Momentarily, I will attempt to rescue one of my favorite posts from the mouldering depths of the old blog. An ignominy I'll probably extend to old tweet-threads and g-pluses—or whatever it was we used to call those. In an act of infinite hubris, and a little desperation, I'm going to tag these greatest hits under :we-sold-our-soul-for-rock-n-role.

I've got a few reason for doing this.

1. I've done a lot of free writing over the years for platforms I didn't own or operate. Time to steal some of those sweet, sweet words back.
2. The new blog is going to need a little padding before it looks like the real thing.
3. I've been at this game designing business for a couple of decades now and could use a refresher on what I've been on about all this time.
4. For that matter, I wouldn't mind revisiting a few of these topics from my current perspective to see if my opinions have changed.
5. Plus, it'll provide a nice set of test cases to develop my blogging software around.

That last point is perhaps the most exciting to me at the moment. The technical back side of what you're seeing right now is pretty rudimentary. I'm basically writing these posts in Hiccup, which is almost like writing in raw HTML. I don't mind it at the moment, but eventually I'm going to want to make it a bit more convenient. Working through these old posts/tweets/whatevers should help me figure out what that might look like in the future.

Who knows, though? In all my digging, I might unearth an old abandoned project or idea worthy of a full resurrection? It has happened before and doubtless will again.

With that, I'm off to find some good spelunking music. Maybe one of John Carpenter's many Lost Themes.

You've Got To Start Somewhere

Welcome to the new dig1000holes.com. Enjoy that recursive link!

How do you like my new digs?

Let's save all the introduction stuff for later. Odds are, if you're reading this and there's nothing else on the site, you know who I am anyway. Formerly, this here was a free WordPress blog, and not a very active one at that. It started ambitious, in the days before the great shadow of social media, but eventually devolved into an afterthought. A place where I might remember to announce a new game release a couple days after announcing it elsewhere. If I've hooked all my wires up correctly, you should still be able to get to those old blog posts. For now. There are a few posts there I believe are worth revisiting. I'll do my level best to hunt them down and stuff them into this contraption. Eventually. Probably need to figure out how I'm going to host images first.

But this site is not primarily meant to be a blog. It's a playground, for yours truly, and with a little luck, for you, too. A place were I get to put into practice my newfound coding knowledge and make some toys that we can all enjoy. Maybe that's more of a workshop? You know what, let's just call it an arcade and be done with it.

Right now, it's a blog though. But not just a blog. A blog that I built with these ten fingers. In the very near future, I'm going to talk about how and why I built it. Spoilers: it's going to involve Clojure, Biff, Tailwind CSS, htmx, XTDB, and more. I want to talk about each of these parts and how they made me rethink my approach to all of this. And maybe even my approach to tabletop role-playing games? I think even those among you disinclined to make your own website might find it interesting. It's been a challenge, and a surprisingly engaging one.

And there are many more challenges ahead.

And You've Got To Have Somewhere To Go

This is the grand adventure: To make the online tools I want to use in my role-playing.

I'm going to start small.

I'm going to make some mistakes.

I'm probably going to have to rebuild things from the ground up a few times.

But with a little time and a song in my heart—Rainbow's "Stargazer," most likely—there should be something worth playing with.

To be clear, by "online tools," I mean tools you can access online. This will, of course, make them particularly useful for online play, but I've got bigger dreams! I want stuff that fits on my phone screen, stuff I can pull up at the table, when we're playing in person, all vaccinated, tested, outdoors, masked, and doing our level best to keep our immunocompromised friends healthy and safe, right? So probably nothing like a full-blown virtual tabletop, but you don't really need a full-blown virtual tabletop to play most of my games. Maybe some character creators or a dice-roller that keeps track of who you passed the dice to, or some more prompts in the same vein as the miscellanies from Worlds Without Master, that sort of thing. Bespoke stuff.

I've got ideas and I've got prototypes in various stages of development, most of them very early. I won't make any predictions about the what and when just yet. This is only the first step in the journey. I can see the horizon from here, but I can't yet make out the details.

For now, I intend to quietly celebrate having made it this far with a cup of coffee and my very first blog post.