Starting a blog . . . for some reason

I'm not even quite sure why I'm making a blog. Blogs are a trend which seem to have passed the height of their hype. Who knows if anyone will read this except my friends. I guess I just feel like writing some things down, and who knows, someone may be interested.

Last night, I watched The Empire Strikes Back with some friends. Afterwards, I felt like rereading The Darth Side, which is a great Star Wars fiction blog. There's a PDF of the whole thing (as it's done now), and it contains some interviews with the author. In one, he discusses the phenomenon of blogging, and I reconsidered making a blog.

So I'm home alone, I had a drink, and I'm watching Aliens (one of my favorite movies), and I decided to make a blog. (Yes, I am making links to movies everyone has heard of, nice of you to notice.) Now, do I have anything worthwhile to write tonight?

The same author who wrote The Darth Side is now writing a blog-published science fiction novel, "Simon of Space." It's rather good. (Make sure to hit the table of contents for the whole story from the beginning.) He's definately an author to watch. He seems to be winding towards the end of this novel, his proclaimed 'test novel', and is planning to write another in traditional book format after. I'll definately look at purchasing that one.

This brings me to the book I really want to read, the upcoming "A Feast for Crows" by George R. R. Martin. It's the fourth book in his series, "A Song of Ice and Fire." These are currently my favorite books. I really like Tolkein-style fantasy, but it did get old with some of the later writers who imitate it. This is a different style of fantasy, a moderately realistic-feeling world, where the elements of the fantastic are subtle, and the affairs of humanity darkly realistic. I only wish I could write so well. I just wish Martin could write a little faster :)

My outlet for writing is to write scenarios and such for the RPGs I run. Currently, I'm running a GURPS fantasy game set in a world of my own devising. I'm not a great GM, but I'm getting better. I try to throw in enough social elements and a touch of realism into my game to keep it away from traditional, simple dungeon crawls. We'll see how well I do this time around. We're about to start playing again after a few month hiatus. I should really be prepping and writing that game instead of doing this.

However, I'm not in the mood, yet. I think I'll go play Urban Dead, my current game of choice for some reason. I don't recently seem to get into the games I usually like, so I'm playing this web-based free MMORPG, instead. Mmm, zombie-killing. It might be getting a bit old, but it's a work-in-progress, and the author seems committed, and may fix it.