I liked the new fonts fine, but I decided to change everything else! Let me know if any of the old posts become hard to read with the new theme and tweaks.
Category: Site
Slight changes on the blog
Nothing big right now, but I’ve been trying to tweak the fonts for better legibility. I like sans-serif fonts, but most studies suggest that a good serif font is easier to read so I changed the body text font from Lucida Grande to Lora, and the heading font from Lucida Grande to Oswald. Let me know what you think (if you even notice.)
Comment Policy
OK, time to explain my policy on comments again. This is my site, not a public forum, so I moderate comments and allow only the worthy. And you know what’s not worthy? Posting anonymous slurs or innuendo regarding someone I’ve mentioned in a post, without the least shred of support, especially when your allegations are only very distantly related to the topic of the post.
It pisses me off, so please don’t do it. If you want to criticize, by all means do but be factual and concentrate on substance, not rumours.
Also, need I add? Yes I do —
No racism, misogyny, disparaging of various genders or sexual orientations, or otherwise being a dick, please.
Ugly acronyms: NaBloPoMo
A lot of my friends participate ever November in NaNoWriMo, an ugly acronym for National Novel Writing Month. I don’t, but I do like to write and this year I’ve been writing a lot. I spent a lot of time in November working on the War of Ashes RPG for Evil Hat Productions, and I also decided to participate in NaBloPoMo, an other ugly acronym for National Blog Posting Month.
I did it sub rosa, I didn’t want to register anywhere or make announcements, but I did manage to post at least one entry every single day. I didn’t cheat; I did use the scheduling feature to write some entries in advance and have them auto-post at the appointed time and day, but I did not back-date anything. As a result, this month saw the highest readership of all times for me.
After a blogging hiatus of a couple of years, the last thirteen months have been good for me, getting back into frequent writing; I see blogging as a place to shape my ideas and to practice the craft, like morning kata for writing skills. And I’ve received heart-warming feedback about some of the materials I have shared, so I count it as a success.
As for the War of Ashes RPG, I’m at 47,000 words today and I’m planning on submitting my alpha playtest draft tomorrow night.
Blog To-Do List of Tall Orders
Having now thoroughly promised more on this blog than I can deliver unless I set priorities and timelines, I’ll ‘fess up to what readers can realistically expect, in descending order of priority:
1. Notes related to the games I’m running at Big Bad Con next weekend: two scheduled games, Rob Wieland’s CAMELOT Trigger using Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) instead of Fate Core, and Emily Care Boss’s Colony Wars series pitch for Robin D. Laws’ Drama System; and two stand-by packs for Games on Demand, The Muppet Show for FAE based on Tom “Blue” Tyson’s playset, and Jared Sorensen’s psychotronic game of post-apocalypse octaNe. Since I’ve committed to those months ago and the whole thing is going to be over in a few days (Big Bad Con runs October 4-6, 2013), they go first.
2. Notes related to writing the War of Ashes RPG for Evil Hat Productions. The project is on a short schedule, it’s a contract commitment, and it’s fun. I’ll probably concentrate a lot of effort on this through March 2014, then it should decrease as the book will then belong to other team members.
3. The last post in my Fate of the Budayeen series. I’ve had it outlined since I posted the previous entry, and I started writing the first section but the other commitments must take priority for now. Still, I’ll slip it in as soon as I can while I still have momentum, so I hope to post it in October 2013.
4. The occasional cooking post. They don’t take much time to write and I like sharing recipes. Posts of opportunity only.
5. The book club notes, maybe. It looks like the Goodreads book club is moribund right now, but should it rise from its ashes, I enjoy writing pop culture notes on the monthly selections. If it lives, and if I can fit it in, monthly posts.
6. Occasional game reports. I’ll continue to post my character sheets and pictures when I play, and if I have time, mini-reviews of games I try. Posts of opportunity only.
7. Wild promise #1: Fate of the Skyrealms. Yes, I announced I wanted to use FAE to adapt Skyrealms of Jorune and I still think it’s a great project, but it will have to wait. Probably a lot, like summer 2014 at the earliest. I’m pretty sure I made other equally ambitious project announcements I can’t recall right now, and they will have to wait too.
Reboot
It’s been over three years since I posted on my personal blogs and over two since I posted on my professional blog. Instead, I’ve been posting to specialized blogs and forums like deviantART or Cartographers’ Guild, and to social media like Google+, Facebook and Pinterest, as well as sharing public docs like my recipes through Google Drive. I want to try to regroup my scattered writings so I can find and share them more easily, so I’ll start by reusing this old one. I think I will also copy some key posts from other locations to bring them here and back-date them, so things may look a little confusing, but I think that’s OK.
The Reef 