The End

At the end of the experiment, you will be baked, and then there will be cake.

I feel equally sad for leaving and proud for the things created. It has been quite the long run but it's time to end it. I've entertained, helped and informed people through monthly contributions to the gaming community, and also helped myself to understand games and gamers while teaching myself some English along the way. This has been my greatest project ever and it was a blast.



It all began mid February of 2014. I thought about creating my own website many times but never really went through with it, until I found out about how easy it actually was when checking out Google's Blogger. The enthusiasm was quite palpable as I was writing my first entry on this blog:


Diary of gaming awesomeness? Holy shit I have so much time to waste on this!! LETS DO THIS!


At first I didn't really have structure or fixed idea about what I wanted to write, so for the first few months I just posted some short stories, screenshots or video I made, with the exception maybe of the review of the AS-Val from Battlefield 4, which was probably the first post that kind of started to look like an actual article for which I researched and what not. Today the formatting is completely fucked up, but more to that later. The game that rustled my jimmies in such a way that it prompted my first in depth critique was Battlefield Hardline, the article has a weird structure but I liked the idea and it probably began to define what my future content would be like.

At this point of this blogs timeline there were still many low effort posts like showing off my videos or patch notes from games, but also my first nostalgia trip article talking a bit about my times playing World of Warcraft, my first attempt of a story driven screenshot dump with The DayZ Bronicles Ep. 1, and my first game review showing off Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

2014 is closing to an end and my posts have started to gain substance, are well thought through and researched to the point where I feel comfortable calling them articles. A good example of this would be not only the aforementioned Borderlands review, but also my complete Phantom Program guide for Battlefield 4, which began to attract readers to my blog. This made me happy, I obviously helped some people with it, I now wanted to write not only for myself, but also for the community, I wanted to share my thoughts and not just write them down for no reason. Talking of thoughts, the next post that sparked some interesting discussions was my Battlefield 4 Rant!. I don't even play BF4 anymore but just rereading it increased my heart rate.

2015 spawned new and interesting articles about games and gaming in general, like and article about Pre-Orders and Early Access or my massively successful Strategy Guide for Rocket League, as well as some non gaming related articles about the FN P90 and the A-10 Thunderbolt. It also brought the second episode of the DayZ Bronicles, a story about two guys lost in the wasteland based on actual events in the game and at sixteen pages long is the post I am most proud of. Until the end of that year and all through 2016, and actually until this very post, I kept the format as seen in the past few articles, creating at least one a month, covering everything that came to my mind including game reviews like The Division and Portal Knights or personal stories like my first games ever or the whole story of how I got into gaming. Also worth mentioning are two posts about my experience in games like 7 Days to Die or Lineage II, they are not reviews, but tell the story of how we found out about the for us mind blowing mechanics of 7DTD and how I got accused of identity theft in a role playing game (I just noticed how click-baity the last two links look). They document the effects a game can have on people and I find that quite fascinating, I also loved to use more of a story telling type of writing, which in my opinion immerses the reader much deeper into the article. My last big game review was of Battlefield 1 and how amazingly bad it is, from every aspect. In 2017 I began to run out of time and ideas to write about, the only exception to this was one last heavy in depth look into my motor skills for Rocket League, which I analyzed in my Transition to Controller article.

Reality is a story the mind tells itself. An artificial structure conjured into being by the calcium ion exchange of a million synaptic firings. A truth so strange it can only be lied into existence. And our minds can lie. Never doubt it...

So here I am , three and a half years later writing a short recap of what this writing experience has been. I mainly used it to practice writing in English, which isn't my first language, but close enough since I consume like 99% of the media in English. I noticed a huge improvement when comparing one of the newest article with an older one, I'm still far from perfect, but I'm happy with the results so far. It has also helped me appreciate games way more than I used to, which also makes me enjoy them much more. I am proud of what I did here, and I am proud of knowing that some of it even helped other people out there. The only thing I regret is trying to rebuild the Blog using a new template, I wasn't able to customize it to my likings and it screwed with the formatting of older posts, which probably contributed to me not wanting to work on it anymore. I still love the content tough. That said, here are some numbers and statistics for myself covering the 3.5 years of existence of this blog:

• Total of 71 posts.
• Total of 186 pages of text.
• Total of 87.796 words written. 
• Total of 500.000 characters including blanks.
• 25 original articles.
• The blog has gotten 84.000 visits, 54.000 being from the USA.
• December 2016 was the most active month with 9.000 total visits.
• The Rocket League Strategy article is the most viewed with 19.000 views.

Thank you very much for coming along with me on this adventure through bits and bytes, it has been a blast. I wish the best to everybody and see you on the battlefield!

Cheers

DHR_000x

Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: "A
horrible person." We weren't even testing for that. Don't let that horrible-person thing discourage
you. It's just a data point. If it makes you feel any better, science has now validated your birth
mother's decision to abandon you on a doorstep.