Tales From The Backlog

It’s finally over.

After two and a half years of working on my Master’s degree, it is finally over! For those of you who don’t know the origins of this blog, I created it as an escape from writing research papers while still improving on my writing skills. I needed an escape from the pressure of writing for a grade and just for fun on topics I actually wanted to talk about. That escape lead to this fun journey where I have meet new people and found an online community that I’m happy to be a part of. Thank you all for allowing me to be a part of the community and reading the random content that I write.

But enough of the mussy stuff. Now that I have more freedom and less stress to worry about (laughing at myself), what am I going to do with the extra time and energy that I will (pretend to) have? I have many ideas on how I want to expand myself a bit more and really concentrate on things here on the blog. So let’s start with one project that I’m excited to get started on!

My 50/50 Challenge!

While I’m happy that I was able to finish grad school, there were two negative effects that happened during the course of it. The first one is my health. Besides increasing my anxiety levels to a whole new plateau, I really let myself go in the weight department. I would definitely consider myself overweight to my standards and have been trying to diet and exercise when I could. Now is the time for me to fully commit myself to getting healthier and reduce a lot of this body fat. So for my first challenge, I want to lose 50 pounds (22.68 kg) by this time next year. Sounds simple enough since I was able to lose a lot of weight in one summer (but that was due to walking everywhere in the Summer heat and only eating one meal a day. I do NOT recommend). I’ve already started a routine and made changes to my diet to avoid overwhelming myself to get started. So far the routine is fun and manageable minus the soreness I feel everywhere. The gym that I go to is fairly empty during the summer months, but once students return to campus in a few weeks I may have to invest in some home gym equipment (I don’t like crowded gyms…).

That’s one half of the challenge. So what is the other half? My waist wasn’t the only thing that expanded these past two years. My backlog has expanded to a level that I was not anticipating when I started collecting. There are many games on my shelf that I picked up during a sale or found a good offer on that I could not refuse. I originally had the hope of playing them sooner than later, but I have games that I got five years ago that I have yet to play. It is time to make amends with this betrayal by finally reducing my backlog a bit. So for my second challenge, I want to finish 50 games on my backlog by this time next year. It would be simple if they were shorter games, but I’m a RPG fan and I like to take my time while playing; so this part of challenge may be the hardest. The good thing for you is that I will write about every game that I finish, so expect lots of new content for each game I finish*.

*The posts on SaGa: Scarlet Grace – Ambitions and Mario Golf: Super Rush do not count as part of my challenge since I finished them before the challenge began.

So that is my new challenge from me to me. I don’t want to flood the blog with updates with my challenge since most of it would be small updates. I will instead use my old almost-abandoned Instagram account to post updates there (and hopefully start using it more). I’m really looking forward to see if I can beat this challenge.

Reorganize Content

For a while, my content has kinda been all over the place with the types of post I upload to the format of them. After much consideration, I have decided to go with these formats to help structure my posts a bit more:

• Backlog Tales – Posts about games that I have recently finished for the first time.
• Collection Tales – Posts about games that I’ve already finished, but want to talk about.
• Opinions Are Just That – My opinion pieces on various topics that I feel like talking about
• One-off Posts – These would be things like holidays, events, collaborations, the January Awards Ceremony, etc.
• EXP Share Posts* – Community engagement posts
• Monthly Reports – My monthly blog report at the end of each month.
• Updates – Ye ole updates.

I have decided to alter the EXP Share posts a bit. To me it felt like I was heading into generic territory when coming up with prompts each month. I like to be creative when coming up with questions, and I feel like I have been for the most part. So from here on, EXP Share posts will no longer be a monthly thing, but instead pop-up only when I can think of a really good topic that most people will enjoy writing about and/or reading about. I think this will make the posts feel more special rather than a monthly obligation for you and I.

Recording Gameplay

One thing that I really want to get into the habit of doing is recording most of my gameplay. Eventually (and with practice), I want to start creating videos with highlights of my gameplay. Just a fun idea I’ve been playing around with that would also serve as extra content. This also goes in hand with my return to streaming throughout the week.

“BuT Danames,” someone might be saying. “Didn’t you try streaming before and found it weird and stressful?”

Yes. But I realize that that was entirely my fault for making it weird. I was still in the mindset that I needed to be “entertaining” at all times. This resulted in me stepping outside my comfort zone of forcing myself to talk when I have nothing meaningful to really say. I have learned that I am more entertaining to myself when I tell little jokes to myself that turns into a running gag later on. So that will be my strategy going into streaming; and if that doesn’t work for me then I will give up on the streaming idea. This is what my tentative schedule would look like:

Sunday – TBD (most likely in the afternoon)

Friday – 7PM EST – 10PM EST

I will be streaming over at ye olé twitch.tv/danamesx. Come watch me struggle with control inputs and talk to myself as I start to get tired and loss my mind (I talk to myself a lot when I’m tired).

That’s all I got. I’m excited to get back to writing for fun and sharing more gaming related posts in the future!

DanamesX