#blogpsa

First and foremost: Me.

After I got sick last year my priorities shifted. Clearly a lot of my life is dealing with this chronic, incurable illness now. I am learning to live a different life than the one I had lived for 35 years. This stuff on top of the day-to-day minutia of running my ME “side” blog has made a lot of what I used to do here a bit of a chore. While I don’t love the seeing new ME content and boosting other’s work any less than I ever did, the endless queuing and tagging can drag a bit.

(As a note, I don’t use XKit or anything for tagging which means that ALL of my tags are typed out by my own two little hands. As any of you who tags regularly knows, this part of keeping a neat blog can be a bit tedious, and yeah, I’ll admit, tagging removes a bit of the fun at times from blogging.)

I used to prep tomorrow’s posts when I’d get home at night, but with my “new” body, I find I’m much more tired when I get home after work and I generally don’t/can’t sit at my computer to take the time to tag and queue for the next day. This means I usually try and sneak queuing in when I get to work. This isn’t the best scenario for MANY reasons though. It’s also why I haven’t been posting on the weekends lately. If I’m not in the office, it’s hard for me to want to sit down at my computer first thing on Saturday/Sunday morning to set up that day’s queue.

In short, the “business” aspects of running a blog like this have gotten to me a bit. After 2 1/2 years of near daily blogging, I’m worn out.

Secondly: The amount of new content being posted.

Previously, I’d check the main Mass Effect tag daily to see what new fun stuff people had posted so that I could add it to the blog. It used to routinely take about 30-60 minutes to scroll through it. This habit was slowly broken over the past few months as I noticed new content slowing to a trickle.

This isn’t to say that there is NO new content. We are thankfully getting wonderful stuff still - from new fans and old! However, it’s kinda clear to many of us that there is considerably less of this content than there was even just a few months ago. I am always excited to see new stuff. ALWAYS. It’s one of the reasons why I love tumblr. The fans for Mass Effect are INCREDIBLE at creating fun stuff for these games, BUT when there isn’t as much as there was before, it’s hard for me to fill my queue sometimes with a variety of diverse works/posts.

There are other things that make it difficult for me as far as content goes. The new postings for a specific character/pairing are FAR outnumbering others lately. I try to keep this blog as equal opportunity as I can but it’s been hard to keep things as assorted as I like.

Third and final: I also personally had a really hard time with Andromeda. A. REALLY. HARD. TIME.

The game came out right when by health started to go and unfortunately a lot of feelings about the game are tied up with the very negative feelings about my body failing me. It also means I have a bad bias towards some of the characters and stuff in the game. I try not to let these feelings get in the way, but yeah, it’s been hard for me to boost Andromeda content (screens mostly) as much as I boost Trilogy content. It also probably doesn’t help that all of my pre-release MEA blacklisting is still in place. (OOPS. I was avoiding spoilers, ok!?!?!)

I could write an essay about my thoughts & feelings about MEA, but that’s an entirely different post altogether.

The short of this LONG, LONG post is this:

I have no plans on stopping this blog, however my posting may slow down even more than now, and I may forgo scheduling my queue by hand as I have been doing for years now.

ALSO, MOST IMPORTANT:

I appreciate every new follower that comes here, I hope you stick around!

I appreciate every long-standing and old follower that’s stayed. I apologize to my old crew for the lack of updates and post diversity lately.

For those of you that haven’t already but perhaps want to check it out, I do have my personal blog that I post all non-ME related things to: Dustie Rhoades.

It’s kinda a shit-show and I am VERY lax on tagging there (because of reasons mentioned above), just as an FYI.

Thanks and much love~ Marina (Dustie)