Blog Updatitude: The Lateness

Hey everybody! Long time no blog! Hope everybody is doing well and that the "spring" has been treating them well. I use quotations because thus far spring has yet to fully arrive in Edmonton. We've gotten spits and starts of warmer weather but it has snowed the last two days here and, frankly, I'm beginning to think Mother Nature might have skipped the rest of the year altogether and just gone straight back to winter.

I apologize for the lack of updates on the blog; YouTube has devoured the time I usually spent thinking about here and, though I won't complain about how things have been going over there, it has meant that the blog has fallen by the wayside. Which is too bad, because print has a versatility that even video can't reach. But you should definitely check out my channel because it's doing awesome!

Regardless, I'm planning a few blog updates over the next week or so. I need to get back to tracking our Ravenloft campaign, because that is still going strong (though things have changed dramatically since the last update), and I should really be linking each of my YouTube videos here as well, if only for some cross-platform promotion. I've also been toying with the idea of doing some board game reviews -- if you actually read this and think it might be interesting, leave a comment to tell me so and I might take it a bit more seriously!

There's also another idea that I've been toying around with: I spend quite a deal of time world building and have a veritable plethora of worlds that I like to use for my tabletop games. Fantasy, sci-fi, and everything in between; there's a lot of stuff there and a lot of content inside each world. The one that I've grown most fond of over the years, though, is a setting I created for a Mutants & Masterminds campaign: a floating metropolis known as Eden City. I've fleshed out quite a lot of the setting, including detailed NPCs, villains, technology, politics, economy and everything else you can imagine. Because of the work I've put into it, and the positive feedback I've gotten from various players over the years, I've been thinking about developing an official sourcebook for the material. It would be a compendium of everything about Eden City, including plot hooks with various villains, and maybe even a brief outline of some campaign arcs you could run. For those of you who are into tabletop RPGs, is that something you would be interested in? Would it be worth the effort to actually put down on paper and make available to the public? Let me know if you have thoughts on the matter!

I'm happy to say that the first month of my foray into YouTube has gone quite well thus far! I am up to eight subscribers in eighteen videos (half of which are playing Sir, You Are Being Hunted) and am trying to make connections with other burgeoning YouTubers. I've talked to Mike Weem from the Weemcast, who is already quite successful (over 8,000 subscribers!). He's a really nice guy who offered me a little bit of advice, which was helpful! I have also recently found a few smaller channels: one called TheDynamicGamer87 who is run by a lady named Morgan -- she seems really nice as well and primarily seems to play Mass Effect, so what's not to like there? There's also another channel by the name of ProphetsAwaken who I found by looking for stuff about the upcoming horror game SOMA and he's a really cool guy too.

I've been struggling with ideas on how to promote my own channel thus far but I think just getting your name out there and talking with other YouTubers is the way to get it done! One thing I have definitely been struggling with is creating artwork to help brand the channel. My lovely lady Kait has been helping me on the front, designing me a new avatar/icon/thing but I need to think up an idea for my channel art (the banner above your videos on YouTube, which could double as the banner for the blog; any artists out there who might be interested in helping me with this, hit me up!), and eventually I would like to have a splash screen before my videos. But that's something quite beyond me and isn't strictly necessary. We'll see how things go, I suppose!

Anyway, I've rambled a bit too long, I'm afraid. Let's wrap this up by saying thanks to everyone for all the support they've given me. I was in kind of a bad spot, creatively, but things have picked back up and I'm happy to say that I'm doing much better now! I'll endeavour to get some more updates to the blog over the next week or two so keep an eye out for that! Thanks for reading!

Cheers!