The Basics
I started Geek Becomes Eclectic as a blog where I could express my opinions about the things I like, that just happens to be manga, anime, indie music, and video games right now. But that doesn’t mean the site is limited to those subjects either, I’ll cover whatever catches my fancy at the moment. That could mean news stories, tutorials, and maybe even some previews of upcoming projects. I do try to take into account the popularity of a subject before I write about it, and whether I feel that I have something unique to offer you as a reader. There are a lot of places out there for you to get opinions on a lot of popular subjects, but when you come here I want to try my best to make sure you’re getting something special.
Reviews
Naturally a good deal of my articles are about reviews, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a dedicated review site just yet. For one, the things I talk about aren’t always on the cutting edge of newness, some of the articles on here are about things that are already a few years old. That’s because I want to talk about the things I think are important, not just the things that are new. There’s plenty of things in our everyday life that we just don’t have time to look into or experience. Our view of popular culture would have us believe that after the new stuff comes out it’s too late to buy the old stuff, and I’m here to say that’s just not so.
I don’t use any type of grading system per say, but it’s possible I will in the future. For now I try to treat every review as a conversation between me and the reader, where I break things down for the goal of helping them decide if this product is right for them. Giving something four stars doesn’t always mean that someone will automatically like it, and the small about of information available to us at the stores isn’t always enough to make a purchase decision.
I try to treat you the reader as I would a friend, telling you about the new thing I just bought. I want you to have a complete understanding of it, because I’m excited about it. And if I don’t like it, than you can be sure I’m going to be passionate about not liking it. Either way you’re going to get a lot of information that explains exactly why I did or didn’t like something, not just a brief synopsis and a grade.
Images
I use a lot of images in my articles, in many ways I use them to create their own article (like in the Wolverine review). Unless otherwise stated, all images are property and creations of their original license holders. I take no credit for any of them. I do however put my logo on the images which I have personally captured or prepared for the articles on the site. I do that to show that this site took the time to get the images, while also protecting the work it took to prepare them. Also, at this point I’m not large enough to get into contact with the PR firms for the products I review, that’s in the cards, but I’m not there yet. For me, having the logo on the images means that if I were ever asked to take them down, it would be easy to track if someone took images from the site and was using the elsewhere.
Ads and Affiliate Programs
Right now I’m using Google Adsense to place targeted ads on the side bar of the site, I’m trying to make them as relevant as possible, but at the same time I don’t want them to be a distraction from the core site experience, so they will remain on the sidebar. If you do see something that catches your eye, then by all means feel free to click it and see where it takes you, all the sites they lead to are safe since they must comply with Google’s terms of use.
Secondly I have an Amazon.com affiliate list above the adsense bar. That is a list of items created specifically by me, to help you get your hands on any of the products I talk about as quickly and painlessly as possible. Clicking on any of the items will take you directly to their Amazon.com product page. Buying the items from that process also gives me a small kickback, which doesn’t affect your purchase in any ways at all. I also only put items on there that are worth buying, not everything I’ve talked about ever. So if you see it on the list that means I at least gave it a passing grade.
As of today though (06/29/11) Amazon announced that they may discontinue the affiliate program for CA residents, due to a new state tax law on online revenue. If that comes to pass then I’ll probably utilize some other affiliate program like YesAsia’s and just keep a list of links to the Amazon items on a non-blog page like this one.
