Here I go again. Well, more like testing how it feels. Praedor.net is built on WordPress and many people use that blogging, so I thought to give it a go. I doubt anyone is surprised I couldn’t resist for long. I am not saying I will start a new frequently updating blog today, but I will feel better knowing that the option is there.
While the rest of Praedor.net is in Finnish (apart from this wonderful fan translation of the world comic the Tale of Three Sovereigns), I will be writing in English. It is good exercise for me, those who followed my old blogs expect it and there is a small but non-zero chance of Praedor RPG getting translated into English one day. Don’t hold your breath, though. Praedor Omnibus, a collection of all Praedor comics by Petri Hiltunen thus far, comes out in a few weeks. If that ever gets translated and published in English, the roleplaying game will follow. But until then, I am happy to be a good-sized perch in the very small pool of Finnish RPGs.
So what happened to my old blog? There are two stories, both of them true.
Basically, after too many technical hassles, monthly payments and getting Pro-Putin propaganda in my inbox from them, I ragequit. In retrospect, I wonder if they actually had picked sides in the Russian-Ukraine conflict, or if they had just been inundated with the Russian war bloggers and the algorithm began pushing new content to other subscribers. In any case, it was a poor showing from a commercial blogging service that not only cost me a monthly fee but very aggressively wanted me to pay extra for promotion and whatever.
That’s the easy story. All true. Then there is the hard story, which is equally true. Despite being a freelancer, I’ve been working full weeks this year. Looks like this will continue for the foreseeable future. On top of that, there are 3-5 public RPG sessions per month and I am expected to produce two books – one RPG supplement and another novel, for next year. Back when I was working only sporadically, something like this seemed manageable. Right now I can feel my nerves fraying. Maintaining a blog, on a platform I paid real money for, was just one more rock added to the pile. Intervals between posts got longer and longer, not to mention how difficult it was to come up with new and interesting stuff to write.
Then came a particularly bad day and I just snapped. Faced with the choice of cleaving my monitor in half with an axe or shutting my blog down, I chose the latter. Losing the blog was a pity and in retrospect I regret not saving up some of the articles. But losing my Dell Ultrawide would have scuppered all the other things I was doing as well, so if I had to ragequit something, the blog it is.
This text is a test firing, to see how this platform works. There may never be another, or this maybe the start of a new and beautiful friendship. Oh well, this is Praedor.net so I suppose we are among old friends already.
But let’s see if this works.