The Times, They Are A Changin'... and so is this blog.

NOTE: The text of this article was originally set to publish September 30^th, but I couldn't publicly announce a few things until after a phone call I had just last night. I've changed some dates and updated a few events to reflect the change in publication date, but this is the article that should have gone here. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy for me, but I've managed to keep to my rigorous 5-day a week publication schedule here. This past weekend, I took the Foreign Service Officer Test, and next week I recertify to return to work with troubled kids in a therapeutic day school. I will be shortly rejoining the workforce, while I go through the process of trying to get a government job. This would normally be the place where I announce that this blog will be shuttering its doors and joining the many, many sites that don't make it a full year once life gets in the way. I promised way back here that I wouldn't be doing that, and I meant it. My studies and responsibilities have limited my time to read and comment on other blogs, and for that, I'd like to apologize to longtime supporters and faithful readers. I hope to make some time real soon, but things are going to get worse before they get better.

My XBox Live Avatar, inpiration for this site's FavIcon.

I have to make a few changes. For one, I'll be swapping to a different template for the blog to make it look a little different. Bloggers who have played with the new "Dynamic Views" have a pretty good idea of what this page will look like in the near future. The title "Unemployed Geek" will be kind of inaccurate by next week, so I'll be keeping "What's Next?" but changing the rest shortly, and I'm open to suggestions, though I'll muddle through if I don't get anything that really grabs me. I also will have to adjust my self-imposed publication schedule, as five days a week while holding down a day job and preparing to transition to a new career isn't realistic. I've had a few articles where I felt I kind of "phoned it in," and I don't want that dip in quality to become the new norm. I'll be shooting for Monday-Wednesday-Friday as of 10/10 and will see how that works, and if I absolutely have to, I'll move instead to Tuesday/Thursday, but I'd like to avoid that if I can.

I started this blog on a very personal note, nearly all text, before I figured out that pictures break up walls of words nicely and that my writing was at its best when it was about a subject with wider appeal than...well, me. In the last seven months I've had two guest posters, 165 articles and almost 100,000 pageviews, and I learned a lot from working on a project that was originally something I thought no one would read. I started it to, as the URL says, "Get my head on straight" and maintain some sort of schedule and preserve my sanity while figuring out what to do next. This post feels like a goodbye, and in a way, it is. I've figured out what I want to do, I've started doing it, and this blog has to change along with me if I intend to make good on my promise to keep doing it. I've also recently started putting up shorter articles as a writer over at Technorati.com (my first published one is here,) but writing for another site doesn't affect this blog in any significant way. Eventually, I plan to add a custom domain address, but continue to host and publish through Blogger.

I imagine the site will look something like this sometime next week.

Starting over this coming weekend, October 8-9, I'll start rolling out visual changes to the blog. (Safety Tip, this site looks weird in a few of the dynamic views, but I think it looks AWESOME in "Magazine".) I may not officially change the title until I go in for my first day of gainful employment to give myself the longest possible time to get it right. I also will likely do something I haven't done at all since starting this site back in February. I may take a week off. Then, content-wise, we're back to business as usual with tabletop roleplaying, board games, video gaming, fantasy novels, comic book, tech and science fiction/fantasy/horror TV and film reviews all turning up, just a few less times per week. To not risk offending anyone by leaving them out, I won't be too specific in my thanks, but I'd like to thank everyone who has turned up to read this blog since the start, and hope you'll bear with me as things shake up a bit.

Sincerely,

Josh "Docstout" Brown – The Unemployed Geek, October 2011.

The current "classic" layout for the site, for posterity. Let me know if you prefer this to the
slick site redesign. It may not change anything, but I'd like to know.