I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends, readers and colleagues about how I am adjusting to the new job. It’s only really been a month, so there’s a lot of HELP ME still going on. Throw in a very rushed and imperfect move and you have the recipe for me to continually wonder whether I’ve done the right thing.

I think I have, for a lot of reasons personal and professional, even though some stuff is yet unresolved. But here is short list of the things that I do miss most.

1) Running the podcast. Now Rob has done a pretty good job with it. He’s learning how hard it can be to get things organized when the clock is running low, but so far I am very pleased. But I miss doing the intros and nagging guests and planning a month ahead but no further. The podcast is the best thing I have ever done, I will be back on it soon and I am happy it is still going.

2) Yelling at my former colleagues. The part of PR that has proven probably most difficult is restraining that impulse I have to yell at bad writing, bad journalism, bad editing and general stupidity in games journalism. I wouldn’t do this *a lot*, but I’d do it enough and retweet other people’s complaints enough that it became something that I considered a part of who I was as a writer. Now only a couple of people get to hear my rants about how no one cares about the craft any more.

3) Yelling at my current colleagues. The past month has seen so much good and bad and misplaced marketing that I’ve wanted to write screed after screed about trailers, marketing strategies, money sucks, gamification…I guess you could say that I miss yelling.

4) Being forced to play new games. Though I do not miss reviewing games, I miss the fact that I would have to play them because an editor had asked me to. I haven’t really touched Dawn of War 2: Retribution yet, or Cities in Motion. In the last two months, the only new game I can say that I put a lot of time into was Magicka, and even that largely to help a friend with her review. It is hard to stay current when you are thinking about games all day but not forced to play particular ones at night. Now that I am settled and aiming to blog properly, this should pick up. But I am less likely to just play something random – it will be something I am expecting.

Now there are lots of things I don’t miss. I don’t miss assigning scores to things. I don’t miss rushing to meet an editorial deadline with only ten hours of play in and knowing I need at least another ten or fifteen. I don’t miss writing previews. I don’t miss looking at my monthly pay and sighing like a failure.

In all, a good move. But there are still some regrets.

Next up, French character post. Promise.

So the move was not perfectly smooth for a number of reasons I won’t get into. I found myself a little cramped financially, not in the right place at the right time and once again relying on the generosity and good will of a good friend or two to keep me sane and moving forward. Throw in trying to do my best in a new job for which I am still finding my bearings and gaming on my own all of a sudden becomes a less important thing. I don’t even have a proper desk chair yet.

I haven’t even done a lot of reading about games. Last week was GDC week, which is kind of like Christmas to pointy head game nerds like me, but instead of ravenously consuming all the reporting on Gamasutra, I pretty much waited until Twitter told me what was interesting.

But here are a few things I have been doing game wise.

1) Dungeon Crawl. Of course. Still my comfort game, and still the best way to kill five or ten or, if you are lucky, sixty minutes. I seem to have been a good influence on at least one person.

2) Polynesia in Civilization 5. I have been arguing for a Polynesian civilization since Civilization 3. It’s a remarkable history and their Civ 5 iteration is actually a very interesting culture. The Maori warrior is a great early rush unit to accompany Bronze Age units and the wayfaring ability makes exploring the planet faster and more fun.

3) Game genealogy. I love tracking how features and developers and ideas travel across the game design world. I am trying to find a good way to map this sort of thing. Still working on it, and to do it right for strategy games I will need a few other people. But it’s a good way to think about the book.

4) RIFT. I played about ten hours of this MMO last year at Trion HQ and I loved it. Life got in the way of me writing up my impressions, and I haven’t even jumped into the real game but I am following other people’s adventures. Once the servers and queues work themselves out, I think I will be jumping in.

5) The French post. The very late French national character post is being written. I keep finding new things to say, many of which don’t exactly fit a single argument. The American post that started this series is a real mess, and I don’t want to do that again. Hopefully by mid-week I can publish something I am proud of.

6) Field of Glory. A new expansion came out last week and now I am playing that. I will have a full post on how the series has evolved later this week.

Thanks for all of your patience as my life takes another turn for the wtf.