{"id":44236,"date":"2018-10-07T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-10-07T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44236"},"modified":"2018-10-06T21:07:54","modified_gmt":"2018-10-07T01:07:54","slug":"two-retrospectives-at-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44236","title":{"rendered":"Two Retrospectives at Once?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew this would happen sooner or later. Sometimes there just isn’t enough news going on to give me a topic for a weekly column. Now that I’m writing at the Escapist, I’m trying to fill two<\/em> columns. <\/p>\n

One of the decisions I made when I took the Escapist gig was that I wan’t going to reduce the volume of content here on the blog. I think that’s the only way to be fair to my Patrons<\/a>. Now I’m having trouble filling both commitments. <\/p>\n

My self-imposed quota goes something like this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A weekly column for the Escapist.\n
  2. Some low-effort content for Sunday. (Hint: You’re reading it now.)\n
  3. Podcast on Monday.\n
  4. A 1,500 to 3,000 word column on Tuesday. (Currently This Dumb Industry.)\n
  5. A retrospective post on Thursday. (Currently GTA V.)<\/ol>\n

    My other problem is that I have too much content<\/em> in the form of retrospectives. Right now I’ve got an accumulated 7 months of lead time in the form of Grand Theft Auto V + Mass Effect Andromeda + Spider-Man. It’s not a lot of fun writing something that won’t see the light of day for half a year. Usually if I’m writing about something it’s because I’m interested in discussing it now-ish.<\/p>\n

    This means I have a shortage of one kind of content (columns) and a glut of another type of content (retrospectives) and my deadlines are either tomorrow or next year. That’s… weird.<\/p>\n

    My quota has me putting out about 5k words a week. I can hit that easily. The problem isn’t writing time, it’s the lack of column topics.<\/p>\n

    The obvious solution would be to send all the columns to the Escapist, and run two concurrent retrospectives here on the blog. I’d have to be careful with the category filing to keep them from getting mixed together in the archives, but otherwise I can’t think of a reason why this wouldn’t work.<\/p>\n

    This would mean more total words here on the blog, since retrospective posts tend to be a bit longerA minimum column length is 1,500 words, while I prefer retrospective posts to exceed 2k.<\/span> than columns, but it would mean you’d need to go to the Escapist to get my bitching & moaning about the industry. <\/p>\n

    Then again, I kind prefer “This Dumb Industry” to “Experienced Points” in terms of branding. I really love the TDI header image…<\/p>\n

    I've always been fond of this.<\/div>
    I've always been fond of this.<\/div><\/p>\n

    …and I’d be sad if it didn’t pop up on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

    I dunno. It really looks like this is the best solution to the problem of unbalanced content pipelines. We’ll see. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I knew this would happen sooner or later. Sometimes there just isn’t enough news going on to give me a topic for a weekly column. Now that I’m writing at the Escapist, I’m trying to fill two columns. One of the decisions I made when I took the Escapist gig was that I wan’t going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44236","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=44236"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44255,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44236\/revisions\/44255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}