2023 State of the Mackerel
Hello fine internet people! The blog portion of my main account has been dormant for quite some time, and I've been wanting to put something here to give the few people who are following me an update. I've also wanted to change a few things on here, so with the end of the year upon us, I wanted to put forward something to help provide some clarity about the blog's past, present, and future.
The Past: Noteworthy Life Events
Since my last official post on here on August of 2021, obviously at least a few notable things have happened in the intervening two years. Here is a quick rundown of the highlights, presented as fake headlines:
Fish Davidson gets over by a minivan and yells swear words
"Guess I'll go back to school," says local internet weirdo
Studies indicate minor promotion at work leads to corresponding minor improvements in life satisfaction
Combining a bunch of words, Fish Davidson writes a book
Yep, tabletop gaming is a thing and it's not going away
Fish Davidson learns to make two sounds at once
Okay, so now that I've hopefully piqued your interest, here's a little bit more detail about each of those items. In November of 2021, I was walking across the street at a crosswalk and was hit by a minivan. The driver wasn't going very fast, but it was enough to break three bones (including my tailbone) and put me on crutches for a while and I needed special orthopedic pillows for my butt for about 18 months. I'm mostly back to normal now, but it was a long road.
The next big thing was that I went back to grad school in an online program. I've been a student for about a year now, and I'm about halfway through the program. Whatever intermittent dreams I would have and wanted to write about have been shoved aside to make time for the seemingly endless papers of graduate work. It's stressful, but I'm glad to be back in school.
Part of the reason for going back to school is because I got a minor promotion at work. Predictably, it came with more responsibilities, but it also came with a little bit more money. I'm going back to school to learn more about things that are related to my job, but also to leverage it into another potential pay raise.
Now we get to the personal creative pursuits of the recent past. I wrote a novel called Power Frank about a superhero whose only power is that he can open any jar. And he has to leverage that power to both overcome family dysfunction and save his desert hometown from being destroyed by malevolent hogs. I'm starting the querying process for agents and hope to have it published eventually!
I also finished up my multi-year Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shits and Giggles that ran from level 1 to level 20. Several smaller (much smaller) campaigns happened after that. Then Wizards of the Coast did some stupid stuff with their Open Gaming License, and now I've redirected the bulk of my gaming money to provide support for smaller independent creators and lesser known systems. I've really gotten into several OSR systems like Shadowdark, Basic Fantasy, and (if you count these as OSR) Cairn and Knave. Other non-fantasy systems that I'm currently really digging into are Orbital Blues and Mothership. Granted, I don't currently run those games for people yet, but I do like reading the books and seeing different approaches to solving certain mechanical problems. I've also been creating a bunch of random tables for things.
The last important creative pursuit is that of Tuvan throat singing. Tuva is a region in the geographic center of Asia that is known for a style of singing that allows the singer to produce multiple notes simultaneously. I've been fascinated by it for decades and tried off and on to learn it, but this summer I finally made progress and am finally learning how to do it. It takes a lot of practice and making weird sounds, much to the chagrin of my (very patient and supportive) wife.
The Present and Future: Lumped Together For Expediency
I want to write a dream journal and that's what this blog was primarily conceived for. Unfortunately, my dream output has been incredibly fickle and the other demands on my time (professional and academic) make it difficult to report or even remember dreams. Does that mean I'm closing up this blog? Nope! I'm still on tumblr almost every day. But if I'm not able to reliably post dreams on here, what should happen to this blog?
That's the question I've been wrestling with for the past few months. What should I do? Since fishdavidson is my primary blog and I can't easily swap over to a new primary blog to archive my content, I've decided to pivot a little bit. Even outside of tumblr, I use Fish Davidson as my basically my brand (obligatory shoutout to the 1-800 contacts commercial).
So it makes sense to keep using Fish Davidson for personal promotion and creative pursuits. I'm not going to be deleting or moving any of my old posts, but new posts will be relatively rare and limited to mostly things that I create.
However, tumblr lets me create a bajillion different sideblogs for my various interests. I've got several different blogs, all geared toward different interests. Future dream journal entries, if and when they happen, will be published to fishdreams instead of here. Other posts and reblogs will be spread across my various sideblogs. So without further ado, here are
My Various Sideblogs and What They're For
fishdreams - dream journal stuff
fishcrap - various reblogs and anything that I find interesting but outside of the scope of my various side blogs
fishability - for disability awareness stuff
fishrpg - this will be where I post a lot of tabletop RPG stuff. I'm planning on participating in Hexplore24, which is a tiny daily challenge for RPG creation that starts in January.
tuvafish - stuff about throat singing (and maybe even some of my practice sessions) will go here as I find stuff to post (currently empty)
brownstonarmy - probably won't be updated, but if you want to read a novel-length account of the entire Shits and Giggles campaign, here you go!
Thank you all for being such cool people on tumblr, have a great holiday season and new year, and I hope we stay friends on here.
