Blog note: A long absence and another milestone

 

 

 

It’s been a week – strike that; it’s been ten days since I last posted. I try to get something up at least weekly (I aim for six or seven posts a month – anything extra is gravy), and I hate letting A Fast Game fall into disrepair through inattention, but sometimes life will get in the way. This isn’t the longest I’ve gone without posting – I think the record is fifteen days without a post. It’s still not a good look. I feel like I have a responsibility to my handful of regular readers to have something fresh when they drop by, but at the same time, I don’t want to post something half-baked so as to not waste the reader’s time and burn through any good will I’ve built up.

The gap isn’t because I don’t have anything to say. I have two AARs in varying states I’m working on, one unboxing (and a couple of others waiting in the wings), and a multi-part examination of a beloved game. I’m also doing the background for my annual-ish statistical review of the collection, and a Quarterly Report due at the end of the month – now just a week away (yikes!). But I am also in the midst of some basic home maintenance stuff that’s been eating into my writing time, so there’s that. More posts will be forthcoming and sooner rather than later.

We've been playing a lot of Continental Commands & Colors: Napoleonics lately at
T's place, and Claude has been my Aide de Camp for most of the battles (he's pretty
good at not knocking over blocks, but soaks up a lot of attention).

So, this note is part-apology (see above) and a thank-you to the readers of A Fast Game. I guess I could be accused of burying the lead, but in the early hours of the morning (Adelaide-time), the page-view count for A Fast Game tipped over into six digits. At time of writing, the view-count for the blog sits at 100,264(?!). It was about this time in October that A Fast Game hit 50,000 views. It took two years and nine months to reach that figure, and just eight months to double that figure. I’m shocked. Pleasantly shocked, but it still doesn’t feel quite real. I work hard at every post that appears here, and I’m confident I’ve gotten better at conveying what I’m trying to say than I did at the beginning – and in less words, though it may not seem like it with some posts – but to me it doesn’t seem the blog warrants this kind of audience.

Here is where I need to point out that I couldn’t have reached such lofty heights without the help and support of a bunch of people pointing new readers to A Fast Game; Rachel and the good folks at GMT Games, Brant, who’s responsible for the weekly Tuesday Newsday post for the Armchair Dragoons, Yasushi Nakaguro at Bonsai Games, Grant at Pushing Cardboard, Jerry at Cardboard Commander, Brian Train for the shoutouts whenever I write about a Brian Train game, and everyone else who have given their time and effort for interviews or surveys. 

And, of course, everyone that checks in and reads the blog. Y’all make it worth the effort. Thank you.