Not Another Post About Chimeraland?

Hmm. I have several ideas for posts today but most of them are about music and the rest are about Chimeraland. I kind of wish I had something else to talk about, just for the sake of balance, but I suppose the whole point of having my own blog is to be able to talk about whatever I want to talk about.

I think I'll try to keep the music posts for the weekends. No hard rule on that but as I've said before, they're a lot faster to put together and also they're more fun to do after a day at work, relaxing and refreshing at one and the same time. 

That's fine for the kind of loose series I seem to have fallen into a pattern of creating, almost from when I began posting about musical topics. 

There are strands here on cover versions and musical death matches. I haven't done a death match for a while. I'd like to do some more, if only I could think of some good match-ups. 

I never made a tag for the death matches, something I regret now. I suppose I could go back and retro-tag them but if I start on that I probably ought to redo the entire tag cloud and that's days of work and who ever even uses tags, anyway? I used to but then I found out how good the Blogger search function is so now I mostly just use that. It's much faster if you're looking for something speciific.

Then there was the Pitchfork 25 series. Technically that's unfinished still. I never did get around to my definitive post on my #1 album of the last quarter century, Lana del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell. 

There were a couple of reasons. One was that I'd already written about NFR, both before it came out and after. The other, the main one, was that it seemed like such a big deal. I didn't want to throw the opportunity away so in the end I just let it slip out of my hands. I ghosted my best love, if you want to look at it that way.

I should also have done a final wrap-up, with links to the Pitchfork post where they collated all the results and gave a bunch of infotainment style facts about the poll. It took forever to appear and if it was ever in my Pitchfork feed I missed it. In the end I had to go looking for it.  

It shows the top two hundred albums. Guess how many from my twenty-five made the cut? Four. Honestly, more than I expected. Three of them are by Lana, with NFR the highest at #17. Born To Die (A decade old today.) and Ultraviolence were the other two, at #121 and #153 respectively. Why Chemtrails isn't on there I cannot possibly imagine. The fourth was Taylor Swift's Folklore at #68. 

There were quite a few albums in the 200 that either I or Mrs Bhagpuss own, a few of which I might have shortlisted myself had I thought of them. Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister would certainly have featured in my twenty-five, had I realised it was eligible.

That series is still open, then. Maybe I'll do the final couple of posts and finish it off sometime. 

The oldest and biggest Inventory Full music series of them all, the annual, then quarterly, then monthly round-ups of songs I've borrowed for post titles is probably gone for good. I say probably because I've noticed recently I am using the occasional musical steal as a title. There might be enough for an annual catch-up.  

Or I might get a second wind and start titling posts that way again. I was very tired of doing it quite a few months before I stopped but now I've had a break I sort of miss it. Never say never.

I think that's all the semi-regular virtual columns that've featured here. It's quite a few, now I count them, especially since I don't believe I've ever done anything that could properly be called a "series" or a "column" on gaming. 

Well, there was the very short series of in-character posts I did when the Beastlord class was added to EverQuest II. That was a long time ago and it only ran for four episodes. 

I often think about writing more "in character" posts. I really enjoy doing them. I was doing something like it even before I had a blog, as I discovered last week. I was going through a screenshot folder and I found shots of every page of two in-game diaries I wrote in EQII, back when I was playing on Test, at least a dozen years ago. 

The thing about in-character posts is they always feel like they must be a lot more fun for the writer than the reader. I've read a lot of them by other people over the years and these days I tend to skip past them unless they really catch my attention in the opening few lines. I can't imagine it helps that I tend to pick characters who either talk like precocious seven-year olds or who have weird speech patterns.

Still. it's something that's often on my mind. You can see yesterday's post almost flirting with the first person at times. I can't help feeling Chimeraland would lend itself very well to that kind of conceit. 

And here we are. We've come full circle without actually going anywhere. (Please don't point out that's what "coming full circle" means.) I started out trying to decide whether to write about music or Chimeraland and I spent almost a thousand words deciding it wasn't going to be music.

I guess it has to be Chimeraland, then...

Oops! Out of time!