A Little Introspection
Hi guys, Tacos here, self-appointed editor of the blag. I had some free time recently so I’m doing some catching up, and I’d like to sort of talk about where we are right now, with regards to the blog and its content. If this sounds familiar, you can relax, we are not shutting down or downsizing.
When we started out, the whole enterprise was pretty much without direction, with a vague idea that it would be funny if Osamu became e-famous in internet-land. Once every few days weeks, we would just open up the page and bang out some random stuff on the off chance that people would find it interesting or funny. Perhaps we were lucky enough to fill a niche, maybe some people like what we do, but at the end of the day it’s nice to see that people visit our blog every day and read our rantings and ravings.
I think judging from our content so far, we’re positioned in a sort of niche between mahjong entertainment and education – edutainment? We’re sort of the go-to guys if you’re not really interested in deciphering ancient scrolls of mahjong wisdom, and yet don’t mind picking up a tip or two. I think it’s kind of cool that we’ve evolved into this, and yet I doubt we’ll ever feel super comfortable doing this.
Why so, you might ask, isn’t everything just plain sailing from here on? Well, yes and no, I guess. Something you might not know is that besides xkime, none of us can actually read moonrunes on a serious level. Some of us can’t even play our way out of a kiddie game in Chinatown. Blind theorizing and newbie tutorials are easy, but we’re more inclined to shy away from the murkier waters of intermediate-high level play. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We could start churning out reams of dubious advice and unsubstantiated teachings, call it “digi-occult mahjong” or “Osamu-style” or something, but if nothing else, we might as well take pride in keepin’ it real. OG’s in da normal lobby 4 lyfe, and all that.
While that’s all fine and good, it doesn’t leave us a lot to work with where content generation is concerned. News worth reposting doesn’t spring out of nowhere, strategy posts aren’t divinely inspired, and it’s gonna be a sad day when we run out of poor saps on the internet to make fun of. It’s not like this issue just hit me overnight, over the last year or so we’ve been looking for easier or more familiar directions to expand a little. A number of us are gamers to some degree, and Japan-related stuff does catch our attention from time to time. That stuff is easy, all you have to do is sit down and write what you think. Opinions aren’t worth anything in mahjong. The odd post aside, it’s always come back to good old mahjong at the end of the day.
I wouldn’t say that we have absolutely *nothing *in store for you, though. Ron5 is finishing up a writeup of his jansou adventures in Japan, Osamu is writing stuff he never publishes, and I’ll try and get some graphs up soonish. If you have any comments or questions about… stuff in general I’ll try to answer them here. Some kind of magical solution would be great too, as long as it doesn’t involve midnight sacrifices. Those are just scams.
