So, all you have to do is look at the right-hand side of the blog and see that posts were pretty decent for the first few years, peaked in 2013 and then the site almost died for the 12 years since. I've made my apologies for that time and again and half-hearted promises to keep posting, but only a smattering here and there.
The amount of activity in 2013 was always my goal and I had intentions of keeping the pace of posting up for as long as I could. My job at the time had other plans. I was working late most nights and what little time I had, I didn't want to be set at a computer, because that was most of my work time. I was still gaming heavily, I was spending free time with friends, my girlfriend, and family. I started experiencing some health issues but largely assumed it was fatigue and stress.
In 2018, I lost the job that I had banked on making my career when the company unexpectedly closed. The new job was even more stressful and in 2019, that company and I parted ways. Around this same time, I had been feeling "off" and decided to go to the doctor, which I never did before. I was diagnosed with diabetes and the physician I had at the time admittedly had little experience with diabetic patients. My initial prescriptions were a mess, and I got worse.
The job search that summer added to my stress and took up a majority of my time. I landed a manufacturing job at a small company that was looking to grow as the night supervisor. Though I held a position, I still had to do all the physical tasks with my crew, and the hours were really late. Medicine management and proper nutrition were hard to manage working those hours, and due to my condition, I developed several skin infections due to micro-abrasions and other factors.
I enjoyed that work and stayed with it until 2023, when I went on vacation and developed a blister on my foot that wouldn't heal. After a bungled period of dealing with a wound clinician that wouldn't listen to my concerns for a month, further tests showed that the infection in my foot had moved into the bone. I had surgery on my foot, and they did a bone scraping to remove what they thought was all of the infected area. I was out of work for quite some time while I went through heavy dosing of antibiotics.
The efforts were mostly fruitless, as I returned to work and was experiencing incredible pain in my foot until one morning I woke up with the top of my foot dark black. The tissue had necrotized inside around the bone, and I admitted myself to the hospital on December 23rd and 40% of the soft tissue of my foot was removed the next day by an ER surgeon. The surgeon who had performed the initial procedure on my foot came in to look at everything and I was given the choice of slowly having my foot and leg amputated piece by piece or having a below-knee amputation to clear all affected tissue and move into healthy tissues and bone. I chose the below-knee procedure because I wanted to heal and rehab and get a prosthetic so I could continue with my life. That surgery took place on December 29th, 2023.
In May of 2024, I had gotten a prosthetic and immediately started looking for a job. I landed a security guard gig and started working on paying off medical bills. The time since my amputation has been a pretty dark one. Lots of learning some lessons about limitations, lots of falls, a loss of good income, tensions building with loved ones because I withdrew, etc.
Fast-forward to today, things are looking up. I'm the site supervisor at my job now, I've gone through the stages of grief with my leg, and I accept and embrace it. I'm learning what works and doesn't for my health and about being an amputee still, and just generally in a better place.
This all to say, basically, that I've had my reasons for the fall off in the last few years. I've been working on my Khardtha setting quite a lot (more to come on that later) with the hopes of developing it into something fleshed enough for me to use almost exclusively for Pathfinder/D&D, and I'm excited to share some of that work. My philosophy for running games is ever-shifting and I still have musings on that, various systems, and other gaming-related topics to share in addition to actual play reports.
If anyone still reads this thing, is there anything that interest you that I could cover?
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