Hey everybody!

It's good to be back.

I remember having a blog back when I was a student and sharing whatever weird trick I found or project I was working on at the time, and I started missing it. Over the past few years, I relied on social networks to browse the world and put some of my thoughts into text. But the way these platforms devolved into doomscroll factories and superficial opinions reminded me of the pleasure that comes with the slow writing of an actual blog post. I really missed having a space of my own, where my ideas can flow without colliding with meaningless shitposts, and where I feel like I can take all the time necessary to formulate my thoughts and put them into a properly articulated write-up.

And then, I decided to rent a dedicated server to start a Seedbox. If you stick around, you'll probably hear about it in the first posts I will write here. 😉 It crossed my mind that it would be a great time to setup a fresh WordPress install and start writing again, what can go wrong?

What was said was done, and here we are!

The rules of the game

I really am looking forward to writing a first proper post, and a little bit stressed as well. I ultimately failed at my previous blog because I was putting way too much pressure on myself about the quality of my posts, their thoroughness and the rhythm at which I wanted to post. Obviously, I am quite afraid of making the same mistakes here, so here as some rules I want to try and follow as we start on this new journey together.

No article is too short

Sometimes, I find interesting stuff and I realize that there's just not much to it. I used to think that "that is not enough to make a post about". I can be picky about the topics I want to talk about the day when I have too many of them!

No article is too simple

On the same principle, I used to think that I knew too little about something, or that I needed to dig deeper before having the necessary credibility to write about something. If I just discovered something something and I want to talk about my first impressions, then so be it. Not all articles have to be deep dives into the intricacies of the topic!

I write when I feel like it

It is probably easier said than done, but I am going to try and ignore metrics like articles per month, views, search engine results and the like. This commitment is by far the hardest one on the list; I guess it's also the most important one if I don't want to feel pressured and forced to write anything. This first post is a good example: the blog isn't even online yet, but I heard the call of the white page, so I sat down and started typing.

What's the plan?

So! Now that we're here, what can you expect to find on this blog. Well to be honest, I don't really know yet. If the rules just above weren't clear enough, I am trying to approach this without over-thinking it too much. There are, however, a couple topics that I've had in mind for a very long time, so I wouldn't be surprised if these were the first things I'm going to write about.

Video game design

I've always played a lot of video games, but I feel like my understanding of them and my ability to talk about them have never been so sharp. In particular, I have this very precise idea of what I call ludography. Just like cinematography is the art of making a movie, ludography is the art of making video games. There are rules and techniques that can be used to convey meaning or emotions. People invent new stuff all the time and pieces influence one another through the years.

I happen to have a bunch of very concrete examples of these mechanisms at play, and I really, really want to put them in words.

Computer stuff

Even though I spend a bunch of my free time playing video game, IT engineer is still my full-job. I also have way too many side-projects that I have started and that never came to fruition.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this blog is very likeliy going to talk about computers. It can be a neat Ruby trick that I found at work or an update on some obscure side-project that I happened to pick up that weekend, who knows!

And more!

Honestly, I have lots of ideas and topics that I want to touch on, I just don't know yet which ones will come up. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that may or may not appear on here at some point: mental health, language learning, video production, social media, wacky top 10s, memes... Like a box of chocolates!

In the meantime

I still have some work to do in order to get properly started, so I don't expect to churn out posts in the very near future. However, I will add a couple links to places where I expect to be active, namely Github, Twitch and Twitter. Feel free to check out what's going on there while waiting for the first posts to turn up!

See you round!