Fall-time Spectacular: The State of the Blog!

It's been too long right? I know, I know, you are wondering, where has he been!? The answer my friends is that I've been here, just not writing as much as I've been intending to. In fact, I'm starring at a virtual stack of half-finished term papers ... err blog posts ... that I'd love get finished and submitted to the interwebz professors; but life has been hectic lately. I'm sure you've all been there.

Part of me is also a little torn about what direction in which to take the blog. One thing I'd like to do is have more frequent blog posts, which of course requires me to actually write blog posts more frequently. This conundrum is somewhat at odds with the fact that I haven't had a lot of extra time lately in which to write said blog posts (hence the lack of posts over the past few months). Sigh, it is a circular and terrible circumstance. What to do?

One thing I'm going to endeavor to accomplish is this: write shorter pieces more frequently, say at least once a week. I enjoy writing and talking about games and design thereof, and I have plenty I'd like to blather on about. Yet, I feel this pressure to wrap half a dozen disparate little threads and ideas together into some big monstrous magnum opus each time I post has become its own barrier to writing. It gets a little daunting when each post has to address some minutia of game design and relate it all the way up to grand cosmological theories! So perhaps I can force myself to be more incremental, to make smaller but more frequent and reflective posts in-between the big pontificating ones.

What about the content of these smaller posts? Here is the rub: I have to be honest in that I haven't had much time or opportunity to play boardgames over the past few months. Having two young kids will do that to you, especially when one of them isn't much of a "sleeper" and results in my wife and I stumbling through our days like zombie creatures. Breaking away and leaving the homestead understaffed for some period of 4 to 12 hours for a moment of blurry-eyed gaming is not a prospect I want to leave the home with. I will say my wife and I have been playing (far too many) games of Emu Ranchers in the evening - that game being about all we can collectively muster the forces to play.

BUT! There always a but! I have been playing plenty of games lately, even new ones, just far more of them are the digital sort, either on my various iOS devices (iPad Mini or iPhone 5s) or on my aging but venerable PC laptop. I have also continued to advance a number of game designs, and even daydreamed up some new ones worth talking about (soon). I've also been playing more boardgames with my older daughter (old being relative, she is only 3) and her cousins - HeroQuest and King of Tokyo have both seen some table action.

So, like the double rainbow, what does this all mean? This will mean that I'll be spending my fleeting flickers of time writing smaller posts on the blog. Perhaps these smaller posts will focus more on digital gaming and gaming with kids, at least until I get my hardcore tabletop mojo back! I have other enticing topics I'd like to discuss as well, related to game design and gaming culture, but I'll save those for the bigger, longer-windier posts. All said, I have justified this course of action internally because eventually I want to write a magnificent and eloquent post about the intersection of virtual and meat-space games and gaming - thereby retroactively making all these hypothetical posts about video games also actually about boardgames. You with me? Hang on!

If you have any applause or commentary to send my way, the comment button below was functioning fine last time I checked.

Till next time, thanks again - and cheers!