A Blog Recommendation

I don’t read many blogs – I have enough in my hands reading my correspondense and a couple of forums. I’m also pretty bad at reading recommended linkages, but I do make the effort. Some time back Joshua Bishop-Roby linked me to an excellent blog. Then I just read the article he linked, but during my first annual State of the Blog address yesterday I went there again, and man that’s one amazing blog!

State of the Blog Address 2008

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but being that I barely have the time to write anything else, it’s been postponed. What is? Why, the State of the Blog Address, to commemorate me having blogged for a whole year now. I’m celebrating the occasion by retagging and recategorizing the blog contents to make the structure reflect the contents better – hindsight is so much better than foresight at this sort of thing.

My Gencon

Ho ho ho, as some of you might already know, I’m going to Gencon this year. (That assumes that they don’t have to cancel because of their bankrupcty or something, of course.) One big reason is that I’ve wanted to participate in the Forge booth for a long time, and for some reason I have this feeling of closure, that if I don’t go this year it won’t be pertinent next year anymore. (Perhaps I’ve just let too many years pass without going or something.) Another reason is my most fine and excellent zombie game (still only in Finnish) I’m going to produce for the English-language market and publish at Gencon. A third reason to go is that I was thrust into the role of republishing The Shadow of Yesterday by surprise, which is more than enough reason to go shop it around like a mad elephant.

Back with news

Ho hum, a human is a busy creature, and apparently the first thing I cut when I’m busy is blogging. This is a fortunately non-pressurized medium, though, perhaps because of the singular publication model: no need to edit, print or publicize yourself when you want to write. Nice.

Anyway, as a brief explanation for the latest month-long silence, I offer thee this. In other words, I’m going to Gencon this year with the Forge booth if everything goes well. There’s quite a bit of planning involved with all the flight plans, hotels and, foremost, preparing products for the convention. I’m going to perchance discuss my products in greater length later either here or some other medium, for now it’s sufficient to say that I’m being pretty busy writing and producing the games I want to sell at Gencon.

I’m still hoping to write the blog as well during the summer months, though. The first order of business is to write more extensively about different flavours of fantasy gaming, which topic has stood open for a while now after my latest post. A big topic, but I’ll tackle it soon.

New Blog!

Ha ha ha haa, I started a new blog in Finnish. The name of the blog is Bear Blog and it’s quite cute. I’m doing it at wordpress.com once again, for I’m pretty happy with WordPress. The new blog is going to be about Finnish topics and stuff that has nothing much to do with game design, such as politics, religion and philosophy. We’ll see it in action during the coming months.

Back from hiatus…

If you can call a month’s break a hiatus, anyway. I’ve been plenty busy with all seven kinds of projects ranging from typical whitecollar slaving to preparing for Tracon, one of my favourite Finnish conventions. Apparently blogging is one of the simpler things to set aside when you’re busy, so here we are.

It should make sense that after not writing the blog for a month I should have some interesting topics. At least they interest myself:

• I read the entire oeuvre of Vaskikirjat, a Finnish indie fantasy publisher. Pretty interesting, I’ll be writing about it a bit later. Erkka Leppänen, the publisher, has good taste.
• I’ve been playing a lot of Fantasy Flight Games boardgames, which basically means large Ameritrash games with  lots of pieces. Something useful should be said about those, I think.
• I’m almost done with Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is apparently considered one of the best adventure video game titles of its generation at the end of the ’90s. I was mired in low quality computer gaming at the time, which perhaps explains why I’m just playing the game with determination now. Some interesting notes presumably forthcoming.
• As the readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with “adventure gaming” lately, which then became the topic of a lecture I gave at the aforementioned Tracon convention. Some folks have asked for written notes, which I’ll probably put up here at the blog at some point.

As for when I’m actually going to write about the above topics… well, we’ll see. Hopefully soon.

Blogging plan

Hee hee, my blog got positive attention from Ville Vuorela (who’s apparenty becoming a strange raving gnosis-gnome mascot for my blog, based on how I end up referring to him constantly; I probably should get his picture in the sidebar or something), which has interesting results for blog visibility. One of the good parts in being hosted by WordPress are the pretty powerful usage statistics the software keeps for me. These tell me that while I’ve been writing my blog for the last couple of weeks, I haven’t had any significant traffic. This isn’t really such a surprise, considering that I haven’t told practically anybody about the blog yet. I told Ville a bit ago because I’d love to hear what he thinks about our developing game project, and I linked the Acts of Evil playtest report I made earlier to the Ashcan Front forums. The latter brought in around ten people during the last five days, WordPress tells me. Ville’s blog seems to have brough 17 visitors as of this writing, and it’s only been a couple of hours since he made the posting, I understand. Pretty interesting, the day is my best yet with 55 views total at this point, and it’s not even finished yet. Not that I have any use for views per se.

Building up my link list

I’m nocturnal, but this is ridiculous. After this I’ll leave well enough alone and go get some sleep. Instead of doing that sensibly an hour ago, I ended up making a list of links for the “blogroll” as it’s called. My list is rather restrained right now, not exactly the “sites that you visit often” recommended by WordPress.

Starting a WordPress blog

OK, I come to the wonderful, huge world of blogging with little in the way of experience. I don’t read many blogs (I think I listed the majority of them in my first post, actually) and I’ve never had a blog myself. I don’t even know if my temperament suits blogging, now that I think of it. Perhaps it will.

Now, why a weblog?

Why would a sensible man get himself a blog? The influences that led this particular unique snowflake to the same solution adopted by quite a bit over 50 million others can be triangulated thusly: