zwolanerd

Tomorrow will be the start of the seventh month of zwolanerd’s existence. It started in November of last year, with a plea to Disney that I still hope they’ll listen to. The goal when I started was to not miss a day (M-F) posting for a month. Then another month. And now here we are six months later, and I’ve missed maybe 5 days. Nobody is more surprised than me.

Thank you for coming by and reading. No matter how little or how often you do so, I appreciate every look and I’m thankful for all of your comments and input.

I hope you’ll indulge me on this day as I list some of my favorite posts. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy writing all the other ones, it’s just that these are the ones I enjoyed the most. And, hey, this could serve as kind of a “zwolanerd primer” if you wanted to introduce the site to someone you know/love/want to impress.

 

10. A Year at the Theater – When you think “zwolanerd,” you think “lists,” don’t you? Trying to come up with a “BEST _________ OF ALL TIME” list would be immensely frustrating, but ordering a list of things already given?  Immensely satisfying to me. Honestly, I just want to go through all of my collections of anything and put them in order.

9.  How I Think Pokémon Works – I want to do more “How I Think ______ Works” posts, but it’s hard to come up with topics for this!

8. Why? – Responding to how a game or movie makes me think about the process of creating or playing a game or movie is one of my favorite things. Back when I used to write game reviews, I never felt up to the task because I wanted to talk more about what the game made me think about than the actual game. Any window I get into the hows and whys of game theory is fascinating to me.

7. tGIF –  That’s just the first one in series, but it includes that Batman/Snake GIF, so it is my favorite. These have been some of the most popular posts on the site, which should make me sad because I didn’t create them, but it doesn’t because I like to share joy.

6. Draw Something/Draw Something Pro – More in the “looking into game theory” series. There’s a Draw Something 2 out now, but I don’t have much time into it. I’m guessing there will be a follow-up to these two posts some time in the future.

5. I Apparently Hate Ghosts – This mixes my love of Ghostbusters, Pac-Man, and The Sims, but the real fun for me was Pac-Man as First Blood.

4. Scrabble – You will never, ever, ever convince me that people should be looking up words during games.

3. It’s-a Me, Mario! – This realization of a year-long dream isn’t just one of my favorite things on the site, it’s on the list of favorite things I’ve ever done. I know that might seem ridiculous, what with it being just a silly cartoon that appeals to maybe .001% of the population, but I am really, really happy with this. (Thanks again, Brandon!)

2. The End of Bones – I had way more fun writing/imagining this than I ever would have guessed. Fun fact: for several days a GIS for “Bones” had the picture on this page in the second row of results.

1. Zen and the Art of Angry Birds – Thus far this is the pinnacle of my “how games affect me” articles. This, too, festered in my brain for many, many months, and I was glad to finally put (digital) pen to (digital) page.

I will also say that I’ve been enjoying writing about Better Off Ted, even though they’ve been some of the lowest-hit articles here. Despite that, the discipline of writing through a series has been good for me (even though I’ve missed a couple of deadlines!), and the process has helped me towards figuring out how exactly I want to approach projects like that.

I still don’t really feel like I have a handle on how exactly to go forward on this site, but each entry I write and each terrifying “I’ve got nothing and I should close the whole thing down” moment helps shape the next such moment.

Thanks again for reading!

Tags: meta

Written by: Mark