Winter break at work has ended, and with it, so too goes the stream of Eagle Leader/Fulcrum Leader productivity.
Category Archives: Meta
Not Really an Annual Report III
Three years, and I’m still sort of here.
For various reasons, my personal accounting of years begins in October, not January, but the turning of the calendar seems to be a more commonly-accepted time for annual recaps (and I did actually spin up this thing in January 2023, so it fits in this case).
2023 was a year of heavy posting (due in part to New Toy Syndrome), with 126 entries. I slowed down heavily in 2024, with only 51 posts, and none during football season (while I give no shits about football, my day job means it cuts into my fall gaming time quite heavily). 2025 has been slightly better for content, with 106 posts – though that’s a bit artificially inflated due to my participation in Character Creation Challenge 2025.
Competing demands, low energy levels, and the scheduling complexities of gaming in middle age have kept me from getting in more than a handful of Kaserne on the Borderlands sessions last year. I did start Somewhere West of Light as a side campaign, though I’ve done a lousy job of keeping up with session logs. I also attempted to start a Discord chat-based Shadowrun 3e campaign for my wife and her Tumblr bestie, but that does not seem to have gotten any traction. As a player, my gaming was limited to a handful of D&D 5e sessions with NLP and the one-shots I was able to get at RiverCityCon and CharCon.
As I’ve remarked before, one of the main sources of content here has been a 30-year backlog of various gaming-related things that I’ve posted elsenet or never actually released for public consumption before. With the exception of a handful of pieces that I’m saving for specific times or occurrences, that well is now dry. Going forward, almost everything here will be new content.
I did turn on commenting a few months ago, mainly to enable my players to provide their perspectives on session writeups. If the spam moderation requirements become too onerous, I’ll flip the switch again.
Banner Rotation
I’m trying out a rotation plug-in for my banner images. All of the images I’m using should be formatted correctly, but let me know if anything looks off.
End of Summer Update
Happy equinox, everyone.
Posting frequency is likely to slow down for the next few months. Work has entered one of our busier seasons, so I’m not going to be running many game sessions in the autumn. I’ve also all but exhausted my backlog of pre-written and re-posted material, which has been a majority of the content here when I haven’t been actively blogging Kaserne on the Borderlands session reports.
The d12 Decimal System
The Girl and I moved into our current house just under a year ago. Some of our initial choices in where to put things have never been fully satisfactory. Yesterday, we began implementing a plan we’ve been discussing over the past couple of weeks.
The RPG library – which occupies approximately 60 shelf-feet of space – was previously sorted alphabetically. As part of a larger furniture rearrangement, it is now arranged by genre. This is still not entirely what I’d like, but three-dimensional bookshelves only support usable organizational schemes in two dimensions and are wholly unsuited to a rapidly-searchable multi-attribute tagging system.
Still, it’s probably more rational than sorting 40 years of RPG accumulation autobiographically.
Appearances
I made some tweaks to the blog style package (mainly to remove an irritant involving the placement of the comment functions). All content should remain intact.
Commentary
As an experiment, I’ve enabled commenting. This is primarily to enable my players to add their own thoughts to my session logs, but other readers (assuming I have any) are welcome to engage.
At present, all comments require admin approval. If the spam bucket gets too full, I’ll shut it down again.
Post Tagging Updates
Because I’m always in search of a better taxonomy, the cluttering of my post tag cloud in the right sidebar has become an annoyance. Accordingly, I’ve gone through the post histories for both of my currently-documented campaigns, Kaserne on the Borderlands and Somewhere West of Light, and removed, respectively, the Twilight: 2000/Twilight: 2000 4e and Shadowdark tags from most of them. Going forward, campaign log posts will only be tagged with the game system in question if the post:
- is an initial post for setting up that campaign; or
- contains mechanics or other general content that readers may find useful at their own tables.
My vague hope is that this change will make the blog incrementally more usable for readers who come here in search of material for a specific game line and don’t want to have to sift through the (currently) 106 Kaserne posts trying to find my NM-116 writeup or something like that.
Minor Site Template Update
I realized not all of my post tags were showing in the tag cloud, so I replaced the default WordPress widget with a free custom one. Hopefully, this will show all the tags, even the ones I’ve only used once or twice. It’s a bit more colorful, too – my apologies if it looks like ass to my readers with restricted color perception.
Let me know if y’all can’t see anything, or if what you can see is blatantly unreadable.
Not Really An Annual Report
It’s hard to believe I’ve kept this blog active for a year with at least one post per week. That’s largely attributable to two things:
First, I’ve been using this platform as a means of recycling old material from my defunct LiveJournal account and various forum posts. All of those will eventually go the way of all bits, and while there’s no guarantee my hosting provider here will stay afloat, it’s a centralized repository under my administrative control.
Second, the Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign log generated a ridiculous amount of material (and was a ridiculous amount of work to maintain). The campaign has been on hiatus since late August, but my current intent is to restart it in the spring.
Because I’ve been relying on recycled material, my actual “new” content creation here has definitely not been in the once-a-week model, with the exception of the aforementioned campaign log. I currently have (pause, count) 14 recycled posts scheduled after this one. Once that well is dry, I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain the once-a-week schedule. I also have some major life changes coming up in the next couple of months that are outside the blog’s scope but which definitely will affect the amount of creative energy I can invest here. The result of all of this is that I expect my posting frequency here to drop off sometime in April.
Because I have comments disabled (all the better to not be spammed with), I can’t tell whether anyone is actually reading this thing on a regular basis. This is strictly a hobby thing, not a revenue-generation attempt, so I’m not advertising the blog. But I hope I have a few semi-regular visitors who are getting some use out of it.