The Best Laid Plans Part 1

In Which Our Hero Just Can't Get Enough

“The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Often Go Astray.” Story of my life.

Gather round children as I tell a tale of frightening woe. It’s a tale of ugliness and shocking revelations. It’s the grand story of plans that went horribly, horribly wrong. In short, I’m going to describe to you how all of my grand life schemes went sour and I disappeared from the internet for the last 5 years.

Yea, I was cool as hell back then at 340 pounds with my piercings and chain wallet.

In the year 2009, while studying abroad in Japan, I started this blog to have something to do. Honestly, that’s the only reason. Spring break was boring as shit. Couldn’t stand all the freedom, lack of classes, and general ability to do whatever the hell I pleased. My laptop computer was cheap and junky and could barely run Ragnarok Online and that was only fun for botting. I was on a strict budget so I could afford the all-you-can-drink bars that my former roommate and I frequented on days without class. I was fat and didn’t want to go running around, literally or figuratively. Thus, I generally stayed in my room. Also, my delightful girlfriend, as wonderful as she was, couldn’t spend ALL her time sneaking into my dorm for romantic trysts, though I admit I encouraged her to do that as often as her train pass would carry her to me.

I suppose another grand impetus for begins serious about my RPG blog was the fact that I found a group of roleplaying fellows who were quite charmed with D&D 4e. I had hoped to impress them with my RPG acumen and community fame. The group in question was also not far from said lover’s home, which was quite convenient if you had asked me at the time. I could pop over to the girlfriend’s station for a quick date, then head over for some roleplaying of a different nature with my friends, who were interested in an entirely different kind of dungeon than my better half and I. That’s a lie. We never visited any dungeons.

So, for a long while, I gave the whole “blogging” thing a good college try in an attempt to catalog my play and force my inane babbling upon the RPG world. I eventually got good enough that companies began to send me review material.

This, for quite a while, was a damn good time. I, for one, had high hopes for that game and my blog. However, shit doesn’t always turn out the way you want it to. My girlfriend and I decided to get hitched. I was tickled at the fact that my souvenir was so much cooler than my friends’, but, marriage put a serious kibosh on my aspirations at leveling my Warfogred Druid up to that level cap from nothing. If I recall, I only ever got to attend that particular gaming group twice. Even today I feel somewhat sorry for my lack of commitment – to the game of course– not to my marriage. I hard committed to that nonsense. I was all-in.

So, despite good intentions, over the years, I grew my gaming blog, into a force of very little reckoning in the RPGBA world. I achieved very little of the fame and fortune dreamed of by so many. I did gather a few followers (600 or so on twitter, and 67 blog followers) a reasonable enough assemblage considering how anemic my site was. The unfortunate consequence of marriage and living abroad is I simply didn’t have the ability to write enough about actually playing games. Apart from the occasional play-by-post – those never lasted long either - I wasn’t able to play anything during my last year of college and when I moved back to Japan afterwards I was only able to keep up a regular gaming group for a few sessions before I ran fowl with the missus.

Over the years, things changed. In 2011 the Great Japan Quake kicked the living crap out of Japan. A nuclear reactor blew up making my Gamma World obsessions a little too real for the people around my hometown. My son started growing up (oh yea, I had one of those, and named him after an Anime character too). We started gaming together - mostly Minecraft – because everyone must start somewhere and blowing up my houses seemed to appeal greatly to his baby psyche.

I attempted to get my wife into gaming as well, but we never really made it past a few intro games of Magic: The Gathering. I actually posted about that very important topic on both my site, and Stargazer’s World, where I was lucky enough to be granted the title of guest blogger. In short, she couldn’t stand all the RPG stuff, and quite frankly she wasn’t very fond of the people I was playing them with either. I mean, they were all such shady foreigners, you know, with the college degrees, high paying jobs, and intellectual capacity higher than a grape. What’s not to like? She eventually gave me an ultimatum. Give up the gaming in person, or give up the marriage. If I had known all the hell my life would go through over the next five years I probably would have picked the bleeding dice.

So… the gaming dwindled and dwindled and my blog came to a slow, grinding end back in 2011. Without a group to play with, what’s the point? I tried to write about other things: video games, CCG’s, etc. It just didn’t spark with me enough to make the blog content stand out. So, The Dump Stat went offline. I had planned to bring it back. Yes. Planned. Many plans. I had lots of plans in 2011, but that, as they say, is a story for another time.

TO BE CONTINUED