I'm a Blogger Now
Funnily enough, it's been nearly a quarter since my quarterly existential crisis, where I found myself only able to write.
This quarter, and hopefully for many more quarters moving forward, I want to continue to write. Here, more than elsewhere, if you catch my drift. I know it's the whole artificial clean slate, new years resolution shenanigans getting to me, but I've still given myself permission to claim the future, to create, and to enjoy it.
I read a lot of Tabletop Roleplaying Game blogs, and I do anticipate writing about the things I see, and the things that inspire me in that space. Something about seeing that graph that the ever-incredible elmcat of Among Cats and Books fame (do we refer to each other with that word?), I really wanted to just appear on it.
I have a computer science background, as in that was what I've studied academically, and so seeing a terrifyingly dense graph with nodes and vertices does get me a little excited. I'm also really inspired by people on all "corners" of said graph. I don't play/do/create/follow GLoG, but I find a lot of incredible inspiration from GLoGgers. I'm not a Grognard, but I feel drawn to the humble beginnings, the core premises, and the tasteful (and often completely non-tasteful) abstractions that form the old-school game. While I'm more proud of growing up on AD&D 2e than I am my years of experience being the "forever-DM" of a 5E (2014) group back in my heyday, it was that unsatisfactory experience for me that got me to break down my style, my quarrels with the system I had, and to explore what it is that I actually wanted to play, and run for my friends. In fact, one of my favourite "OSR blogs" that is entirely 5E-driven, was probably one of the first I ever saw, that being The Monsters Know What They're Doing, who taught me how to approach monsters as puzzles, as strategic, tactical elements, with context, and intricacy, rather than just a stat block that I narrowed down filtering on the old Kobold Fight Club. All of that is to say that I don't want to be pinned down by artificial labels, and grouped together with one blogger or another. I hope that I can be a contributing member to all of their communities.
I imagine it will take some time for me to find my style, to come up with series to write, and topics that I'm passionate about. I'm not worried if my early works are crap, or if they're my best, and everything after is garbage. I don't care if people read my work, or if my work is deemed "good", or if I pace it right, spell it right, make sentences that make sense, or use too many commas and really make you run out of breath when you try to read it out loud. What I care about is making room for myself to engage in a hobby that I love, and don't get the opportunity to create for enough. I care about forming a healthy connection between my conscious self and the self that is deeply terrified of someone observing me. I care about feeling like I did something, and having done something, even if it was just typing words in a box to put in a dark corner on the internet. I care about having a part of the internet that is mine.
It won't all be tabletop roleplaying "content" though. I have other thoughts. A lot of them, when I choose to admit that to myself. In fact, you may have noticed this "roleplaying post" had no gameable content. They probably won't often, and I tend to agree with Lizzie of Magnolia Keep that gameable content simply stands as a term to narrow down what is and isn't supposed to be useful. Being someone who creates isn't about being someone who is polished down into their most useful state. There are so few things that I can just pick up from a blog and shove into a campaign because someone else made them for their thing, or a hypothetical other thing, that my thing is not. I want to, and I hope others in the space do too, just make cool things and let the things, the art, be the inspiration, instead of tacking on some half-baked polished "content" to make sure it's useful enough to be consumed. So I'm going to make stuff, and I'll try to remember that it's art. I hope that I can use the things I consume to make things for others to consume that helps them make things. Or point people to the things that I consumed that helped me make things, and maybe get a couple of recommendations in return. I want to link to things an annoying amount, but I want those links to be to things that I found to be art that inspired me. And I'm inspired for TTRPG things, and for life, by things that are and are not TTRPGs. How can I separate, or define either. And this is my corner of the internet, so sometimes you're just going to get thoughts. Sorry?
I want to be one of those people who does that whole 52 in 52 thing where I commit to actually writing "a post a week" for the year, and then do that for 10 years or whatever when I randomly vanish from the internet. I do hope the internet is still a functioning entity by then, but to save myself from opening that can of worms, I will now depart, and begin my life as a blogger, in 2026.