Welcome to 2018 and Year 5 of Dyvers

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to Year 5 of Dyvers.

As this is the first post of the year, and the first post since I had my health scare back in August of 2017 I would like to begin by catching you up on what's been going on with me. My health scare, for those of you out of the loop, sent me to the hospital half terrified that I was having a heart attack and half convinced that such things happen to other people. Well I did not have a heart attack but it appears that my dependence on Goodies / BC headache powders to relieve my headaches was a mistake - especially since I was taking two or three doses a day. The cumulative effect of taking so many doses of Goodies / BC was that my body began to constantly feel anxious, I was having difficulty breathing, and then chest pains as I started having numbness in my left arm. As you can imagine each of those symptoms alone would have been distressing but all of them together and you're just one step away from a full blown panicked phone call to 911.

I'm okay though.

I've stopped taking Goodies / BC unless I have a migraine that other headache medicines won't touch. I changed my diet; increased my exercise routine; and started getting more sleep. In other words I've made a lot of positive moves in my personal life to get myself back on track. Work-wise, things are going well. I'm happier there than I have been in some time though I am continuing to push myself to improve.

How are you doing?

Excellent.

So now that we've caught up let's talk about what I'm going to be trying to do here on the blog this year. My goals:

• Get any actual play fully written before I being posting it so that people don't have to worry about it petering out as I get distracted by life. 
• Theme my posts better together. This doesn't mean that every post has to be about the same topic in a given week or period of time. Rather I'm looking to make my writing have a better sense of continuity so that readers feel like there's something more substantial going on than just some silly ass chucking words out into cyberspace. 
• I'd like to publish a Best of Dyvers PDF by the end of the year that gathers all of my best content together into a single space so that people can read it. What's held me back from this project is that I want to go through and edit things into a better read and expand my thoughts into something more substantial than they've previously been. That's time consuming and often incredibly difficult as I tend to be a bit of jackass.
• I want to do another blog project with +Mark Van Vlack, +Jens D., and maybe one or two other people. Just something that gets a bit weird and fun where we can all do our own, quirky styles to make a thing that people actually enjoy fucking around with. 
• I'd like to start exploring a new world. Maybe something that I'm making up as I go along. Maybe not. Either way I think that it would be fun to go somewhere new on the blog this year. 
• I've got this funky, little idea about a thing I'm calling "Gamma Dungeon." It's a bit weird and not fully formed yet but I've been enjoying kicking it about mentally and I think 2018 would be a fine year to put it to paper rather than just mentally masturbating. I don't want to Gould this shit. It's too fun for that. Well, at least it's fun for me. 
• I want to write the nastiest fucking goblin encounter that a group of players could ever hope to walk into and publish it on the blog. I want it to be the sort of thing that Game Masters come across and throw their players into on nights when they're really looking for a challenge. I want it to be called on when they've killed dragons already and spit at gods. I want it to be fucking bad ass. Maybe this one's a pipe dream? Maybe not. 
• I think I want to start doing a Best Reads of the Week again this year but if I do I'm going to have to severely limit how many blogs I read during the survey period. I just can't read 700 blogs a week, each publishing an average of four posts a day. It's too daunting. Perhaps I should select a group of 50 blogs at a time? People who are consistently putting out good content would be best. 

That should be enough for right now. Anymore and I'm likely to fuck off and forget completely about them.