Here's a blog post.

Hello!

There are two different "sign of life" style posts in two different .txt files on two different computers, which were incidentally written in two different years. This is not either of those.

I used to have a job. I used to have a job that gave me what is, presently, an unbelievable amount of money for not a ton of work. That's one sentence. Here's another one: I used to write on this and other sites a lot more than I have in some time. Maybe those sentences are related. Maybe not. It is a mystery.

I miss NamCompendium. I miss HuCARTography. I miss having a drive to write about video game stuff. My relationships to those projects have been strained for some time now. Here's one thing that I can say for sure: I won't be renewing the namcompendium.com domain or hosting going forward, so that writing is going to live on this site and perhaps wind up mirrored on some free blog ala @borgmaster.

As for what either of those projects look like going forward, the reality is there are just better ways to absorb some of the same information. Between Jeremy Parish's ongoing work, RndStranger's criminally underappreciated Famidaily and PC Engine Power series on YouTube (if you don't click on this link I'll kick your shin) and blogs like Ant Cooke's Gaming Hell, a lot of my creases either have been or are actively being covered by more capable people. And that's not to mention GB posts from aforementioned Borg and other Deep Listens collaborators @zombiepie and @arbitrarywater, whose work has outshone mine from the jump.

And yet, here I am trying to stoke this thing alive again.

What may wind up happening is I'll crib ideas from the above mentioned GB bloggists as well as @mento, and just write less expansively. There's no word count requirement here, and if I simply must cover the twenty-seven discrete ports of some Namco game nobody particularly cares about, it probably makes to not produce novellas on each of those ports. That's for NamCompendium. As for HuCARTography, that project will start hitting some real natural walls once the games largely shift to CD-ROM format with no English support and only the dimmest fan translation prospects. It is scoped. Honestly the thing I hate the most is dicking around putting images into the posts, so look forward to fewer words and fewer images.

Do I have anything written for either of those projects? Buddy, I absolutely don't. Am I hitting the back half of a school semester with a bunch of assigned writing coming down the pike? For sure. So rather than commit to either of my existing things, I'm also considering just doing a semi-regular check in talking about what I've played in the last week-ish and how it's sitting. These posts would be less because I think anybody here would be thrilled to read them, and more for my own sake. It would be nice to remind myself in the future how I felt about something in the past; I guess that's why we started writing stuff down?

Furthermore, I'd like to leave something behind about this hobby that I've loved for thirty years. I've experienced some very off-time deaths in the last few years of friends and family. It has me thinking about what I'd like people to know about me when I'm gone. I'd like them to know plenty of more practical things, sure. But my friends, these stupid toys made out of light and sound are what make me happy. They've been the bridge to some of my closest friendships, have earned me some money over the years, and they're what I would rather be doing a lot of the time. I don't know what the media landscape of the future will look like, but maybe my relatives in fifty years would like to know that I thought Katamari Damacy is a masterpiece. Maybe I should articulate why, in writing. Here, even.

Anyway, hey I made a reference to Vinny's Diamond <> in an Advanced Communications class this week and thought about this site and how much I love it here. Hope I still have something to contribute. In the meantime if you're ever on Vancouver Island let's get a beer.