Six Years and Future Developments

It is strange to think that this blog has now been going on for almost a quarter of my life so far. Galactic Antics has seen me through two full university courses and now it is seeing the working world begin knocking on my proverbial door.

When I set out to start this blog six years ago, it was because I had a lot of thoughts on various goings-on in SWtOR and, while I had been sharing them with a former friend of mine, I felt it would be better-served to get them out into the wider world. I had no idea at the time that I would still be here over half a decade later, as most of my personal projects before this would last barely a year.

I feel incredibly lucky. While the prime of this blog has long since passed (2016), I am incredibly grateful for the readership which I have had over the years since then. It feels like I say this every year, but the fact that people still willingly read the words I chuck up on this big scary old internet is still something of an amazement to me.

A little over a month ago, I took a long hard look at things in my life just to gauge where I am at. Not for any particular purpose – I’ve just (unsurprisingly) had a lot of time to think to myself about such things this year. This sort of thing last happened three years ago while deciding what paths were open for me at that time, although that was after pulling out of a third university course that just was not right for me. Unlike in 2017, one of the things which reared its head among this period was the future of the blog.

I have come close to considering stopping outright a couple of times, but partway through June I was this close to pulling the plug for good. I cannot remember the exact reasons, and I do not particularly wish to try.

This is the main reason why I had not been posting that much despite having things to write about. I was not sure whether it would be "worth" posting if, ultimately, I was going to pull the plug soon after anyway. This anniversary and the direction my life is hopefully going to be taking have both helped me come to some conclusions about what I want this blog to be. I will not be stopping, but things will certainly be different. 

From this point forth, I will no longer feature Star Wars: The Old Republic as the primary focus of the blog. Instead, I will shift its focus to having a more generic Star Wars gaming theme. This is because I have been spending proportionally less time in it compared to other games for the past couple of months for various reasons and this will only continue as time goes on. This change is intended to hopefully increase its longevity by giving me more things to "officially" focus on.

SWtOR will still probably feature the most out of the games which I intend to cover because it'll be the one which has the most frequent and varied updates so, practically, things won't be changing too much besides some occasional variety.

I am not going to be changing the name. Galactic Antics is probably the best name I could ever have come up with in hindsight. I certainly do not think Smuggling with a Cool Head or Blaster-Whipped Cream could transfer across anywhere near as successfully!

I don't know what the full extent of the changes is likely to be yet, but I certainly intend to have the face-lift finished before October as I already have a post mostly-written which will go live during that month. Fair warning, though: it will be a long one. Seriously.

One thing which I do know is that the long-postponed Thoughts on 6.0 series is now officially cancelled. Back in April my computer mysteriously malfunctioned and with it I lost all the videos and screenshots which I had so diligently been recording throughout Onslaught's story. I feel it is better to just cut my losses and move on.

I have other things to work on alongside this face-lift, namely a potential career to get off the ground which will require its own website. I am curious to see what lessons I learn in the process which I may be able to transfer over to this site in terms of potentially improving its aesthetic. I'm going to be a bit busy with this sort of thing, that's for sure!

I will be pulling the blog down from public viewing on the 16th of August at 13:00 BST, exactly one week from this post's publication date, to begin work nice and early on the changes. If you have this blog linked via your blogroll or website, be sure to remove the link until it is back live. 

All that remains is to thank you all so much for your patience over the past six years. 

See you soon!