…so it wasn’t really my intention to have a 365+ day hiatus between posts. So…um….sorry?

It was around a year ago or so that two big life changes intersected at the same time. The first is that my weightlifting coaching job got MUCH more involved than it had been before….what had initially been a position where I subbed whenever another coach was out of town or sick because a semi-regular position became holy-crap-I’m-officially-official. The second is that I realized that I was getting very, very tired of streaming. Don’t get me wrong: I really loved my years of streaming and I miss my streaming friends, subs, and followers a lot. I’m very thankful that I still get to stay in touch with a couple of them (but if I haven’t talked to you in a while YOU SHOULD SAY HI OR SOMETHING), but I gotta be honest: I don’t really miss streaming regularly. In fact, when I stopped streaming, I mostly stopped playing MTG. I’ve really been absorbed with improving my coaching and learning more and better ways to help people get fit. Why? It’s not because I think there’s something wrong with the game, or because I’ve gotten too dumb to play it (debatable). It’s because WotC has decided that the mere act of keeping up with new sets and cards is a full-time job to do well, and I don’t want to do that for my full-time job. I honestly cannot keep up with a new set every six to eight weeks across multiple formats and feel like anyone should listen to what I have to say. I was barely handling it when I stopped writing…figuring out hundreds of new cards every ten weeks wasn’t something I could do without making mistakes that I didn’t like making…forgetting what’s legal where, how cards interact…that sort of thing. And when the calendar contracted and that time period was almost cut in half, I had no prayer.

In fact, it’s only been in the past couple of weeks that I’ve been playing again. I do miss the game. But in order to just enjoy said game, I decided to just play the decks I already own in the formats I enjoy with the gameplay I like and to not pursue anything that I don’t have time for or invest a lot of money in it. (And DON’T GET ME STARTED on the money part: how anyone can afford the multiple hundreds of dollars invested into EVERY SET in order to build diverse decks is beyond me. What was sold to the community as a “cheaper, easier way to play” has turned into a cash cow that makes almost no one happy. Sunrise, sunset.) In other words, I’m treating it like…a game.

I don’t expect that I’ll be streaming again any time soon. Hell, I don’t even know if my ol’ compy could handle running anything like that any more. I will say that I really miss coworking streaming on some days. I’m still an avid watcher of coworking streams and I believe strongly in the benefits of the product and the great people I consider to be my friends who I met in coworking streams. In a time when more and more people are working from home and increasingly isolated from the sort of community that benefits mental and social wellbeing (you can hate being “in the office” all you want, but the truth is you need other people to be nearby), coworking and “body doubling” is doing a great service for others. On top of that, I can tell you that I definitely get more done if I look at my second monitor and someone else is doing the same thing.

But what I KNOW I’ll be doing again is writing. I’ve been writing throughout the past year, but maybe not what you would assume. (More on that later.) But I really do love having this old-school corner of the Internet. I played around with moving to another business or starting my own Substack, but I honestly didn’t want my words to be controlled by another company that I had to depend on for eyes. Even Substack has an incentive to act like Tiktok (delete that crap from your phone BTW)…give you a SURPRISE! ton of hits on your first few posts only to completely ignore the value of your content and tease you with the most engineered slot machine in the world to keep you churning out “content” 24/7/365.25. If I decide I want others to find my articles, I’ll learn more about SEO. If I don’t care enough, I won’t. It’ll just be me writing for me. Well, writing for you AND me, since you’re clearly here. If a tree falls in the forest and stuff.

So I make no promises about subject matter or frequency or length. I have a lot of things I’m interested in now…whether weightlifting or productivity or sports or current events or streaming or whatever. I’ve even considered starting a podcast on the sports side of my interests just to get things out of my head on my terms and not be bathed in the flotsam that is social media in order to do so, but we’ll see about that. But I’m strangely happy to be back here. More to come.