An Apology

Well, I went into February with all sorts of grandiose plans... ...and they fell apart. There's a week left in the month, and this is my only post so far. I'm not sure where I hit my tipping point, exactly, but at some point in there, I piled too much on my plate, and shortly thereafter I dumped most of what I was on it into the metaphorical trash can.

By polling for what I should consume and setting myself a large to-do list, I inadvertently just gave myself a pile of work to do that wasn't any fun in aggregate, even if the individual pieces would be, and since this isn't a commercial blog, and therefore isn't really a responsibility, I shirked it. My last week was spent on vacation, and that should have afforded tons of time to catch up on the backlog. But, I didn't. I played Mass Effect 2 instead. And that was fun. So I guess I'm going back to the old way of doing things, but I think I'm also going to work in some new posts about some of my favorite pieces of media over the years.

You see, I've got a ton of them, and they all deserve a shot. And while I may not have just read, watched, or played them, they had an effect on me, so I'm going to write about them. I might go back and revisit them, or I may write from memory. I'm still going to keep knocking new stuff off the list, but I think giving some of my old favorites a post here and there may make this blog a lot more fun for me to do, and hopefully, it'll also make it more fun for you to read. Here's a (partial) list of stuff that may eventually make the list of posts I'm going to call The Archive.

PC Games: The Fallout games, the Mass Effect games, the Baldur's Gate series, Half-Life 2, Diablo 2, Civilization IV, Jagged Alliance 2 (despite the fact that I've blogged it once already), Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Syndicate, The King's Quest Series, the Dawn of War series, the Quest for Glory series, Silent Storm

Movies: Die Hard, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Anne of Green Gables, Identity, The Matrix, Equilibrium, Tombstone, Ronin, Heat, Collateral, Black Hawk Down, L.A. Confidential, The Incredibles, The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Les Miserables, Wanted, Braveheart, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Emperor's New Groove, Rat Race, Tremors, Taken, Thirty Days of Night, Cloverfield, Narc, The Fugitive

TV Series: The Shield, Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sons of Anarchy, Kirk, Foyle's War, Batman: The Animated Series, 24, Lost, Band of Brothers

Nonfiction Books: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Wild at Heart, When Christians Get it Wrong, Nickel and Dimed, Sneaky uses for Everyday Things, What Cops Know, GURPS Basic Set, Third Edition

Fiction Books: Astro City: Confession, Night Watch (by Terry Pratchett), God's Demon, Wizard's First Rule, the Mistborn Trilogy, The Man Who Used the Universe, Slipt, This Present Darkness, The Tim Rackley series, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent, Rainbow Six

And like I mentioned earlier, this is a partial list. Some of it's serious, some of it's less so, and there are varying levels of depth, but there are a lot of things that have made an impression on me that I think I can pepper into this blog to jazz it up a bit. I will at least try to pad February out with some of these. Probably at least one every other day.