End of Year Seven

I've been at this for seven years now.

As usual, whatever plans I had in mind got sidelined by external events. Instead this blog retrenched into gaming, specifically reverting to its tabletop RPG roots, thanks in large part to the #BROSR breaching containment due to Jeffro Johnson's leadership and the incessant presence on Twitter that culminated in #BROverloft--a Ravenloft take that came out entirely as a goof in a Twitter thread--launching tomorrow.

Did I ride that? Yes. Do I regret it? No. I'll keep at this into the next blogging year because this topic focus has proven beneficial to maintaining a steady readership and growing that audience over time.

Which has me considering what I've heard about blogging generally many times: a narrow topic focus works best.

Looking back over the year and the topic shift, I think I can settle on a permanent decision to shunt other stuff to the other blogs. Media-related stuff will go to the Study, with a focus on literature over film and television, and Big Thinks will remain the province of Empire Must Fall.

While the rest of the world is going full-tilt bozo, the fact that my little piece of it is finally rebuilding from the foundations long ago discarded by fanatical Death Cultists (plugging JD Cowan's book on it here, because what went down in the Pulps got repeated in gaming a generation or so later and both are still going on).

More on what I want for Year Eight tomorrow. As usual, my birthday is a week from today. In addition to what I mention here, one of Metokur's hats--I prefer the 4/5 stars in black--would be cool and you find those here, one of Frank Frazetta's pictures he did for Burrough's Mars books is here and I would love to have a print, or the original cover to the first novel edition of A Princess of Mars as a print.