So what happened?
Comments(4) And here we are galloping towards a full year since my last post. The chief factor in my silence can be summarized as “work”, and summarized slightly longer as “the worst, most extended crunch period of my entire career”. It wasn’t eleven months long, but it was long enough to completely get me out of the habit of blogging, and habit is the most important thing.
But there’s another factor as well. Last year, I violated the Oath in a completely new way: by purchasing a game on Steam when, according to the Oath, I was not allowed to. It was one of those cases where a game was so zeitgeisty and in-the-moment that I felt like I had to play it in order to keep up with the broader online discussion of games in general. And, having done that once, it was easy to decide to do it again, and again. Now, I’m accustomed to breaking the Oath by posting late. And I know what to do about that: just write the post late and move on. But I wasn’t sure what to do about this new infraction, and that uncertainty has paralyzed me.
These are the games I purchased this way: Her Story, The Beginner’s Guide, Undertale, The Witness 1Thekla, 2016; not to be confused with Stu Galley’s The Witness (Infocom, 1983). I’ve contemplated pulling the same joke as I did with Portal but I don’t think it supports it as well., and Firewatch. Each worthy of lengthy discussion that I still don’t feel up to. No, if I’m going to make blogging a habit again, I think I’ll have to just blog about whatever I’m playing on any given day — just write the post and move on.
| ↑1 | Thekla, 2016; not to be confused with Stu Galley’s The Witness (Infocom, 1983). I’ve contemplated pulling the same joke as I did with Portal but I don’t think it supports it as well. |
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The return of the Stack! Hooray! And yeah, I can see how what was once a way of keeping the stack manageable has become a club to beat yourself up with.
I feel like I don’t need to worry about my own stack as much lately, because the move to full-priced games while salutary for the economics of games has also pushed games past what I would spend on anything approaching impulse, and also I moved to a computer that while much faster and more functional than my old one also doesn’t even really have enough disk space for all my music and games, and it’s the music that wins.
Welcome back to the fold!
Always keep in mind that maybe you don’t want to blog about some game because it has been talked about to death on the internet….which could well be it with those games you bought last year. I for one have heard much about them.
So glad to find you writing again!
IMO writing is what’s important. The rules and oath and all of that are simply means to the end of writing. If they get in the way of that end, they need to go.
Just play and just write.
Also, yet another plug for you to finish Deus Ex. ;)