Welcome back

It’s been six years since I’ve been here, and a lot has changed.

I stopped being a full-time game journalist in September of 2016, when The Daily Dot laid off a slew of writers and editors in an attempt to revamp and stay in business. I knew that video game coverage was an experiment for the Dot, and I tried to make that experiment pay off. Thanks to a burgeoning relationship with Geoff Keighley, I was a year away from the Dot having access to Judge’s Week, the pre-E3 awards judging event. That would have been a feather in my cap.

I freelanced for a while afterward at the website Mic as an SEO writer which, at the time, meant writing a lot about Pokémon Go. I still know way too much about Individual Values (IVs), considering I somehow, as a hardcore, lifelong gamer, knew nothing whatsoever about Pokémon until the release of Pokémon Go in July, 2016.

In February, 2017 that contract gig ended, and I didn’t do much writing-wise until later that year when I wrote about my favorite video game in the world, the Destiny franchise, for Activision, the game’s publisher. When developer Bungie and Activision parted ways in late 2018, this gig also ended. I wasn’t fastidious about backing up that work but they were very short posts. I was pleased with the Diary of a Guardian series that my editor, Kevin Kelly, had come up with. I’ll post some of those images soon!

I had never thought about writing as a portable skill. I wrote about video games, I figured. When I started as an Associate Editor at Vision Systems Design, a trade magazine about machine vision systems, in November of 2018, I realized that not only was I now a writer, but I also knew something about the publishing business, helping to guide the development of a print magazine, of all things.

In my personal life, I got divorced amicably, and have since met the most amazing woman who’s ever been willing to put up with my nonsense and the size of my Star Wars collection. Things are very good. And I thought the start of this year might be a good time to get back to this blog, that I originally began just to build my brand and break into writing about games. I have plenty of other topics to write about.

So, welcome to 2020. This is going to be my best year ever. I hope you find something in the old posts to enjoy reading. You can also head to my portfolio page to see what I think were most of the best stories I wrote during my tenure as a game journalist. If you want to learn what machine vision is, you can check out my author page at Vision Systems Design. 🙂