Those were the words I opened with as I sat down with the person who was going to teach me how to play Magic: The Gathering at PAX Australia 2014. Not the “Blogvember 2014” part, but the “let’s do this”, after I threw down the gauntlet, informing him I knew how to play Magic but might have been a little bit rusty at it. A story for another time, I’m afraid.

It feels like so long since I’ve written regularly on ye olde blog. I’m not really sure what happened — it’s not that I’m not writing, because I do that every day and get paid for it, but it’s been so long since I’ve written about personal interests. Not that those have changed drastically, either: I play Dota most days, I’ve been really enjoying Shadow of Mordor lately, and I could probably write at length about those, but every time I’ve told myself to write about something other than Apple or consumer technology, hitting that new post button just seemed way too daunting.

So, here’s what’s going to happen in my return to blogging. Every day in November, I’ll be publishing something on my blog. Since I’ve just returned from PAX Australia 2014, a tonne of these stories will be related to that even — little anecdotes from things I saw/did/experienced at the show. Like many others, too much of my writing has gone into Twitter, and while I won’t go as far as saying “Twitter has killed my ability to write”, it’s definitely had an impact on the greater-than-140-characters content I’ve produced, especially on my blog.

The reality is, there’s plenty of stuff that could be written about. Twitter is great for brevity, but loses in terms of permeance. Twitter is too fleeting, and people tend to live in the moment. That’s fine, but I think the opposite is important too; having somewhere you can come back and read something substantial about what you were doing/living six months ago.

Jason Snell at Six Colors sums up the problem nicely:

If you had something interesting to say, but it really couldn’t bear more than a few paragraphs, you had two choices: Just swallow it and not write anything, or fluff it up with empty filler until it seemed more substantial than it actually was.

Plenty of stuff is bigger than a tweet, but there are times when you just don’t feeling like tapping out an 1800-word essay on the Nemesis system in Shadows of Mordor. It’s not that the Nemesis system in that game isn’t worth discussing to the tune of 1800 words, it’s that you could say “it’s bloody awesome” in a tweet and leave it at that.

I thought about imposing an upper word limit on the posts, to prevent me from going overboard and over extending my efforts on any given day, but we’ll see how we go. I have no posts in the queue currently, so all the content will be hot out of the oven, so to speak — sometimes it’ll just be a photo about something that happened at PAX, other times it’ll just be a paragraph or two about downright unrecognisable cosplay, or the differentiation between TF2 players and those with fancy hats for the Melbourne Cup.

At least I’ll be writing on the blog again.