I’ve started blogs before, and they’ve never lasted. Starting up another one in 2020 is definitely a bad idea. This isn’t 2002 anymore.
I think the problem was that I was writing for audiences that I knew weren’t really there. That’s why, this time, I’m writing all this for me.
I got back into programming about 10 years ago. The first thing I completed was a Pac-Man clone. Pac-Man is always something I wanted to take a stab at. Thanks to the Pac-Man Dossier (now hosted on Gamasutra, though it wasn’t when I used it), I was able to make stuff like ghost movement as close to the original as possible, though I never added the fruit, which is actually a pretty major omission. Anyway, I pulled the assets from MAME, including the Ms. Pac-Man art and mazes (don’t tell Bandai Namco). I was happy enough with the results, which you can still check out here.
Like I said, that was a decade ago. Since then I’ve gone through a number of projects, most them ending up half-finished. But that’s okay. Each one (in theory) builds off of the last, and my overall programming skills (in theory) improve with each iteration. What’s missing, however, is any sort of record of the work I have done. I can remember bits and pieces, and a lot of my old code is stored somewhere I can maybe access, but I have little trace of the day-to-day work, and how my thinking evolved over time. This blog will hopefully ensure that the next 10 years (ambition!) won’t become similarly lost to time.
My writing is going to be bad at first. That’s something I have to accept. In my limited blogging experience, I was never able to develop a voice I was comfortable using in the long term. Even now I feel like one of those self-important middle-aged men, penning his memoirs in his home office, determined to win fame and fortune by sharing his supposedly hard-won wisdom. That’s why I’m determined to focus on an audience of one. I want this to be something that at least I can look back on, and maybe use to search for links to interesting stuff I’ve found and then forgotten. I keep way too many tabs active in my browser. If this effort helps to reduce them, it at least serves that purpose.
Also, of course, we’re in the middle of a plague right now. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Prediction: the United States, at least, is in big trouble.