It's so damn hot.

Hey yeah, quick site update thing for you.

1. You may have noticed kind of spotty news here over at least the past week or two. Sorry about that. As most of you are probably well aware, most of the States are on fire, figuratively speaking. Where I am is no exception to that. It's been in the 90s for the past week with high humidity and it's just been absolutely miserable. It's even more miserable in my work room with an AC that cannot keep up at all with the heat, especially when the AC downstairs is on and pushing even more excess heat upstairs. The AC's temp was reading higher inside than it was outside at a few points!

It sucks. I've been working less because of it and spending more time downstairs with the more powerful AC to try to keep cool.

2. On top of the heat thing, I've also been working on reviews when I can at night. The first of which was for the Phantom controller, which you can check out right now. I'm also working on reviews for the Steam release of Crime Boss: Rockay City and apparently I now also have to review the Elden Ring DLC. I had put in a request for the DLC weeks ago but didn't get a review code when other outlets did. I had (typically pretty safely) assumed I wasn't going to get a code.

Well, a code came in probably 30 minutes after I already got done downloading the DLC through Steam anyway. So while I was going to just play it casually, it's now a review obligation. I have no idea when that will go live but you probably already saw the scores for that and know it's stellar.

3. Thirdly, you may have noticed some slight changes to the layout on the site. I was trying to just get things looking a little more uniform across the different pages. I hope it's alright.

You may have also noticed some less obtrusive ads and ad placements (I hope). I was letting Google do their "auto placement" thing for ads but over time they just started to appear damn near everywhere. I saw them showing up between articles on the main page and making the layout look terrible. Then there was the full page thing that showed up whenever you tried to load a new page. It was getting out of hand.

I made some adjustments to those settings so that it hopefully isn't an issue anymore. I also believe it's set up so that you maybe see an add or two less when logged in as opposed to viewing the site as a guest.

Besides making the sidebars look similar between the main page and article pages, another change includes moving the social media buttons to the bottom of every page. You may notice a couple of extra buttons now. One for Bluesky (@totalgamingnetwork.com) and another for Threads (totalgaming.network). While I haven't quite fully committed to it, I am thinking of ditching Twitter as far as one of our social feeds is concerned. I have been thinking about this for roughly a year now, ever since I closed my personal Twitter account due to, let's just say, the absolute fucking dumpster fire that is Twitter these days. Of the laundry list of issues it has is the fact that if you aren't logged in to an account you typically cannot even see the most recent posts anyway. Plus, the only recent likes/comments have been from "M Y 😺 I N B I O" bots.

I'm not 100% there yet on ditching it but I am in the high 90s.

I have also briefly started to look into adding separate share buttons for Threads and Bluesky, which on the surface seems to be a bit more involved than I thought (the hell is an intent link?!). At least with FB and Twitter, vBulletin has them built in. As it stands, I click the share button for Twitter after I post new news. I copy that and post it manually to Bluesky and Threads. Facebook is at least handled by IFTTT (except when it randomly stops working and only alerts me two weeks later).

tl;dr: Uniform layout. Less ads. Twitter bad, use Threads or Bluesky please.

4. Finally, just something I am in the very early stages of working on...