{"id":25435,"date":"2014-12-23T18:06:56","date_gmt":"2014-12-23T23:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25435"},"modified":"2014-12-23T18:06:56","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T23:06:56","slug":"experienced-points-the-200th-column-you-asked-for-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25435","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: The 200th Column &#8211; You Asked For This"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I have written 200 Experienced Points columns. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/video-games\/columns\/experienced-points\/12795-On-Valve-Programming-BioShock-and-More-It-s-Reader-Mail\" title=\"The 200th Column - You Asked For This\">Here is number 200, where I answer reader questions<\/a>. At an average length of 1,200 words, that&#8217;s about a quarter of a million words. If gathered into a book, it would be awkward and heavy. For comparison, Fellowship of the Ring is around 180k, and that thing is a pain in the ass to carry around. <\/p>\n<p>I really enjoyed doing this. One of the things I dislike about this job is the search for topics worthy of doing a column. <em>Will people care? Does this matter? Is this story going to be irrelevant, or fundamentally different, by the time this column goes live?<\/em> I&#8217;ve scrapped a lot of columns and wasted a lot of hours digging for the &#8220;right&#8221; topic. Reader questions gives me a way to latch onto stuff that people care about, and it lets me cover smaller topics that might not be enough to fill an entire column.<\/p>\n<p>So I hope this goes over well. My plan is that when I have one of those weeks where there doesn&#8217;t seem to be a worthy news topic, I can just dive into reader questions. <\/p>\n<p>Of course, this was a terrible week to do this one. Christmas week is odd, traffic-wise. People change their browsing habits. So a tepid response might mean people are just busy Christmas-ing. I dunno. Maybe I&#8217;m over-thinking this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I have written 200 Experienced Points columns. Here is number 200, where I answer reader questions. At an average length of 1,200 words, that&#8217;s about a quarter of a million words. If gathered into a book, it would be awkward and heavy. For comparison, Fellowship of the Ring is around 180k, and that thing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}