I’ve ended up, mostly unintentionally, taking a blogging break as of late. Whoops! Life has been hectic and as today marks the start of my eighth year writing here, I wanted to put up something, so I think the best thing I can do today is to talk about where I’ve been, what I’m doing, and outline what I want to try to do in order to get back to writing more regularly here.

I Stream on Twitch Every Day

Last year, I did a stream-a-day experiment for a month, and I found that I really enjoyed it. It took the pressure out of streaming a bit to just go without much in the way of rules, and so I decided to resume that starting back in mid-January, meaning my streak is over a month at this point. It’s mostly been for MMO gameplay and raids, but it has also had me doing 3D modeling on stream live and also working on some backlogged stuff. I’m at twitch.tv/kaylriene if you wanna check it out!

My MMO Experience Has Been Good, Not Great, Not Bad

Right now, both WoW and FFXIV are in the pre-expansion doldrums of little new content and a lot of waiting. My guild in WoW got AotC for Amirdrassil after I switched from monk tank to death knight (the grips are too strong to pass on) and my main FFXIV static is working on P12S Part 2, the final Savage raid of Endwalker. It’s been fun, but nothing much has stood out about the gameplay as worth commenting on too much as of yet. I will write up the full WoW raid tier and reflect a bit on my Savage experience for my first expansion doing it in FFXIV, but it may take a minute to collect those thoughts, especially because…

Gaming News Sucks Ass Right Now

The Microsoft layoffs that hit Blizzard are a topic I want to discuss, but the way I want to approach it has meant drafting and redrafting to get everything to be as good as I want it to be. Across gaming, there’s so much bad news right now – record-setting layoffs, debates about the creativity and originality of some games, consoles hitting an off-streak of bad or non-existent first party title support – and while all of these are interesting to me in some ways, there’s a lot to chew on in those topics that needs time and real diligence. Which is also the case for another hobby I write about…

Wrestling News Is Even Worse, Somehow

Vince McMahon is a sex trafficker (allegedly). WWE and executives are being sued due to that. The Rock almost swept in and stole the Wrestlemania main event from Cody Rhodes in an awful booking decision and power flex, but walked it back and built a story on it, which also prompted discussions of it being a smokescreen for that sex trafficking allegation. TNA Wrestling rebranded back to TNA and then the ownership fired the guy behind the creative and business decisions that brought that company into a comfy, fun spot in the industry. CM Punk left AEW, went back to WWE (the company that he alleged fired him on his wedding day after almost killing him with a staph infection treated incorrectly), and then promptly injured himself again. AEW can’t fill a quarter of a building for weekly TV shows to save their lives and feels like it has lost its way in the fervor of the last few years. I’m back to watching wrestling almost exclusively as clips and shorts because damn, the weekly shows feel so weird and disjointed that I don’t quite dig it the same way AEW was getting me to back in their 2019-2021 era. Without the sex trafficking lawsuit hanging over WWE, wrestling is still, like, doing well, but damn, the energy that I liked about the industry has started to fade out pretty hard and then when that lawsuit comes back in, oof.

I’m Working on Evolving My Writing Process

When I was trying to write daily or near-daily, I would often do a single draft and a single edit pass on any given post, not stopping for too long to really sit and contemplate what I was saying. I’ve been working on doing more local-only drafts, really sitting and workshopping longer and more analytical posts, and trying not to do too much jumping onto news beats and push something out for the sake of being in that first wave of information. I think that is a net good, but the opposite end of that spectrum is taking too long to say too little, workshopping posts to death and keeping the notepad files on my desktop in shame. I did, at a point in late 2022 and early 2023, allow some bad faith criticism of my writing to poison-pill things a little bit, which I should not have, but I did take some time to contemplate how I write and communicate in general and to make sure I was meeting a standard I wanted to achieve. The balance I want to achieve is to do more analytical posts, more gameplay-experience posts, and to return to roots in some ways, while trying to focus on a more structured process for drafting and editing my work. I’m eager to see how it works out once I get some of these more recent posts up!

Real Life Is Kinda Crazy

I try not to let real life seep in too much here, but my fall was a shotgun move in two months of time due to numerous housing issues including broken-down AC in the summer heatwave and maintenance negligence that led my wife and I to file our first lawsuit (what a process, helped by the fact that we baited the office into putting everything into writing!), rapidly packing to move, working on raising a second cat (we got him outside a grocery store, his name is Cheddar, he’s orange and cute but chaotic as fuck), working on life improvements, helping my wife set up to stream, planning a double-birthday trip for this fall back to Japan for a few weeks for my wife and I, keeping up with friends, taking back up 3D modeling, working through my second year in my game development and programming degree, and dealing with various other stressors that I kind of just don’t wanna write about in a summary post. Working on all of that alongside daily streams and my normal time commitments for social events has meant that making the time to write has been difficult, and making enough time to draft and really put a shine on what I write has been tough. Balance is something I need to seek more, and I hope to be able to find it more adequately soon.

Going Forward

I have two major posts I want to put out before I do any other little things – a post about the Microsoft layoffs and the general state of the gaming industry and a post about the WWE’s various issues. I think these are the perfect template to test my process and rigor with – detail-oriented stories with lots of perspectives and a need to carefully tread upon them. I also think that before I can feel comfortable talking about playing WoW, I need to put forward some sort of stance on how Blizzard, and now Microsoft, treats the employees that make my fun in the game possible and what I hope to see change and evolve from that. I don’t have any hard deadline I’m setting on those, because I want to let them simmer as long as they need to without artificially imposing a deadline. I have a hopper full of smaller topics and easier posts to write after that, so my approach is going to be to let the floodgates open with a couple of big and substantial posts and then pepper in the smaller ones as I go. Obviously, the coming months are going to be the most hectic for writing about both WoW and FFXIV, as the summer will be the first time both of these MMOs have launched expansions in the same seasonal window and year, and while Dawntrail will likely hit shelves first, the testing process of a WoW expansion means The War Within news will be coming out consistently throughout the coming months from all sorts of sources.

For another year in the books, I feel great about what I’ve been able to build with the thoughtful contributions of commenters and readers all over the world. I never envisioned when I started writing about Legion 7 years ago (oh god that getting old thing is happening again) that I would have a readership numbering into the hundreds of thousands of people or predict the way it would reinvigorate my enjoyment of my MMO pastime and allow me to share my experiences. I’m perpetually grateful that so many continue to care and allow me a self-created outlet for my experiences, good, bad, and frustrating, in the world of MMOs, technology, and broader entertainment. Writing here has given me so much – new perspectives, new understanding, an outlet which allowed me to make positive changes in my life and my hobbies, and it is important to me that I do not take that for granted. Hopefully, I’ll see familiar names and avatars in the coming year and again when I get to celebrate eight full years!