My blog, re-birthed – Welcome to Arty Ponderer!

I feel the time has come to re-birth my blog anew. I’ve renamed it “Arty Ponderer”, a name I chose because it’s an anagram for my name, Darren Torpey, and because it seems a suitably ironic name for a blog where I intend to talk much more about what I do than what I merely think about. (I really love irony; I can’t help it.)

There are many reasons I’ve re-launched the blog. First and foremost: I needed to make what feels to me like a clean break from my blogging past. I’m proud of what I did on my old blog, The Designer’s Scroll, but in many ways I feel I never quite managed to crawl out of my shell with that blog. I never wrote exactly what I wanted, how I wanted. I didn’t show the whole me; my posts didn’t span all of my core interests.

I want Arty Ponderer (hereafter referred to as ArtyPon) to reflect all of my core interests: philosophy (a mix of “Western” and “Eastern”), people (developers, players, and other awesome folks), and games (of all types, though I am ever so fond of those new-fangled videogames). I also expect that I’ll throw in a dash of web-development-specific topics here and there, but much more so I will focus on the core problems, questions, and quandries that I’m struggling with as I explore the known and uknown worlds of games and game development. (Truth be told, I’m just not quite nerdy enough to want to dig too deep into any particular topic, anyway. I’m more of a sythesizer: I try to put ideas together to create great new things.)

I hope that others will join me in these journeys: I’m really not much of a do-it-alone kind of guy. Discussion, feedback, coordination, and cooperation are all intergral to how I work on creative projects. I’ve learned to not try to do anything truly alone, save for holding only my vision: that’s one torch I’ve got to hold onto myself. For everything else, including just how in the world I can make that vision a reality and how that vision will grow over time, I look to others both individually and as a community to help guide the process and to grow ourselves as people as we go along.

I hope that with this post I’ve already surpassed my old (relatively low) standards of personal-ness and geniune self-expression that I’ve put out there in my The Designer Scroll past. I hope you enjoy this journey that I’ll be sharing through ArtyPon. I look forward to seeing what kind of responses I might get, and I hope to hear from you who read my writings here and contribute to the discussions.

Welcome, enjoy your visits, and please, please, please let me know when I have piqued your interest, when you have something to contribute, and when we can help each other explore these topics further and farther still.