8

Another year, another milestone.

Fun fact, until last week I had convinced myself that this year would actually be this blog's ninth anniversary, not its eighth. I'm not too sure exactly when I first thought of it like that, but it's certainly been in my head for a good few weeks, as most things that I dwell on are.

Regardless, eight years is still worth celebrating. This blog is definitely on its last legs by now, and I have kept it alive a good few years when it could have died several times beforehand. That said, I have decided that this next year will be the last year for Galactic Antics. It's been a wonderful little passion project throughout the years, and I have got to know some really lovely people through it, but it's time that this blog begins to face the long-awaited curtain call at last.

I may refer to the blog rather derisively as a "rust-bucket", but I have enjoyed working on it a fair bit over the years. While I was not inexperienced with being "out there" on the internet prior to its creation in 2014, having hosted numerous webcomics on a separate forum through 2007 to 2011, it's been a wonderful confidence booster in being able to keep an online project active for longer than a single year before moving on, either to a successor or to different things altogether.

So even if it isn't going to reach the "ideal" of a tenth anniversary, hitting eight years and ending on its ninth is not something I would have considered a likely outcome all those years ago. It's been great exposure to creating and running a website, something which I will need to look more into again in the near future once I pull my finger out a bit and focus more on my prospective career options.

It's been a fun ride, and of course it isn't over yet. With everything else going on, I don't know what sort of things I'll be touching on over the next twelve months, but since there are more than a couple of things I've been meaning to touch on over the years that I never got around to writing about, I imagine I'll try to incorporate those in the line-up somewhere.

Once again, thank you all for reading this blog, and here's to the next and final year of GA. I'll be sure to try and make it as good as possible.

Seven Years a Blogging.

I may not be blogging consistently anymore, but that doesn't mean that I can ignore when the blog's anniversary rolls around.

So... that refit from last year aged well, didn't it? After all the intention to start writing about other Star Wars games as much as The Old Republic, it's kinda just... boiled down to still being about The Old Republic. Most of this is because I had high hopes that Squadrons would provide more writing material beyond my four posts about it last year, but then that just went nowhere. Motive moved away from providing patches for the game after December, and on the 4th of May this year they delivered their final intended server-side update.

I don't mind them doing that - indeed, I actually admire them for releasing a game as "finished" (barring the annoying glitches, of course) and only providing updates as a way of thanking the players for their dedication - but in terms of writing... there isn't a lot to really talk about with the game that I haven't already touched on in some form!

While that is a bit disappointing, I do think the refit itself looks nice, and it at least gave me the excuse to cull a couple of pages which were just becoming more and more impractical to keep up-to-date. Ultimately, I'm still happy I've done it, even if I grumble about the intentions not working out as well as I had envisaged.

But anyway, enough moping about the past.

For the rest of this year, I intend to focus on the past ten years of The Old Republic, since this year is of course its big tenth anniversary! I have a series in mind to focus on several things which BioWare have included within the game across the years, as well as to provide some introspective thoughts about my own personal history within the game. Ten years is a long time to stick with anything, and I have made some really great friendships and learned some lessons about myself over the years thanks to this game.

Plus of course, there will be the continued look at the PTS updates. I haven't touched on it here for some time, primarily because the most-recent update was for a combat style I don't intend to play. However, one thing which is also apparent is that BioWare's new philosophy for things like class defensives can't really be gauged until the group content is properly scaled and all changes have been revealed. Right now on Live, we often need several of these defensives in many fights due to the general tuning issues, and this heavily-influenced my gut reactions when I saw the plans for Guardians before BioWare stepped up to the plate to say what was what.

That's not to say that I still don't have some concerns, but I don't want to make any further PTS posts until we know more about exactly how Legacy of the Sith is going to be. The current PTS state is just a bit too barebones for my liking, but I certainly do have to praise BioWare for making it clear for Sentinels what their ability / passive choices would allow them to do for all three specs, which is far more than Guardians had access to at the start. They are at least improving on communicating more than the bare minimum, but at the same time I don't think that should really be something that I would have needed to praise...

We'll see how it all pans out!

For now, though, thank you all once again for reading this shambling husk of a blog. There hasn't really been a lot to write about over the past few months, but I do have plans to pick things up a notch!

Six Years and Future Developments

It is strange to think that this blog has now been going on for almost a quarter of my life so far. Galactic Antics has seen me through two full university courses and now it is seeing the working world begin knocking on my proverbial door.

When I set out to start this blog six years ago, it was because I had a lot of thoughts on various goings-on in SWtOR and, while I had been sharing them with a former friend of mine, I felt it would be better-served to get them out into the wider world. I had no idea at the time that I would still be here over half a decade later, as most of my personal projects before this would last barely a year.

I feel incredibly lucky. While the prime of this blog has long since passed (2016), I am incredibly grateful for the readership which I have had over the years since then. It feels like I say this every year, but the fact that people still willingly read the words I chuck up on this big scary old internet is still something of an amazement to me.

A little over a month ago, I took a long hard look at things in my life just to gauge where I am at. Not for any particular purpose – I’ve just (unsurprisingly) had a lot of time to think to myself about such things this year. This sort of thing last happened three years ago while deciding what paths were open for me at that time, although that was after pulling out of a third university course that just was not right for me. Unlike in 2017, one of the things which reared its head among this period was the future of the blog.

I have come close to considering stopping outright a couple of times, but partway through June I was this close to pulling the plug for good. I cannot remember the exact reasons, and I do not particularly wish to try.

This is the main reason why I had not been posting that much despite having things to write about. I was not sure whether it would be "worth" posting if, ultimately, I was going to pull the plug soon after anyway. This anniversary and the direction my life is hopefully going to be taking have both helped me come to some conclusions about what I want this blog to be. I will not be stopping, but things will certainly be different. 

From this point forth, I will no longer feature Star Wars: The Old Republic as the primary focus of the blog. Instead, I will shift its focus to having a more generic Star Wars gaming theme. This is because I have been spending proportionally less time in it compared to other games for the past couple of months for various reasons and this will only continue as time goes on. This change is intended to hopefully increase its longevity by giving me more things to "officially" focus on.

SWtOR will still probably feature the most out of the games which I intend to cover because it'll be the one which has the most frequent and varied updates so, practically, things won't be changing too much besides some occasional variety.

I am not going to be changing the name. Galactic Antics is probably the best name I could ever have come up with in hindsight. I certainly do not think Smuggling with a Cool Head or Blaster-Whipped Cream could transfer across anywhere near as successfully!

I don't know what the full extent of the changes is likely to be yet, but I certainly intend to have the face-lift finished before October as I already have a post mostly-written which will go live during that month. Fair warning, though: it will be a long one. Seriously.

One thing which I do know is that the long-postponed Thoughts on 6.0 series is now officially cancelled. Back in April my computer mysteriously malfunctioned and with it I lost all the videos and screenshots which I had so diligently been recording throughout Onslaught's story. I feel it is better to just cut my losses and move on.

I have other things to work on alongside this face-lift, namely a potential career to get off the ground which will require its own website. I am curious to see what lessons I learn in the process which I may be able to transfer over to this site in terms of potentially improving its aesthetic. I'm going to be a bit busy with this sort of thing, that's for sure!

I will be pulling the blog down from public viewing on the 16th of August at 13:00 BST, exactly one week from this post's publication date, to begin work nice and early on the changes. If you have this blog linked via your blogroll or website, be sure to remove the link until it is back live. 

All that remains is to thank you all so much for your patience over the past six years. 

See you soon!

Half a Decade

I may not be blogging consistently these days, something which I attribute to real life goings-on (which I will not go into any more detail on), and I'm honestly surprised I've been able to keep this going on for as long as it has been.

Most of my personal endeavours have collapsed in on themselves after a year at most. Based on this history, I would never have imagined my blog to have lasted two years, let alone five. Yet here we are. Fifth year over, and the sixth is beginning.

I don't have many plans for the blog currently, at least as far as pre-Expansion writings go, as indicated by just how empty this celebration post is especially after the last couple of years. There's a post I've been working on for the past couple of months which will go live on the last day of 5.0, showcasing my favourite and least-favourite aspects of the current expansion.

Beyond that, I think it will purely be PTS-related stuff. I am already fairly certain that Phase Two will begin after I'm out of the country from next Thursday, but we're still to see Hunters hit the PTS, hopefully this weekend, so I'll try and crank a post out before I depart for new territory if I can.

There are certainly some inaccuracies in my original post regarding the PTS, either because things have since been updated (I had already noted one change, but it is clear from the Mercenary and Powertech posts that set-bonuses in general are receiving a significant update at some point) or because I had completely the wrong end of the stick (e.g. set bonus attribute gain) at the time. It would just be easier to include those corrections in a new post than adjust a post that people may no longer be reading.

Or at least I view it that way.

So, five years on. How many may yet follow? I do not know, nor do I particularly wish to know. As with a lot of things for me these days, this blog is very much on "take it as it comes" status. I daresay things won't be at all different for the SWtOR community with its absence, but it's still been a useful outlet for my thoughts across the years.

That's all there is to this year's post. Now, on to the future and what it brings.

Thank you for your readership, those of you who have stuck with it all this while.

~Cal.

Milestone: 4-Year Anniversary!

So this rustbucket of a blog has survived its fourth year, undoubtedly the roughest of the lot so far. It can't have escaped anyone's attention that I haven't been posting at all frequently over the past 365 days, but regardless, the fourth year is in the can.

Much like the last two years, this heralds a look back over the past twelve months' worth of posts, seeing which the most popular were and allowing me to provide a commentary of them. This will purely be looking over the posts made after the Third Year Anniversary post, and I feel the need to make this distinction because otherwise the Curing Bergola Post would top the list in two ways; firstly, for still being the most-read post on the blog, and secondly for managing to acquire 700 views over the past twelve months - more than twice that of the most popular post written between the previous August 9th and this one.

Not that that last detail is particularly impressive; this is only the thirtieth post in all that time. Still, it's nice to know when my peak-blogging was.

Milestone: 3-Year Anniversary!

So again the time comes to celebrate another year of running this blog. Three years ago on this day, the blog's initial incarnation, Spawn of the Dread Master, was released unto the world. It was just a bit of a mess, something which probably hasn't changed in three years, but it's certainly been an interesting ride.

As with last year, I still find it rather incredible to say that this thing is still going after more than one year, although obviously compared to last year the amount of blog posts has been reduced significantly for some reason or another.

Regardless, it's certainly been an interesting year. Those of you (un)fortunate enough to have been following the blog since its inception may recall that last year I made the transition from WordPress to Blogger due to my frustrations with certain elements of the former platform (e.g. the scheduling system) finally getting the better of me. Thankfully, a complete transfer of all data, posts, etc. to Blogger was possible, so nothing important was lost.

Although the formatting is still woeful on all those old posts and the comments didn't transition properly (replies aren't staggered but instead all comments in their own right), so this is something that will need to be fixed at some point. Maybe.

The point is that this isn't just a standard anniversary post but also an anniversary of my and the blog's time on Blogger. Let's get started, shall we?

Milestone: 2 Year Anniversary!

Two years ago today, I kickstarted the blog Spawn of the Dread Master. It was an initiative which I didn't know whether or not would succeed, given that most of my previous projects only lasted a year before falling to pieces, but I figured that it was worth a go.

To say that I'm still blogging two years later is a great achievement in my book. I don't always find it easy to find something to say or write about, as you can tell from the numerous breaks I took prior to the rebranding. Suffice to say, I currently believe that the blog is in its strongest form yet.

Unlike last year, I actually have some things planned to celebrate this particular anniversary, so let's get started!