blog it probably had a different name, The Hot and Bothered Effect. Maybe you never bothered with the old blog and for you this is the first post you're seeing. Either way, this is the official relaunch of my blog. I love to blog. It's fun. I use it as an educational avenue since each post usually involves some semblance of research on my part. And it's a great way to keep in contact with people. I also am trying to use blogging to push myself into new experiences under the auspices that they would make for great blog topics. However, my blogging fell off over the last two and half years because my move from Cincinnati to Los Angeles presented me with significantly less time for blogging with increased commute and work time. I don't live on the internet. I live in the real world. And if my intention is to use this blog to facilitate real world adventure then it makes no sense for me to use all of my  free time trying to stick to a stupidly stringent blogging regiment that I've set up for myself. My posts were lengthy and took a lot of time write and probably too long for my readership to read in one sitting. It was probably a good idea to take a step back and shuffle some things around. Here are some of the changes that are being made:

1. Shorter Posts

With the length of my old posts, it was nearly impossible to keep the fairly stringent pace of two posts per week that I set for myself. It was also difficult for my readership to get through a post. I may as well have changed the name of my blog to TL;DR. This was the biggest criticism of the old blog. So I'm now going to start capping blog posts at 5-7 paragraphs. I don't have any interest in making a Tumblr-style, super short format with quick hits because that doesn't go well with my writing style and it sort of defeats the purpose of my blog. However, I do want to make the posts more manageable and accessible. It also would behoove me schedule-wise to post less often, but this was a concession that I didn't want to make. If you can't put up content at least once a week then you really don't have much business having a blog. Keeping a schedule is important because it allows your readership to know when they can expect new content and not have to laboriously check for it until they get fed up. I still intend to post 2-3 times a week. I still intend to have regular segments. In order to keep this pace I have banked away 100 blog posts that have been written over my blog's lengthy hiatus. I won't actually have to write 2-3 posts a week. I'll probably write 1-2 so that I can have content that's topical and then fill out the schedule with the banked up posts. Eventually the two will catch up, but by that time I'll hopefully be in Phase 2.

2. Name Change

Another problem with the old blog was that the name of the blog (The Hot and Bothered Effect) and the URL for the blog (embracethedeception.blogspot.com) didn't exactly sync up. It presented a problem for people trying to find the blog and just made things generally confusing for people. So I've decided to remedy this by simply changing the name of the blog to Embrace the Deception. I'm still going to call the monthly podcast The Hot and Bothered Effect to give it a little continuity link but from here on out this blog will be called Embrace the Deception. Time for some new business cards.

3. New Schedule

My ideal posting schedule would be to post about a dozen times a month. Below is the way that I've outlined the new schedle over the first several months of the blog. I'll likely change this up after a year or so once the blog develops:

Two posts every week. One on Wednesday and One on that Alternates Between Monday and Friday.

Wednesdays Posts will be The Hump Day Top 5. It will be a Top 5 list that will usually in some way relate to the week's other main post. This will keep posts short and sweet and hopefully give readers a good laugh as well as an incite into the weekly topic for the other post. The title graphic for this segment can be seen below:

The other weekly post will alternate between Mondays and Fridays. The Friday posts will be called Friday Night Writes. These posts will usually revolve around a debate that I'm having with friends at my favorite weekend pizza spot (Reno's in Burbank, CA). We tackle a lot of interesting dilemmas and conundrums and I think that it would be a good idea to present the arguments and talk them out on this blog. The title graphic can be seen below:

The Monday posts will be a rotating selection of three different segments: The Year of Living Dangerously, ETD Confidential, and free-style non-denominational posts. The title graphics for these can be seen below:

The Year of Living Dangerously will revolve directly around my life. I've tabbed my 27th year as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and I'll let you know how I'll be living up to that. Yes, I know that this is the name of a movie. Please don't tell Mel Gibson's lawyers about this blog.

ETD Confidential will be an investigative segment where I will study a societal phenomenon and share my findings with you all after the detective work is done.

Many of you will notice that this will normally result in about nine posts a month. So the other three posts will be special posts that will appear on the second Thursday of every month, the final Saturday of every month, and the last day of the month without a regularly scheduled blog post on that day. Those posts will be reserved for my Movie and Restaurant Review segment, The Hot and Bothered Effect Podcast, and Guest Blogger of the Month segments respectively. The title graphics for these can be seen below:

Ray's Restaurant Reviews will feature myself and a few friends going to America's oddest eateries and pitching our experiences here on the blog. Obviously many of the establishments will be in Los Angeles, but I'm also trying to set up some on upcoming trips to Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego, New York, and Washington DC. It's not about the food and whether it's good or bad, it's about the adventure. Every restaurant that we go to should have some ridiculously unique premise or absurd quirk.

3 Critics and a Couch will involve myself and two friends watching a film and reviewing it on my couch (or a suitable replacement couch). The film could be a new release in theaters, a classic worthy of a good discussion, or a truly turr-ible film for even livelier discussion. This segment will be videocast to allow me to work with this blog's videocast capabilities.

The Hot and Bothered Effect podcast will be much the same format as the old one. Though I will be working to integrate videocasting into the podcast as well.

The Guest Blogger of the Month segment should be substantially different. Under the old system I would take friends who had blogs and ask them for content for my blog to help promote their blogs, along with taking excerpts from some of my other favorite blogs across the internet. I've decided to open the Guest Blogger segment up to anybody who wants to write for this blog. Many of the best word smiths I know don't have their own blogs and I'm hoping that this segment will propel this blog towards the aforementioned Phase 2. Eventually, I'd like for this blog to have two or three co-bloggers. We'd each write a post a week, but the blog would still pump out content every other day. That's the dream.

Thanks for your readership and I hope you enjoy the new blog. Please feel free to comment as usual.