Future Plans for the Blog

Time to talk about the blog. We’re over a year old (started in late March of 2013… bad times) and we’re not over 200 different posts. The total views for the page have currently reached… over 3000. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s a lot more than I ever expected. Though I’m also speculating that at least 40-60% of those are repeat viewings because I think blogger calculates each view, not each person. Meaning if you come here more than once to view, say, a different post, it’ll count as two views to the site overall.

Not that it’s bad. This blog was initially made for me to sort of post about my life and what’s going on in my head. I’m not really great at speaking about how I feel or anything because I have such a hard time slowing down my thoughts into intelligible words, making hard for me to really put together a clear thought. Writing out lets me focus those thoughts in an articulate way and edit them should I find that something doesn’t make sense… no, it’s not a perfect process, but it’s the preferred way I have to communicate my thoughts and ideas without tripping over my words constantly.

Ideally, the blog was also designed to reach out to more people and maybe get some feedback from people on whatever issues or problems I was going through. Minor as they might have been, it’s still always nice to have someone to talk to about said problems and use the shared wisdom of a circle of friends, family, and even just impartial perfect strangers to figure out some solution or clear away doubt of a particular thought or idea. Sadly, the responses and feedback from people has been incredibly minimal at best. I’d love if that changed at some point, but I’m not going to keep clinging on in the hopes I can get a dialogue going here.

As such, there will be a few changes to the blog starting August 1^st (lots of changes coming up, I know).

First, all personal posts about me and my life will remain here on this Journal of Clarity. But given how many posts a month AREN’T personal to any discernable degree, this does mean we’ll be having less posts overall on this page. I’ll try to have it at no less than once a month just to keep you updated on how I’m doing and what I’m doing if you’re still interested. There will also (ideally) be a second post a month regarding the next topic…

Second, as for the rest of the posts, I want to keep them together with my E-Vac Station stuff (the youtube, twitter, tumblr, etc). It’s something that I would like to evolve into a professional career at some point or, at the very least, a lucrative hobby. I’ve been wanting to reorganize the blogs and what not for a while anyway, but given the restart of Game On and the upcoming splurge of game and movie reviews I’m hoping to do in the last quarter of this year, I figure now would be a good time to make this shift and get ready for all of that. That said, on the Journal of Clarity, I’ll set up a weekly or monthly post (depends on frequency) which will link all of the various videos and columns I’m working on for that week/month. If changing which blog you follow is that big a deal, this resolves your problem. If not that big a deal, I can probably drop that entirely within about a year.

Third, my posting is somewhat sporadic. It’s one of those “if there’s something interesting to write or talk about, I’ll write or talk about it” deals. Since I don’t get paid and don’t have anyone managing me, I really don’t have a schedule. I’m working on updating that. Journal of Clarity will still be sporadic as it is based on life events and nothing more. E-Vac Station will have a schedule that (ideally) goes as follows:

Monday, Wednesday, Friday: Game On (the original series) in which a group of us get together to compete in whatever game we want. We have a special LONG-running Game On series we’re kicking off in August and will end… well… that’s yet to be determined. Until we can get a good recording schedule, this will likely only air on Monday and Friday for a while, but we’ll add Wednesday once I have a more consistent schedule with people for recording.

Sunday: Game On: Power Hour – In lieu of a podcast and with difficult scheduling everyone for a single day to record stuff, it helps that at least Josh and I can get together for an hour or two a week to record something and get it ready for the next week. Right now we’re in the middle of a Donkey Kong Returns run, but we’ll be switching once the game is over. I definitely plan to kick of Bayonetta before Bayonetta 2 is out just to celebrate that we’re actually getting the sequel.

Tuesday and Saturday: Review days! My goal is to review a game on Tuesday and a movie on Saturday. It really depends on what I’m capable of getting done in a single week. Right now, this will certainly be on the sporadic side of things until I have a stable enough income to support getting/renting games/movies on a regular basis. Alternatively (and most likely solution) will be retro reviews of older games and/or movies I haven’t played and will finally get around too (maybe).

Thursday: THREE-WAY PODCAST – This is an eventual goal. Again, this is dependent on getting a solid group of people to meet up on a weekly basis. But, more importantly, also dependent on getting viewers. I want to get this podcast on to iTunes for better distribution, but that costs money on both having a site and archiving the podcast somewhere. Unfortunately, I don’t have extra money to do that. When I know we have a substantial following to do so, the Three-Way Podcast will return to some capacity (bi-weekly, monthly, weekly?).

Anything else posted (predictions, opinions that aren’t necessarily reviews of anything, or just ideas for games or movies) will be posted sporadically still, and mostly used to fill any gaps that need filling. Anything not related to gaming or movies will stay on the Journal of Clarity (political opinions for example). I’m not saying that E-Vac Station can’t encompass those different interests, but in the spirit of trying to build a larger audience, I want to keep E-Vac Station as non-controversial as possible at the start. With more people on production, community management, and editing, we can expand for more stuff. But since this is basically a one-man operation, I want to keep things SOMEWHAT simple.

Lastly, anytime I’m unable to make a post (vacation, sick, etc), rather than worry about getting it up as soon as possible, I’m just going to put up a notification on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Steam indicating that there will not be a post for said-day due to one of the above. Again, until I get more people involved in the process, there’s only so much I can do and I’m not going to push harder to make this run like a RoosterTeeth, Escapist, or Destructoid if I don’t have the support or audience to justify that.

If there’s any questions about something above you aren’t clear on, please let me know either here or one of the sites I’ve mentioned we can be reached at. If you have a question on something that wasn’t discussed above, please let me know and I’ll do my best to address it and perhaps make a supplementary post if it is valuable information to other individuals. I think that’s all for today. I might have a few more posts before Friday (no promises). But once Friday hits, I’ll likely be on E-Vac Station a lot. Until then, see ya next time!