Four weeks.

Twenty-eight days.

Four weeks to the day from the time that I'm posting this, uh, post will be the Wongery's hard launch, when I finally make some effort to publicize it and get some viewers. And it's not going to be nearly in the state I hoped it would be in by then.

I had hoped to have at least a thousand articles in the Central Wongery. I had hoped to have reëdited all the old articles there, and expanded the oldest articles that are far too short by my current standards. I had hoped to have multiple other namespaces implemented, including the Gamespace, Assetspace, and Buildspaces. I had hoped to have the site's design more polished than its current bare-bones appearance. Heck, I'd hoped to have a logo.

None of that is the case. Not counting redirects, templates, and disambiguation pages, the Central Wongery has only three hundred and forty-one articles. Only seven of the earliest articles have been rewritten and expanded. None of the new namespaces or other MediaWiki customizations I'd planned have been implemented, not least because I still don't know how to do that. Aside from some minor improvement to the display of the blog posts, the removal of the World of the Week, and some changes in which social media sites are linked to, I haven't made any changes to the site's layout since I first put it up more than a decade ago.

And of course the logo is still "coming soon", but hey, at least I struck out "soon".

Again, it's been tough; after mostly neglecting the Wongery for a long while, posting only the very occasional article or blog post, over the last year or so I did finally buckle down and try to start getting serious about working on it. But that's only in relative terms; I still haven't spent as much time on it as I'd have liked. Part of that was circumstantial; in the beginning of the year of course the world was still dealing with the effects of a global pandemic (heck, to a large degree it still is, even if it's no longer officially a public health emergency according to the WHO), and then later in the year unrelated to that there were some major issues in the industry I work in that meant work was slow and I was in considerable financial trouble and had to devote a lot of time and attention to dealing with that. And of course part of it is just that I have severe executive dysfunction and don't get anything done in general. (When I say I have executive dysfunction, I'm not trying to minimize that phenomenon, and I'm not trying to imply there's necessarily any specific neurological cause for it. I do strongly suspect that I have ADHD, but I've never had it officially diagnosed, and the possibility remains that I'm just making excuses and that I am in fact just lazy.) And lately what time I have put in on the Wongery has not mostly been devoted to writing articles; it's been working on other aspects of the site. I've been taking those Udemy classes on CSS and Javascript and PHP so I can figure out how to do what I want with the site (as well as classes on Lua, because that's needed for certain MediaWiki extensions that are going to be used in the Gamespace; and GitHub, because I do eventually want to make any MediaWiki customizations I make freely publicly for others to use if they want to, and that seems to be the most widely accepted way of doing so). I've been writing things for the Gamespace that I can post once that's finally implemented, and figuring out how to stat up some Wongery material for various game systems. On the one hand, these are things I want to get done; I do want to have those other namespaces implemented, and they're an important part for my vision of what I want the Wongery to be, so I suppose it may be a good thing I'm finally getting around to actually trying to figure out how to implement them instead of just vaguely planning for them to be implemented one day. On the other hand, well, it's discouraging that what I'm currently doing for the Wongery isn't have any immediate obvious effect the way posting new articles is—and I definitely do want the Central Wongery to have a lot more articles than it currently does, as well.

So, given that the Wongery is currently such a tenuous shadow of what I hoped for it to be, should I (once again) delay the hard launch until such time as it better represents my goals for it? Eh, well, maybe, but I'm not going to, for two reasons. First, the stupid and irrational reason: there's a part of me that sees a lot of allure in the, uh quasinumerological resonance of the date. I had been reluctant to delay the launch the first time because if I'd had the hard launch on December 21, 2022 as originally planned, that would have been exactly ten years to the day after the original "soft launch" when the wiki was first made publicly accessible (even if nobody from the public was then accessing it). But then it occurred to me that if I had the hard launch on January 1, 2024, then that would not only be fifteen years to the day since the Wongery's first article was posted (which predated the soft launch by several years), but also, if I chose the time correctly, exactly eleven years, eleven days, and eleven hours since the soft launch, and okay, I can live with that. If I delay it again, I don't think I can find another date with as much anniversal appeal.

Second, the less stupid reason that may actually make sense: Sure, I could delay the hard launch again, maybe another year, and continue working on the Wongery for that time out of the public eye. And maybe by next year it'll have more articles, and more of the features implemented that I planned. But my ambitions for the Wongery are grand. There are a lot of things I want to include in it. And chances are that by next year, even if it's in better shape than it is now, it still won't be everything I hope for it to be. And then, having already delayed it twice, it may be far too easy to delay it again, reasoning that, well, it's closer now to what I want it to be, but it's still not quite ready to be shown to the world; maybe one more year... And again and again; it's likely that the Wongery will never be everything I hope for it to be, and there will always be more to do on it, and it will be far too easy to just continue putting off any attempt at publicity. Better, perhaps, to just rip off the proverbial bandage, to go ahead and move forward with trying to get it out there, even if it's not what I ultimately hope for it to be. Better, perhaps, to try to introduce it to the public in its current, unfinished state than to just repeatedly keep pushing it back, never getting it to be all I wanted it to be, and so never getting around to taking that step and leaving it languishing forever in obscurity.

And hey. Maybe knowing that other people are seeing what I'm doing, maybe getting comments and feedback, will actually help get me more motivated to work on it. And especially if the Patreon/Ko-fi thing works out and I actually make money on the Wongery, that will definitely give me more motivation, and maybe even allow me to cut back on other work—though, as I've said before, I'm not sure how likely that is to happen.

(Besides, it has recently occurred to me that as it stands even if the Wongery does make money it may not be feasible for me to use that money for personal expenses. If I want to keep myself pseudonymous, I'd have to have a separate bank account for the Wongery, wouldn't I? (Which I guess I ought to set up soon, then.) And I couldn't just transfer money from that account to my personal account without leaving a paper trail that might give away my identity. So even if the Wongery does make money, I may just have to spend it on Wongery-related things... which I guess isn't necessarily a problem, since there are a lot of Wongery-related things I'd like to spend money on anyway like illustrations and game assets and the anthology and game jam (more on all of which below). Anyway, I guess maybe this whole thing would be a lot easier if I weren't so insistent on hiding my real identity, and honestly I'm not altogether sure why I am so intent on doing that, but I am. Oh well.)

So, yes. I am very disappointed in the Wongery's current progress, or lack thereof, but I intend to go forward with the hard launch nonetheless. Although I'm afraid that hard launch won't include everything that I said it would when I last discussed my plans for it. In particular, the game jam and fiction anthology are, I fear, out. For one thing, I'm just not going to have the money for the prizes for the game jam or to pay the writers for the anthology. I'd said before that even though money was tight, I'd take out loans if I had to fund my publicity plans for the Wongery. "Would I be able to get a loan, given my financial status?" I asked, rhetorically. "Well, despite everything," I answered myself, "I have strong reason to believe the answer is yes."

Well, as it turns out, my "strong reason" may not have been as strong as I thought. What were my reasons? Well, first of all, most years I'd been able to take out a holiday loan from my credit union in November, even if my finances at the time were less than stellar. I didn't see any reason this year would be different. Furthermore, a few months prior I'd applied for personal loans through third-party companies, and had been conditionally approved for fair-sized loans, but they needed me to send certain paperwork I didn't have at the time to verify my income. I had since obtained said paperwork, and I figured that if those companies were willing to offer me those loans before, that would probably still be the case now; my finances weren't appreciably worse now than they were then.

As it turns out, though, I was mistaken on both counts. The credit union did offer me a holiday loan, but for only half the amount it had the previous years. The other companies that had offered me loans earlier were offering only secured loans now, and I had nothing valuable enough to offer as collateral. (As I've mentioned before, I took out a title loan a few months back that I'm still paying off, so my car is not currently available as collateral for a new loan—and even if it were, I'm not sure it's worth enough to cover the offered amount. It's a cheap car.) I did get an offer for an unsecured loan from a third company, but when I submitted the requested paperwork, they demanded more paperwork, and in different formats, and as of the time I'm writing this it's still far from clear whether they'll ever be satisfied and whether that loan is going to go through—and even if it does, it will be for less than half the amount the other companies were offering. So, yeah. I'm not going to have the money I thought I was. (Which in the long term of course may be for the best; after all, if I don't take out loans, I don't have to pay them back. In the short term, though, I really could have used that money. As it's looking right now, even if that second loan never does come through I'm still going to have just enough money to squeak by for rent and other expenses through the holidays, but I sure won't have much to spare.)

But even before I knew the loans were a no-go (or at least a much-less-go), I'd already decided that the game jam and the anthology weren't going to happen as part of the hard launch, for an entirely different reason. There's just not enough detail about the worlds in the Central Wongery to expect someone else to make a game or write a story set there. That's not to say they'll never happen. When I have a lot more articles posted in the Central Wongery, when the worlds are more fully described, and maybe when I have a little more money to spare, it's still definitely not off the table that I may want to host a game jam and/or solicit stories for an anthology in the future (probably and, though not necessarily simultaneously), but it won't be part of the initial hard launch.

So what will I do for that initial hard launch? Well... not as much as I'd hoped:

• I'm still going to post about it on social media, but since the Wongery has no followers on social media that's unlikely to accomplish much. (Maybe the "blazed" Tumblr post, which I still plan to do, will attract some attention, but maybe it won't.)
• I'll still start soliciting art, though, given my current finances, not much; I'll be lucky if I can pay for a handful of illustrations right away.
• I'm still going to try to release at least one free RPG adventure. I'd considered releasing at least two, one for D&D 5e and one for Pathfinder, but given that Pathfinder is currently in the middle of its "remaster project", I should probably at least wait for the release of the last of the "remastered" main core books, Pathfinder Monster Core, in March. Which is just as well, because even getting one adventure done by January may be an impractical goal; I probably was not being realistic in hoping to get two done for different systems, especially since I've never actually published an RPG product. (I've created plenty of homebrew material for games I've run, and I've started writing a lot of adventures and supplements for various systems that I intended to publish; I just, uh, haven't finished any of them. Like I said above, I have trouble finishing things. So maybe the fact that the Wongery will by design always be a work in progress and never be finished is a point in its favor as far as its being a project I can devote time to.)
• As for the free 3D assets for video games... ah, we'll see about that. Okay, in addition to the aforementioned Udemy courses in CSS and Javascript and PHP and Lua and GitHub previously mentioned, I'm also taking a Udemy course on the 3D modeling software Blender, as well as another course specifically on creating characters in Blender for video games, and a course on pixel art to be able to create assets for 2D games... but there are two problems here. First, I'm probably not going to finish those courses by January. Second, even if I do, I've already said I'm not a skilled artist; if I'm not able to create illustrations of acceptable quality through traditional media (or even through digital analogues of traditional media, e.g. drawing tablets and Photoshop (oh... which I'm also taking a Udemy class on)), what makes me think I'll be any better at creating acceptable art in other media like pixel art and 3D models? Answer: Nothing. Nothing makes me think that. If I really want to have high-quality game assets for the Wongery Assetspace, I'll probably ultimately have to pay someone to make them. (So, wait a minute, why am I taking those Udemy classes on pixel art and Blender and Photoshop if I don't think I have the skills or talent to actually do anything worthwhile with them? Who knows? I do a lot of dumb things for no good reason.)

Another thing I'd intended to have in place before the hard launch that at this point almost certainly won't be is the Static License, which, again, I really have to think of a better name for. I haven't had the money to pay lawyers to write the license (and I'm certainly not competent myself to write it in a way that would stand up legally), and at this point even if thousands of dollars' worth of money magically fell into my lap tomorrow, I'm not sure there'd be time to get a lawyer to write it before January. (I do know exactly which law firm I'm going to approach about it; there was a law firm specializing in gaming IP that hosted a panel about it at Gen Con; but the problem of course remains having the money to pay for it.) Still, even if the Static License (or whatever I end up calling it) isn't done before the hard launch, everything in the Central Wongery mainspace will still be usable under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, and of course I can say there's another license coming later.

So what will be on the Wongery at launch? Well... I think rather than try to focus on a few features and details, I'm going to try to have as many features implemented as I can in broad terms, even if there's not much done with each feature. Basically, my plan is to go wide.

Yes, this is the reason for the title of this post, and I honestly thought when I started writing this that that part was going to make up a much larger proportion of the post than it looks like it's going to end up being. As it is, I guess the title is just going to refer to a few paragraphs at the end of the post. Oh well.

I do very much hope before the hard launch to have the additional namespaces done. Most of them, anyway. Not the Atlasspace, which is going to be a gamespace for maps and is going to have a custom map interface allowing the user to zoom in and interact with the map in various ways, all of which is going to be very complicated to implement and may be years from happening. But definitely the Buildspace, the Gamespace, and the Sourcespace, and hopefully the Assetspace as well. (The Worksspace can wait until there are any works to populate it, although since once I've implemented the ability to add custom namespaces the way I want to adding the actual namespaces themselves should be fairly trivial, maybe I'll go ahead and implement it anyway.) Not all of these namespaces will have much in them, but they'll all be present. Why? Because it shows my intentions for what the Wongery will become; because even if there's nothing there now maybe it will help demonstrate my intentions for the Wongery's future potential.

(How likely is it that I'll get those additional namespaces done before January? I don't know. I'm going to try. I want to finish those Udemy courses on Javascript and PHP first so I feel like I have some idea what I'm doing; as of now I've almost finished the Javascript course, and then I'll start on the PHP course. Will I get done with the course in time to have time left to actually put into practice what I've learned and make those namespaces (for that matter, will I really have learned enough to be able to do so)? Well, we'll see, I guess. I certainly hope so.)

I do already have a few models more or less ready to put up in the Buildspace; I've designed a LEGO xastre and enforcer batirine, and am partway through designing a tabulator batirine, an azagog, and a section from a city in an onirarchy. (This last model is rather complicated, and may not be done before the hard launch.) The Assetspace... may not have much if anything in it at hard launch; like I said, I may have to end up paying someone to make models for it. Of the additional namespaces, it's the Gamespace that is likely to be the most fully developed.

Even there, it's going to be the RPG section of the Gamespace that will be more fully developed. In the CCG section, at the time of hard launch there's probably only going to be support for one game, the Strike Engine, though more may be added later. And even then probably not yet a full, playable card set; just some cards representing a work in progress for a Dadauar Strike set. In the wargame section and the miscellaneous game section... I don't know. There may not be anything there at the time of hard launch. But still the very existence of these sections will testify to my intentions.

Within the RPG section, though, my plan is, again, to go wide. Rather than focus on just one or two RPGs before the hard launch, I'm going to have many RPGs represented even if with only one or two articles for each of them. The intent here, again, is to demonstrate my intentions rather than to include all the material necessary to run a campaign in a Wongery world out of the gate. (As much as I'd like to include all the material necessary to run a campaign in a Wongery world out of the gate, at this point that's clearly not going to happen.) Even here, "many" is relative; I have a list of sixty-some RPGs I hope eventually to include—and it's by no means exhaustive—but I definitely won't be able to have them all up before the hard launch. Still, I think I can maybe manage at least half a dozen.

(Okay, I guess the part of this post the title is referring to ended up being more than just a few paragraphs after all. Still not the majority of the post, though. Oh well.)

I also think maybe I'll go ahead and go wide with worlds. What I said a couple years back about slowing down the pace of introducing new worlds? Yeah, forget that. Sure, I definitely want to flesh out the existing worlds a lot, but I think it might actually not be a bad idea to keep introducing a lot of new worlds too, especially given the plans for Patreon/Ko-fi supporters to be able to vote on which redlinks are filled in next and so guide the development of the Wongery. That way, we can introduce a lot of worlds and see which ones people have interest in; worlds that pique supporters' interest and have more associated articles written, whereas those that people aren't interested in will see less development. Regardless, this is something, though, that probably won't happen before the hard launch, because articles about new worlds are the most time-consuming articles to write, and at the moment I've kind of got my hands full trying to finish those Udemy lessons and get those namespaces implemented.

(Anyway, the Wongery Patreon/Ko-fi accounts very well may not be implemented before the hard launch, either, since before I set those up I'd have to have a separate bank account for the Wongery, and before I could have that I'd have to have it set up as a private limited company, and I'm not at all sure all that is going to happen before the hard launch. Oh well.)

So... anyway, the Wongery still is not what I want it to be. It won't be what I want it to be before the hard launch. Maybe it will never be what I want it to be. But the hard launch will proceed on schedule regardless, albeit maybe slightly scaled down from my original aspirations. Maybe after the hard launch the Wongery will start getting attention and visitors, and maybe having people actually interact with it will spur its development, and maybe it will change everything. Or maybe it won't change anything. But it's going to happen anyway.