And the ultimate bloging begins

Everyone’s starting a blog nowadays and so am I.

I’ve wanted to make some kind of space slightly distinct but not really from my “professional” stuff, where I’m not pinging everyone who’s just here to play video games, and now I’m pulling the trigger and actually doing it. This has come about from a few motivations:

• I have terrible illnesses that make me desire things such as “going back into academia and getting a PhD”, so this feels like a good way to sate this until I figure out how to do that.

• I’m getting a cool couple dollars to write something for a non-fiction anthology and decided to put out more things in that vein for free, for some fucking reason.

• I saw other people making short, impactful blogs that I rotated in my head for a few days, and then I went: Huh? I don’t have to pad a thought around five thousand words of work to make me feel like it deserves to be shown to the world? Damn. Wish I’d known that earlier.

This guy’s made in Hugo and uses the PaperMod theme, which I’ve spliced up a little. And using it has been pretty fun! It’s nice to play with something modern and powerful enough to potentially do whatever I’d like (and it was nice enough to let me do some Whack js to get margin footnotes working)¹, but also light enough that it doesn’t feel like all that power’s wasted as bloat. Exporting this to see the whole website was under 300KB gave me satisfaction that was almost sexual.

My hope for the blog is to write short snippets² dissecting a design concept, writing about writing about writing, fleeting thoughts, some cool shit I’ve seen recently, mundane rants on life; whatever tickles my fancy. Maybe one or two a month. Less if I’m caught by a desperate need to make another game in a week.

There’s some I’ve got in mind that will need more than a few hundred words (that breakdown of the design links between Dynasty Warriors 9 and Dynasty Warriors Origins I mentioned exactly once being one), and those will definitely be few and far between. Or not. Who fucking knows? I don’t. I’m just moving my fingers around and then words appear on your screen. I’m not in control of any of this.

I won’t be posting stuff on Medium anymore, given there’s literally no motivation for me to do so, and I’m just leaving whatever’s on there now untouched because I’ve seen links to them going around. Game postmortems will be on both itch and this blog, and anything else will end up only here. I do also, at some point, want to set up a newsletter and put all my email marketing “skills” to use. Whether that ends up as a mirror to this blog, just the postmortems, or also include my ko-fi updates, I’m not certain yet. I’ll see if I actually bother to keep this running and go from there.

As for now, I’ve back-ported my previous postmortems to this blog, which you can check out at your own leisure. If I’ve set this up correctly there should be the first actual post if you click that fancy next button on the bottom. I’ve made a career around manipulating people into clicking buttons, so it would make me very happy if you clicked that button.

There’s no proper way to end this. Click that button.