OK, I've always been awful at keeping a blog, but this is it..this is the time I kick my awful habit of never committing pen to paper (you know what I mean)! 😅 I suppose I've always found it hard to 'find my voice', or how I want to present myself to people online, but I think that's because I'm actually quite a shy person. That's not a particularly unique reason and I'd bet a lot of the people on the RT community site feel the same way, but that's my reason and I'm trying to kick it! So here it is...me committing to keeping this blog going. Please kick me here or on Twitter if I stop posting: http://twitter.com/SF_Boomer The reason I want to start this now is that I got some good news recently, in 2020 if you'd believe it! I found out that my application to do a PhD has been accepted! 🎉 I'm not much of a reader and have never considered myself particularly academically gifted, but I found something I'm passionate about and I bust my ass to make it work. 😂 My Masters dissertation was "Value-Generation in the Let's Play Community" (not the RT Let's Play brand, but the wider let's play content creator community). Starting January 2021 I'll be researching "Community-building through Culture: How Two-Way Acculturation is Used in Building Sustainable Online Gaming Communities " So that's why I'm back trying to keep this blog going...if I'm going to be doing academic writing for the next 3-6 years, then I'll need some normal (non-academic staff) people to vent to so I can stay sane! I might do some plain-English versions of the research for anyone that is interested, so let me know if that's something you'd like to see.