Hasta la vista

I'm leaving tonight to go visit my son, my daughter-in-law, my 1-yo grandson and see the birth of my new grand daughter. Needless to say, blog posts will be thin and infrequent for the next two to three weeks as I'm either coming, going, or catching up from having been gone so much. I thought it an appropriate time to reflect on my blog(s) and their organization. Let me make a brief list of all of the blogs that I claim either total or partial ownership of.

• Dark Heritage. This one. It was initially created to document my forays into role-playing games, especially the Dark Heritage fantasy setting, but later also the Ad Astra space opera setting. It's also on topic to talk about general science fiction or fantasy topics. I do have a lot of interests other this this, though. Sometimes those other interests take up enough head-space that they crowd out the initial topics of the blog for a time. Usually I don't worry too much about this, but sometimes a topic starts to grow enough so that it threatens the primacy of the on-topic themes of this blog. When this seems like it might be an ongoing, or at least off-and-on yet sufficiently frequent occurrence, I'll make a split and create a new blog. Sometimes these topics end up running out of steam and these new blogs lie fallow for long periods at a time, and sometimes when this happens if the mood is a passing one, I'll still talk about topics that are more convenient to another blog on this one. But I want to do a better job of keeping topics in their appropriate lanes, I think.
• Flipping Fetching Fiddle-dee-dee. This was one that I left fallow for a long time, but it now seems to be my second-most commonly used blog. I initially created it to talk about religious topics, albeit ones of speculative, fun pseudo-doctrine like the kinds the RMs in their BYU dorms would talk about late at night when they're feeling like they want to talk about things that you can't talk about in Sunday School. It later started to pick up a number of social and political topics as well. I do still mention those kinds of things here more often than I should, but I'm going to migrate them to this other blog where they more truly belong going forward.
• Lone Star Hiker. More because I'm an ethnic Texan than because I'm hiking in Texas; most of the hikes I document are in the Rockies or the intermountain deserts. This blog used to be quite a bit more active, but lately I haven't given much thought to hiking because of idiotic lockdowns, difficulty in traveling, and just a bazillion other things going on. However, I do have underutilized vacation this year, so I think I'm probably going to get out. In fact, I just ordered a Cloud Peak Wilderness map on Amazon (Trails Illustrated) so I better get cracking if I really think that I might be out in the mountains in August. 
• Synthpop80s. I initially used this to review synthpop songs, albums and groups, starting with both the 80s New Waves guys as well as the 90s (and later) underground movement that did the same type of music. I still listen to plenty of this, but the blog later became a documentation of hard EDM; hard trance, early hardstyle, some hard house, some borderline trance, etc. Y'know, the stuff that is so intense that it melts your face off and kicks you in the butt so hard that three days later you're still trying to crap out pieces of it's shoe. I've occasionally still hit a music topic here and there on this blog instead of over on Synthpop80s, and I've long ago given up any worry about "Hard Trance Track of the Day" or whatever. In fact, I haven't blogged over there at all in quite some time. I still listen to plenty of music, and mostly the same kinds of music, although my "mania" from about 2018 or so over hard dance has relaxed, and I'm back to my more esoteric and eclectic mix rather than being stuck in a single style. In fact, I'm even going through a major project where I'm sorting my music on my hard drive (and I'll then replicate that folder sorting on my micro-SD card on my phone too.) In spite of that, I just don't feel very inspired to talk about it much. I don't have any plans to "retire" any of the blogs, but this one is still in hibernation and likely to remain so for some time.
• SFKOFFF. Another blog that's in deep freeze and is unlikely to come out of it soon. The acronym is Street Fighter, King of Fighters, and Fatal Fury, referring to the three series of games of the type that this is most especially meant to discuss. I actually haven't played much since very early in the year when I was still playing a bit of Street Fighter V. I have an extra old monitor, and if I can get an adaptor for the old RGB cables to HDMI, maybe I'll make it a PS2 monitor and play more of these games again. I still believe that Street Fighter IV (which I have for steam on my regular desktop that I'm making this post from) is good enough that it almost invalidates the entire rest of the genre. Anyway, since I'm not really working on whatever fan fiction I thought at the time I was going to do, I doubt I'll have much to say about these games even when I'm playing them. I doubt this blog will get more than a handful of posts a year, if even that.
• Adventures of Elder Dyal. This is where we documented the letters sent home by my younger son from his missionary service. However, given that now (as opposed to when I went, or even when my older son went) he can talk to us every week, so he quit sending letters a long time ago. My wife really owned this blog, although she had set it up so I could post too, but realistically, neither of us has posted anything in a long time, nor are we likely to. Maybe when my youngest son goes out early in 2022, we'll revive this blog. Otherwise, it'll just become archive stuff.

There are three other topics that I wish to talk about with some frequency. One of them is the related interactions of archaeology, linguistics, history and genetics. I think those topics will still fit here on this blog when I choose to talk about them, which is usually only when some new development that I hear about comes to my attention anyway. The same is true for paleontology. Dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals like sabertooths and mammoths are always on topic for me, and actually fit better than you'd think with my RPG interests anyway.

Next, we have model trains. I haven't exactly talked about this a ton on this blog, until very recently anyway, but I don't see that interest going away anytime too soon, and it may well grow. Perhaps if I create a new blog for it, it'll end up being a dead zone blog like SFKOFFF and Synthpop80s have become someday down the line. But I'm going to take that risk, because I see this as a potentially ongoing topic. Model railroading is, as I've said, the big hobby that I never quite had but always kind of wished that I did. I'm not about to start spending money and time on converting my basement into a model railroad any time too soon (more's the pity) but I'm going to continue (and in fact embrace in a new way) armchair model railroading. When I'm done "armchairing" I'll have a good plan to actually build a real model railroad sometime in the future. If I ever get around to it. If I don't, well, OK, and I don't want to clog up my blog anymore talking about model railroading. For that purpose, I've created the new Ruritanian States of America Railroad blog. I don't have any posts yet, or even a banner or format for the blog, and I probably won't until I get back from being out of town, but I anticipate that I'll continue to do more with this in the near future, throughout the remainder of this year at least.