The ENnies: It Is An Honor Just To Be Nominated...

For the first time ever, I submitted the Dorkland! blog for consideration for the ENnies. Do I expect to be nominated, or even win for that mater? Nah, not really. I've been doing this blog for just over 10 years now, and I've been plugging away at it without really caring who likes or who doesn't like what I want to talk about over here. I staked this out as my little corner of the internet, to let the dice fall where they may (so to speak). Why the sudden need for affirmation? To be honest, the whole thing is more of a PR thing for me than anything else. Additional eyes on the blog never hurt, and having links on the ENnies site will help drive some traffic, perhaps to people who have never seen the blog before. A contradiction, I know.


Back in 2003, when I started this blog, blogging was an entirely different thing than it is today. The idea of a "web log" was really to share links to cool and interesting places (search engines were still pretty much in their infancy back then) with little to no commentary (except for maybe why you were sharing the link). Over the years, Dorkland! has moved from that to more of what I consider a "news magazine" approach. Since I studied journalism to be an opinion writer, I have a bias towards that kind of writing here.

The biggest change, of course, has been letting others become a part of this blog. +Josh Thompson has become the resident Kickstarter expert and is doing some of the best writing about Kickstarters that you're going to find on a gaming blog. Josh takes that "news" approach to writing about Kickstarters, rather than coming at it from wanting to see a project succeed or fail.

So, yeah, it is probably a total cop out that I submitted the blog, but really it doesn't matter what others think about what I (or the other bloggers) write, or what I submit to what award. My expectations are low, and I have antagonized the ENnies and their judges in the past for what I consider to be their archaic approach to the whole process.

Apparently for blogs the process is to submit a "best" post, and then the Judges will pick some other from the time period. I put up my interview with Peter Adkison about the return of The Primal Order as the best.

If you find yourself here because of the ENnies, please let me suggest a few of the blog's greatest hits of the last year, for your dining and dancing pleasures.

• Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: Call of Cthulhu Style
• The Crushing Mediocrity of Mainstreaming Geek Media
• Things About The Rifts RPG From Palladium Games
• A Dorkland! Interview -- Mutant Chronicles 3rd Ed. with Chris Birch
• A Dorkland Interview - Nefertiti Overdrive with Fraser Ronald
• Monsters And Magic Capsule Review
• Machinations of the Space Princess: Some Talk From Our New Game And A Rule Variant

You should also probably check out some of the free gaming content that I've put together for Fate, as long as you are looking.

Also submitted is our Geeky Voices Carry podcast. I submitted our "Listener Submitted Topics" episode, because that seemed appropriately meta, and it is our most-listened to episode. If you haven't listened to our podcast, check it out. You can hear it on iTunes, YouTube, or the podcast hosting site. We take a low-fi approach to our podcast. We meander and wander. We don't edit or use slick production values. We don't want to hide what we are: a group of friends sitting around and bullshitting about gaming and other things that interest us. Will we win? We're in a category that has a podcst by Ken Hite and Robin Laws. I'd say that we are an underdog (at best). But it will be worth it just to be nominated (should we be nominated).

And, the best part of the process is getting to pick the music that plays when you walk up to the podium. What can I say, I'm a music geek, too. I picked one of Instamatic's sections of the great 72 mashup to represent us.

Also, as long as you're here, please consider putting some change into the blog's tip jar. It is what paid for the podcast hosting, and it helps with things like sending us to Gen Con and getting things to review.