2025-11-27 03:30:00
It all started when Mr Prismatic Wasteland posted a picture on Discord of a TTRPG blog edge graph someone had made years ago on /tg/. When the folks started wishing for an updated version, I thought: I already follow a lot of blogs via RSS—maybe I could use that data to create something similar.
A few weeks later, I'm crawling back out of the rabbit hole with an interactive map of the TTRPG blogverse, and I'd like to show you what I found.
Explore the graph: Open the interactive graph—zoom, filter by year, poke nodes, and see who links to whom.
It's an interactive graph of all the TTRPG-related blogs I could find. Each node is a blog. Each edge between two nodes means at least one post on one of those blogs links to the other—sometimes outgoing, sometimes incoming, sometimes both.
Both nodes and edges are weighted. The more a blog gets linked to, the bigger its node becomes. Likewise, the more two blogs link to each other, the stronger the edge between them appears. To keep things sensible, only one link to a specific blog is counted per post—if you link to a blog 10 times in one post, it still only counts once. The nodes are clustered into communities using an algorithm that finds groups which are more tightly connected to each other than to the rest of the graph.
It's interactive, so you can zoom in and select individual nodes. The data is historical, so you can display different views of the graph for each year going back to 2003, or look at an "all time" view, which is the default.
There are also various stats like top-linked blogs and posts, as well as graph-theory-nerd values like the betweenness of a specific node or its k-core. There's a glossary in the graph menu if you need it.
My favorite discovery was realizing that, if you scroll through the years, you can clearly see different communities springing up. They rise and fall, but many of them are still more or less present today.
You can also see quite a lot of cross-talk between some of these communities.
Another observation: community events like Blog Bandwagons, RPGaDAY, GloGtober, etc. have a big impact on cross-linking and discovery. These events are important and fun, and they help us find and foster our neighbors.
It all runs on the backbone of my RSS reader. That's where I add all the blogs and where I pull the data from. I was already following the majority of them, but as Dwiz pointed out, if I only included blogs I'm personally interested in, it would just be a graph of my own reading preferences, and I agree.
So I spent a long time hunting down more blogs to add. Shout-out to the biggest sources: the OPML files by Yochai, Ramanan, Alex Schroeder, and Sly Flourish. The rest I either already had (from following some blog hive channels on various Discord servers) or hunted down through sitemaps and blogrolls.
Anyone familiar with RSS might know that feeds usually only include a small set of the latest posts. This is problematic and skews the data heavily towards 2024/25. However, I was very happy to find out that I could paginate backwards on the RSS feeds for both Blogger and WordPress. For Bearblog I was able to use a crawler that someone had already written and, with minimal edits, generate feeds from that.
With this data I could begin mapping the blogs. I wrote a Python script that talks to my RSS reader, watches which blogs link to which, turns that into a big friendship map of blogs with stats and communities, and then spits out JSON/CSV files that the browser can use.
The frontend takes this precomputed data and draws a styled "space map" of blogs. On top of that, it layers search, filters, stats, tooltips, the glossary, and sharing options so folks can actually explore and understand the Blogverse instead of just looking at a static blob of dots.
There are some caveats to this method and some things I simply can't change, all of which mean the data will never be fully complete. Here are the main ones.
RSS usually only exposes the last 10 to 25 published posts when you add a feed to a reader. Most blogs were added this year when I transferred from a different reader around Christmas 2024.
Luckily, I was able to backfill almost all posts for Blogger, WordPress, and Bearblog. These three platforms make up the vast majority of blogs in the graph, so the overall dataset is still pretty large.
For the following platforms, I don't have full post history unless you started your blog in the latter half of 2024 or just don't post much:
RSS is structured into different XML blocks that hold different metadata. For each post, there's a <description> block—this is the part my Python script looks at to find links.
While most feeds provide the full post content here, some only include a paragraph or summary. This means a post that might contain lots of link to other blogs can't be detected and therefore won't be included in the data.
Blogging has been going strong since the mid-2000s, but a lot of blogs simply aren't accessible anymore. They've been deleted, their URLs don't resolve, or something else broke along the way. There's nothing I can do about those.
There's always a good chance I missed a blog. If you think you're missing and would like to be included, please reach out to me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
To avoid confusion: any links generated at runtime via JavaScript won't show up in RSS. Sitemaps, blogrolls, or special pages on your blog also won't show up in the RSS feed and won't count. The graph purely looks at links inside individual posts.
Here are some answers to interesting questions I got over the course of developing this. They come from running queries directly in my reader's database and are not shown on the graph itself. All numbers are taken as of the publish date of this post.
These tables show how many total posts were published per year and how many new blogs appeared each year. Keep in mind that the data for recent years is slightly skewed because I don't have a full archive of posts from Substack and similar platforms.
Some more stats that speak for themselves:
And finally, here is the median lifespan of a blog in this dataset (time from first publication to last) in days:
No promises if or when I'll get to any of this, but here are some things I'm toying with:
As for known issues:
I plan to update the graph whenever I get a significant chunk of new data—either by adding blogs or unlocking more archive data from a platform. Otherwise, I'll probably refresh it about once a season, though I'm not completely sure yet.
I had a great time digging up old blogs, especially the earlier ones. It felt like a time capsule from before the internet was dominated by social media apps. You find some very special-interest blogs that are just interesting on their own. Artists posted on their Blogger pages in a time before Instagram. A lot of that stuff is still out there.
All this made me appreciate blogs even more. It's a great habit, a great hobby. Even if it's not about TTRPGs, it's great to read about people's passions and learn something new. You can argue on Bluesky or on Discord and that's fine, but it's also terribly fleeting. Sometimes you log on and find yourself in the middle of a discourse where you have no idea what's going on.
Blog posts tend to stick around. They can be linked to and revisited, so you don't have to repeat your arguments over and over. Blogs are great. Do more blogging, people.
I hope this graph is informative for you, maybe even helpful. Don't get discouraged if you find yourself on the outskirts of the graph. This is not a popularity contest but a community. Foster good behavior and link to your neighbors. Seen some good posts this week? Do a little link roundup like LootLootLore or Xaoseed. Talking about your next design idea? Link to what has influenced you; better yet, link to posts that do it differently than you to give people more context.
Just link more. It's how you discover and rediscover things on the internet. Make it a habit.
Lastly, I want to thank the good folks on Discord who showed great interest in this little project as I reported on my progress. You actually helped me stay motivated: Prismatic Wasteland, Dwiz, Ramanan, xaosseed, Nael Fox-Priebe, Patchwork Paladin, Warren D, Gus L, Chris McDowall, Benign Brown Beast, Wandering Diejack, Zak H, Sly Flourish, Serket, Nova, dadstep, Rowan, Farmer Gadda, Kati, Isaac, and anyone I forgot.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars (blogs).
2025-11-26 17:14:00
“feelings, internet blues”
i feel the water,
the water is inviting, the depth is frightening.
i sink in the water,
the water nurtured me, my siblings a whole generation.
i stay in the water,
i drown in the internet blues.
\
2025-11-26 05:15:00
life has been going really well, but...
lately (the past 5 months) i've been unable to shake this feeling of waiting for something to happen in my life, almost as if i'm not actively living.
it's weird, because no matter how much time i dedicate to my hobbies and relationships, i still feel like i'm not not doing what i'm supposed to be doing, just feeling like i'm waiting to find something purposeful. is this something common?
the lack of external goals in my life has given me enough freedom to choose for myself which goals i want to pursue. the only problem is, i have none, or at least i'm waiting to find one. aside from my exams, there's nothing in my life that's forcing me to work towards a goal, i'm left with just my free will and my aspirations to decide what i want to do moving forwards.
the hobbies i spend time on and the creative works i've tried to pursue feel like nothing more than just a way to pass the time while i'm not dealing with what "really matters".
what really matters though?? i'm still waiting to find out.
2025-11-26 03:21:00
Today, KO-OP announced their next game, Young Suns, which is out on the Xbox Game Pass "Game Preview" program right now. I did contract writing for this game! Over the last few months, I wrote six characters for the game. You can meet them, hang out with them, and lure them into a variety of weird and funny arguments!
I really enjoyed working with this team. Kevin Snow, the game's narrative director (and my collaborator on several previous projects, including Skin Deep) got me onboard to help hit some deadlines. Their narrative pipelines were fantastic to work with as a freelancer, and I had a lot of fun with the rest of their teammates as well.
The setting they've created was a ton of fun to write for. It takes place after a worker revolution on the moons of Jupiter. Regular people rose up and drove out the corporations in a difficult, dangerous uprising... and now they're building a new society. Everyone has a different idea of what their new society should prioritize, and a lot of them disagree pretty seriously about the methods they should use to build utopia. It's a ton of fun to write opinionated, flawed, silly characters for a setting like this!
The game has a Steam page up, but isn't on that platform yet. If you don't have Game Pass (I don't, personally) then you should keep your eyes peeled here!
To sell my skills again: I rolled onto this team very late in production and wrote about 84000 words on nights and weekends. If you have a problem like this on your game... I can do the same for you! I can fold myself into teams, learn your house style, and deliver massive assets at high quality under some pretty intense deadlines. I'm open to part time and contract work right now.
Young Suns marks the fourth game I worked on that came out in 2025! I was part time on two of them - Young Suns and Skin Deep - and I have yet another project I helped as a contractor coming out next year. When I look back at the last six years of my life, it's been a pretty deranged run. My best count is that I've worked on thirteen different commercial games in a variety of capacities since 2020 - Ruined King, Hextech Mayhem, Convergence, Mageseeker, Song of Nunu, Bandle Tale, Saturnalia, Industries of Titan, A Monster's Expedition, Skin Deep, Young Suns, Hyper Light Breaker, and Possessors. Pretty crazy!!! Anyway, I could do this work for you!!!
2025-11-25 16:30:00
刚才在看博客的统计功能才发现，去年 11.25 是我立下要日更博客誓言并写下第一篇文章（《重新开始记录每一天》）的日子。在过去的 365 天里，我坚持每天更新，我做到了！
感谢各位，能够坚持来看我。我也尽可能再接再厉！
2025-11-25 04:12:00
current mood:
excited
I installed Linux on Nov 24, 2024, amid the news of Windows 10 support going away. The one year mark is fast approaching here!! and I wanted to write a reflection on 1 year of Linux as a beginner (aka a generally computer-savvy person who isn't a programmer).
The first distro I installed is Linux Mint, recommended by my more knowledgeable husband as a good beginner option.1 I was interested but overwhelmed with the options so happy to take his advice. I started out by dual booting Mint and Windows 10, wanting to try it out before fully committing to saying goodbye to Windows (way too big a leap/commitment for me then).
Mint has been a great option for me and works amazing for day to day computing like web browsing, watching youtube, word processing, and playing certain games. The transition was straightforward; it felt like windows in a lot of ways. Different, but still familiar. Mint gives me WAY faster boot and load times. I never realized just how much I was constantly waiting for windows to finish doing.. what? Random scans, sending my data to Microsoft, whatever else. With Linux, my computer turns on, I log in, and it's ready to use. Wild! It's particularly brutal to return to windows after realizing how fast my computer can be. I also figured out how to customize my desktop so it looks just like Windows 2000, which I love.
Of course, with all these positives comes the downsides and issues. My biggest issue is game performance. On Mint I installed Steam and I got a couple games running just fine (Factorio and Ikenfell). But for the vast majority of my games, I experienced crazy lag (10-20 FPS). Even games with native Linux support like Hollow Knight were unplayable.
I've got an NVIDIA graphics card (GTX 1060). I heard that there are some issues with NVIDIA and Linux specifically, something to do with proprietary drivers, so I assumed this was probably my issue. Further supporting this theory was the fact that pance had no problem running the same games on his AMD GPU + Manjaro set up. I figured when the time comes to replace my GPU, I'll get an AMD card, and until then I'll boot into Windows as needed to play games. For the first chunk of 2025, I hadn't been playing games much, so this seemed reasonable. Then came September, where I essentially fully abandoned Linux in order to play Silksong. I think I booted into Mint once that month? After I 100%'d the game and emerged from my anti-spoiler chamber in October, I decided to look more seriously into ways to troubleshoot this gameplay issue. I started wondering if a specific gaming-focused distro would help. I also started thinking about writing this blog post, which pushed me to research possible fixes. What do you mean you're still having the same problems you talked about 8 months ago and have done no work to remedy that? I heard my imaginary audience say to me.
I'd heard about Bazzite from my coworker, which is all about "Linux for gaming". I didn't have high hopes that it would actually work, but I was wanted to try it for a few reasons.
When I first installed Mint, I wasn't involved in the actual installation process (pance did all of that for me) and I wanted to see if I could do a full Linux install independently, figuring it all out by myself with him on standby for questions.
I have the extra hard drive space to easily install it
It seemed pretty low stakes and easy to abandon if it didn't work
So I read through the docs, looked at the installation process and took the leap on Oct 18th. I was surprised at how easy it was! I think it would have been even easier if I was starting with a fresh drive, like I did with Mint, as I was a bit nervous setting up manual partitions with Bazzite (nervous I'd somehow delete everything, even though I did a full data back up before I even started this). It ended up being pretty straightforward and I was really surprised at just how easy the installation process was.
I did encounter one issue around secure boot, which would have been a non-issue if I had confirmed definitively whether or not I had secure boot enabled. (Windows tells you this in Device security and you can also find it in the BIOS). I don't know why I assumed it was off, when it seems like it is just on by default on most windows computers (n=3). So if you're thinking of installing Linux, double check if your computer has secure boot enabled and if there is anything special you need to do for your particular distro! (We didn't encounter this at all with Mint which is why it took me extra off guard installing Bazzite).
Bazzite comes with Steam and Lutris pre-installed, and another launcher called Heroic which is for Amazon and Epic Games. I hadn't figured out how to get all my prime games onto Linux yet and here it had already handed me an easy answer!
I held my breath as I installed and launched Silksong… and it ran beautifully! I was honestly so shocked. I tried several other games I'd had issues with (Rift of the Necrodancer, Hollow Knight) and they all worked!! Finally, I launched Phasmophobia. In my mind this was the true test… I feel like graphically that game is so poorly optimized, so if Bazzite could handle it, then it probably could handle anything. And… it worked! It ran!! I felt my connection to windows evaporating in front of my eyes. The vast majority of my computer work is now possible on Linux!
(Well I feel the need to mention that Phasmophobia does give me some minor issues: occasional fps drops and lag especially on large maps when I can feel the assets loading. It isn't a one to one equivalent with what I could get on Windows, but it's working for me, it's playable, and that's enough for me for right now. I could see someone else still feeling dissatisfied. I also encountered an issue with in-game voice chat that was resolved by the weirdest fix, by typing SteamDeck=1 %command% in the advanced launch settings.)
The initial high of installing a new distro had me ready to throw Mint out the window and use Bazzite daily. However, with some more time I wasn't totally sure about Bazzite. Outside of the "it plays my games!!" feature, there are some nitpicks that annoyed me the more I used it. And I realized that a lot of the things I love about Bazzite are actually the KDE desktop environment, which I don't have in Mint.
I also experienced my first major issue requiring me to load an older system version… seems like a bad start when this happened in the first few weeks of installing while Mint has been fine for 11 months now. Bazzite is based on Fedora, and it updated itself to Fedora 43 without me realizing and suddenly it was booting into a black screen. I don't like that it updated without me knowing. I like being in control of deciding if and when to update, like on Mint. I later found there is a setting for this, but it is set to auto by default. I managed to figure out what was happening and how to work around it (thanks to this youtube video) but I never ended up how to fully fix it before… I decided to delete Bazzite and try something else.
Yes I distro-hopped again. Breaking out of the comfortable bubble of Mint and trying Bazzite was really empowering. Linux stopped being this big, scary, tech thing and now something to play around with and find something that meets my needs. Bazzite is based on Fedora, and Fedora is more has a established community so it seemed like a good option for me. I was also just really curious if it was truly Bazzite that somehow fixed my game problems, or if Fedora would do the same for me. Turns out, games on Fedora work too! I am a bit baffled, and I wish I understood what was going on (or how to figure out what the difference is). Is it KDE? Is it something else? Who knows.
Fedora is still pretty new but I'm happy with it so far. So no more distro-hopping for now, at least on desktop…
I have been working on this post for almost a month now and here we are, on the one year anniversary of first installing linux. And guess what I did this weekend? Yeah I installed Xubuntu on my Surface Pro laptop with the Surface kernel… Who knew I'd be having so much fun trying out different kinds of Linux!! I would not have believed it if you told me that 1 year ago.
In all of this, one of the biggest things I've learned is to take good, clear notes for yourself! Make sure that future you, who has forgotten all context, is able to understand what you're talking about. I think this is very important for Linux but honestly it's helping me in more areas of my life.
If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading! I hope this gave you a bit of insight into my Linux journey and maybe even inspires you to take your own leap to try out Linux yourself. Fair warning, if you start, you might just find yourself empowered and installing Linux on all possible devices.
He uses Manjaro and had been on Linux for 2-3 years at this point.↩