It's Been A While

The last couple of weeks have been busy, though that 'busy' has not been a bad one. It has, however, been more up and down than I believed it would turn out. My free time has been taken up with friends and my busy time has been taken up with... well, attempts to write, or craft worlds, or simply to make sense of so many responsibilities I have assigned to myself. There is the dentist I need to make time to return to in order to set up the appointment for the day I will again have to find time and a chaperon to return once again. There is the apartment I need to clean, not only for myself, but for company; I haven't had company in ages and I feel as though I am obligated in some way to impress them, and believe I consistently fail to do so in every respect. There is the woman I continue to pursue, and a relationship which I require; two things that are mutually exclusive from one another. Lastly, there is the writing.

My writing habits have been bouncing all over the place. The article format I've been using as my regular template has grown a bit stale and I've made a few efforts to post something a bit more personal, as the kind of writing you might run into on a personal blog. While games are a personal passion of mine I'm not finding that my writing or my job are allowing me enough time to play as much as I would prefer to, and it is diminishing my drive to write about them in a daily capacity. From this point onward I may attempt to produce no more than a handful of "articles" each month based on whatever I find to be the most interesting topic for myself to invest time into on any given week. I've taken some time out of each day lately to invest back into producing the one-shot pen-and-paper Role-Playing Game I began several months ago when, for a disappointingly brief period, I was involved in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. This undertaking involves the creation of an entire universe, with its own history and characters, along with a new core gameplay mechanic based loosely on the Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 rule set. I don't have any players available to share the campaign with at the moment, but my creativity will not be deterred, and I am requiring myself to complete this thing which I have started.

My love for gaming journalism took one hell of a blow yesterday when my Twitter account started seeing messages posted regarding a buyout of the 1UP network by UGO. Somewhere between 10 and 12 hours of every week for the last fourteen months have been invested into 1UP's various podcasts and the news that thirty or more of the people producing or otherwise involved in the podcast were 'released' from employment left me rather down. At least 30 of the greatest personalities of the 1up network were canned all in one sitting and are now entering into this new year and its terrible economy searching for work. After investing several months into a television show or a manga magazine a consumer can find himself feeling attached to their characters... After pouring nearly 500 hours into following each of these guys, and any number of hours poring over their articles online, I can definitely say I've grown attached to the crew. Thankfully even in such hard times there's some light in the darkness. Eat-Sleep-Game has absorbed Anthony Gallegos, Nick Suttner, and others of the crew, and is providing the bandwidth to host a new podcast with these characters called Rebel.FM. If they can get some ads up and running they might even be able to make a return on their currently-free time investment.

Anyway it's all been one longer roller coaster of good friends and bad news. As the dust settles I'm hoping it'll get a little easier for me to figure out what direction I want to take my writing, or at least afford me the focus to figure out a system where I can keep myself on track while still allowing me to branch out and try some new things. Lord knows I need more time to read, which drives me nuts enough even without constraints because of my slow reading speed. While that all sorts itself out I think I'll try to press myself back into the whole blogging thing and hammer some more work out over the next couple of days. Stay tuned for updates and some additional exposition.

War in.