Thematic direction, or thematic constraints, have tended to seem somewhat “artificial” to me. I’m sympathetic to a “create what you’re inspired to create” approach, rather than one that sets out hard parameters.
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I’m not very happy with my post from yesterday. I think it was uninspired, didn’t have any great insight in it, and lacked any stylistic qualities to make up for these shortcomings. In addition, I think it would be hard for someone who doesn’t play MTG to get much out of it, while simultaneously lacking detail or analysis that would interest an MTG player. Okay, so it was bad—how can I do better?

I’m talking specifically about MTG posts. I don’t write many, but I am considering writing about my Wednesday night draft each week. Partly because I think it might have a positive impact on my play, and partly because MTG is a big enough part of my life that I think I should write about it. (This holds true even though right now it’s a smaller part of my life than it has been in over five years, and I’m just not playing that much.) Another reason is that I think it’s a good challenge to try to write about it so that it’s interesting—without losing the plot altogether and writing something like Jonny Magic and the Card-Shark Kids (which you’ll note I’m not linking to).

Beyond all that, I’m going to write about just because I want to write about it.

But posts like yesterday’s are far too poor to be repeated weekly (or ever), and the first step towards improvement here is structure. Creating a structure that I’ll write in means that’s time and effort I don’t have to spend planning, and it should also push me to make sure that individual sections are interesting.

What’s important in a draft report?

Expression of my experience and feelings. The idea isn’t to have some kind of pseudo-objective transcript of the games, but rather to be a vehicle for self-expression. If I’m frustrated and whiny after a loss, either that should come through in the writing, or how I got past that should come through in the writing.

Analysis of the draft and games as empirical data about certain approaches. MTG is a very complicated game to play well, and theories about how to do so, particularly within specific card sets, vary significantly. Each theory is just that, a hypothesis awaiting testing. The testing is imperfect, and provides far too small a sample size, but it nevertheless represents more or less the only data available. At the very least I should have a theory which I am able to describe, and analysis of how that theory performed that night.

People and personality. These are the things that make descriptions of the game interesting in a non-technical sense. Players have distinct and interesting personalities, and who they are as people—or at least some part of that—should come across in my writing. This was conspicuously absent from my post last night, and all the players mentioned might as well have been ciphers. (Even as ciphers, they could have been a lot better, improved immeasurably just by linking to their statistical profiles on http://sfmagic.org/. ) Reading yesterday’s post did not inform the reader, for example, that Jim is a critical mainstay in our group and that he is one of the reasons for the group’s longevity; nor did it even hint at the fact that Seth is at heart a filthy combo player who offsets his thirst for lethal Rube Goldberg card interaction devices with an earnest eschewing of tournament-style play.

Accessibility. I would like people who are not MTG players to be able to understand and enjoy the posts. At the same time, I don’t want to clog up the narratives with explication that will bore those who have a firm grasp of the game.

Joie de jouer. I want to communicate not merely that I love the game, but at least some inkling of why I love the game, and what about it keeps bringing me back.

So, a structure to support that:

• Introduction/Scene Setting. A brief overview of the atmosphere that evening, any notable changes inside or outside the game, my state of mind, and so on.
• Overview of drafting. This will be marked out as distinct from the article, and I’ll probably incorporate ways for experienced players to hide it.
• Discussion of my plan for the draft. (This does assume that I have a plan.)
• Overview of the draft pod, complete with who was where, who played what, brief notes on each of the players (including stats links), and my feelings on the overall skill level.
• Overview of my draft, with focus on any difficult decisions and on where things went right/wrong. This will be accompanied by longer explanations for non-players, that will be marked as distinct from the rest.
• My decklist. Duh. With links to card descriptions, which will also be present when I mention cards in the rest of the post.
• A discussion of each of my matches, possibly with photographs of tricky board positions, and definitely with at least some information about my opponents.
• The overall results, possibly with some commentary on season standings, races, etc.

That seems like a structure that should work significantly better. It won’t guarantee good posts on the topic, but had I had it last night the post would have been better.

February wasn’t a bad month, blogging-wise. I intend to continue posting every day through March, and will check in on the idea again at the end of the month.
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I’ve posted to my blog at least once per day every day since 1 August 2006.
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I was happy with how posting every day in December went, and very happy with some of the posts in particular.
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Thanks to Seth‘s much-appreciated intervention, tadhg.com is now up again. Feeds, comments, graphics, etc. seem to be working fine. I’m still having some mail trouble, but I should be able to fix that over the next few days.

Although the Pacific Time timestamp will show this as early, it’s almost five hours into 2007 here, so: Happy New Year all!

Lots of people, especially those from Southern California, deride San Francisco’s weather. These people should spend time in Ireland, as that would give them an appreciation of just how good SF weather is.
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I’ve been getting more and more of it. Eventually I might have to resort to a captcha system, or to WP Hashcash. For the moment, though, all new commenters have to be verified by me before their posts show.
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Well, I made it through November still posting every day, after managing to finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour.
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Access to my sites has been intermittent at best since Monday evening. It’s some recurring problem with my router, and I’m hoping that this weekend I can figure out how to put it into bridge mode, and that this will stop it from happening again. I wasn’t able to access the site at all in that period, although some people have told me they were able to, so apparently at times the packet loss wasn’t atrocious.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll fix the problem properly soon. More details as I discover them.

I have no idea why, but my RSS feed output stopped working a while ago. For some reason PHP just started taking forever to return the feed pages. I’ll look into this more in future, and in any case it should go away when I get around to the server migration, but in the interim I had to change the number of articles in the feed to three (from ten). So for those of you who read via feed, you’ll have to go to the site to see what you’ve missed since this problem started. Apologies for any inconvenience.

This is the blog section of my website, the rest of which is currently at tadhgohiggins.com. Eventually, I’ll have all these things properly linked together, with coherent navigation and so on. Eventually.