If you can believe it, I got a little notification yesterday (New Year’s 2018) telling me that I’d been part of the WordPress community for seven whole years. That’s a bit crazy.

What have I even done over that time? Well, I think I’ve had two or three different little projects over the years, sporadically writing about various gaming- and non-gaming-related thingumebobs. I’ve probably come up with a few decent little ideas during the time, if only because I must have churned out a couple of hundred articles and at least one or two of them must have been vaguely alright, I should hope. Eventually, though, they all fell by the wayside, as I’ve become old and tired and decrepit and demotivated.

Which brings us to my latest venture. OverThinker Y had its first post on January 6, 2017 – the first things I did were about Undertale being potentially a bit too opaque and narrative dissonance in Tomb Raider – and there have been 152 posts in total to date. It’s certainly the blog project (blogject?) that I’ve been most consistently able to stick with through the first year; averaging a post every two to three days is pretty impressive by my standards, so I’m proud that I’ve been able to accomplish that and still feel like I want to keep going with this.

A lot of the credit for my continued motivation has to go to the amazing community I’ve been able to become part of this time around. I have to give a personal thank you to Kim at Later Levels, who was the first person to reach out to me (very early on in the year) and show me that actually there are tons of really smart, cool people out there who are coming up with amazing content all the time; getting to know some of these people and collaborating with them is definitely a huge contributing factor to me feeling motivated to keep working on this blog. I’ve been able to be a part of lots of very awesome things: Kim’s Question of the Month was the first thing that really showed me how many kindred spirits are out of there, and I’m honoured to actually be a featured blogger in this month’s Question! I’ve also judged Adventure Rules’ Blogger Blitz, been part of NekoJonez’s Zelda Project, taken part in some creative writing courtesy of GamersUnitedGG, hosted Musical Mayhem with lots of cool people (and more in the pipeline)… and a lot of smaller little crossovers too!

So a big thank you to everyone; I wish I could list everybody I’ve got to know this year, but I’d probably forget somebody and then feel really bad, so suffice to say that there are a lot of awesome fellers and fellerettes on the interweb.

I’m excited to see what new community stuff turns up in 2018, and I’m sure I’ll keep coming up with my own posts too. I’ve also decided that now might be a good time to change the ol’ logo, since it’s basically a bit rubbish – I’ve put a little draft together, and I’ll probably start using it in the next week or so unless anyone knows of any reason why I shouldn’t. The PS4 graphic comes from GraphicCave and stipulates that it’s free to use, while the SNES graphic is by Anthony Prezioso. I don’t know whether I’m allowed to use the latter without permission, I have to admit, so I will be asking whether the creator is happy for me to use it – if not, I would expect I can probably find another free-use vector image somewhere.

I’ve literally just stitched it together in Paint, by the way, so if anybody wants to make me a fancier one, then please feel free!

 

 

Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for letting me be part of this community!