This blog is mostly about updates, updates to the website and Twitch, but also have a bit about my writing. A lot of this has to do with the concept of the Brand. Over the last 5-7 years I have been trying to do several different kinds of content creation. Each avenue I tried to brand as something different. Over the past year or so I’ve tried to incorporate the various aspects of my content creation into one Brand. That brand being the Baelnorn brand.
Most of the updates I’m going to talk about has to do with consolidating the multiple brands into one brand; namely the gaming into the LARP. The aspect that took the most work is deciding to merge my Apathetic Gamer brand into the Baelnorn brand. This will be most evident on the website, which is what I’d like to talk about next
The Website
The most obvious change will be the introduction of a “landing page”. I put it quotations as it’s not what people traditionally think of in a landing page. It’s more of a home page that is emulating a landing page.
The main concept is that it is the first page people find and it needs to let people easily see what I’m all about. It’s about promoting my brand and search engine optimization. Make it concise, fill it full of keywords that describe who I am and what I do and bam, done.
The next thing you might notice is the addition of a Gaming section. It took some time for me to decide how I was going to take my Apathetic Gamer website and combine it with this one. In the end, I decided I’m taking little actual content from the old website. What I did end up doing is taking the category organization from the old one and reworked it into the Baelnorn website. Categories will be more heavily used going forward.
The actual gaming section is very bare at the moment. I have an old review, the rating system and a page about Synth Dad and that’s it. It won’t always be so bare. Which brings my to my next topic, gaming updates.
Gaming
The newest addition to the Baelnorn brand is gaming. You’ve seen it in my weekly gaming streams, but that’s not the full extent of gaming. I’ll be adding reviews, full reviews and what I call runty reviews. Reviews which are short concise and gets to the heart of the matter as fast as possible.
The reviews will not come with any regularity but I do plan on writing some as I play games. I’m not regulating myself to just electronic games either, I mean all games (LARP being a separate category under my branding) such as pen and pencil RPGS like Dungeons and Dragons, board games and maybe even card games.
For right now this aspect of my brand will be growing slowly. I won’t be playing many social games due to the whole pandemic and my attention span for video games is low. Depression has always been a drain on my ability to have a game or TV show hold my attention for long. This makes it difficult at times deeper depressive episodes, to really get into new games. Don’t worry though, my depression comes in waves so I’ll eventually be able to pump out some reviews.
For now I transferred at Runty Review from the Apathetic Gamer website to this website. Not only is it an example of my review style, it’s a review of an Indie game that I really, really enjoyed.
Twitch
Emoji’s! Thanks to Uriel I now have three unique emoji’s people can unlock.
There they are! You can see how to unlock them within their caption. They just came out of review today!
Writing
I’ve started to write a short story using the main character from my novel, Philip Clowes. In the story we find a young human male pitted between two vampires, both who want to turn the young man.
I’m writing the story so I can put it in my publication, Failed Schemes Magazine. The big update there is that I’m gearing up to publish my third issue. This time I hope to have writing from people other than myself. I hope to have it out this year.
Discord
This update you might have already noticed if you go to the Discord, it’s been live for a week now. I’ve paid to boost the server to level 1. This mostly means better audio quality when we use the voice/video chat feature. I also turned it into one of the community servers. You won’t noticed to much difference there, it’s mostly a back end thing. Additionally I’ve also rearranged some channels.
I’ve started posting an Amtgard topic every week, there has been some wonderful engagement. I’ve also started posting my weekly streaming schedule in the streaming channel.
If you haven’t joined the Baelnorn Discord server yet here is an INVITE. Come join the conversation.