DAY 6: The Hard Shit

I briefly recapped my awkward reacquainting with Demon's Souls internally. Done with 1-1 to 1-3 without much trouble. Finished 2-1, 3-1, and 4-1 ably, but it wasn't pretty. Blasted my way through 5-1 because I needed a break from the torment I was living through with 4-2. Old Hero and Storm King down, so 4-x is finally over. Farmed souls in 4-3. Acknowledged the cancerous elephant in the room. As seeing old friends goes, it was a lot of forced conversation about the weather with only hints of flirting. Now, it's time for the hard shit.

I had two challenges to overcome with Day 6: First, I decided to heed my own advice and start streaming the playthrough. Yes, I probably should have done this from the beginning, but better late than never. Since I've only streamed via Twitch once or twice with the Castlevania stuff and not using a PS3, I wasn't sure how things were going to go. Thankfully, Twitch and Elgato have been around the block a few times so things are streamlined, and it was pretty easy to set up with only minor fiddling with the interfaces to get cooking.

The real issue with the stream, though, was the crazy, years-long problem with Demon's Souls servers. Without trying to really suss out the hows and whys of it, DS was the definition of "sleeper success" for both From Software and especially Atlus, and neither had any idea the game's online functionality would last this long. Because of what I can only assume was an overload of players on a rickety engine and a subpar server from 2009, playing in online mode will occasionally cause debilitating performance issues to the game. Voices and sound will go out of sync. Loading and saving will take noticeably longer than it should. Occasionally, the frame rate drops so badly you'll think Don Draper is trying to sell you your own nostalgia. The Demon's Souls community have tried cockamamie ways of dealing with this over the years, but the long and short of it is that you either tough it out or quit out of the game and restart.

This is something I don't often deal with in video games anymore, a network connection that hobbles the actual game. When I encountered it again on Day 1 for the first time in many years, I was starting to have heart palpitations. Was this, my fifth PlayStation 3, about to go to yet another busted console cemetery? After all, most of my PS3s have gone kaboom shortly after finishing a Souls game, I supposed it would probably be poetic that this one dies during my final month with the game that inflicted the curse to begin with. Do I even replace this thing, though? After February is over, I was thinking of retiring it altogether. I hated having to think about this, and was seriously expecting the worst. Thankfully, an audience member from the stream reminded me of the game's long-running issue with staying online. I don't think I need to push this old horse any further than it needs to go, so I'll try to keep play sessions short going forward. But sigh of relief all the same.

The second major challenge of Day 6 was what I can only call the worst boss fight of the game, the Maneaters. This is somewhat infamous in the DS community for continuing the game's tendency for bullshit. Essentially, you're on a bridge, and in flies a large gargoyle-type thing with a snake for a tail. It's a tough customer, and only made tougher by an environment that you can easily fall off of if you're not spacial aware (or the AI just gets sick of playing fair and it bum rushes you off the ledge). Sounds kind of lousy, but negotiable with some practice, right? Well, smart guy, a second gargoyle-type thing flies in to double the fun when you get the first down to 50% of its health or a certain amount of time happens. 

I suck at this. I start a new game and dread this fight like I just broke an antique vase and my parents are on their way home from work. There are times where I've done better with it and finished it after half hour of slamming my face into a brick wall and there are times where it's burned whole nuggets of my own happiness away. In a game that I love so much, I hate this fight like I hate Kid Rock singing the National Anthem. It's a urinal cake on top of an actual cake. It's the worst.

But not this time. Armed with the Soul Ray spell and a whole lot of nerve, I dropped the first Maneater before the second one flew in. Knowing the fight and the arena well enough to remember that getting to the middle of the bridge was the best area to move around in, I maneuvered past the first gargoyle-type thing in anticipation of needing more space to breath and I chucked enough spells at it in the process that it was good and dead by the time I made it to the sweet spot in the arena. This sunk my stress level by orders of magnitude. It was still a tense fight, and I almost botched it a couple of times on the bridge, but then, something magical happened: the servers decided to start acting up again, ratcheting down the frame rate and moving everything to a crawl. My knee-jerk reaction to this was anguish and that the Maneater was going to get a win it didn't deserve, and on my best ever run at it to boot. But it stopped dead in it's tracks, the enemy data streaming to and from the server had frozen it in place. I don't care if you think I cheesed the game. My flashing this fight and plowing through it on my first go was a cathartic moment. It has, and will never, happen ever again. I peppered that motherfucker with so much magic you'd think we were at a Liberace farewell show. 

Another hurdle down. At this rate, I need to start thinking of future plans for the rest of the month. I suppose I could roll another character and start from scratch, or I could just head into NG+. That might be getting ahead of ourselves, though. Now that the worst boss in the game was dead, I needed to move into the worst level of the game.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 5: For Old Time's Sake

I have a lot to unpack when it comes to the Storm King.

Typically, it's the Greater Demon boss that I tackle first. Since I laid out my usual itinerary yesterday in regards to getting through 4-x for the easy level grinding, plowing through the Old Hero drops you on the doorstep of what might be easiest boss in the game. If you know what you're doing and know the layout of the arena, the Storm King is both a trivial challenge to overcome and bountiful horde of insane experience grinding.

It also reminds me of having cancer.

Now, I have a lot of memories of my time with cancer: throwing up in a hospital chair, shoving food into my face as fast as I could after chemo so I wouldn't throw up at home, watching my then- brand new wife watching me fall asleep, those kinds of things. Deeper stuff. Personal stuff. But when I think about cancer as a period of my life, the most lasting, continuous phantom of that is the Storm King arena.

We generally spend Sundays with my wife's family. At first it was more utilitarian; we lived in an apartment at that point and wouldn't say no to free laundry. Over time, it became the norm, especially in the warmer months. It sounds cliche, but a few beers and some grilled food was a routine that most people can abide by. And we certainly liked to have a few beers or more. But cancer and its treatment will wag its finger to that. I was placed on a pregnancy diet of no uncooked lunch meat, no shell fish, and most importantly, no booze.

I stopped going to my in-laws on the weekends. It wasn't a matter of people being shamed into imbibing or not, but trying times in people's lives have a strange way of playing guilt reversal. People would feel bad for me because I was sick. I would feel bad for them because I might ruin their good time. I know it's not entirely right-thinking, but the longer the treatment carried on, the more I wanted my wife to have some sort of release from what was happening. If she wanted to do it with her parents and a few drinks, I call that the best possible situation.

This left me a lot of Sundays in our apartment alone. Not long before coming to this decision, I had started to use Demon's Souls as a way to cope with what was going on around me, I started digging deeply into what else was going on in the game in regard to character builds, hidden magic spells, and world tendency events. I was using a character I had already built to test these things, thinking that it would be easier to sort of bolt new abilities onto a something instead of running through the game with an avatar built for specific things from the ground up (though, I did that eventually). This meant a lot of time grinding for levels to mess around with this spell or that weapon, effectively turning my first character into a jack-of-all-trades that could steal your life with a stupidly unfair bit of magic or crush your skull in with a meat cleaver.

Most weeks were research periods. Most Sundays were sitting in the shack in the back of the Storm King arena as I silently killed flying monsters. I carefully manipulated the world tendency for maximum experience farming. I outfitted my character with gear best served to double that. For hours and hours and hours at a time, the only sound coming from the room was the occasional "well, fuck" if I were to accidentally get killed off (because of that I finally discovered podcasts). It was a redundancy that I found myself craving, a routine my body could adjust to while I sat in my own malaise. I missed being with my new family, but grinding over and over for all these long hours felt safe and comfortable. Getting stronger as I grew weaker, if you want to slap a metaphor on it.

Yesterday, I killed the Storm King yet again with ease. Like everything else with Demon's Souls, the first time was the most challenging, nearly everything that followed propped by the scaffold of prior experience. I remember cheesing the fight during my first go round by worming myself into a glitched chunk of the environment and screwing the game's physics. I don't need those things any longer. I hit the archstone to return to the Nexus, and while I was leveled beyond the need for it, I couldn't help but come back to that lonely, broken house by the sea, murderously obliterating whatever flew above me. After the previous day's frustration through the catacombs of 4-2, I was taking back control. It was satisfying and bittersweet. Any extra help would be welcome at this point, too. I was gearing up to take on the worst boss fight in the game.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 4: It Knows Neither Friendship Nor Loyalty

A few things happened with this trip.One, I should have been recording or streaming what was going on here. I mean, I'm supposed to write a story after the month is over, so I should probably either begin to promote it somehow or at least have some footage I can refer back to and personal screenshots to use. I guess I'll start doing that.

Two, I was right to be afraid. I decided that running 4-2 was the safest bet after how things were going over the last few days. Not that I'm particularly intimidated by what's left of the game (5-2 notwithstanding because it sucks), it's just that 4-2 is prime real estate for early- and mid-game level farming. Right in the beginning of the stage, you can buy cheap arrows from Grave Robber Blige, a vendor that can be freed from a cell in 4-1. You only need between a handful of them for this exercise, but I tend to buy in the low 200s for future purposes. Anyway, just past our shiny-domed friend is the entrance to the actual level, which is a scaffold of narrow stone walkways overlooking an altar below. Standing in front of said altar is a Grim Reaper enemy, who has the handy ability to summon ghostly giants to come after you. But we want that to happen. Armed with a few things to shoot and the knowledge that the dope is right below you, you can rain down some misery on the Reaper before dealing with the phantoms, killing him and making his sidekicks disappear. The payoff for this is a range of experience starting at around 4500 souls depending on your world tendency (which, I promise, I'll get to in a future post), and since this whole affair takes place mere steps after you enter the level, it's easy to kill this guy, head back to the Nexus, and repeat ad nauseam.

When the game was new, I wrote a small "getting started" document for friends of mine that I would convince to play the game because, let's face it, it's kind of a hard nut to crack for first timers. After explaining the ins and outs of character builds, weapon scaling, item vs. equip weight and all kinds of other junk, I would carefully walk them through 1-1 and then immediately suggest that a person bum rush 4-1 with the explicit plan to get them to this one spot. In a way, this is weirdly cruel because 4-1 is super hard the first time through, but I am nothing if not a strict task master. Besides, this little bit of muscle-building should feel like a reward for toughing through such a hard level. Things aren't entirely a breeze after putting the Reaper loop in play, but it's as good a way to easily build some soul levels until you feel like you're comfortable enough to go on.

So I circled through this a couple of times, already a little advanced for the payoff since I had already flattened a few early levels with relative ease. I even augmented it with killing the black katana-wielding skeleton behind a hidden wall not far from where the Grim Reaper stands. I bought some spells, I bumped up my Magic stat, and sat back telling myself, "yes, old friend. You were a wild stallion that I have since tamed. Let's ride off into this internet sunset together, assured that we're both a little older, a little better. Maybe, even, we're a little kinder. We're more ourselves than we were all those years ago." And then I remembered that 4-2 can go right off and fuck itself blind. 

After the success of the further Dark Souls games and especially Bloodborne, the larger gaming populace has found that From Software's series of pitch black fantasy action RPGs are hard, but fair experiences. In a lot of places, Demon's Souls is only one of those things. Enemies frequently ignore the same rules that your character must adhere to, and specifically in terms of stamina loss. I can't just sit there and continuously swing my sword before a little green meter informs me that it's time to stop. Monsters, especially a few in the Shrine of Storms, don't subscribe to this law of nature. Worse, they have some fairly wily AI, so there are occasions where a literally unstoppable death machine will come tumbling before you on a narrow cliff face while another guy is pelting you with arrows and a giant flying stingray is shooting magic spears at you. It's a lousy setup, and worse knowing that the death machine is prone to accidentally falling into the cliff itself, and when this happens, you will wander off of it with it with absolutely certainty. There are times when you can meticulously plot your advances and ward off foes far ahead of you. There are other times where you are the mercy of the random flight patterns of flying fish and their asshole friends on the ground.

Demon's Souls can get a little bullshitty. People forget this, and everything in 4-2 past our first lucrative encounter with Death is there to remind you of that. You'll meet other Reapers and their ghostly henchmen. Sometimes they'll shoot giant, damaging lasers at you (because, sure). Other times they'll just stumble around. This is the only area of the game that's perhaps more infuriating than thrilling because you just never can tell how things are going to react to you foraging for items and poking your head around corners. It absolutely killed 90% of my playtime for the day just fumbling along to the boss, the Old Hero. As a guy with a house, a wife, and a small kid, getting stomped on by a game that I used to think I knew pretty well was making me seethe in fury.

Then there's the Old Hero himself. This is funny fight because the adversary is blind. This way, you can let him wander off and pelt him with arrows or magic from afar. When he figures out that some jerk is behind him shooting shit, he comes running. If you're in soul form (which I assuredly was after dozens of deaths in this level), you're quiet enough that you can sprint to the other side of the arena before he drops his giant sword down on you. Well, that's how it's supposed to go. I've never gone toe-to-toe with this guy before after figuring out what to do, but for whatever reason, my tried and true plan just kept screwing up. He'd figure out I was running past him and swipe me for an easy kill (magicians are frail, you see), or peg me with a long jump that I had trouble reacting to. There were many, many times where I wanted to just put the controller down and tell 4-2 to eat shit for the day, but I dug deep and remembered that I had a ring that made me harder to detect by enemies. I put it on finally, more than an hour of my day wasted, and triumphantly beat the snot out of the Old Hero. It wasn't the bittersweet death of an enemy that shared some genteel mutual respect with me. It was a curb-stomping. I earned it. It was time for my first major boss demon, and a lot more power leveling.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 3: Stonefang Funky

Day 3: Ok, Then

After my initial burst through several opening areas, I was sitting on what you might call a false sense of security. Knowing that I now had a handful of forging materials to strengthen the sword that I scored from 4-1 that made melee fighting tenable, I dipped into 2-1 to meet with the blacksmith Ed, fixing that I should probably also finish the level while I was there.

Then I nonchalantly walked off a crude elevator and remembered what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.

Demon's Souls is perhaps the most straight-up when compared to the games that followed it. There are levels that are basically straight line partitioned off by bosses, which denotes each sub level (though, you can logically run and entire level front-to-back if you want). Further games in the series are what many consider 3D "metroidvanias" where you roam a giant world with smaller environments that interconnect and circle back to each other. This added a deeper layer of mystique to the games as exploration was now a major concern. But the first Souls game was, in many ways, the most opaque in terms of what was running under the hood. We'll get into this more down the road, but the most obviously difficult concept to grapple with was body vs. soul form, which drove some of the game's heralded multiplayer functions.

It works like this: Kill a boss or use a certain item and your character is "revived," which means that they have twice the amount of hit points. While in this body form, you also have the opportunity to call in other players over the internet to give you a hand, be it killing further bosses or helping you through sticky situations in the levels themselves. The game never explains any of this to you, though, so while this seems relatively straightforward (and having all further games in the series use practically the same method), the onus is on the player to suss out how things work with strange items that never leave their inventory or rare consumables that only restore more hit points on the surface. There are some distinct advantages to staying in soul form, but that's what we'll come back to later.

This tumble off the elevator (and right in the begging of the level, too) was the first real death I had encountered up to this point; scripted tutorial doom notwithstanding. I was pretty irritated, to be honest. I thought I was doing well for being in body form for so long, and a dumb mistake like not accounting for momentum when I tried to drop onto a wooden lift was just about the last way I wanted to experience the first (of what will still be several) deaths. But it reminded me of that the whole point of this exercise was to say farewell to the game's network functions, not to tumble through it for the eventual final showdown with an end boss.

The truth is, I almost never play this game connected to the internet. Yes, this is bit ironic regarding the task at hand, but I feel as though I have good reasons. When DS was released in the US in 2009, I had come off a solid decade of playing nothing but one-player, story-driven, death-march-to-the-end Japanese RPGs like your Final Fantasies and Suikodens. Even the occasional action RPG like the Kingdom Hearts and Fable games were entirely solo experiences. My first initial impression of the obtuse multiplayer functions of DS was to ignore it, then. It wasn't worth wrapping my head around it if I were just going to go through the game myself anyway, so I brute forced my first character past the end credits, and to much consternation. This was a mistake in hindsight, but that first run of the game was enlightening in many ways. Eventually, I learned the game well enough that a second player never felt necessary, the advantages of playing it offline seemed to outweigh the disadvantages. I had some fun multiplayer experiences over the years, but to me, Demon's Souls was a lonely, solitary endeavor. What I'm doing now can't be. This first death slapped me upside the head to remind me of that.

I wove my way through the rest of 2-1 (in my opinion, the best designed level of the game) in soul form, knowing that the rare Stones of Ephemeral Eyes that returns you to body form were still a scarce resource and not worth dipping into just yet. The Armored Spider at the end of the level wasn't even close to the hardest boss of the game, so I decided to drop my summon stone just outside of his arena to see if anyone needed the assistance of a budding wizard. After 15 minutes of waiting, though, there were no takers, and the giant arachnid died painfully like it should. I didn't see the need to stick around Stonefang any longer with it dead and in the ground. Plus, it was time for some power leveling.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 2: Slooww Doowwwwn

Demon's Souls, amiright?

DAY 2: This is going to fast

I left this out of the first post because things were getting a little lengthy, but after three hours playing (still sick on the couch), I found that I remembered a whole lot more about this game than I thought. The roll move in DS as well as early game magic spells have gotten a rep in the community for being fairly overpowered, something later games have since addressed. But once I fit back into that old suit and began running through levels, this knowledge came right back to me like I was getting my ass to Mars. Enemies --nearly all humanoid-- in 1-1, can't handle the starting Soul Arrow spell that the royalty class comes packed with, so even though I slid right back into the old habits of melee attacking most things, when life was low and mobs got hairy, one-shotting enemies with low level sorcery almost made me feel guilty about how I was steamrolling this early level. Almost.

The royalty comes equipped with some weak armor to counterbalance the unfair offensive output, which means that I'll drop dead if a larger monster so much as gives me a funny look. But 1-1, the first level of the Boletarian Palace and the actual tutorial of the game, was easily overwhelmed with these weaksauce duds and the rush of old memories regarding the level layout. Enemies came and went, Red Eyed knights left alone and a noble NPC saved, and the first boss was stomped on with a handful of firebombs and some turpentine. Everything felt good and right.

Now was the time for follow through. Demon's Souls is a game that greatly benefits from a carefully formulated plan, and its discretely separated levels and the rewards/ hazards therein can be tackled in more advantages manners depending on what kind of character you want to build. Want to swing heavy weapons? Next stop: Stonefang Tunnel and their copious forging items. Feeling devout and miraculous? Better head over to the Shrine of Storms to bust out Saint Urbain and learn some higher-level prayers. Scheming that magic was my weapon of choice, I knew that I had to go through the Tower of Latria, affectionately known as 3-1, but the learned player needs not be so dogmatic; there are strong weapons strewn about a many environments that can give a big boost in the early game, it just takes a little forethought and a lot of guts to go get them. For me, then, running into the first section of the Shrine of Storms (4-1) was worth the trouble to grab a sword that scaled with my magic stats vs. the normal stuff that bumps in effectiveness via Strength or Dexterity. I felt that it was worthwhile to just tough it out and finish the level now that I was swinging a melee weapon that doubled my damage output, and then there I was. Two down.

The Tower of Latria was a pushover, then, irrespective how lost I get every time I play it. But the point wasn't to finish the level, it was to meet Sage Freke, a high-level magic instructor. But getting him out of the the level and back to my Nexus hub world meant that you've run the entirety of the level anyway, so killing the boss became an easy bit of side work. Three levels done. This is going easier than I thought.

Car doors closed. I could hear them through the thick brick walls of my house as the sound traveled past old windows that still need to be replaced, the thud of my wife's wide swing slamming the back passenger side shut with a toddler in her arm. I come to, the fugue of replaying this game snapping. Had I seen too much too soon? Am I going to destroy this game? Do I need to start thinking of another character (and maybe one named after a more poignant album title?)? I'll need to stop today, and this was as good a place as ever to do it. I probably wouldn't need to be so concerned, though.

We'll talk about that tomorrow.

The Demon's Souls Farewell Tour DAY 1

So, the day after I announce to myself and the gaping black void that is the internet that I'll try to resurrect a February blog-a-day, I skip the first day. In fairness, I got sick yesterday and could only muster sitting on the couch for several hours before going to bed.

This is ironic, actually.

The real reason I'm doing this is because Demon's Souls --maybe the best video game of the last ten years-- will have its servers shut off on February 28. I have an intense personal connection to this game, and while it will still be playable in an offline capacity after the end of this month, it will be a different, almost hollow experience. Effectively, Demon's Souls will be a husk of its former self; it's ability to connect to other players for eerie, otherwordly multiplayer opportunities stripped away will lobotomize it. I have been contracted by USGamer.net (a website I contribute to and that you should read) to witness the surgery.

Like all articles I write on the internet for money, I began to have a small panic attack about it. I've written a lot about this game in the past as well as its successors, and a whole lot of other people have done the same. Demon's, and especially its follow up, Dark Souls, were born into a screaming YouTube age where whole careers have been made out of people dissecting them, and it's hard at this stage to have something new to add. I could rehash a terrible year of my life and how I used the game as a perverse coping mechanism, but that's already been done, too. But I have things in me about this video game that need to get out, even though I'm having a little trouble finding them at what is now its twilight.

I have concluded, then, that we're going to find them together.

DAY 1 (February 1, 2018):

It has been more than five years, or maybe more, since I've played this game, which is a realization that came to me early in the morning before I would have a chance to sit down and play it. To some, and definitely when I try to look back on it, five years is no time at all. In video game release terms, though, five years is more like ten. Three Dark Souls and a Bloodborne later, I was wondering yesterday morning how much I would recollect about DS. There was a time that I literally knew the game backward; I played it once this way just to see every level from every angle. But after doing the same with the first two Dark Souls games (plus, you know, playing other video games because that's my thing), I had both a lingering fear and childish delight that maybe I won't be coming back to it from scratch, but I won't recall as much as I would have a year or two or three ago.

So, I began to plan ahead, but without spending the morning looking through wikis or message boards. What build should I make for my character? Most playthroughs for me were hybrid melee concoctions, so should I branch out? What about an archer? A priest? Will I have enough time to finish the game in the month that I have with fewer and fewer hours in the day? I can't mess with that when I have a deadline looming. I decide to compromise, then: I only played a magic build once, but I'm too much of a chicken to start with the mage class. I chose to start with the royalty class (essentially, the game's only sort of "easy" mode).

This was only the first of many small-potatoes agonies, though. While it's the first time I've played the game in years, it will likely be the last time I play it ever. It needed to be momentous, almost monolithic. As the only game in the series that had gender-specific equipment, I wondered if I should make an avatar that resembled me physically --a bald, blue-eyed man with an athletic physique-- or should I take a more feminine course to enjoy the few advantages the game will offer me? Feeling the crunch of time as I nursed my illness on the couch, I chose the latter. But it got worse when I was instructed to choose my character's name, which gave me actual pause.

Choosing the name of an on-screen avatar is not the sort of thing to make a person pensively stare at a wall for close to ten minutes in total silence. Typically, it barely registers as an afterthought for me. I could go the wacky, funny route, my "Doc Brown"s and "Butfface Magoo"s running around and terrorizing hapless demons and crazed soldiers in the Boletarian Palace with reckless, fluid impunity. On the other hand, there have been times when I realize that names have been effectively meaningless as a practice. I am the title-free savior of this wretched Northern kingdom, strolling in and out of tunnels and mines dishing out the kind of No-Name justice that would make Clint Eastwood blush. But this time, this final stretch, needed to mean something. I need to capture that finality. I settle on "Dynamite Step," the title of the last Twilight Singer's record. She ventured into the colorless fog, and I played through the tutorial.

This is my fifth PlayStation 3, I think. Over the course of the last decade or so, these small supercomputers had a habit of dying in my home. This is something that has always bothered me, as you might guess. I tend to take care of my belongings, and I fucking babied these things over the years, but foul luck or cosmic injustice decided that they needed to die at my feet every other year or so. This meant that saved data is long gone for old characters (the first one died before my buying into PS+ and cloud saves), which meant that the game was going to force me through the tutorial, which can normally be skipped. I didn't mind, though. The mechanics of a Souls game is branded onto my inner being now, but I don't think I've gone through the trouble of letting the game teach me how it worked or watch the brief intro story sequence since my early days with it. It felt right to start from the beginning, this joke of an opening area. I even tried my hand at killing the Vanguard Demon at the end. That didn't turn out how I wanted, though, and I was really getting the sense that I was right to be concerned. Going through the game again after all of these was going to be a rough ride, and I would see that no matter how much I may have loved this game, and how much it helped me through the hard times, Demon's Souls knows no loyalty.

Turns out, I was wrong all along. We'll talk about that tomorrow.

It's the End of January

Today is January 31. Not a remarkable day, really; it's the last day of the first month of the year, just about the end of the pro football season but before baseball, cold enough that I never want to go outside, and yet just close enough to spring that I can start lusting for warm weather. So, January 31 sucks.

In year's past, though, it was the day before the "blog a day" month. Back in the old days when blogs were still kind of a thing and websites gave their users tools to share their thoughts outside of simply comments and tweets (and, in a way, do some of their content-baking work for them), the 1up.com community universally agreed that February would be used for dumping out your brain on the internet every day. Like an unofficial NaNoWriMo for the nerd set, it was challenging enough that you needed to start getting creative with the work you were putting out there, but since it was the shortest month of the year, the commitment wasn't very overwhelming (even though we're only talking two or three extra days here). Of course, I never made it all the way through the month myself.

Long story short, I'm going to give it the old college try again starting tomorrow. I haven't really gotten a chance to write on this blog for a while, and I basically pivoted what I was doing over the last year and a half to the Annotated Symphony of the Night project, so even the stuff I was writing was devoted to a specific thing. I miss it, I suppose. Writing took something of a back seat since starting the video stuff, even though there was still script writing to take care of and various freelance projects that come and go. Writing for myself, though, wasn't even on the radar. I think the February tradition of a blog a day is inherently pure and good insomuch that writing for yourself is the same, so let's give it another shot this year.

Plus, I have a freelance piece on deadline for the beginning of March, and this will get me back into fighting shape. Fair warning, the next month will probably all be centered around a few central themes, so it might not be as freewheeling. I think you'll like it, though.