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14 YEARS OF DADDY ROLLED A 1 (BLOG ANNIVERSARY)


Oddly, even though I've been doing this for 14 years, my blog anniversary snuck up on me this year. A few years ago, I had to create a recurring calendar appointment in Outlook to remind me, and it's a good thing I did. Confusing the issue is that my YouTube Channel's anniversary is two days prior to today, on February 9th. Too bad I didn't think to wait a couple of days to launch my channel so they could share an anniversary! 

If you watch my YouTube channel, you may have heard about a bunch of things that happened toward the end of 2024 that partially contributed to my lack of posts again this year. In succession of exactly one month: 

  • Our oven stopped working (while this isn't the end of the world, it was a huge inconvenience for us since we were hosting a Christmas Party and needed to bake cookies, and were also planning to host Christmas Dinner for our family; to this day, it is still not fixed, which is a very long story involving an incompetent repair person and also having an oven of a width that is no longer made)
  • Less than a week after that, my dad went into the hospital for what he and other thought was pneumonia. It turns out it was much more serious, and his cancer had spread to his lungs causing a build-up of cancerous fluid that ultimately contributed to cardiac arrest and his passing away a few days later. He was a fighter but also did not want to burden my sister and me and our families with his condition, so he'd kept just how badly off he was, but that also meant he hadn't put any plans in place with regard to funeral arrangements, final financial and legal affairs, etc. So my new full-time job has been navigating through mountains of disorganized paperwork trying to determine basic things like "did he have life insurance?" and "where did he want his funeral services to be held?" and "where can I track down the numbers of his friends to let them know?" It's frustrating because, of course with hindsight, I should have proactively figured all this out earlier with him, but I was also ignoring the elephant in the room and hoping he was going to get better. 
  • One might think I could ask his wife, whom he married a few years after my mom passed away, but unfortunately she has advanced dementia and Alzheimer's disease and doesn't even comprehend that my dad has passed away. She's almost completely non-verbal. I am her Power-of-Attorney agent, so my second full-time job has now become to make sure she's being taken care of and answering questions regarding her medical care, etc. 
  • I've had to spend the past month and a half cleaning out my dad's apartment and figuring out what to do with mementoes and things that I know he kept for a reason, but now that both he and my mom are gone, I'll never know why. 
  • Just a few weeks after that, the hurricane-level windstorms followed by the horrific fires happened here in Southern California, and our house was evacuated for a few days while we planned my dad's memorial service from the lobby of a hotel and hoped our house would be there when we returned. We have been very fortunate, but tonight as I write this, my daughter's friend, whose family lost their house and all their possessions, is having dinner here and spending the night because her mom does not currently have a place with enough space to accommodate her and her three kids. 
So, it's been quite a whirlwind and that did contribute to a lack of me wanting to blog. Interestingly, I have a very different reaction to starting a blog post than I do about making a new video. It's difficult to explain, but staring at a blank screen to start a blog post is very intimidating and almost tiring from an emotional standpoint. I do recall having fun blogging in the past and I think if I were doing it more consistently, that feeling would come back, but sadly right now it feels more like a chore, and I don't want it to feel like that. 


The Kickstarter went well. My supplement about "Alchemy, Explosions, and Inventions" more than tripled my goal (which, admittedly, was a bit low at only $800, but it was my first time and I wanted to make sure I met my goal) and the feedback has been very positive. Once I've determined that everybody who pledged received their copy, I'll put it up for general sale on DriveThruRPG for both PDF and POD options. 

The D&D Family Tree chart I posted was originally something I tweeted about years ago to help explain that I meant when I told folks I was running "B/X D&D." At that time on Twitter, around 2021 or so, the majority of my followers were 5E players and many of them told me that every time I said I run "B/X" D&D, they didn't know what it meant and assumed it didn't pertain to them, and so they just skipped those tweets. None of them bothered to ask, "What is B/X D&D?" So I proactively created the chart, and it became one of my most popular tweets, liked by Ms. Margaret Weis (of Dragonlance fame) and liked and commented on by Joe Manganiello, among many others. One of my Twitter and YouTube friends suggested that I blog about the chart, so that's how that post came about. 

What's coming up on the blog? I have another mini-campaign setting very similar to the one I posted about Ancient Rome that I'll be sharing, for starters. I'll be sharing snippets of other Old School Essential stuff I'm currently writing, and I'll get back to chatting about the B/X D&D game I'm continuing to run for my 15 year-old daughter and her friends (October will be 5 years!). 

But, let me know - what things would you like to see me blog about?

STATS (Feb 11 2024 - Feb 10 2025 compared to year prior)


People are continuing to find my blog through a variety of resources including search on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, social media (primarily Facebook, but also Twitter [although to a much lesser extent than the past], and even Reddit, which I never use). 

My overall takeaway is that despite not blogging as much, my YouTube Channel is driving people to my blog, as I mention it in every video, and my YouTube audience is much larger than than my blog audience. 


Hanging: Home office (brand new laptop! Well, new as of December 2024)
Drinking: Scotch (Monkey Shoulder) and Soda
Listening: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (on vinyl, but you can listen on Spotify here)




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