Bringing the blog back to life
I let this blog go quiet way back in 2014. I had been primarily focusing it on posting the comics I made, and I guess that was about the time I stopped making comics. And any non-comics things I had to say online I just posted to some social network or another. But lately, I deleted my Facebook, I barely check Twitter or Tumblr, I post the occasional photo to Instagram, and I use Google Plus only for RPG related stuff (and that’s going to go away soon too).
With all the annoyances and privacy violations that come with the big corporate social networks, I’d like to think blogs are going to make a comeback. This month this blog switched over to a server I manage, and I did a bit of a site redesign for simplicity and speed. Maybe now I can get into a better habit of doing more writing (and in the process, thinking).
For most of this site/blog’s life I tried to keep it all thematically coherent, which seemed like a great idea at the time, but then often lead me to feel limited. I’m not great at sticking to a singly focused subject for long. For awhile I was very focused on making comics, but at some point, I just didn’t know where else to go with what I was doing in the form, and there weren’t a lot of people to care anyway: non-narrative comics poetry is not exactly popular, even most “comics poetry” such as it exists is narrative and features figures/characters.
It was back in 2013 when I started playing D&D again with some friends, and that shifted my focus away from comics to a certain extent. It was returning to something I’d mostly given up, but in contrast to all the playing I did when I was younger, I got to see the more creative side of role-playing games, thanks especially to a whole slew of bloggers I discovered. I used to write a lot about the concept of constraint in art making and literature, and in it’s own way that is exactly what RPGs are, it is creativity within a set of rules. And even more so, when you bring to a certain mindset related to random generation of game elements.
So, I’ve got some ideas for a project or two, and I also just want to let this space be a little more… casual, I guess. Where I’m not trying so hard to make it be whatever I was trying to make it be before. Probably there will be more photos, and more stuff about RPGs, and maybe even some comics stuff. I’ve been getting a desire to start drawing again, so maybe I’ll post some drawings if I ever convince myself to just pick up some implement and draw. I’ve also start putting my old mini-comics up in an online reader I made.
Probably at this point, no even comes to this site anymore…
I’ll be auto-posting from this blog to Twitter and Tumblr, and I’m trying to work out this system that will post my Instagram photos here automatically (since Instagram is closed and unfriendly system that has no API for posting to it (hell they still don’t even let you post from a browser!)).