Please bear with me, as I will be posting actual RPG related material very shortly after/in conjunction with this post – thank you for your patience and understanding.

Not directly gaming related, but more to the visitors to this site. First of all, I’d like to thank you for your visit, and I do hope you find something useful, or at least entertaining, as that’s the intent (useful moreso), because that’s what *I* look for on the net, is rare, unusual, useful, specific/niche resources that I need but nobody seems to have, and so that’s what I aim to provide, if and when possible – that and voluminous amounts of text, but that’s just a freebie.

Anyway, just quickly, I’d like to give an official welcome to visitors from Tabletop RPG Fun’s top 21 countries, as shown in the list below, from the very cool, free Statcounter – so “Hi!” to everyone from the US down through the Republic of Korea!

Italy? Third for visitors to this site? Why? What do I have that has an Italian aspect to it?  And I still puzzle over #17, ” ” – apparently I get visits from the Great Void, 3 so far, who apparently also play RPGs when they’re not busy being no one and doing nothing.

I always feel bad, from the first days since I got on the net and figured out how to use “analytics” or keyword tracking

programs and find out how people got to my site, at the sometimes bizarre phrases that I used as “one-off” throwaway comments that for some reason “stuck” as major hits in searches, like my old site jpatt.net (now a parked ad domain) got the most hits for Paulina Poriszkova (or however you spell her name), because I mentioned her ONE time in an offhand joke in ONE post.

Luckily, keywords and searches have improved some since those days, but now it’s more specific and you have to live up to your reputation you make for yourself – you make a couple of good posts and then your hits start coming from those, and without a lot of similar posts, you feel almost like you’re cheating people.

I recently made a post about a bunch of sites that let you generate images of your own custom superhero characters, and that turned out to be pretty darn popular – my most popular post yet, even outpacing my paper miniature one, which was also a big walker. But that isn’t really my forte – I made the post about those – it’s kind of a dead fish – there they are, use them, you know, what more can I say?  I suppose if I got the gumption I could do tutorials or something on how to use one or more of them, I dunno.

Warhammer 3rd Edition has been out a while now but I still get comments on some of my posts now and then, which surprises me, as I feel like I’m kinda in a state of suspension – I don’t really have any real idea people are visiting with no ACTIVE activity – I can look at these stats and see this many hits and such but it doesn’t mean anything to me, I mean it doesn’t give me much useful info to go on, of what people think, what they’re looking for, etc., so when I get a comment on assumedly forgotten posts, I’m surprised all over again people actually read what I write on my own site, that people find it from search engines and the few places I post links, or my signature where I post.

I have a larger map but this is just a general idea anyway, that set me back. I’m once again amazed at our culture and technology, allowing people, even people like me, I’m nobody, just some middle aged guy of no note with no particular skillset and only some basic college classes, hardly been out of my own state here in the US, but the things I’ve thought up, my opinions and creations, have been read by people from countries I’ll never visit, people in foreign lands who speak languages I’ll never learn, with beliefs I might never understand.

It’s not that it makes me “important”, it’s that the internet cuts through the whole concept of “important”, like “space folding” or wormholes or something, and just replaces “important” with “useful”.  Countries can share with each other – not on a national governmental level, politics and military and trade goods, but the citizens themselves, the PEOPLE, the heart of the countries, not the structure, can share information and culture and behavior, humor and outlook and goodwill, and help each other, cooperative, selfless and beyond the bounds of nationalism, racism, religious intolerance and all that nonsense.

Maybe someone in Holland really needed that Warhammer 2nd Edition Mass Siege rule addition I wrote, or maybe I needed that fan-made article from the Phillipines on how to run faster mook combat in Feng Shui – do any of us, the writers or the downloaders care where it came from or where it’s going, other than appreciation-wise? No. And even better, for us, is maybe someone will get that thing we put heart and sweat into and will say “This isn’t at all what I wanted, or what I thought, this is really pretty awful”. If we can KNOW this, THIS is what makes things great, because we get feedback – we get to improve, we get important information and opinions and likes and dislikes from others, to get to know what people think we did right or wrong, what people are or aren’t looking for, how far out or close we are to other people’s general mindset on the same subjects.  Maybe my aforementioned siege rules were terrible (probably are, the more I think about it, and need redone), but maybe someone took the kernel of an idea and made their own GOOD ones, that’s great too! And if they emailed me and told me what they thought, that would be even better!

None of us are going to become famous or rich (even if that WERE possible in RPG circles) even if we’re top content producers and even get real published and internationally sold documents, but I think there is something satisfying, maybe it’s just ego, about knowing you’re able to provide something to someone, something useful, practical, something someone else is looking for and appreciates, to someone else, especially someone far off, someone different than yourself – because when you’re able to do this, you’re also able to realize maybe they AREN’T so different after all.

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This entry was posted by J P on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 5:59 pm and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.