REBOOT_BLOG: success

Good evening everyone! It's been a while since I last wrote — actually quite a bit longer than I realised, in fact, so apologies for that. But that's something I wanted to talk about today, as part of my ongoing efforts to continue enjoying my own private creative projects while simultaneously taking a bit of unnecessary pressure off myself.

More recent arrivals on this page may be wondering what the whole #oneaday thing was about on previous blog posts, so I thought I'd explain — because I'm ditching it from today.

#oneaday originally started back in 2010 as a community blogging project initiated by a few UK games journalists. I was never really part of the UK games journalism clique at any point, despite being a professional games journalist — the fact I typically worked for American websites probably didn't help there — but I was keen to participate in this project, because it sounded interesting.

Essentially, the idea was to post one thing on your own personal blog a day, every day, for a whole year. Each individual post didn't need to be good, it just needed to be something that you'd written. It was a means of keeping in practice, as it were, making it especially valuable for freelancers who might not have been constantly working on writing things.

Interestingly, the people who "founded" #oneaday all dropped out within the first month of starting, but I found the concept intriguing and enjoyable enough to continue going for two thousand, five hundred and forty-one days. You can read every one of those posts at my old, defunct personal blog here.

I enjoyed #oneaday, so when I started this Patreon page and was focusing more on MoeGamer than anything else, I decided that it might be fun to take up the challenge again. The daily posts would make a good opportunity for people to get to know me, and it would keep me writing stuff, even when I was working jobs that didn't exactly provide a lot of opportunity for creativity.

It didn't quite feel the same, though. Patreon lacks the sense of community that WordPress has — largely because it's a gated community with an admission fee, of course — and, moreover, the blog editor here just kind of sucks, particularly on mobile.

On top of that, there's no easy way to export stuff from Patreon somewhere else — or at least there wasn't when I started; there seems to be a WordPress plugin that does that now, though you need the ability to install plugins on your site to take advantage of it — meaning that if I wrote anything here that I was particularly pleased with, it was pretty much trapped here outside of manually, painstakingly copy-and-pasting into something else.

And on top of that, now that I'm writing every day over on Rice Digital… well, the original intention of #oneaday is a bit surplus to requirements. So rather than fretting over "missing days" and just churning out something quickly at the end of the day if I forgot or couldn't think of anything better to write, I'm instead ditching the #oneaday commitment and instead simply committing to writing to you all on a "fairly regular" basis — at least once a week, but more if I have something particularly interesting to share.

The result of this should be that my posts here should be a bit more interesting and substantial, and I take a bit more of that unwanted pressure off myself. I won't lie: on a number of occasions over the past few years I've considered shutting down Patreon entirely out of some weirdly misplaced sense of "guilt" for one reason or another — this particularly hits me when a patron leaves, though I emphasise that it's absolutely, definitely not their responsibility! — but I also really, really appreciate your support. Plus said support actually helps me out in my professional life by allowing me to acquire hardware, software and other goodies that I can use or write about in my actual job.

So basically, I want this to be less of a stress for me, but still provide you lovely people with something of worth in exchange for your valued contributions and generosity. So that's the plan. No more #oneaday, no more numbered posts, just some hopefully insightful and interesting things for you to enjoy on a semi-regular basis — plus the monthly Patrons Only! S videos for the S-rank patrons, which will be resuming this week now that I've shaken off COVID.

I suspect I've been overthinking all this considerably more than I needed to, but I wanted to give all of you a full and candid update on what's been going through my mind. My enforced "break" through COVID gave me plenty of opportunity to reflect on things, and I think this is going to work better going forward.

Thank you for your time, attention and understanding, and please look forward to some new posts soon!