And Now For Something Completely Different…

Being an editor, writer and publisher on a deranged blog of insanity has its upsides and downsides. The upsides are that it’s awesome essentially having my own blog where I can write about kinda almost everything, but the downsides are, well, this is a Team Fortress 2 blog. Almost everything we’ve written on this blog has been connected in some way to both Team Fortress 2 and our little, fading community on the Steam User Forums. A community that used to be actually rather busy, and one that’s kinda not really allowed to talk about our other interests. Of course there’s always an Itsurblog lurking around somewhere (often in the Daily SPUF thread) but none of us are willing to go to the Off Topic section, where posts don’t count and people with scary numbers of reputation roam.

Of course, we could always bugger off to other websites, Steam groups and the like. These never work. It’s like telling someone who likes playing games on Steam to play games on Facebook. The only reason the Daily SPUF is still around is because I’m a stubborn bitch who won’t let it die, and I like to lure people here with cookies and nude pictures of aabicus contests.

But when your main writing focus is one single game, there’s going to be a desire to expand. We already kinda do that, we spread out into other games. Payday 2 and Killing Floor 2 have both been affected by Team Fortress 2, Skyrim fills the modding hole that was left when Valve fucked with SV_Pure and I basically play LoL in spite of Dota 2. Still, I’ve managed to link all of these to TF2. I even did a mini-series comparing LoL’s Sona to the TF2 Medic.

At some point though you need to expand. Open yourself up to new things. What’s the point of having a blog around SPUF and not discussing things that interest SPUF’s denizens? What about games like 100% Orange Juice that have fuck all to do with TF2? Or the new, stupid as fuck Valve trading thing that’s going on, that does have to do with TF2 but could be better discussed elsewhere? What about people like Gyokuyoutama, Jay and Corvette, and their desire to discuss anime, roleplaying, trading card games and the duties of housemaids? That’s always been a running theme on SPUF, so really they should be able to discuss it here too.

Basically what I’m trying to say (and doing a really shit job at it) is that we could do with an off topic section. Every discussion area known to man has an off topic and general discussion area, and the ones that don’t end up getting derailed into off topic conversations at some point anyway. That’s what happens when you have people with similar interests all bundled up in one place. So the Daily SPUF is going to have an off topic area too.

For now, I’ve decided to call this area Now For Something Completely Different, in honor of Monty Python, because they’re like the best people ever. I’m going to start filling it up with random stuff slowly over the next few weeks. It will also double up as an area for smaller articles, as well as things not really related to TF2 or gaming what so ever. I invite all three of you readers to come along and add your own thoughts and articles and random ramblings.

Let’s have an itsurblog on an actual blogging platform.