Hey, funny seeing you around here

Hey Y’all. I’m not dead or anything. Just letting you know… Okay, see you in another 16 weeks.

I wish I was brave enough to just make this post and genuinely wait another four months before posting again. But it’s taken me two weeks to actually sit down and actually write this post. So yeah, it might go without saying, but I haven’t been especially active in 2022. I let my WordPress Premium lapse and everything. I’m going to be real with you though. After writing multiple posts a week for several years on end without much of a break: I was just burned all the way out. Extra crispy like Al Simmons.

I was writing so much, and while I used to do it to feel creatively fulfilled, it had all the way started to feel like an obligation. Like an extra job on top of the terrible job I already have. It was making me unhappy and worse yet, it was making me resent blogging all together. I started to care too much about the metrics and the feedback from people showing that they were actually reading what I was writing. I mean, sure, getting any kind of positive reinforcement does wonders for your motivation when it comes to creative pursuits, but it shouldn’t be the sole reason you do it.

So I threw my hands up. No, not really. Actually, I just started missing deadlines, then I started trying to make new schedule plans, and then missing those. In the end I realised I was enjoying my free time more now it wasn’t mostly dedicated to “consuming corporate product” and trying to produce my own “product” in reaction to it. So I just stopped and started living my life some more.

And you know what, it’s worked wonders for me, I’m just one new job away from being an entirely new and reinvigorated person. Or I would be if world politics and souring cost of living weren’t beating me down like some raging orc with multi attack. But hey, you take what you can get and considering I’m in a healthy and happy relationship now and I found myself a new hobby on top of that, I am getting some good things I feel I’ve probably been due considering the past half decade of my life.

The astute of you may have realised that I dropped a clue towards my new hobby just then. Any of you who have been reading my blog with a fervour over the past number of years (Which I absolutely know is no one at all) will know that this isn’t a new hobby for me at all, but one I dipped into and then back out of a few years ago. But I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons again.

And you want to know what It was that put the bug back into me and make me want to play table top RPGs again? …What? Stranger Things? Haha! No, I don’t have Netflix anymore. It was Tiny Tina of all fucking people. A bloody Borderlands spinoff game based on a DLC that made me remember how much fun D&D was and made me want to play again. Which is an admission that’s about as hilarious to me as it is embarrassing. But you know what, it’s not about how you got there, as long as you do get there in the end.

Boy am I also really lucky that Stranger Things did come out, because it put table top RPGs back into the public interest in a major enough way that a local “Geek” cafe opened in my town and runs games pretty much every night of the week. And so, for he first time ever I was able to sit around a table with a bunch of other real life, flesh and snot humans and roll some dice and pretend I was a Cleric of the Nature Domain.

It was so much fun and scratches such an itch that I have found myself looking for other games to sate my appitiate, to the point that I found myself playing three games a week. Three very different games. My live one, one entirely text based on discord and a voice chat game online playing the published adventure; Curse of Strahd. Don’t tell anyone from my other games, but that last one has become my favourite game of the lot. I play a himbo psychic Dragon man and couldn’t be having more fun.

So much so that I started writing up session synopsis for the players who missed games.

Which brings us all round back this very post I’m writing now. Yeah… you thought this was just a pointless ramble? Of course it was, I’m not smart enough to write academic style breakdowns anymore. BUT. Writing those synopsis and getting some feedback about them, it put the previous bug (the bug scorned and left out in the rain) back into me. I started to remember that I enjoyed writing. And maybe enough time had passed that my sour feelings were gone and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to come back and start putting stuff up on my blog again.

But don’t get all excited and make a mess. I’m not promising nothing. All I’m going to do it try and see how the fit feels. I’m going to try and post once a week. Once every seven days. that’s four times a month and 52 times a year. 

For how long I couldn’t say. This could very easily crumble and I go into another 16 weeks of self imposed exile of actually enjoying my life. I’m going to get back and start talking about some games, some anime and some Star Wars again. I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about my D&D hobbies. I have a habit of oversaturating myself with my obsessions and mixing it with my blogging might sour me on both. I don’t want that.

So here I am, back on my blog that’s now covered in hideous adds because I can’t afford the premium version of the site anymore. Let’s see how it goes. I think I’d like to try and write more collaborations and stop being this aloof/antisocial/assburgery loner. Who knows if I’ll have the bravery to reach out to anyone and organise that…Oh shit… this means I have to start watching Rebels again…