Happy New Year!

The new year brings new excitement and new challenges, but first I’d like to take a moment to recap some of the highs and lows of the past years blogging efforts.

First, I’m proud I posted as often as I did in 2017. My goal was to blog once a week, and while I didn’t quite make it, I did post new blogs 45 out of 52 weeks – a new best for me.

I had 17,099 page views this year — more than two-thirds of those views came from a single post back in April. The amount of views I’ve had this year is more than half-again the number of page views I’ve had for the previous thirty-nine months of blogging since I started. I hope that means I’m doing something right!

I attended eight different conventions this past year. Four were Steampunk-oriented events, two were gaming-specific conventions, and two were general-interest sci-fi conventions. I was deeply honored to have been selected to be the Gaming Guest of Honor at Great Falls Gaming Rendezvous next year, and look forward to that trip and meeting a whole crop of new folks in October. As of this writing their website hasn’t been updated yet to reflect the 2018 event and rates, but the hotel information should be accurate, if, by chance, you’d like to book a room in order to attend and game with me…

Far and away my best source of readers was Facebook, which is both exciting and troubling. It’s exciting because it means people see my posts and click on the link to read them. Roughly two thirds to three quarters of the folks who visit my website come from a Facebook link. The troubling part comes from Facebook’s algorithm, which seems to be growing more random by the day in who it reaches and why. I want to encourage anyone who enjoys reading my blog to please, please sign up for email notifications. There’s a box to the side of the page for doing just that simply and efficiently. As I mentioned above, I rarely post more than once a week — sometimes not even that often — so I won’t be spamming your inbox too much…

By far my most read post this year came on April 10. More than 6,300 views came in a single day, which is mind-blowing to me when my average weekly traffic is 60-80 views. In “What The Hell Is Wrong With Gamers?”, I discussed the open call for women game designers by a major tabletop RPG publisher, Green Ronin Publishing. The response was immediate and overwhelming. At first, I was cheered by the number of people who supported this initiative. Later that same day the commentary turned brutal as the trolls started to come around. Cries of “That’s discrimination!”/”That’s illegal!” became frequent. My web site was the target of a number of attacks aimed at taking over my site, which my hosting company caught on to rather quickly and initiated procedures to prevent brute force attacks from succeeding.

I didn’t post all of the commentary I received regarding that post: mostly only the supportive ones, as the rest weren’t reasoned arguments, they were attacks. I was almost disappointed to not be called a “cuck”, but many of the commenters made up for that in other ways. Accusations of harassment are being weaponized, folks: get ready for more of that in the coming year.

2017 was a good year for blogging for me, and overall I still enjoy doing it. I’m looking forward to continuing my strong showing by blogging every week in 2018. My thanks to all of you who read and commented on my posts; if there’s anything you’d like to read from me — a report on my experiences at a particular convention, reviews or comparisons of specific games, or anything, really — you can leave a comment on one of my blog posts. Comments don’t become public until I approve them, so even if you have something wacky you’d like to see me write about, go ahead and suggest it: where the idea came from will be OUR little secret…