Forgive me if I may be a bit disoriented, but things have changed a wee bit since I last contributed in any meaningful way to a site. The web is a bit of a different place now, as anyone with a web connection can post their thoughts to a blog (complete with free hosting, mind you)... somewhat posing a watered-down threat to "reputable sites" in the same way that scene sites were stealing from pay sites way back when. Shoot, in the day we paid for that hosting and we needed to broker our own deals for ads if we wanted to avoid putting a dent in our pocketbooks, and we fought an uphill battle to garner industry connections and get invites to events or evaluation games.
Danged whipper-snappers these days don't know how easy they have it! We didn't have the TwitterBook or FaceSpace! We worked boards diligently on other sites trying to get nibbles through cross-links or we'd work to grease the palms of other sites with promises of linking back to them or whatever we could think of to suck someone in. We also didn't have nice site back-ends for publishing our content into a database. Oh no! We hand-crafted our HTML and manually made our links and we liked it! Shoot, back at the start it was wild when I coded up a JavaScript powered form that you could type your content into that would then spit out the HTML for people to email me so I could then upload the page via FTP and link it up within the site through the front page and main section pages with much diligence and care! Even when the original DB-backed incarnation of this site made its unholy debut (an effort in learning Cold Fusion and SQL that ultimately contributed to getting me fired from my full-time job) with primitive DB design and god-awful beginner code that was progress somehow... we were pushing the edge of what people did for free on the side.
But no, I'm not bitter how comparatively easy people have it now... someone had to expend blood, sweat, and tears to get the ball rolling. You pay extra to beat the curve and it was a hell of a time back when you could count the truly known sites and people in the scene on your fingers and toes. Now it is certainly simpler to get going but in the end your content has to be that much more remarkable to be heard above the chattering of the crowd. I think I love the Despair.com Demotivator that says it the best: "Blogging: Never Before Have So Many People With So Little To Say Said So Much To So Few". Amen.
I hope to get back to contributing in some capacity, with my advanced age (all of 35... so over the hill!) and two lovely girls (for those who remember, the birth of my first prompted my departure from the scene over 8 years ago) perhaps I have a new perspective to offer as a gamer with kids. If you have ideas for things you'd like to see be sure to let me know. I have as much to blather on about as I ever did, just at some point a real job and family really took away the spark to put it cohesively into print. Perhaps it is time to get the brain out of mothballs and begin pissing people off once more. Now THERE'S a motivator...
