Admin: Anniversary, the Fifth

• In honor of this milestone, let's do something a little different.

It has been five years since I started blogging here at Bullet Points. At the time I was chafing against the constraints of my prior blog, Guild Wars Kira. I wanted a place where I could write about whatever was on my mind.

And this blog has certainly lived up to that. I've written about MMOs and found a small place in the MMO blogging community. But I've also written about PC and console gaming, about comic books and novels, about RPG worlds that exist only in my head, about podcasts and music. And I've written a very little bit about myself. There are little bits of me in all of these posts, like shards of a mirror strewn throughout the blog, each reflecting a fragment my life.

Blogging like this was actually a throwback to my first blog. Way back in 2002, I had a blog that I hand coded in HTML on my personal Charter server space. I shared Raven's Prayer with my wife and we posted book, movie, and game reviews. That page has long disappeared, but one remnant of it still exists here and there around the internet. That was where I posted my rules for Risus Firefly. (I really need to revise and repost that here someday.) Raven's Prayer was very personal. So when it was taken down in 2006 due to an ISP change, it was only a matter of time before I took up blogging somewhere else.

The bullet points thing came as a whim. As I state in my first post, I thought it would let me put up whatever random collection of thoughts that was on my mind without need of a connecting narrative. I didn't really expect to be writing long form posts as the blog evolved. By then the gimmick stuck and I think it makes the blog stand out, if only because of my bloody minded adherence to the shtick.

You might notice that the first post doesn't start with a category name. That conceit didn't start until the second post. I'm very happy to see that the practice has spread out to other blogs in a limited fashion. But, it has taken every bit of my self restraint not to go back and append "Admin:" to the subject line of my first post. But that would betray the history of this blog, this autobiography of the minutia of my life.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that, beyond starting an amazing family who I love very much, this blog may be the primary mark that I leave on the world. I think that I'll be okay with that. Here are my thoughts, cast out into the void, for anyone to peruse, to comment on, to link and share. No one knows how long it will persist. But I like to think that nothing is ever lost on the internet. Things just become harder to find.

So thank you to everyone who has ever read Bullet Points, whether it was because you were looking for a WoW gear auditor, for EVE Online's biggest stories, for a list of things to do before WoW's Cataclysm changed the old world. Or even because you were genuinely interested in what I have to say. Knowing that even one person gets something from these words has made all of this work so fulfilling.

• Let's put these back on before I get too maudlin. I'm going to keep up with my hundred post anniversaries from here on out, just because I like being contrary about how I run things around here. But I felt that I couldn't let the occasion pass without comment.


• Here's to another five years. Hopefully together with friends and family.

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© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.