Website Update

2025-04-29

Tags: News Meta

Prelude Thingy

It’s kind of remarkable to think this site is almost two years old, and how I envisioned this blog in the beginning was just about running Basic Fantasy and the other OSR retroclones, and then evolved into my current goal of documenting my process of game design.

My initial inspiration for creating this site was Luke Smith’s video Get a Website Now! Don’t be a Web Peasant!, which convinced me to be the change I wanted to see in the world, which was returning back to the Web 1.0 days where everyone had a personal blog and we weren’t shackled to social media.

In the time since, my interests and goals have expanded, but the core conceit of wanting to be internet landed gentry has remained and infected other aspects of my life, such as wanting to make my own TTRPG game, to rebuilding my website from scratch!

Why did I redesign my website/blog?

Three primary reasons, actually.

  1. To have my own aesthetic which was not a preexisting Hugo theme/template.

  2. To have a website and tech stack I understood better and could modify easier (since I built the damn thing).

  3. To enable features I previously did not have and to make the site more navigable.

With some elaboration pertaining to that last point: one thing I hate about social media or feeds is long scrolling, and given my prior theme, Terminal, had no quick way of viewing all posts or searching specific posts or tags, I aimed to make something that could. Nothing against the Terminal theme, mind you—it’s a lovely theme—but it wasn’t what I needed now that my site is growing.

The only regret I have in this whole process was that I needed to use JavaScript to make the search function… well, function. I’m not proud of needing it, but at the very least it’s only 7 lines of that abominable and infernal script they call a language…

Notable Additions

As mentioned before, there is now a search bar, which lets you search titles and tags—this will make finding older articles much easier, to be sure. As well, I have a landing page instead of just a scrolling feed, which is quite nice!

And finally, I added a donation page with my crypto wallet addresses if you’re interested in throwing me some spare change here and there. Keep in mind everything I put out is free, I never plan on taking paid reviews, and I never plan on putting ads on this site. Likewise, everything I plan on publishing—the SRDs/rules portions of the texts—will be either CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. So basically, I’m doing this for free, which more than I feel justifies me putting my public crypto wallet addresses here.

Regardless of whether you believe in crypto as a legitimate currency or not is somewhat irrelevant. While I’d agree the vast majority of it is rubbish, there are some with validity.

As an aside, I moved my Appendix N (inspirations) to the footer instead of it being at the header. I may also add other appendices as well, depending on my needs.

Goals Moving Forward

Primarily to publish my own RPG, Be Not Afraid, which I have been quite coy about outside of specific elements. Though in the near future, major points of it and its protagonist will be revealed! however, the next couple of articles about the setting will be focused on the antagonists so as to set up how bleak the state of the world is. Light and dark are deeper when contrasted against one another, and I want to set the mood before setting the glimmer of light.

As for Monsters of /X/, which is somewhat related to Be Not Afraid—if anyone has kept up with the news, 4chan.org recently got hacked pretty badly. This shouldn’t really affect the series moving forward, as most of the interesting creatures and tales are already archived. Also, last checking, it seems to be back up? So I guess its death was greatly exaggerated.

While this isn’t an announcement, some other things I’ve been planning include starting up a podcast, as I already have the first episode recorded with one of my planned co-hosts. Likewise, I’m bringing back the Socratic DM show (casual audio vlog kind of thing). My first episode was poor quality and was taken down for a reason, but I’d like to take another shot at it sometime.

As to my long-time readers (if any)—thanks, it’s been a pleasure for sure.