The second year of the site. There’s been fewer posts this year (11) than there were in the first (15), but I haven’t fallen off completely or deleted everything in a fit of unsatisfied despondency, which means a lot on a personal level. I’ve been playing other genres and pursuing other interests outside of the blog and games. 2024 was an awful year for the games industry, with massive redundancies and shutdowns for developers and journalists alike. It seemed like a good year to get back into books, film, music, all the other things I enjoy. Most relevantly to this blog, I think I’ve finally been bitten by the physical TCG bug. A minor childhood dream was realised earlier in the month when I completed a little binder of Pokemon cards from a recently-printed set of the original 151 monsters. This in tandem with running a little lunchtime club for students of mine with several starter decks has given me a taste for physical cardboard, so to speak. This is a slippery slope that either ends in bankruptcy or finally getting into Magic aproper. Either way, there’s a lot of games to get around to before that.
A new project was started in the form of the Playdate Season One reviews. At a lower word count than the RDBG posts, they’ve made for a nice little palate cleanser between the card games, as well as something that has a much smaller and more achievable end goal. No promises, but I’ll endeavour to finish that up before this time next year. I’m actually using a Playdate game called Pomo Post as a little timeboxing tool while I’m writing up this very post, funnily enough!
Last year, I mentioned I was using social media less. Another year on, I now barely use it at all for posting. About 10 years ago, I used to run a Facebook page with friends that, at one point, had more than 10,000 followers. Then Facebook kneecapped unpaid reach and it withered overnight. Since then, I only use it as a matter of course for contacting small businesses – a far cry from the place where I made some of the closest online friends of my life. Instagram is the one that feels most transparently like a Skinner box for someone like me who doesn’t use TikTok. I do enjoy a good inscrutable reel pull, but only in the same way you can’t just eat one jelly baby. It’s rare to come across something that goes beyond a quick laugh or isn’t bait for an established interest it knows I have from data scraping. Cohost, one of the original post-Elmo Twitter contenders, just went read-only. I will give Bluesky a go starting today, as I’ve been hearing the name crop up more and more from podcasts and people I follow. I just want the Twitter experience with less culture warfare, though I do appreciate that’s a lot to ask in an election year.
I don’t mind sharing that I actually have no upcoming plans for a third Shrine Offering video. They’re quite time-consuming to script up, and I’ll only make them when I have an interesting unifying theme for the pieces of media they cover. These are certainly to be the least regular of my already quite irregular output – once in a blue moon, only when I really feel I have something to say.
So, the coming year? More interviews, more roguelike deck-builders, and possibly even more mention of media outside of those. I’ve found it increasingly easy to delay updating my usual ‘annual media’ threads on Twitter, given that at least 75% of my followers are bots, so I may just make that a seasonal thing in long-form posts here. We’ll see. Happy Halloween to one and all!
Shrunken Shrine 