Hey! It’s been a while. Funny how parts of your life get can be eclipsed by other people without your even noticing. I’ll hit the highlights:

• Met a girl. Dated the girl! Broke up with the girl. (Repeat steps 2 & 3. And again. Aaaand again. Yikes.)
• Got laid off — again! Got re-hired — again! Made it through a teacher’s strike. (Mostly, it was boring.) Finally got to the end of a school year with my job intact, which was sweet, sweet relief.
• Got transferred. Got secretly transferred again, at the last minute. Wasn’t happy. Loving the new school, though!
• Watched an embarassing number of TV series from start to finish.
• Went to PAX Prime three years running. Played a lot of games.

Those are the pieces that stick out to my brain, anyhow. So what is this? What to make of this place, now I’ve got it up & running again? Used to be I pretty much talked about games & stories. Small sample size, I admit. But the theme is there. And even when my brain wanders away from strange habits like frequent blogging, it’s pondering and doing those things.

Back when I was last posting here, my sphere of gaming was much narrower. I’ve always been a tabletop fan, but in the last 2-and-a-half years I’ve had the chance to get to know the genre even better. We’ve been playing Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel these last months. We’ve tried out Mutants & Masterminds, FATE (via the excellent Dresden Files RPG), Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands (using Savage Worlds), Void Vultures, ApocalypseWorld, Mouse Guard, DungeonWorld, Microscope; with established favorites like D&D Fourth Edition and Shadowrun popping up fairly often.

There’s probably more games liberally sprinkled throughout — my memory ain’t so good! We’ve added Fiasco to the regular one-shot rotation. Done a few sessions of the D&D Next playtest. One of us is writing and playtesting his own indie games! And four of us went off the deep end (most everyone at least getting their toes wet) and got big into Magic: The Gathering, our wallets all the lighter because of it.

So, I’ll be focusing on those things I love: games and stories. I’ll try to think about how one medium speaks to another, and ramble about those electric, nebulous intersections. I’ll geek out about geek things, think out loud, veer onto tangets, and drill down on the littlest details. It’ll probably be erratic… but also, it maybe won’t.