- My PhD. It's my last year of funding and my third year of research: this creates a simple equation - Lf + Wy = Panic, where Lf is "last year of funding" and Wy is "writing-up year". Panic is perhaps slightly too strong a term, but I have basically about 10 months to finish off the damn thing and get on with my life.
- Work. I translate ordinances and acts into English for the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on a freelance basis, and autumn is for whatever reason the time of year when this sort of field gets busy. So since October I've been hunched over my computer looking up obscure Japanese terms and discovering they mean things like "zero coupon bond" and "share with put option", rather than, say, "3d6+4 damage" or "zombie beholder".
- Gaming. Seems strange to say, but regular gaming in "real life" has taken a lot of my energy away from writing about it. During this blog's heyday of 2008-2009, when I was writing an entry pretty much every day and often even more frequently, I wasn't gaming at all, and thus Monsters & Manuals was a kind of release valve. Now I'm playing pretty often and have a solid group, so there's no need to let off steam online.
- Swearing off forums. I do love hanging around places like rpg.net and the rpg site, but I realised about 6 months ago that they were pretty much hives of scum and villainy (and in rpg.net's case, annoying mods) and grotesque sinks of my time. Since forums are a great source of grist for the blogging mill, my lack of access to them simply stripped away a lot of stuff to write about.
- Having a Kindle. Alright, it didn't stop me blogging really, but I've been doing a lot of reading on it (thanks to the magnificent feat of human endeavour that is Project Gutenberg) and, well, I just wanted to show off my latest toy, really.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying, thanks for sticking with this blog despite its silence over the last few months. You can probably guess what my New Year's Resolution will be: To update my blog and comment on somebody's else's once a day on weekdays and once at the weekend for the duration of 2011. Can I make it beyond about January 8th? Watch this space.
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