13 YEARS OF DADDY ROLLED A 1 (BLOG ANNIVERSARY)

Yesterday, February 9th 2024, was the 13th Anniversary of my blog. Sadly, I've rather neglected this space over the past 365 days while I prioritized things like trying to find a new client for my boutique advertising agency (always a challenge even in the best of times), improving my YouTube Channel, and continuing to run the 1981 Moldvay B/X game for my (now) 14 year-old daughter and her friends. All that, combined with some family health issues and other "life" things, have contributed by my lack of presence here. 

Hopefully my recent post on D12 Class Concepts for Fantasy Ancient Rome is an indication that I'm not ready to let the blog just fade away. I really enjoy the community I spent time building here over the past 13 years, and I'd hate to see it go. 

I have continued to create new content as well, but I've mainly been posting it on social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the most part). I find that with many ideas, I can create better layouts and design to present the ideas as graphics/pictures in social media, but they don't really translate will to this blogger platform (as an example, I'm not thrilled about the way the table looks for the Fantasy Ancient Rome class concepts). That said, I do have some stuff ready to go in terms of another D12 Class Concepts article, some thoughts on the Thief class (that will probably be a video first but while I'll expand upon here), and updates for my daughter's campaign. They made their way through the Caves of Chaos, left the Keep, and are now in Saltmarsh investigating a haunted house... 

One of the things I do struggle with is finding time to create content for various platforms while also keeping up on my work, planning for my daughter's campaign, and allowing time for other pursuits such as spending time with family, reading, exercise, etc. As an example, a typical video takes me between 4-8 hours to research (the history videos are on the longer side of that), about 2-3 hours to record, and about 8-10 hours to edit and include all the graphics/cards/etc. plus developing the thumbnail and even working on figuring out the best title. so that's between 14 - 21 hours per video in a week. Part of that also is that my computer is very slow, so just uploading the videos to the editing software can take a lot of time, during which my computer is basically worthless. 

By the time I've done all that to keep up on my weekly video schedule, I'm usually out of energy to devote even more time to crafting a blog post. But, like I said, I'm working on it. 

The final revisions and layout are done on my Experts and Specialists book, and I'm looking to launch it on Kickstarter in March. If you've been following my blog for any period of time you'll probably know I started talking about this years ago. Part of my procrastination is that I really have no idea how to launch something on Kickstarter, figure out the pricing, figure out the print-on-demand option, etc. But, I think like I mentioned last year, I also have a very bad tendency to let exacting details get in the way of actually ever finishing things, so I think I just need to do it and figure it out along the way. The product is completely done so there shouldn't be any word of it not being delivered at the end of the Kickstarter campaign. I'm just looking to make back the money I spent on art and layout. 

Thanks for sticking around with me, whether you've been here for all 13 years, whether you're new to the blog, or whether you're a lapsed reader who is returning. I really appreciate your support and I'm really looking forward to year 14! 

STATS (Feb 12 2023 - Feb 11 2024 compared year-to-year)

This is going to be impossible this year unfortunately, as I didn't migrate to the new Google Analytics 4, as I am very technically unsavvy and also wasn't really paying attention. So, my old tag stopped collecting data back in July. 

That said, there are a few things I can figure out. 

• Page Views: My new tag indicated I got 2.7k views from July 1st 2023 - Feb 11th 2024, which puts me much lower by far than any other year. 
• Top Referring Sites:
• Google is the clear leader
• YouTube is now #2, about double that of Twitter, the previous #2 referrer
• DuckDuckGo, FollowMeAndDie and Bing are all in there, as usual
• One new one is Reddit, another surprise as I almost never use that site (I've never really understood how to use it)
• Location:
• The US is #1, followed by Singapore (!) and then Canada

My Top 10 Most Popular Posts Over the Past Year

Again, this is "flawed" in that it's not capturing the entire year, but the data I do have shows: 

1. Character Classes: The Noble
2. New Comics Wednesday: Revisiting my Post About Why People Do or Don't Read Comics
3. Finally: A New Post (Updated Currently Watching)
4. Making Characters Weird: Clerics
5. Making Characters Weird: Halflings
6. Open Game Content: New 3rd Level B/X-OSE Arcane Spells
7. 12 YEARS OF DADDY ROLLED A 1(BLOG ANNIVERSARY)
8. 2019 One Page Dungeon Contest: Part 2 - Comments on the Winning Entries
9. Making Characters Weird: Thieves/Rogues
10. Open Game Content: New 1st Level B/X-OSE Arcane Spells, and Twists on Existing Spells

Hanging: Home office (laptop)

Drinking: Maker's Mark (neat)

Listening: "Incarnations" by Charles Mingus, in stereo (vinyl)