Nerd Bacon News: December (2)

Salutations Baconeers and Baconettes!

We are right in the thick of the holiday season, and for that reason, I won't take up too much of your time. Nothing in here is terribly time-sensitive, so if you've unplugged for a few days don't sweat it. In fact, we don't have too very much to go over in this issue, I'd just like to address a few points such as Unanswered Emails, the January Clean Up, our ongoing efforts to collect Game Series Lists, and a few other minor points.

So let's take a look at that Mario Challenge Scorecard and kick off the final issue of Greased for 2015!

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Mario Challenge Scorecard
Member	Number	Games
AbyssalOblivion	1	Mario Hoops 3-on-3 (DS)
The Cubist	7	Yoshi's Woolly World (Wii U) Super Princess Peach (DS) Mario is Missing! (SNES) Super Mario Kart (SNES) Mario's Time Machine (SNES) Mario Party 10 (Wii U) Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash (Wii U)
Doc Croc	2	Dr. Mario Online Rx (WiiWare) Mario's Picross (GB)
Justicescooby	1	Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GC)
NerdBerry	4	Mario's Tennis (VB) Super Mario Bros.: The Movie: The Game Mario Paint (SNES) Prima's Super Mario 64 Guide
Nerdy Friend	1	Yoshi's Woolly World (Wii U)
Paladin	1	Super Mario RPG (SNES)
Space Invader	1	Donkey Kong (2600)
Steroid Gamer	1	Super Mario 64 (VC)
ZB	4	Mario Tennis (N64) Wario Land 4 (GBA) Virtual Boy Wario Land (VB) Mario's Tennis (VB)

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Our scorecard is filling out slowly but steadily! So far I'm still the only one to earn a badge, but ZB and Nerdberry are right on the cusp with 4 reviews each! Justicescooby, Steroid Gamer, and Nerdy Friend enter the race; they've got a ways to go but there's definitely still enough time to pull it off. Don't give up!

Remember folks that there is only 1 month left in the challenge! We will always welcome your Mario reviews, but if you want them to count towards the mega awesome Weird Mushroom badge, you'll need to get a total of 5 of them in by February 1st! As always, if you need more details or if you've forgotten the particulars, go and take a look at Issue #14-S for everything you need to know.

My personal-ish challenge of reviewing a whopping 10 Mario games during the same time period is still open to anyone wishing to participate! I still plan on hitting this mark by the deadline, so if you're looking for something to do with your holiday-related free time, play as many Mario games as you can and join me!

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Unanswered Emails

I know that some of you are waiting for me to answer emails from you. I apologize for the tardiness and I promise I will get to them soon. If I haven't responded to you by the 27th, please resend your message just to be sure it hasn't gotten lost in the deluge. I've been kind of all over the place lately and as most of you know I prefer to answer emails when I have the time and energy to give you a proper response rather than just rushing through them as quickly as possible. So sit tight. I will be with you shortly!

For those of you who may be trying to reach David/Nerdberry, please be informed that he and the wife have just returned from the hospital after a prolonged childbirth. A planned induction turned into a cesarean and they spent several nights in the hospital, but everyone is home and doing well the last I heard. So let's give David and his family a "congrats" on their new baby girl!

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Game Lists Still Wanted!

Hey! Remember the "game lists" we kept on going on about a week or so ago? Well, we were truckin' along nicely when suddenly...they just stopped! What happened!? You all were doing a great job of filling up that list and keeping me busy and then they just quit coming in!

We've still got a lot of series to cover, and we'd really like to have a good chunk of this stuff ready to go when the January Clean Up gets started. So keep those lists coming! Several of you said things like, "I got this" or "I'll handle those" and I have yet to hear from you! Let's make a big push during this last week of December to get these lists done when possible, particularly those on the WANTED List. The master list of all the lists we've compiled so far can be seen at 1.17.3. We're glad to take lists for any and all franchises you care to cover, but remember that we've listed some especially important series on the Wanted List linked to above. I will continue to do my best to update the list in a timely manner so that the most recent versions are always available at the preceding links. Keep those lists comin' Baconeers!

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Email Issues with Yahoo Users

For the past several months, the Nerd Bacon servers have had some serious trouble sending messages to Yahoo's mail servers. I have no idea what the issue is, and the respective "postmasters" haven't helped much either. I don't know who's end the problem is on; NB mail seems to make it to other servers just fine and, as far as I know, the NB mail servers have no problem receiving mail from other servers. In fact, I'm almost 100% sure that any and all emails sent from Yahoo reach NB addresses without incident. It's when Yahoo receives (or rather tries to receive) messages that things go awry. Based on the number of "undelivered mail" bounces I get, I'd say 50% or more of the message sent from Nerd Bacon addresses to Yahoo addresses do not make it through.

The majority of you all have Gmail-based email addresses, which to my knowledge, have never given us any problems. We're definitely not going to ask those of you with Yahoo addresses to change them or create a separate email for receiving stuff from us, though if you are a Yahoo user, it's worth noting that not everything may make it through. Naturally I attempt to resend something whenever it gets bounced back to me, but sometimes it seems as if certain messages just will not go through. If you do have a Yahoo account and you're an author with your own domain email address as well, I would encourage you to use http://nerdbacon.com/webmail/ to log into your domain account every couple of days, even if you've set up automatic forwarding.

If you use Yahoo but do not yet have a domain email and are worried about missing emails from us, we will set you up with an NB email account, even if you haven't yet hit author status. We definitely want everyone to be able to read what we send out, and that's about the only thing we can offer up for those that might be affected. I don't think anyone currently with us falls into this latter boat, but just in case, there it is.

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We Need New Members! Badly!

It's no secret that recruitment is down...way down. We've got a tight-knit little team that we're really proud of, but we need new members! New members not only increase our productivity and bring even more opinions and viewpoints to the site, but they also help us expand our reach and get more stuff done. I'm not sure why the Craigslist scene is so dead - that's where we found most of you - but we're having a difficult time drawing in newcomers. Please help us out! Reach out to whoever you can, whether it's 1 or 2 friends or 1 or 2 hundred completely anonymous souls. Seriously, if there's one thing you can do for us over the next couple of months, it's to help us recruit in whatever way you can. If you have some unorthodox ideas or plans you might want to run them by us first to be sure, but we're pretty damn open when it comes to welcoming a few new faces to The Bacon. It's essential that we usher in some fresh talent so do whatever you can. Blanket Craigslist (maybe you'll have more luck?), bug your Facebook friends, hell, hand out our URL at your local GameStop! Direct anyone interested to http://nerdbacon.com/apply/. Every single member counts, so get out there and do what you can!

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Retroary is Coming!

February isn't that far away, and most of you know what that means around here... On the off chance that you're scratching your head in confusion right now, let me explain. After the rush of new games that hits around the holiday season, and once those winter days start getting really monotonous, we keep ourselves busy with Retroary, a month in which we celebrate "old games." As always we accept any and all reviews submitted during the period, though we do work to highlight our coverage of "retro" material. We define retro as anything pre-2000. You can also think of this as anything before the 6th generation, though we do make an exception for the Dreamcast and its library since a) it was released in 1999, and b) was the Dreamcast ever really a 6th gen competitor?

It's not quite time to get into the retro spirit yet; we definitely want to hear about all those new games you all got over the hoildays, and there's another month of the Mario Challenge left to go. Just keep it in mind, and maybe snag a few retro games the next time you're out!

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Review Spotlight

I know I said that our Review Spotlight would return in this issue, but everything's been just a little too busy and out of sorts this time around. It will be returnig shortly though!

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Get Greasy! ... in 2016!

2015 is drawing to a close, and with it, Volume 1 of Greased. Going into 2016, we'd like to update and refine the newsletter, based on what you all would like to read about! So stand up and speak out! What can we do in 2016 to make Greased a better newsletter? What kind of stuff do you want to see? Obviously we will still be covering on-site events and other relevant happenings, but what about everything else? Do you want us to go into more depth about how to be a better writer, technical stuff like writing more grammatically correct and using punctuation properly? Or maybe we should spend some space constantly reiterating certain rules and regulations? (Which we probably would do if we had a regular influx of new members...) Or perhaps I've totally caught your attention with my "guides" on certain HTML/CSS topics? Whatever you can think of, let us know, be it content-related or something to do with the layout. We'll do whatever we can to make the newsletter more readable, more informative, and just plain fun, or at least as fun as we can make a newsletter! Don't be shy! We do things a certain way because that's what we think is best, but we don't know what's best until you tell us, and we're almost always open to change and suggestion. Greased is for you guys (and gals), so tell us what you want!

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January Clean Up

January is right on our heels, and if you've been paying attention at all, you know that we're working on organizing a "clean up" effort for the site. While we don't necessarily need everyone on the site chipping in to get this done, we do need some volunteers, and so far we've only got 3 members willing to donate their time and energy to the task. To be any kind of effective I would postulate that we need somewhere around at least 5 people willing to help out. Don't forget, there just may be unforeseen rewards for joining the clean up (and actually following through, of course!) so at least keep it in mind if you think you might have some spare time throughout the coming January.

I'm currently drafting up a piece documenting the goals/procedures of the clean up, which I hope will be ready when January 1st hits. This piece will get into more specifics about what will be expected of any volunteers and instructions on how to meet these expectations, but just as a reminder, we'll be systematically examining every single article on the site to make sure it's as "up to code" as possible. This includes fixing incorrectly sized featured images, correctly filling in SEO information when missing, generating an acceptable excerpt when necessary, and keeping an eye out for articles of dubious quality that may need to be excised from our archives. We'll be looking out for a few other things as well, so we'd prefer that any volunteers have a basic understanding of WordPress, though if you've been with us a while and your Editorial Repors are generally clear, you should be good to go.

Please let me know if you'd like to help us out as soon as you can! If 10 of you guys come to me and want to be part of the effort, I'm going to have to say no to a few of you. We want enough members involved to get it done, but not so many that we're all bumping into each other. I would say it's first come-first serve, though those of you who've displayed a more competent understanding of WordPress may be accepted irrespective of order.

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Beyond Bacon: BEEF (Pork?) IT UP

Most of you are aware that a perk afforded to authors is the chance to start their own column under the Beyond Bacon banner. We still encourage those interested to do so, and we do enjoy having this little subsection to showcase other facets of nerdiness, but to be perfectly honest, we were really hoping that those of you with columns would, at least initially, inject them with a generous swath of content. We know it takes time to generate content; I guess we had just assumed that there'd be a degree of enthusiasm that would propel these columns, at least early in their development. For those involved, let's really make these areas count if possible. It looks a little strange to have a big ol' section set aside for an anemic selection of 1 or 2 articles. Don't panic - we're not going to delete your articles or anything, but we do want to see some activity! We know the holidays are busy so don't sweat it immediately, but maybe as this hectic time of year dies down those involved can put a little extra "oomph" into their columns. Forget the 50/50 rule for a little bit and focus on giving these columns some substance!

On behalf of Nerdberry and myself, I would like to apologize if we failed to adequately underscore that columns = work! Let me break it down: one review per month is the bare minimum for those wishing to be a part of NB. We do expect members running columns to regularly exceed this most minium requirement. One review per month means 12 per year. Our only rule regarding columns is that they account for no more than 50% of your total output. So if we do the math, that's only 6 column pieces and 6 reviews for an entire year. We'd hoped that those interested in maintaining columns would produce material well beyond this rate...think about it...a whole subsection of Beyond Bacon....that grows at a rate...of...6 articles...per...year...?

Columns are a chance to express your interest(s) beyond gaming. We never envisioned these columns as replacing half of the work you'd normally do; we figured that, having free reign, this would encourage you to write more! We don't mind handing over a slice of the site for you to make your own little corner with, but you gotta earn it! You gotta make it count! So embrace your column. Run wild with it. Just please, don't let it sit there and creep up at the rate of 1 article every month or two...

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Site Developments

Nothing major going on with the site itself, though this'll probably change as the clean-up gets into full swing. I have updated all of the online issues of Greased with up-to-date menus and made some other small adjustments and changes. You probably won't need to flip back through old issues (well maybe the HTML/CSS stuff), but hey, it's there if you need it! Visit the Greased Index if there's anything you need!

Site Stats are still on hold for the time being. I plan on doing a year end/year in review piece during the month of January (if not January's first issue then certainly the second) so I'll get you good folks caught up on our traffic next month.

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Until Next Time...

Well, we hope that everyone is having a great holiday and continues to do so! Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year! As we get into the dead of winter and everyone starts getting back to their routines, don't forget to make Nerd Bacon a part of your routine again! And also don't forget that we need some help around NB for those who can spare it. There's the January Clean-Up, the fact that were are badly in need of new members, and those damn game lists to consider. This is Greased, signing off for 2015.

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Issue #18

December 24th, 2015

Volume 1