The Art of Video Games: The Guestbook

I went to The Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday with my brother. I'll upload more of the video we took when I get back from the two-week road trip I'm leaving for tomorrow, but I wanted to show off one of my favorite things at the exhibit: the guestbook. This guestbook was laid out for visitors to sign just a few days before on August 30th, and it already had quite a few people write in it. There are a lot of nice messages in there, along with people mentioning their favorite games or drawing their most beloved characters. It's a little lengthy, but I recommend checking it out to see what fellow enthusiasts had to say about the exhibit and video games in general. You can see my brother and I put our own messages in at the end.

I didn't see any mentions of Giant Bomb in there (I'll do that when I return to the exhibit later this month), but someone did draw the NeoGAF logo!

Go to the 15:00 mark for my hilarious suggestions for what my brother should write.

The New Year

January 1st, 2010. It will be a while before we have a year that sounds this cool again. I figured the first day of the New Year would be perfect for the first post of a new blog!

My name is Charles Alan Ratliff. As you might have already inferred, this is my website. This means I will be writing about whatever I wish. I'm really into video games, so that will be the primary topic written here, but instead of creating a blog with "game" somewhere in the title, I opted to go with my name instead. This way, if I ever feel like writing something unrelated to video games, I don't have to ponder as to whether or not I really should. I won't have some nagging feeling that instead of posting about this unrelated topic on something that calls itself a video game blog, that I should just make a separate blog for such a thing. Going with my name gives me the ultimate freedom to write about what I want without feeling like it's "wrong".

I created this site for one simple reason: I like to write. That is it. DONE. I like to write where things can be read, and I figured a public site on the Internet is a pretty good place for that. This site has no specific aspirations, no specific goals. It is merely an outlet for myself. If people like to read it, cool. If not, cool.

This site is a major work-in-progress. Depending on when you're reading this, there's a good chance everything you see is going to be changed dramatically. For now, I have started with something basic as I wanted to get a post out on January 1st, 2010 at midnight. I could easily fake the timestamp on this post, but I didn't want to start my site out with a lie.