My Absence Explained

I briefly mentioned in my previous post that my two-year absence from the old school RPG blogging scene wasn’t because I lost interest. In fact, I didn’t vanish completely from the OSR. I mostly vanished from the ODD74 forum, but did continue to comment from time to time. And I’ve been commenting more on the /r/osr subreddit. So what gives?

The Video Project

About 8 or 9 years ago, I had this crazy idea: “I’m going to make Minecraft videos”, a cross between a let’s play series and a parody of old nature/travel shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It took a while to build what I needed, and I used up all my creative energy working on that instead of…

The RPG Projects

I have a couple unfinished works that I still want to do, such as the Undying Neighbors and Infernal Neighbors monster books, random dungeon and wilderness generators, various old school adventure modules, and Liber Zero. Always Liber Zero. There’s so much to do, and so much software I had to reconfigure or replace, that I just got overwhelmed and didn’t do much at all.

I did discover Obsidian, which makes notes and prep much easier, so I may get this stuff back under control.

The RPG Community

A lot of OSR people vanished and a lot of others drifted over to other things. I haven’t been seeing as many posts about OD&D, improv old school gaming, brutally simple generator tables, or other topics I’m interested in. There’s been less of a hobby focus, lots more commercial focus. In this environment, I’ve had less and less to talk about here. And I believe I mentioned that I never really adapted to the loss of Google Reader, finding it harder and harder to keep track of what everyone else is talking about.

Life Itself

Yeah, there’s also the usual. Health problems. Being busy doing other things. Death in the family. Getting a new computer itself created its own hassles, as new computers tend to do.

I also like to blame the cats. When I had a stretch of bad health that had me sleeping a lot during the day, one of the cats got used to sleeping on my lap the entire time and now he’s a bit of a pest about it. I’m working on a way to work on the computer while still giving him the six or so hours of laptime he craves.

Things are slowly getting back under control, so I’m ready to return to active participation in the community. I will need to switch to a lighter workload, but I’ll talk about that in a follow-up post.