It could be. I’ve been playing a lot of it. But, it isn’t.
It’s about finding the motivation to blog, which, from what I gather, is this week’s theme.
When blogging was at its biggest, blogging meant something. So many people that I followed at the time turned their blogs into real jobs. I turned my blog into two real jobs – one at an insurance company (where I still work), and a short gig blogging with Massively. I met a lot of really good friends, including my boyfriend, blogging.
Even at that point of what I considered great success, my posts had no more than 150 visits per day. And I sweat blood over those posts. They’d take me hours. I’d do illustrations, do extensive research, use special fonts. I had a photography setup on my dining room table. My free time was spent blogging. And I had a bunch of blogs. I travelled the Northeast, Virginia and Ohio snapping pictures of cool bridges. I had a blog about writing an AI to solve the Shapeshifter puzzle in Neopets. I had a blog that I just used to talk about whatever was on my mind that day.
And then, I just. Stopped.
Finishing a game of Mini Rogue
I stopped so hard that I couldn’t even be bothered to renew my blog’s hosting or domain name, and so, West Karana died (though of course I had backups. I’m a professional software engineer. I back shit up.)
I got interested in blogging again a year and a half ago, during the pandemic, when I started getting excited about “Blapril”, and then again in last year’s “Blaugust”. That kept me going until December, or so, when I mostly stopped. I started again just before this “Blaugust” began, but I don’t expect I’ll continue blogging afterward.
Maybe I will.
I read about half the posts my fellow Blaugusters write. There’s some astonishingly good writers among them, and if anything, I’d rather celebrate their voices than inflict the world with mine.
I don’t feel I really add any interesting views to the news of the day, and so I stay out of it. People aren’t interested in pictures of my family playing board games. I hardly play MMOs any more. I do stream on Twitch and publish highlights to YouTube, but I don’t do the on camera or voice stuff because I really can’t be bothered to do it. It would be an astounding amount of work to just be able to say I tried.
I play games to relax, and have fun. Writing really isn’t relaxing or fun in and of itself. I do like chatting with people about stuff. I like Twitter, I guess. Google Plus was just so good for me. It was like longform Twitter. No pressure. Of course, Google would have to kill it.
But in the end, blogging is just something to do instead of doing something fun.
You should play Mini Rogue. It’s a lot of fun. I got the Old Gods expansion and spent the time while cooking dinner playing with a new character, “Bones”. He starts with a curse and can use it to gain a crude sort of power, now and then. Next time, I’m playing the Priestess.