Yes, it’s one of those periodic posts where I make excuses for the distinct lack of posting recently. There have been things getting in the way the last couple of weeks and I’m having trouble finding enough times to both play games and write about them, or do the background research necessary for science posts. This is nothing new; I write this blog because it’s a genuinely healthy thing for me to do and the trickle of posts will never dry up completely, but this state of affairs looks like it is going to continue and I just wanted to save anyone still reading it some time by outlining when exactly they should be checking for new posts (if they don’t have reader programs that do it automagically, that is.)
- Mondays. There will almost always be something posted on Mondays because I’m never going to stop playing games and I’ve usually got something to say about the games I play; the only reason last week got missed was because the game I was playing was Fire Emblem and I’m not really in the habit of doing 3DS games on here. (P.S. Fire Emblem is really good and you should buy it if you have a 3DS and I’m totally up for Fire Emblem chat in the comments.)
- Wednesdays. There will usually be something posted on Wednesdays now that I’ve realised I can mine the rich new seam of particle physics. I don’t know it as well as I do astrophysics but that makes me more likely to write about it, not less, since it’s actually genuinely useful for me to go off and learn about it. That being said, science posts do take a hell of a long time and I’m not going to be able to do one every week.
- Fridays…. are something of a question mark. For example, today there was going to be a post about the power of games to stealthily educate people and I spent the last couple of days working on it, but then I realised at the last moment that I didn’t know nearly enough about conventional game pedagogy to state anything beyond the bleeding obvious, which is why you’re getting this post instead. Maybe that post will resurface in a couple of weeks, but it reflects the difficulty I have filling that third slot; writing about old games isn’t much better because I usually have to go back and play the old game in question again, which is something I really don’t have time for now. Treat Friday posts, when they do appear, as a nice bonus.
Tl;dr version: checking back every Monday is probably the most efficient way to read this blog for the time being, so really it’s business as usual since I started my new job. Life catches up with us all, I guess.
Don’t worry about keeping it up to date every week. We come back because your posts are awesome, not because they’re regular.
It baffles me when I get complaints about my blog not being updated regularly enough and I just think, “Look, I’m doing it in my own time and it costs you nothing. Just be happy with what you get FFS.” so I’m just thankful you post at all. I don’t always comment but I enjoy reading every post.
I was joking with Lu that maybe I should move to the RPS model of ten posts a day, nine of which are practically word-for-word copies of press releases/videos posted on other games websites. Sure, the quality of the output is horrifyingly generic and the mechanistic schedule means there’s rarely any genuinely thoughtful pieces, but at least I get those pageviews rolling in!
In all seriousness, though, I’d happily write this blog even if nobody read it because it’s a good mental exercise. It’s just that people *do* read it, and I feel bad if I might end up wasting their time somehow.
To be honest, even the bleeding obvious will be unknown to a lot of people. And even if it is, it’s nice to have a blog entry that can generate discussion.
And I know nothing about conventional game pedagogy, especially as I had to look up what pedagogy meant. ¬_¬
So I say, even if you think a post you’ve written is stating the obvious you should still post it.
Pedagogy means “Hentzau is showing off with unnecessarily obscure vocabulary again.”
Echoing the above comments; also, do a Fire Emblem post! It deserves a review and just because the console / PC tide has turned doesn’t mean the odd console game doesn’t deserve some critical attention.
It’s all been said above but I’ll reiterate: You provide quality blog posts. Most of us don’t mind if there is a missed day (or week.) Don’t worry you won’t lose us.
That said. How open would you be to guest writers to this blog?There have been a few times over the past year or so I wanted to write a short article and post it somewhere like this. I don’t have the time to keep a full fledged blog myself. Would you be interested in hosting any articles (possibly gaming or science in nature) on this post if someone like, say, myself were to contribute?
I’ve thought about this for a few days, and as long as it was gaming or science related then I’d definitely be *interested*. The thing is, though, this blog is something of a personal self-improvement project rather than a serious attempt at journalism or writing or whatever, and I have this weird fear that if I start moving away from that I might have to start taking it a bit more seriously than I do right now. Still, if you’re really interested in doing something like that then by all means let me know about it through my contact email address (hentzau@scientificgamer.com) and we’ll probably be able to work out a mutually acceptable approach to guest posting.