New Years Blogoversary

The new year marks the second anniversary of Servitor Ludi.  It's become customary at times like these to do a bit of reminiscing and crystal-ball gazing, so let's have at it...

An informal goal of mine is to post to the blog at least once a week, and this year I'm glad to have been able to surpass that a bit.  My post counter says there's a total of 158 posts here, and in last year's blogoversary post I said that I had 79 posts in the first year.  Thus, oddly, that means there were exactly 79 posts this year, too!

For me, the blogging high point of the year was definitely the April A-Z Challenge, in which I attempted to take readers on a whirlwind tour of weird signs, symbols, and glyphs.  Those 26 posts often veered into the philosophical and esoteric, but I tried to keep them fun and full of game-relevant content, too.  They're all collected here for easy browsing.  I'm also grateful for some wonderful new friends found via April A-Z blog-hops.

The springtime of philosophical A-Z posts led to some continuing musings about "pairings" of ideas with regard to the Glass Bead Game, and also to some reviews of books and CDs.  Throughout the summer and fall, I also got a bit braver in sharing some awkward attempts at fiction (that's the blog label term that seemed most appropriate!), mostly spurred on by the indomitable Suze's challenge to post literary "False Starts" on Fridays in November.  I'm surprised that I was able to post as much as I did in the fall, since I was also teaching a graduate course for the first time in many years -- the workload was enormous, but it was an amazing experience.

I've kept working on my Homebrew '82 old-school role playing game rules, but with everything else going on, it's been relegated to seemingly eternal back-burner status.  That doesn't seem likely to change soon, but I can still hold out some hope for finishing Volume 1, the Player's Guide, this year.  In the fall, I also started some brainstorming about a new game concept to emulate the friendly competition of hotshot astronauts and their dangerous missions at the dawn of the space age; i.e., a kind of Right Stuff RPG.  (There are only two posts on that concept right now, but I hope to do more on it...)

And I can't forget Blendsdays!  :-)

What of the future?  More game development, as described above.  I also hope to unearth some additional "lost gems" like the Perry Mason plot wheel that I posted about last month.  As of right now, I'm beginning to plan for the April 2013 A-Z Challenge.  I have an interesting unifying topic for 26 mind-bending posts, but I think it's still a bit too early to talk about the details.  All in good time!

Have an awesome 2013, everyone!