2019 Update

2019! It's January 1st, and tomorrow morning I'm leaving Colorado, leaving grad school, moving to New York (my dream city!) and starting a new career and living a whole new life! It's bananas and every time I think I've processed it all, I get hit by another wave of realizations. In the very, very, uncomfortably near future my life is going to radically change. It's stressful and terrifying and depressing, despite the fact that this is exactly what I wanted and my future prospects look amazing, but change and uncertainty are difficult and I'm trying to grapple with that.

I've still got plenty of posts backlogged, but I do hope that once I'm settled in, I can start engaging with the blog more actively again. I think the twice a week or so rate I was doing for nearly 6 months is something that I likely won't be able to return to though. Even at the time, I knew that wasn't going to be sustainable in the long run, I just figured I'd ride that wave while I could. Hopefully I can eventually settle into a once a week schedule, or maybe play with the format and do more frequent but smaller posts.

As some of you may be aware, I've largely disengaged from the community. I more or less stopped posting on / checking the tabletop subreddits, G+, and the larger discord groups, and virtually stopped advertising my blog. I have a few smaller groups I still engage with, still follow several blogs, and welcome people to introduce themselves to me or keep in touch with me, but I needed to take a step back from the larger community. Part of that was just a matter of practicality, in that I've had a lot of other stuff on my mind, obviously, and needed to focus on those things. Part of it was also, if I'm being honest, that I was getting frustrated, and I realized that I was engaging with the community in an unhealthy way and it was bringing out the worst in me, and I needed to take a step back and re-think things.

Honestly I still don't think I'm where I need to be in regards to the community, but with the New Year and a new life around the corner, now felt like the right time to at least make a first-pass effort at expressing myself.

First of all, I'm sorry to anyone I've made uncomfortable, offended, or pushed away as a result of my frustrations. In some cases it was me putting my foot in my mouth saying something I shouldn't have said, in other cases it was just me being a really negative, mean-spirited drag and venting that onto other people, and I'm sure there are all sorts of other dumb things I've done without even realizing it. Whatever I've said or done to you, I'm sorry.

Second, I don't know if I'd consider this a New Years resolution per se, but over the last year I've made a real effort to work on my interpersonal skills and be a more empathetic and open person, to mixed but generally positive results, but I really think I critically failed in regards to the tabletop community. Once I have the time, I'd like to find a way to re-engage, but in a more healthy way. I allowed a small number of toxic people to really get under my skin and take a lot of the joy of blogging and writing and tabletop out of me. There were times where certain things didn't go the way I wanted them to and I felt alienated or isolated or like I wasn't being understood, but I know that in most cases I wasn't effectively communicating in the first place, or it was mostly in my head until I made it a self-fulfilling prophesy. There were some other personal (as opposed to interpersonal) issues I was struggling with, and the two turned into a feedback loop that was not going to be sustainable for much longer.

There are so many things I want to do with my blog and in the tabletop community more generally, and I think I will soon have the means to make those things a reality, and the only thing that could keep those things from happening would be me getting in my own way, and that would be a shame, I think, or at least it would be a shame to me.

In terms of tabletop specifically, here are some loose "resolutions":

• Publish something. I'd like to do some small-scale book first, either a collection of tables, or a bestiary, or a setting book, or a book of settings, but something relatively small in scope and building off of things I've already worked on for my blog. Something I can hang my hat on and say "I made this thing, and it is good".
• Pixels & Platforms. I've discussed this with a few people, and maybe even on this blog and I'm just forgetting, but I'm working on a game of my own, tentatively called Pixels & Platforms. It's still in a very rough state and I haven't had the time or energy to give it its proper due, but I think the core idea of it is cool and I don't think anything like it has been done before, and given my design goals for it, I don't imagine that it will ever be anyone's main game, but hopefully if I get it in a shape that I'd be comfortable sharing, people will be able to appreciate it for what it is.
• Some avant-garde shit. Again, I have a few ideas I'm sitting on that I don't want to discuss quite yet, but given my whole "Weird & Wonderful" schtick, I'd like to do something unique and provocative; something that is unabashedly weird just for the sake of being weird, even if impractical, even if only a small number of people "get it".
• Play/GM more games; play with greater frequency, play a wider variety of games and settings, be engaged. There are certainly systems and settings I have in mind, but it's less about any particulars and more about just making sure that this remains a part of my life after all of the transitions I'm about to undergo.

So ya, that was a long post about simultaneously a lot of things and nothing, but that's where my life and where my head are at in this moment. I hope to talk to you all and share ideas with each other again soon!