Fourth Wall Break #6: Wrapping up 2024 with Some Changes

I've had a week or so off work as of today and I have spent at least some of that week trimming up stuff. I went through the past four or five months of DriveThruRPG purchases and sorting those (and sometimes renaming files so I can actually find them), I sorted by Feedly folders to have a better grasp of stuff floating up, that kind of stuff. Almost nothing that makes me more able to do this blog but a lot of stuff that will help me to have a better time doing stuff for this blog. 

I have also been mentally sorting (hey, see what I did there) some ideas/plans/concepts for 2025. That's not this post, though. We are at Janus and currently we are standing by the head looking back. Head looking forward is most likely Thursday or Friday. 

A major chunk of time has been spent working out more stylings, some scripts, and a slightly different layout for the backend of the blog. Some things are pretty obvious. Other things less so. In rough order of most important to least, let's lay some recent changes out (if nothing else, this will help me to later figure out the timing of things since I can pretty bad at that). 

• The BIGGEST CHANGE as far as technical aspects go is that some of the incremental style/layout improvements have finally reached a point of "completion." I will almost definitely do more things here or there but the plan for the next few months is to stick to this formatting. The irony of it being the post that shows it off more completely is scheduled to go out tomorrow night, all things considered. For now, the best example is the Anatomy of a Post page I made that breaks down the various elements, colors, and functions.
• The BIGGEST CHANGE as far as the creative process goes is that what I used to call "the multi-phase" style is basically going to just be the regular play style of the blog. I just really like to have moments where I can focus on various elements: session-design, scene-setting, mechanics-development, lore-building, and in-character-play. I have fun getting to use all those different muscles - gamemaster, game designer, artist, fiction writer, role-player, map designer, etc - and for me it works best to slightly separate the different mindsets and modes. Recaps for stories that are played more "off-line" or in less bloggable formats will still be frequent. There might be more downloads and file-shares to take off some of the onus of spending considerable time reformatting play notes into a blog-friendly format. This latter part I am not sure.
• Related to this, but my Bleak + Pearl series is now purely going to be recaps so I can get deeper into hex crawling and dungeon delving, neither are gently bloggable without far too many screenshots. I'll also get to use a lot more pre-built adventures which can be hard to share without just outright infringing. I still owe this blog a post about turning GIMP into a person VTT.
• The default format will have a "hide GM elements" which hides the primary disruptions to the story (but not, yet, Lore or Mechanical elements). This allows folks to ignore some of the game-ness of the posts though not entirely.
• I have also separated out my numerous notes about content, lines/veils, representation, and things I do and do not tend to include into its own page instead of having it as a section under "About." The tl;dr: I play weird games that often touch upon horror, I write content warnings for my posts, all of my game worlds are considered default queer-accepting, I avoid some -isms even for the bad guys, and all of these things are subject to some change or alterations on case-by-case bases.
• Kind of minor but one shift in my creative process to get rid of my weird and annoying habit of having all links open into new windows. I have a lot of those to remove and probably will never get all of them but I should cut that out. It's easy for the reader to do it if they want.
• I try to now add notes to images and some sections to make it more clear exactly where something is coming from. Then, I repeat this is the CREDITS of each page with a bit more details. Credit is good, but keeping the conversation going is even better. Both are served by being really open about sources in case others wish to follow suit.

I think that wraps it all up. See you in the new year (as in, around 10 hours from now).