Well, shit. Where do I even start?

I realized this past week, while paying far too much to renew my stupidly expensive vanity domain name (Armenians charge $50 a year — it’s true), that this is the second time I’ve renewed it without updating my blog. It’s been some 15 months or so since I posted. I know people who’ve met, married, and had a baby in that amount of time (also true). I figured, hey, maybe it’s time I make the most of all that money I pay for hosting and a domain name (even though I have virtually no money — also true). So, I’m logging in to my WordPress account to — I know, it’s hard to believe — actually write something. I’m not logging in to just clean up a bunch of spam (although I’m doing that too).

Let’s see how briefly I can sum up the past two summers & year:

Last (err, last-last — 2010) summer, when I actually managed to get a bit of writing done, I was working in the industry again — this time for just the summer as a QA project manager/lead for one of Montreal’s many third-party joints. Being stuck at a computer all day and only being able to write for fear of getting caught doing other shit (like looking at cat videos) has been one of the major ways I’ve managed to write over the past several years. But, during the school year, nobody’s looking over my shoulder, and I’m mostly focused on school, and I’m poor (it took them eight months for them to give me my student loan last year — I spent the entire year barely surviving, unable to afford transit to school, or textbooks, or food a lot of the time, and they finally gave it to me — all in one chunk — a week after school ended). Then this summer just passed (2011, now) I had this huge chunk of money and no reason to work, so I mostly hung out with people who had that kind of money all the time (you know, the students whose parents put them through) and drank beers and acted like a moron. Then I moved across the city, and started a new semester with a bunch of great courses, and got to really focus on them, and I started writinhg for school a bunch, and figured, hey, now’s a good a time as any to write here.

Oh, and the other thing that happened — I basically quit playing the video games I was “supposed” to play. You know, the ones with epic stories and world-changing meanings and that. In 2011, I think there are maybe a half-dozen games I’ve played with any amount of frequency. Two of them are iPhone baseball games. One of them is Football Manager. This transition is sort of like deciding you are tired of reading fiction novels and instead you start reading technical manuals on how cars work, or something. Except imagine the fiction novels didn’t really give you any world perspective, and the car manuals don’t teach you anything useful about cars.

So, nothing was really inspiring me to write about games, or the industry, or anything even peripherally related. It all just seemed so outside of my life — so irrelevant. What could I write about? I could’ve written about all of the vaguely-fun, alcohol-infused nights I had, but this isn’t a Livejournal. I could’ve written about the textbooks I was reading for my urban planning courses, but then again I could also just rub my scalp against the wall really hard, too. I could write about the few novels I managed to read, but, who wants to hear me, a barely-literate fiction-neophyte give his (probably tired) opinions on Haruki Murakami and Samuel Beckett? Especially given that this blog has only ever been about videogames?

But, I thought about it. I have a few videogame things to write about again. And, shit, getting back into the groove might actually inspire me to read other good blogs again, and actually see what’s worth playing, and actually play them, and actually think about them, and actually write those thoughts down.

So consider this long-winded post a sort of “sizzle reel.” A really long, boring sizzle reel. I hope to talk about:

- That time I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent with a big group of people and it was actually way more engaging than it would have been if I played it by myself.

- This class that I am taking (Videogames and/as Literature) and how, in spite of the class makeup being like basically everyone I have ever been exasperated by on the Internet, I am really learning some awesome stuff and reading some excellent academic writing on games (note: that syllabus is old, but more or less that’s the class)

- Playing through Bioshock again, as part of that class, with my excellent group (I lucked out and got the 3 coolest kids in that class on my team — more on that later) who are all less gamer-y than me (someone who is not really that gamer-y to begin with)

- That talk Jason Rohrer gave at MIGS (which I didn’t attend, because, well, $600 is why because) and how he continues to be the best dude in the world to me.

- How much I love iPhone baseball games (well, no. Well, maybe).

I hope that this November is finding all of you who forgot to delete this feed from your RSS reader well.

Love,

Will/Brilliam