Seventeen years. Somewhere between twenty-one and seventy-seven posts a year, depending on how much life was in the way. It works out to more than six hundred posts about a video game and the guy playing it, written under a name that isn't mine, for an audience some years I could count on two hands. When people find out, they ask why anyone keeps a blog going that long with numbers like that. Fair question. Here's the honest answer. I kept going because I never made it a job. The second a blog turns into a content calendar you owe somebody, it dies. Mine has gone dark for months at a stretch. Whole expansions where I barely posted. Then something clicks, I get the itch, and I'm back once or twice a week like I never left. I stopped feeling guilty about that a long time ago. The blog is a place I go when I have something to say, not a machine I have to feed. The other reason is the people. Not a big crowd, but a real one. The same handful of names in the comments, year after year. Other bloggers I've never met in person and would still call friends. That's a hard thing to explain to somebody who doesn't do this, but if you do it, you get it right away. And I'll admit the pen name helps. Joar isn't quite me. He's the part of me that plays too much WoW and doesn't have to answer to anybody about it. Writing as him is easier than writing as myself, for reasons I'll get into later this month. Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything for no particular reason. But that's sort of the reason. Nobody's paying me, nobody's making me, and I'm still here. That's it for now! Cheers! Joar