2017 Year in Review

Well, another year draws to a close, and it’s been a quiet year on this blog. That’s bad in some ways, but not terrible.

It’s definitely the case that the heckshow that was 2016 diminished some of my enthusiasm for thinking about the kind of historical stuff I usually write about on this blog. In essence, I try to only write “serious” posts every so often, but I ended last year in a mood that didn’t really allow for the kind of writing I typically prefer. That wasn’t the only reason, though, and the other ones were a little better.

The first reason things went a little quiet is that a new project wound up taking a lot of my time. I’m referring of course to Monster Man, my new podcast about the 1977 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. I released over 30 episodes in 2017, and also spent a good amount of time blogging and promoting it. I even went up on Patreon, a project that was almost derailed by the recent Patreon shenanigans.

So obviously that project’s been taking up a good amount of my free time, and I’m very pleased with how it’s been going. But it’s not the only thing that I’ve been doing, and the other thing is a little more history-related.

As I have mentioned in the past, I started volunteering at the Centre for Computing History, the computer history museum here in Cambridge. I mostly do behind the scenes stuff, whether that’s adding items to the archive, helping to organise the collections, or just lugging stuff around. It’s fascinating to see the museum at work, and the team there are a great bunch of people. So that’s been good. I should blog a little bit more about it, honestly.

I think the recreated 1970s office might be my favourite part. 

Anyway, all of this adds up to mean that I haven’t had a huge amount of time not spoken for, but hopefully I’ll be able to use the holiday to knock out a couple of posts on things I’ve been reading and watching lately.

Despite the fact that 2017 has been a rough year in many ways as well, I come into 2018 with more a … faint-glimmer-of-hope sort of feeling of optimism compared to the grim resolve of last year. Let’s see how the year develops. I hope that all of you enjoy your new year celebrations and that the coming year is a good one.