Welcome to the Velvet Edge

It seems like everyone is creating a blog these days. Last December, I created my first blog. It's a journal that is narrowly focused entirely on roleplaying, and more specifically on the wonderful Risus roleplaying game by S. John Ross. Maintaining that blog has been a lot of fun, but it made me realize that I needed another outlet for non- Risus posts. Fortunately, I've had my unfinished velvet-edge.com website just waiting for me to give it attention.

Two things pushed me to finally launch this blog. The first is that there have been discussions in the Risus community about taking the name of my Risus blog, Risus Monkey, and appropriating it for a community webzine. If that should happen then I would need another blog for personal Risus-related posts, not to mention non-Risus posts. The second thing that pushed me over the top is that I've been playing around with Blogger. I've known that I needed to move to professional blogging software at some point (Risus Monkey is done by hand), but I just hadn't investigated it yet. Now that I have, there is no turning back. I think it's awesome that I'm submitting this post by email.

This blog is not going to be solely about gaming stuff. I have a lot interests in adventure travel, alternative music, film, literature, technology, futurism, and philosophy and will certainly post on these topics. I may even dip my toes into politics and religion, assuming I am comfortable that resulting discussions will (mostly) be civil.

That being said, I suspect much of what will be discussed will be roleplaying-related, or will at least pertain to "geek culture" in some way. The name Velvet Edge is itself a gaming reference, being derived from a GURPS modern/near-future fantasy campaign that I ran throughout most of the 90's. The links sidebar (which is still taking shape) will feature all my recent campaign worlds, as well as any other original gaming content that I have published to the web.

This website is still very much in development. I still need to fix some small formatting issues (and not-so-small issues when it comes to working with handheld browsers). I also need to figure out what I want to display in the sidebar since I certainly can't link to every site that I find cool and interesting.