I started this website as a place to collect my thoughts and to write them out. The obvious rebuttal is:

Well, why not just put it into Notion, like so many things? It can even publish pages to the public!

That's all well and true, and I still very much like and use Notion as a place to document knowledge that grows and sprawls over time. Creating this Ghost blog really happened out of exploring what services I can easily host over Docker. As crazy as it sounds, I first learned of Ghost back during its original Kickstarter and I'm happy that its delivered and continued to grow.

So let's go over what I want to try and accomplish this year. Even if I don't meet the goal post, these are some core focuses.

Blog and Journal

Yeah, a continuation of the above, and hey - look - I'm doing it! But let's get down to the contents:

Board Games

I'm a huge gamer, with a library of unplayed Steam games and board games. It's a work in progress, and not everything that's been in my collection has been played. I posted the recent stats here, and the idea is play through my library.

Originally I was planning to do 365 games, reviewing a game a day, but that might be a bit too ambitious. So I think my softer goal is a game a week, trying to be realistic with how much time I actually have to myself when I factor in everything else I have to do from day to day. But hey, if we can get to that 365 count, that'd be pretty awesome.

And importantly not every game covered will be new to me. While ideally it should be a focus for the unplayed games and try to play them at least once, to help decide if they’re a keep or cull game, the main thing is to share my thoughts and feelings on games in general.

Tech

When I was rexploring self-hosted services and what's out there in the open-source world and Docker containers, it came to me that I like technology and it's worth sharing those discoveries. So I'm hoping to do a "Weekly Shiny" segment in terms of something that's caught my eye or am trying out.

Personal Reflection

All of this is really to practice sharing my thoughts, being my authentic self, and having a space for myself. For the board game stuff, maybe I'll cross post the content to BoardGameGeek, and that way what I write will actually get eyes, but we'll see.

And if I do anything for say personal journaling, I'll probably keep that in Notion or somewhere else.

Game Dev

It's been a long, long held desire to develop games, and the idea pile just continue to grow. There's threads of long standing concepts and one-offs but I've always reasoned that I'm just too busy with life and juggling everything in it. The most I've ever done in terms of a "published" game was a little dinky proof of concept for a card game I made up working on a military base, CardLane.

So similar to the above, journaling about my journey and personal development I think will help keep me accountable and at least make the project get some momentum. It's easy to start and do throw away stuff, but I want to commit to a project and put something together. So the goal is to have something "demo-able" every two weeks with at least one new feature of some kind.

So there you have it, the ideas behind what this Ghost blog will be. We'll see how things work out. And if you want to see the next post, well, here's my first board game play of the year: Harmonies.