Aaaaand I've just reached my 50th blog update again this year, making it 15 years in a row now of reaching this milestone.
My 50th blog update is usually very boring, because all I do is talk about how I managed to reach 50 blog posts on that particular year, lolz.
Other years, it was about giving enough dedication to my blog, and balancing work and fun while trying to find the time to update my blog. This year though, it was quite easy to achieve this milestone actually, as most of us were stuck at home since March due to CoVid-19 lockdowns.
With no jobs or kids to take care of, I could have reached this milestone much sooner, but somewhere along the way between lockdowns and hand sanitizers, Steam happened. I started playing all the Steam games that I had bought through the years but never got to play, and eventually I was clocking 150+ hours of gameplay in 2 weeks!
For the uninitiated, Steam records and displays your gameplay duration for every 2 weeks stretch.
150 hours in 2 weeks, that's a lot. Considering there are 336 hours in 2 weeks, out of which if you sleep 9 hours a day, that's 126 hours of snoozeville. Out of the remaining 210 hours that I was awake, I was gaming 150 hours. That's more than 70% of my day spent on just games alone!
Eventually I did come out of that slump and disciplined myself by not crossing 2 hours of Steam time per day, but it sure felt good to finally play all those hundreds of new games lying in my Steam library untouched for so many years. The perfect pensioner life of a retired game designer, aye? :D
Other than that, most of my blog updates this year were about CoVid-19, especially among our Mizo community and how we were dealing with the pandemic. Hopefully next year, there will be more cheerful topics to write about.
As I have told people a lot of times, maintaining a blog is not just a good exercise to build up your writing skills, but it helps you record important incidents like the current CoVid-19 outbreak and you can read them again years from now.
10 years down the line, you'd probably be like, "Hey remember that CoVyd or CoVeed thingie years ago, I kinda vaguely remember that we were on lockdowns for many months until they gave us the vaccine, other than that, I don't remember much about it, everything is all hazy" whereas for me, all I have to do is look back at my old blog posts and relive all the memories again, from the first outbreak to the front-line workers, the selfless LLTF and other volunteers who stepped up, the way our community came together as one to minimize the spread, etc etc. :)
It's never too late to start blogging. Maybe you should make this your New Year's resolution, which is coming up in just 8 days. Start a blog. Write down whatever you feel like, and share it for the world to read.
Let this be my 50th blog post message to you all - Start writing whatever you feel like. Put it up on a free blogging platform like blogger.com or WordPress, even at a micro-blogging site like Tumblr or Medium. Just don't do it on Facebook or Instagram because those aren't archive friendly.
You'll realize the importance of archiving years later. Posting your thoughts or opinion on your FB status or in an FB group may give you that initial hit, with lots of friends and strangers commenting and "liking" it, but like all things that are social media, it will fade. People will no longer see that feed on their timeline in the next few days. Whereas when you write it on your personal blog, you will not get that initial rush of traffic, but it will be there for all to read, with various visitors coming across your links through search engine searches and referrals, every day, for the rest of your life (and beyond).
You will be amazed at the things you can churn up and record, especially when you look back at what you've written today years from now.
Trust me, that feeling is awesome. I'll let that be my short message for this 50th post. Hoping to update my blog about Christmas again before this year ends. Peace out, everyone.
