It's roughly three hours til midnight as I write this and while I would like to say I have some magical insight into what the next year brings both for myself and for Total Gaming Network, I can't.

In fact, this probably won't be too long of an update at all as I really cannot think of what all to talk about. In 2017 it feels as though I did not accomplish anywhere near what I would have liked with the site. While I said a while back that I would be phasing out TGN news in favor of more opinion type pieces, that obviously did not come to pass. A number of you mentioned that you enjoy the news postings and would be sad to see them go. It would be wrong of me to say that it was because of those comments that I decided not to lessen the focus on the news as I had planned.

Instead, the real reason is perhaps a bit more selfish. Any time I thought of something I would like to write about, I always ended up doubting my abilities. I do this constantly when it comes to writing anything that will be seen publicly, even something like this blog update. It's the sort of performance anxiety I get when I play team focused multiplayer games with people that aren't my friends. I always feel as though I am going to let them down. To that end, I feel as though my content just isn't up to snuff when compared to others out there. It doesn't help that views are nowhere near what I, or anybody with any sort of business sense, would call "good."

I tend to ramble. I tend to restate points I already made. These are things that can be seen in any of my written reviews. And no, while you guys can say that the reviews are fine or good, I know that they could be much better and more succinct. I also have a problem of not staying focused. I will often begin to write something and then my mind wanders off elsewhere, typically to my other monitor where I stupidly have a Twitch stream up, or Discord, or even music. Even if I don't have anything up, I still tend to switch to doing other things like browsing the web or even just getting up and walking away from the computer for whatever arbitrary reason I can come up with. It has happened no fewer than six times so far just in these few paragraphs. It upsets me mainly because I used to be rather focused on the tasks and the work I had before me. Of course, this was moreso back in school where I felt like it mattered more than this.

For whatever reason, I still see this more of a chore rather than the job it actually is. And that is something I need to work on. I think that doing this for 13 years going on 14 has taken a rather large toll. Doing anything for that length of time will get to anybody, even if it's something people may perceive as being a "fun" job. The passion I once had is gone, replaced instead by self-imposed discouragement. It's been upsetting to see fewer views, especially on original content. It's upsetting to see it on YouTube content, a big reason why I simply stopped bothering to edit anything and just upload things "as is" from streams. Speaking of which, it's upsetting to see it with the low view count on Twitch streams. It sure makes for days where I simply don't even want to bother.

Anyway, what was I getting at here?

Oh yeah, there will be "worst of" and "best of" articles coming. I know only a few people will end up reading those unless I make a headline saying something like "Wolfenstein 2 is one of the worst games of 2017 (which it is)." I'm just going through NieR: Automata as a last minute 2017 game to see how I feel about it. I suppose that's all for now.