It’s been just short of a year since the last PAX East, of which I promised … well, more than I gave, as what I ended up giving was nothing but silence for the better part of a year. It’s also been just short of two months since my last blog post, and I promised more of those as well.

So today I’m going to fix that.

A very good question indeed!

This is not the first time I’ve thought about livestreaming, after all. It’s been years since, but I dabbled in livestreaming for a time before realizing that the way I was going about it was just not very interesting to others. Needless to say, I realized it quickly. And, like many that reach that point, I gave up.

So why try again? Well, many reasons.

Wordle. A simple game. An old viral craze. An ongoing, albeit personal, obsession.

I’ve always loved word games … which isn’t surprising in the slightest given my passion for the written word, whether the writer is myself or someone else. Usually that game is Scrabble, a game I’ve played with family for many years. Now I won’t say I’m a master at Scrabble, or that I could get anywhere near placing in a tournament, but my grandmother did play in several tournaments and I could usually hold my own against her. Even managed wins with some level of regularity.

But this isn’t about Scrabble. This is about Wordle.

One might notice, even were one not all that observant, that I’ve been absent for most of last year. One might even notice that this blog has spent more time without a recent update than with one. In fact I believe it has spent three times longer in this inactive state.

This was not intentional. Or planned.

So it’s that time of year again … well, one of those times of the year. In this case I’m speaking of PAX, or what was originally called Penny Arcade Expo.

Which starts tomorrow. Or, at least, PAX East does.

So, as one might expect, there is a lot that goes into building a modpack … at least if you want to do it right. And by right, of course, I mean to do a good enough job that yours stands out from the many, many packs out there. Unlike what some might say, there is no ‘right’ way or ‘right’ style of modpack. No. There are just some types that are more suited to one audience and some that are more suited to another. Or, in the case of some players (incl. myself), both have their own place.

Minecraft. My next project. Or, more accurately, now my current one.

It has been a plan for a good long time now to roll another Minecraft modpack (and server) for myself and my friends to enjoy. A long put off and long overdue plan. And, now that I have this wonderful space set up here, I have the freedom to work on that project!

As of the writing of this post, it is quite difficult to find this blog … and by ‘difficult’ I mean you’re not gonna find it without the URL or a link. Obviously I want a bit more than that if I’m writing a blog. After all, if I only wanted to share all of this with my closest friends then I could already do that via Discord and the like.

So!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the rescue! Time to add in those annoying but somewhat crucial details that the brainless robots used by search engines need to actually grok what a website is and what it contains. Maybe in time they’ll be smart enough, but we’re nowhere near that point just yet.

So I knew going in that the theme I had chosen, m10c, was pretty barebones. I went with it, still, because it was clean, lightweight, no JS whatsoever, and had a sidebar. That being said, I also knew going in that I was going to mod the heck out of this thing to get to where I wanted it to be. I suppose I just wasn’t expecting to need to start at that this quickly.

But. If I want to get people’s attention, if I want to get an audience, then I definitely needed something a bit lot more than the default.

And I think I found made it.

Now back when I was first considering this blog, a good few years ago, I had no intention of comments. It was purely going to be a place for me to dump my ideas and thoughts and all that. Nothing less. Nothing more.

As I got to thinking about it, though, I realized that, despite the risks that are inherent in opening yourself up to the feedback of random Intarweb strangers, the benefits outweigh the risks. I mean sure some people are absolutely awful examples of our species, but at the same time it can be helpful to hear what others think about your content. Perhaps people might want more details, or sometimes less, or are curious about other things that you may usually cover. Perhaps someone will correct you, in which case not only you, but also your readers, get to learn new things. Perhaps they want to point you towards things that are related or that they think you might be interested in. Or, perhaps, people just want to thank you for your content. Whatever the reason, comments can be a real boon.

And, lets be honest, if you don’t have comments where you can see them, if enough people are reading your blog then it’s likely that they’ll start up some comments where you can’t … or at least where you don’t know where they are, but the difference there really is trivial if you think about it.

So without further ado!