Fourth Wall Break #11: Just Catching It All Up

 

Bringing Back the Fourth Wall Breaks

It has now been very nearly three months to the day since the last proper Fourth Wall Break and since tomorrow [which would actually be the actual three-month-iversary] was supposed to have a Bleak + Pearl session that is not ready to go out, I figured I'd combine those two needs into one and post this in a few minutes. 

Why is this a Fourth Wall Break while the "Waking Back Up" post wasn't? I don't know, Space Pilgrim, I just volunteer here. Afterall, this is my personal solo rpg play journal that is largely posted online because the pretense of talking to other people helps me to sort my thoughts. 

Where Is Bleak + Pearl Then? 

I mean, it's right here [imagine me pointing to some files on my hard drive]. It's only been around a week since I actually got my internet fully set-up on my main comp and even then there are a couple of pieces I should get for EU compatibility before I consider things more stable. I have a folder with all the notes and ideas [and this blog] but I haven't quite had time to fire up the graphic tools, notes, and such to sort through everything and get it all up to date. It's kind of like an actual traditional RPG session that gets delayed for three months because people can't make it due to all kinds of adult-human-being commitments only every single one of those people has been myself trying to navigate new electrical outlets and stay online.

New voltage, New Me. Or some blathering non-sense.

The hope is that in a week or so I'll have time to at least get everything ready to go and start logging some games but at this point it might be a bit before the posts show up because...

Post'em As I Get'em Format For a Minute, Probably

I've done some one-post-a-week stuff and I've done more-than-three-posts-a-week type stuff. Back when I found out that playing out a single campaign with focus worked better for me, it was intended to fit into the exactly-three-posts-per-week formation. Then that turned out to be rough to always maintain with a lots of posts being slightly rushed earlier in the day just to get out. The very first iteration of the blog was "post when I had something to post" but I liked the idea of having things scheduled ahead of time. 

As I was waking things back up, I liked the idea of trying to maybe have a Monday + Thursday/Friday schedule. Having such a schedule means it is easier to play things out earlier and build a up a lists of posts for future sake. 

The problem with that is that interferes almost immediately with the blog's purpose as "Grown Man Talks to Himself About Games He Plays With Himself". Because the reason HTML works so well for this, for me, is because I can link to things. However, by the vagaries of the blog format, posts not published cannot be linked. This means that stuff that happened several sessions ago are probably up there but stuff that just happened a session or two would still be in the queue. I had posts scheduled for three weeks out for the current The GLOW arc [posts going out once a week on Monday]. This includes a slight glitch that a link I need to link can't be linked because a change/experiment is in a post that would have hit the first week of October or so. 

In that light, and just to get things back to 100% casual as my brain sorts through things, the plan is to undo that and go back and reschedule those posts to once per day until they are out [which frankly is like...three days in that light] and then add new posts to the stack as I get them. This means I don't run into the weird issues where I have to wait days or weeks to do all the background stuff for posts. Well, I guess days since I just said I'd do one per day. I feel like that's a good max. Maybe. I don't know. "Prep is Play" with a shared solo rpg [yes, yes] suddenly starts including figuring out the damned SEO of the thing. Not that I have any of that.

What makes this interesting is that one weeks I play a lot, there might be three or four sessions. Weeks I do not might have nothing. It does however encourage me to try and think up interesting "other" posts instead of just focusing on moving on immediately. It also frees me from thinking about my solo play in the context of an external project quite so much. I don't need three-days-a-week content. I just play when I play and the content gets posted here. 

If nothing else, it will feel more like a proper solo rpg journal. Stuff will show up more immediate to its surroundings and some editing and retcons might happen but at a later date. If I ever get to a point that I plan to launch this blog more as a "Content Creator" version of itself, I can rethink this decision. 

EDIT: After posting this, I figured I'd go back to even before the "once per day" safety valve and just get all the backlog out. At least schedule it to a post-per-couple-hours. Just so I don't end up in some weird thing where I have a week+ of scheduled posts and it undoes the whole purpose of this [perhaps temporary] change.