A fresh start

Today, I begin a fresh start on this, a new blog here at blogspot.com. Now, I am not completely new to the internet, nor to blogging. I have spent many years playing online games and reading their forums, and making long, opinionated, blog-like posts at such places as the City of Heroes forums, the SWG forums, and so forth. I have also run a website dedicated to roleplaying games (RPGs) and that site has a "blog" section where I have written many rants, raves, etc.

However, every site of which I am a member has some sort of a "theme" to it -- roleplaying games in general, or some individual game in particular, or something along those lines. As a result, I haven't really had the freedom to blog about whatever I darn well please at any of those sites (doing so would violate the rules of the site). Even at the gaming site I run, the rules (which I wrote myself, and thus it would be hypocritical to violate) clearly state that the subject matter of all content must relate, at least indirectly, to roleplaying games.

And so, I decided it was time to get my own "blogging" site. There are a few of these around, but I decided to go with this one because it is affiliated with Google, and I like how Google does things (at least at this point). It's a free website, so if anyone reading this wants a blog, click the link to blogger on the side-bar to the right of this page (you may have to scroll down a bit, but it's there) and follow the step-by-step instructions. It's quite simple, and convenient.

Now that I have my own blog site, I am going to use it to continue commenting on the things of interest to me, but this time I can make the topic about whatever I choose. Today it might be an online roleplaying game; tomorrow it might be on an environmental issue.

One decision I had to make right away of course, was to come up with a name, so I will explain a little bit about that here. I wanted a name that would be unique, and would describe me in a few short letters. I am, by profession, a biologist, and by hobby, an RPG gamer. I thus combined elements of the two things (Biology + an RPG wizard, or mage) and came up with "BioMage." The picture is of Shogun Suzerain, a character I played for a while in City of Villains (he was a Ninja Mastermind). It's a fictional character and so, of course, looks absolutely nothing like me.

That's all I'm going to post for now... Later on today or in the days ahead, I will use this spot to post my thoughts on a wide variety of topics, including games of all sorts (both computer and non-computer, roleplaying and non-roleplaying), entertainment (movies, books, TV shows, etc), photography (another hobby of mine), science, the environment, politics, you name it.

I welcome comments and feedback about whatever my thoughts are. For now I will let just anyone post comments and I will not moderate. As long as comments remain civil, post away. However, I will moderate any comments that contain anything I consider offensive. Since this is my blog I won't bother to define it in detail. If there are any problems I will restrict comments in a more aggressive manner but I trust (and hope) that I won't have to do this.

And with that... welcome to my blog. Enjoy!