Shifting Down a Gear

Recently I’ve been maintaining two blogs every day, this one, and the official Loreshaper Games blog on steemit. This has been going okay, but I’ve seen a few issues with it.

First, Loreshaper Games is the public face of most of my writing, and it’s where I’ve been putting up my high-yield articles. While this blog is also tied to steemit, it’s a lot slower than my other stuff and largely personally interesting rather than intended for an audience.

Second, writing two posts a day is not necessarily difficult for me, but keeping up the high-quality posts is becoming more problematic. There is a limit to how much good writing I can do.

Third, I either wind up with too much overlap or too little focus. I’ve frequently worried that I repeat myself too much here. I don’t have a diligent content creation plan like I do with the Loreshaper Games steemit platform.

So I’m going to be shifting down a gear on this blog. I’ll still be writing posts occasionally. I’m not going to go into a long hiatus like I did in the past (unless something extreme happens). Rather, I’m not going to feel like I am pressured to write for this blog every day. Something like 70% of my writing until very recently focused on game design, and now I want that to all happen over at Loreshaper Games. The remainder will happen here.

I think that will result in more quality. The quantity of writing will be less overall, but not meaningfully so; I’ve been writing ~3000 words a day on many days, but at the cost of not getting enough work done on my game projects and hitting a wall in terms of stamina and burnout.

When I have something interesting to say about philosophy, my campaign of self-improvement, or other non-game topics, I’ll write it here. Everything game-related, except for reviews, will go to Loreshaper Games.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reader Response Theory

One thing that used to bother me as a writer is that I would always have a point I wanted to make, and not really know how to make it.

My attempts to be obvious were heavy-handed and artless, and when I was subtle I found that the stories I wanted to tell didn’t say what I wanted to say.

This was the cause of no mean frustration for me, since younger me wanted to make a point with everything, to the point of ultimately giving up and writing either stuff that I considered meaningless drivel or stuff that was so chock-full of symbolism and heavy-handed ideas that it lacked any real development or originality.

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The Ashen King on WorldForge

It’s finally here, the Ashen King, the first official Hammercalled sub-setting, is on WorldAnvil.

Don’t get too excited yet, because I had a lot of other stuff to do and I haven’t finished transferring everything over or replacing the stuff I lost in a crash.

But it’s a start.

Sorry for the short update; it’s been a hectic week.

Tomorrow I’m aiming to get another five or six things that are ready for publication up (which requires some minor editing and re-arranging to fit the WorldAnvil format).

The Importance of Reading

Since beginning a voyage of self-improvement in March, I’ve read 200 articles and at least 10 books just for the sake of reading more.

I spend at least one hour every day dedicated solely to reading, and I spend a fair amount of time reading stuff written by people who are wrong disagree with the beliefs that I hold.

And I’ve noticed a few positive trends in my life.

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Goals (April 23-April 29)

Still been keeping up on steemit. Got a Curie upvote last week, which meant a huge boost in reputation and Loreshaper Games is almost to 100 followers over there.

Hammercalled entered playtesting last week, which means two things:

A) There’s no time like the present to finish the GM section.
B) There will be a moment to finish up the velotha’s flock advanced play guide that I’ve been working on for like two months now and continuously procrastinating.

With that said, here’s the list of stuff to do:

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Learning from Barbara Bush

This past week, First Lady Barbara Bush passed away. Her passing has left a major impact on the news cycle, but also in the hearts and minds of many Americans and even people overseas who have come to realize what a legacy one woman had on the nation and the world.

I’m not someone who writes about politics very often. I’m pretty apolitical, at least in public, so I don’t want this to stand as a striking endorsement or condemnation of any policy. In any case, I have no living memory of the Bush (senior) Administration. What I am writing about is based strictly on my reflections on the accounts of people who knew Barbara Bush during her life.

What I write is based on what I have heard her character described as, but the reports are so consistent and so broad that I have no doubt in their veracity.

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Principles: An Antidote to Deception

I was reading an article on Vox this morning about the  advent of realistic and easily accessible “fake” tools, which allow for the creation of altered video and images with relatively high rates of accuracy, relatively low resources required, and the vast expanse of the internet with which to spread them.

This is a very real concern as we head into the 21st century. Our lives have become controlled by society (whether we like it or not), and if society is controlled by deception, what chance do we have to really have to live our own lives in a good way?

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Audioshield and VR Design Experiences

I got Audioshield on sale, and I was pleasantly surprised by how different it was from the other VR experiences I’ve tried. I’m generally quite pleased with VR in general, but I noticed a few things that really stood out about how Audioshield was using its design in a much more efficient and smooth method than other games.

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Writing for Games versus Writing for a Game

One of the things that’s been entering my mind recently as I work on Hammercalled and playtesting is how differently I approach the topics of writing for a game versus writing for a published product. With a handful of exceptions, I’ve never published a setting that I’ve been playing in at the time of publication. That’s not because I’m against sharing my work (like this, the campaign I’m going to start running Hammercalled in in a couple days), it’s just that I don’t think it works as well.

And I have a few reasons why I choose to work on settings devoid of running a game in them, since I know this goes against the prevailing industry wisdom.

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Happiness

While I was drinking my tea today (apple, if anyone’s interested), I had an interesting realization.

I have been happier in the final weeks of March and April than I have been at any other time in my adult life. Probably more so than at any point in my adolescent life, either.

Some of this has to do with a spiritual re-awakening, since I’ve been more involved in my church and the Scriptures, but a lot of it has to do with simple changes to my life.

I write about two to three thousand words a day on average. I’m more or less equally productive on my previous projects, but I have taken up blogging regularly.

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