Restoring One's Muse (By Inviting Her Hot, Pixellated Friends)

Blogging's a funny thing. Sometimes you can't sleep because you have too many ideas running through your mind. Sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you can't think of one damned thing to write about, and you wind up not being able to sleep because your writer's block is driving you crazy.

Problems, and Massively-Multiplayer Solutions

Here at Stupid Ranger, we've always had a much easier time writing about D&D when we're playing frequently. It's a kind of feast-or-famine thing -- and right now, it's famine. During certain times of year, it's difficult to get everyone together to play. On top of that, Dante and SR are moving far, far away for a couple years to a place called Colorado (or, as I like to refer to it, "Thunder Bluff"). We've been considering several options as to how to both A. keep in touch and B. keep playing D&D together.

I was talking to the lovely Efreak about this situation, and she suggested that perhaps we play World of Warcraft together. Now, you have to understand -- I have long been a person who swore that they would never touch an MMO as long as they lived because I was afraid that it would suck up my whole life, and now here is my wife suggesting that I install the beast on my PC. However, she also assured me that my life would be forfeit the moment that getting epic PvP raid gear became more important than my son, and so I decided to bring it up to the rest of the crew. To make a long story short, I now have a level 21 Shaman and I'm very disappointed that Ghost Wolf form makes you neither invisible nor intangible. My cohorts also have characters on the same server, and we like killing things together.

Broadening Our Horizons

All of us here at Stupid Ranger are very broad-spectrum geeks, and D&D is not our only form of fun. Recently, I've had the urge to write, but it's rarely been about D&D (as you can see by my prolific posting here as of late). What I have had the urge to write about for some time now, is videogames and movies and other general geekery. As it turned out, my compatriots have been having similar urges.

Thusly, we are considering broadening the scope of what we do here at Stupid Ranger. Please do not panic if you see a post about how amazing and frustrating Mega Man 9 is, a scathing review of "The Happening", or epic tales about being a complete newb in WoW. You may also expect to see the same good stuff you usually see here, and we will (of course) tag everything in a way that we can still be RPGBloggers.com compatible (and so those of you who don't care what my thoughts on Rock Band 2 are can continue reading RPG-related stuff only).

And yes, I absolutely realize the end result is that we're trying to be Critical Hits. (I mean, who wouldn't?)

Have Wacom, Will Travel?

In addition, I have been itching to tell more of the Evensbrook story. I have also come to the conclusion that I really don't have time in my life right now to draw the comic as it was (at least with my sanity intact). Therefore, I am going to ask the Internets for help. If you are an artist, or know of one who would be willing to do this, I am looking for someone to draw the Evensbrook strip. My ideal plan is to have a Penny Arcade kind of setup, where I write stories and funny stuff, and the artist draws the pictures and makes everything look wonderful. Me Tycho, you Gabe. And the position would pay exactly as much as I get paid for this! (And I wouldn't even make you chip in a few bucks a month on the web hosting, like I do!)

I realize the chances of this actually taking place are slim to none, but on the off chance somebody is interested it might be a lot of fun. A far more likely outcome is that I start simply telling the story as an episodic novel here on the site. Stupid Ranger has several ideas that she wants to start writing about in much the same vein. In any case, we're going to be firing up the Writers' Turbines here shortly, so please take your seats and don your protective helmets.

Thoughts?

Admittedly, it does feel a little weird broadening our scope since we have traditionally been a pretty narrow-focused site -- but we're doing this for fun, and this will be fun (hopefully for everybody). We'd love to hear your thoughts on the direction we're thinking of taking.