There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks in which decades happen

Well, it happened. I sat here quietly, like granddad sitting in his easy chair with a can of special brew and the TV remote, waiting to see if his ungrateful grandchildren remember his 80th birthday. And sure enough, the day came and went without even a card, let alone a phone call. None of you bastards noticed that the 17th of May 2018 was the ten year anniversary of this blog - I didn't even get one lousy congratulatory email. Was I eclipsed by the bloody royal wedding? Was that it? I refuse to believe that Monsters & Manuals Day 2018 wasn't the subject of at least one street party with purple and yellow bunting and free opium for all.

I jest. Yes, it was 10 years ago I started writing this blog: Saturday, 17th May, 2008. You can find the first entry here. I started with a pretentious, half-workable idea, and I like to think I set the tone very nicely for what followed: a decade of mostly pretentious half-workable ideas, during which time there has been:

• 1,352 posts
• 1,696,166 page views
• Probably getting on for a billion broken promises about stuff I'd blog about/publish
• One marriage
• One baby
• One massive natural disaster and the loss of most worldly possessions
• A PhD
• A move between countries
• Shit loads of alcohol imbibed
• Yoon-Suin

And lots else besides. Ten years is a long time. There's a scene in Magnolia that I often remember, where a character - an old man slowly dying - insists that "Life's not short - it's long". I know what he means when I look back over the last decade. I don't feel like it's a case of blink-and-you-miss-it. I feel like it's a veritable ocean away. In May 2008 I was living in Kawasaki city in Japan, working for a startup, usually packing in 12-14 hour days, doing very little in the way of creative projects, eating and drinking out almost every night, and living for the weekend. 

Fast-forward ten years and I am living in North East England, with a job that offers almost limitless flexibility, doing lots of creative things when I can in between looking after a baby girl and fulfilling husbandly duties (which, for those of you unmarried men out there, involves disappointing amounts of sex or romance and mostly doing stuff like taking the bins out, unblocking the plug hole in the bath, and mowing the lawn), living for the weekend because it means I'll have time to iron my shirts for the week ahead, and spending most evenings knackered on the sofa drinking 18 year old Glenlivet because one of the few things that improve with age are taste buds. You can pack a lot into a decade. Trust me.

What does the future hold? God knows. Blogging is hard when you've got other commitments, and having young children ratchets up the difficulty factor of everything exponentially. 2016/2017 were peak years for this blog in terms of page hits. 2017/2018 has seen a precipitous decline - most of the blame for which can be lain at my daughter's feet. I work every evening, more or less, on RPG stuff, but mostly that work is unseen as it is being ploughed into creating publishable material for different projects. The blog often doesn't get a look-in, sadly. 

Now, don't worry, I have no intention of quitting. I've been doing this for 10 years now, and it's become pretty much the longest-running single thing I've ever stuck at - that includes jobs and even careers. I'll still be writing Monsters & Manuals until the day Google pulls the plug on it (which in occasional dark moments I suspect of being only just around the corner). It might not always be what it once was. But then again - what is?