I last posted on this blog four years ago.
Let’s face it: blogs are dead. There’s no appetite for the written word these days; the best case for any kind of considered (as opposed to stream-of-consciousness) opinion is a video essay, but I’ve yet to consume a video essay that wouldn’t be better presented as text augmented by (maybe) one percent of the video. It’d certainly save on bandwidth, too, but I’m an old-timer who remembers actually having to pay for bandwidth (ten cents per MB, IIRC).
So… why resurrect my blog, then?
Apart from the fact that I’m keen to discover whether I still like writing, the reason is pretty simple: Giant Bomb.
The Giant Bombcast was one of the few American-based gaming podcasts that I found in the late-2000s that wasn’t overtly misogynistic, racist, or elitist dribble. Despite the fact that a significant amount of the earliest episodes’ content was based on energy drinks and pro wrestling, there was a self-awareness and maturity in the Giant Bombcast that I quite enjoyed. Over time, I became familiar with the Giant Bomb crew… and, as I feel is beneficial, managed to map my predilections on theirs. Their gaming discussion was a significant input into my own consumption, and I happily started paying them for their content.
Staff came and went – that’s to be expected – but I always managed to find my bearings with the crew. When COVID forced Giant Bomb into fully remote operations, the style and quality of their output changed markedly – and you could hear the stress in their voices. Multiple changes in brand ownership occurred, and then staffers started leaving – a trio quit, a founder fired. And suddenly, I found myself paying for service that was… well, not what I wanted. I had no touchstones in the current crew, and actively disliked a number of voices. So: membership cancelled. No big deal.
But what does that have to do with blogging?
Well, while I was letting this blog go to seed, I still had the occasional desire to think out loud in a form that Twitter (ha!) didn’t really foster. So I started maintaining a series of lists (lists? really?) on my Giant Bomb account of all the games I’d completed… or, rather, Com-PETE-d. The site functionality made such lists easy to maintain, and I really quite enjoyed re-reading some of the stuff I’d written there.
But the most recent corporate shufflings at Giant Bomb make me think that the site is on borrowed time – new owners, self-destructive sackings. So I’ve decided to try and mimic my Giant Bomb lists over here, which has been a good excuse to look at what WordPress has to offer now. I want to tidy things up – a lot – but here’s a couple of pages to get started:
So, in my typically self-effacing way, all I can do is admit: yep, after four years all you get is some re-heated missives I wrote somewhere else.