It’s been a quiet fall around Nuketown. I didn’t realize just how quiet until this morning, when I was surfing around the archives and saw just how many days I didn’t post in September, October, and November. Granted, November was lost to writing the novel, but the earlier months weren’t all that much better.
The reason for all this is obvious enough – work. There’s been a lot of it this fall, as I oversaw the transition from the Blackboard online course management system to the open source Moodle. It went well, but it was also an all-consuming sort of endeavor – by the time I got home, working on stuff for Nuketown had fallen to the bottom of my list. And as that was winding down, NaNoWriMo was kicking off, which was another double fisted blow to the guts of the thermonuclear automaton, leave me here, on December 10, wondering where the fall went.
And then, of course, there’s the Dire Café. When I did post in the fall, it was often to the blog and forum sections of Uncle Bear’s social networking site. The site’s recaptured all the old mojo of the previous ursine forums, allowing all the wandering tribes of geekdom to once again return to their rightful home … where we proceed to debate the merits of hot coffee, the intricacies (or lack there of) of election year politics, cheer on novel writing endeavors, and generally try to refine our individual pursuits of slack to an art form.
So where does this leave us for the winter?
Work has calmed down, and while it will likely pick up as we head into January and the spring term, there will be some project synergy that will let me spend more time tinkering with Nuketown (namely upgrading the work installations of Drupal to 5.3, which is what runs the ol’thermonuclear burg). You can expect refinements to the site’s navigation, its section views, a reinvigorated Linkport and perhaps even a significant overhaul of the home page to take better advantage of the new features.
My top priority will be returning Radio Active to a twice-a-month, if not weekly, show. It drives traffic to the site is easily has the best bang/buck ratio of anything I post here. I’ll be starting up some of my older columns again; expect to see the DVD Rack, Off the Shelf and Top of the Pile columns back in circulation on at least a monthly basis, as well as the return of the Libertarian Gamer.
I’m also going to be working on more feature-oriented posts, stuff that goes beyond simple reviews and tries to dig deeper into what’s going on in a given game or genre (see my review of BioShock for an example of what I’m talking about).
It’s a lot to do, but if NaNoWriMo taught me anything, it’s that there’s time to do everything you want to do, even as a geek dad with two kids, a wife, and a life that constantly throws up roadblocks. You just have to find the will do make use of it.