Tuesday, April 01, 2008

My Bloggy, Bloggy, Life

So the hail was still on the ground when I got up this morning, sublimating into a thick, "can't see your hand in front of your face much less drive" kind of fog. But instead of talking about that (and its April Fools Day, so who's going to believe it?), let me just talk about the state of the blog.

I think I've mentioned before that I do blogging absolutely wrong. Apparently, the trick is to get a subject, and bang away at it continually, which creates a pool of individuals who tune in regularly. If you write about comics, write about nothing but comics (OK, and movies based on comics). If you feel strongly about a political policy or official, slam away at that. Your market self-selects, and will come back if they agree with you, and expect a certain type of mental meal each time.

I don't do that. I'm all over the joint. Collectible Quarters. Local Politics. The Commute. Comics. Weather. What I'm working on (usually LONG AFTER I'm done working on it). I could do nothing but push the latest cool thing I've been working on, but that's kind of boring. Ditto for the idea of covering politics - god knows that talk radio and the cable channels have seized a political viewpoint and just keep beating the drum.

But the other cost of being so wideband is that I have a lot of things I've been MEANING to say that I haven't gotten around to yet. I have a pile of books that I've been meaning to review. I have politics that I've meant to comment on that have now moved into history. I have a handful of half-written articles on holidays and imaginary states (Franklin, Kawana, and Sequoia are all on my to-do list) that have been waiting their turn. And it has been increasingly obvious that, while I don't have any great theory of game design, the old stories need to be told, to pass on to a new generation how we got here.

Another trouble from broadband coverage - I want to be as accurate as is reasonable. I have no problem being wrong - I just want to make sure I'm not obviously wrong. So I check out net links and consider sources, which takes time, which slows me down even further.

So what to do? For the moment, I'm going to try to keep up a daily dose, and not feel bad about posting multiple times a day (I have been trying to keep it to once per day, just out of consideration of my other deadlines). I need to restructure the blogroll on the side, since some of my comrades have changed their setups or fallen by the wayside. I want to find a better way of posting photos. I don't think I'm going to mess around too much with the presentation, only because, after all these years, people are used to it.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with what this blog has done - it allows people to find out what I'm doing and what's bothering me without actually having to buy me a beer.

And I'm good with that.

More later,