Ten years ago this week we got a
new computer. It’s an imac. Don’t ask me what version. The computer it replaced
was one of the original imacs (You know one of
THESE).
I think we’d had it 8 years at that point.
That original imac was getting
super slow at doing stuff because it was clogged up with programs and stuff it
just couldn’t run and navigating the internet was painful as it took forever to
load every website. Some wouldn’t ever load.
So we got a new one.
With the new ability to navigate
the interwebs I decided it was high time to start a blog – to reach out to my
fellow game nerds and hopefully inspire others as others had inspired me with
theirs. So ten years ago on this day (20 December 2006)
I
started this blog.
I’m still using that same
computer.
Ten year old imac is starting to
have the same troubles the original one did – slow to load certain websites.
Every month there are new ones that I can’t load at all. Haven’t been able to
look at Fantasy Flight Games website for a year now. Gmail now only loads the "BAsic HTML Version". At the beginning of the
summer the MEC started giving me this when I tried to go there:
Smart asses…
I am loath to get a new one.
Amanda has a slightly newer one that her and the kids are using. I don’t like
the new photo program – it doesn’t have the same function as the one on this
computer – how does THAT work!? A newer program on a newer computer can’t do
the things I like being able to do on my old one!?
Also this computer has a 10 year
old versions of Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. I use them once a
month or so. Apparently you can’t even load those on to new computers – you
have to pay monthly fee to use them online..?! Is that right?! Ugh…. I don’t’
use them that much, but I do use them once in a while and it will be a super
pain in the ass not having them. Not being able to edit photos in the same way…
Anyway… This was meant to be a
celebration of 10 years of blogging and a little look back, but instead it’s
turned into a whiney rant about computers and the annoyance of having to buy a
new one every decade.
I should have got on this
earlier, so here are a few random highlights of the last ten years.
In those ten years I managed to
crank out 1475 posts. (Damn… if I’d only cranked out 25 more this could have
been the 1500th post!). just before the 6th anniversary of the blog I posted my
1000th post: A Bit About Me, which itself was a bit of a
retrospective of all the gaming I’d done over the years (so I guess I don’t
need to cover that again…).
One month after I I started this blog I announced the Original Plan for the Vimy Project. You could almost say that this blog has simply been a chronicle of that mad hair-brained scheme – and all the distractions I faced… (if there are more distractions than work on the project, can you really say you’re still working on it..?)
While trying to think of what I
was going to write for this post I got to looking at the Blog labels (over on
the left there) and considering how much of the blog was devoted to which
subjects. I should point out the blog post labels aren’t necessarily the best
indicator of how many post there are on a particular topic sometimes posts on a
given topic might fall under two labels and I know sometimes I might both, but
other times I may have only used one or the other…. At this point, though, I’m
not going to go through 1475 posts to make sure they are all accurately
labeled!!
Of the 1475 posts over the last
10 years at least 875 of those posts fell under the label
Painting
Update, which are just posts showing off what I’d managed to paint
since I last posted stuff. I think the next more prevalent were
Hordes
of the Things (at 184) and
DBA
(at 127), which makes sense as I played a LOT of HotT and DBA (and painted a
lot of miniatures for those games) – especially in the earlier years… but
not-so-much lately. I was surpeised to notice
WW2
was at 140 – especially since
Flames
of War is at 3,
Blitzkrieg
Commmander is at 28,
Bolt
Action is at 14 - but after thinking about it a bit I realized a lot
of those would have been painting updates on all the 28mm WW2 figures I’ve
painted and were at first used for Savage Worlds.
Savage
Worlds is currently at
91, which I also found a bit surprising – because in 2008 I started a
whole separate blog (
Savage
Timmy’s Playhouse) devoted just to Savage Worlds gaming – I did this
because a lot of my Savage Wrolds gaming was getting more RPG-ish than tabletop
miniature wargaming and, at the time, I wanted to keep this blog, just about
the miniatures… That has changed as and this blog has become more of a generic
gaming blog (there are 32 posts with the
Board
Games label – indeed there are a number of labels now for specific
board games. I don’t really post about ALL the board games I play… but I do
sometimes.
125 posts have the
Great
War label, but only 35 have the
Contemptible
Little Armies, which had been my “go to” game for most of the Great
War gaming I’ve done. So most of those posts are probably just of painted
miniatures. There are 60 posts with the
Vimy label.
There are 113 posts with the
Fantasy
label. This is a good example of where I’ve used a label sometimes or started
using it after a time ut not all posts about fantasy have been given this
label. As mentioned above
Hordes
of the Things - a fantasy game - has 184 posts devoted to it… yet
Fantasy
only ended up on 113 and a bunch of those would also be on the 48 posts with
the
Song
of Blades and Heroes or the 36 with
Frostgrave
label – and 20 posts have the
Dragon
Rampant label – and I’ve only played the game twice.
Sci-Fi
accounts for only 54. 41 posts have the
40K
label – I know most of those are painting, becaue I’m pretty sure I’ve only
actually played 2 games of 40K in the last 25 years… and both of those were in
the last year!
Future
War Commander has 17 posts – so clearly not ALL Sci-Fi related posts
were getting that label…
Samurai
have 60 posts devoted to them, though it should have been labeled Feudal japan
as I’m sure not all of those were just about Samurai… Although Feudal japan may
not have been the most appropriate either as I’ll bet some of those Samurai
posts were also about Legend of the Five Rings…
There are also 59 posts relating to
Taking
Stock of all my toys – the latest being last months count of ALL my
28mm figures (
Stocktaking
2016)
Seven
Years War comes in at 41,
Terrain
at 29, and I was a little surprised to discover there are actually more posts
about
Other stats of interest...
Blogger has really only been
tracking my stats since 2010, but for most of those last 6 years my blog has
been getting, on average, about 12000 hits – something screwy has been going on
since the spring because they went WAAAAAY up in May, June and July – that
can’t actually be humans checking – especially considering there was nothing
overwhelmingly exciting and new on the blog at that time.
232 games of Savage Worlds.
113 games of Hordes of the
Things
68 games of De Bellis
Antiquitatis
43 games of Song of Blades and
Heroes
33 games of Ronin: Skirmish
Wargames in the Age of the Samurai
21 games of Frostgrave
16 games of Force on Force and
another 16 games of Ambush Z
14 games of Cold War Commander
10 games of Blitzkrieg commander
9 games of Ever Victorious
Armies
4 games of 40K
4 games of Bolt Action
4 games of Fear and Faith
3 games of Modern Ops
3 games of Black Powder
3 games of X-Wing
2 games of Flames of War
2 games of Dragon Rampant
1 game of AK-47 Republic, Broken
Legions, Canvas Eagles, Dystopian Wars, Flying Lead, Flashing Steel, Future War
Commander, Fleet Action Imminent, Fast Play Grand Armee, and Lion Rampant
Some games may not have been
tracked… I’m sure I’ve played a few games of Wargaming 19th Century Europe in
there… Or maybe I just missed them when copying and pasting stuff…? (not going
to bother listing all the board games… go to the hyertextified-link above if
you want to see those too…).
Well that’s enough blathering… I
think I should just stop now. I’ll finish up by saying the most rewarding part of the whole experience
has been, as I originally set out to do, connect with other game nerds out
there. I can’t tell you how much I’ve appreciated every comment that people
have been so kind enough to take the time and post. You guys are all awesome! Thanks for a great 10 years. Hopefully I’ll be boring you with another
retrospective in another 10.
If you've got a moment how about drop me a line below and remind me how long you've been following the blog and what your favourite post was so far!
Thanks again!