Soon

For some time, I've progressed away from a format of dungeon mastering tutorials towards the more sustainable desire to just show off my work.  For many of my viewers, this hasn't been a positive development.  As such, those who cared about how to deal with troublesome players, or how to describe a dungeon, or how to encourage role-playing or whatever, have simply drifted away.  Those who remain of that kind know the tutorials are all still here, floating in the enormous backlog of my posts over these last 15 years (if they can be found).

For myself, I got tired of producing these sorts of posts ... less because I began repeating myself and moreso because they received, on the whole, either resistance or passive agreement.  Once upon a time, back when angry birds roamed the earth, these posts garnered a lot of attention and produced excellent discussions that ran for thirty or forty comments; but those days, along with the "blog" I suppose, are gone.

We're in a place now where discussion has lost it's verve.  And for the record, "what can you show me" is a better path.  It removes the casual blatherer from the fore, putting the worker, the operator, "creator" in front.  Of course, there are still performers and hustlers, but steadily in this experiment we're calling the internet, ephermeral things are on the decline.  They'll be with us forever, no doubt.  But there are only so many cat videos we can care about; so many kids dancing well in their living rooms we have time for; and so many people spewing out yet one more diatribe on why the right way to play D&D is ...

I'm rather comfortable shucking off that shirt and dropping it on the floor, where it can be laundered should I want to put it on again.  I have little left to say.  Steadily, I move further and further from the world of game modules, D&D online social events, even the desire to visibly see other people play the game.  I just don't relate.

Recently, JB posted a series of posts detailing numerous modules that were part of some contest.  I couldn't bring myself to read past the first sentence of each post.  In retrospect, I've been running a single "module" for 15 years now, taking place on Earth, where the various boundaries and choices within the module steadily drift from location to location, occasionally upon a specific theme and occasionally just to fill a few runnings with whatever the players are interested in at that moment.  If I need something to happen, I invent it out of my own head.  I don't steal it from other creators because what they're creating is ... of absolutely no use to me.

The trouble, naturally, is that when I'm in a state of creation, I post on multiple platforms and there's new material every day.  And when I'm not in that state, as with the moment ... there's really nothing to say.  I talk about myself.  I talk about my discontinuity with everyone else.

My houseguests have departed as of Sunday.  There are less interruptions, there's no 3-year-boy laughing and running back and forth, back and forth, in what I could only describe as the desirable manner.  I'm finding myself able to think again.  I'm just sort of kicking ideas around.  Working at the job and thinking about getting started on serious stuff.  But for now, just enjoying the quiet.  At my age, quiet is a wonderful thing.

For those waiting, I apologise.  Soon.  That's all I can say right now.  Soon.