Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1327: More Blogatog

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

It's been over a decade since I did a podcast about Blogatog, my blog where I answer questions daily, so I felt it was time for a second podcast on it.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's another drive to work. Okay, so I'm somewhere in the 1300s of podcasts. I've done a lot of topics. So one of the things I've realized is there are topics that I might have done before, but I did a long time ago, and maybe I have enough content to do more. Case in point today, I decided I'm going to do a podcast about Bloggetog, which is my

blog on Tumblr. Now, I once again did, I mean, but once before, I did a blog-a-tog podcast, but it was number 93. That's like 13 years ago. So I felt like, oh, okay, maybe having, since I do blog a talk every single day, maybe I have enough to say since then. I do realize that, especially in some of the early podcasts where I did stuff, like I can revisit things. I mean, obviously I try as much as possible to do topics I've never done before. but I think I'm coming to realize that it's okay if I have some new content on an old topic. You know, I'm allowed to talk about things more than once, especially if a lot has happened since then.

Okay, so let's talk about BloggaTog. Once again, I have a podcast on Bloggetag, which you can go listen to. It's from a more innocent time just because it was 13 years ago. So Bloggetag, real quickly, I go over this in the first Bloggettog, podcast, but I will go very quickly here. Where did it blog a talk? What is Bloggettog? Where did it come from? I have a blog on Tumblr. It's called Bloggetog.

Before coming to Wizards, my favorite creature was A-Tog. And so it's an A-Tog that eats blogs, I guess. So anyway, I call it Blagetog. Originally, it was called Tales from the Pit. The origin of my podcast is I, for many years, made a comic called Tales from the Pit. And I needed a place to put the comic. And so Evan Irwin,

a magic celebrity person, suggested me that I put them up on Tumblr, which I did. I called the Tales from the Pit. But when I was setting it up, it asked me the question, are you willing to answer questions? And I said, sure, I guess. And as I mentioned in my previous podcast,

I don't think I understood what I was signing up for. So what happened was, I would put my, comics there. A few people learned about it, so I had a few people on the site, and they would ask questions, and then obviously somebody posted that I answered a question, and anyway, I started getting a lot more audience.

So let me walk through sort of modern day how I interact with blog a talk now. So basically, I have access to it. I can get on my phone or the computer, whatever. I would say

the vast majority of my answering blog a talk, is sort of on my free time. I'm not saying I never do it at work. Every once in a bloom, when I'll answer a question at work. Sometimes I'm like in the middle of a draft or something, and I'm waiting for cards. I've answered a question.

So I use it during downtime. The downtime is most often home downtime, but sometimes work downtime. And the idea is, so one of the philosophies of my blog, I learned long ago, was people seemed really excited when I answer their question. So I've kind of made it a goal

to answer as many questions as I can, which means that a lot of my answers are short. Every once in a while I get inspired. I will make long answers. I do do that from time to time. So one of the interesting things is I answer many questions in my blog. At one point, I was averaging like 35 questions a day.

I'm not quite sure whether I'm above or below that. But I answer a decent number of questions every day. Enough so that most people who read my blog don't read all my blog because I just outstripped their ability to read all the stuff I've written. Some people do, and I definitely have regulars. There are people that come all the time to the blog that I recognize. There are certain names that just pop up again and again. I realize they're regulars on the blog.

So I do know the regulars on the blog. I do recognize seeing them time and time again. And who regulars are will vary with time. They're definitely, and people have their own take on things. So the idea is, I answer questions as much as I can. And then some of those questions, because I've been doing this blog now for quite a while, I think I started in 2011. I might have been doing for 15 years.

It's been a while. And I've answered, I don't know how many. I've answered a lot of questions. I've answered somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 questions. My guess is I'm like 160, 170. I haven't looked in a little while. But anyway, I've answered a huge amount of questions. And mostly my goal is I'm trying to give behind the scenes information

that I think it's kind of cool that if you were really into magic, that the head designer will answer your questions. Now, I get way more, I get more questions than I can read. So I don't actually read every question. I try maybe on a slow day or a day where I'm traveling where I just have more, I have more time. Maybe every once in a blue moon, I do read all the questions. But many, many days I don't read all the questions just because I get so many questions. And, you know, I answer what I can.

There's a bunch of reasons that I can't answer questions. It might be something I'm not allowed to talk about. It might be something that I don't have the answer to. It might be something that I don't have a simple answer to. I get questions a lot where people ask me very complicated questions, and I'm like, well, if I have time, I can answer this, but I can't quickly answer it. And a lot of the questions are very thought-provoking,

just when I'm trying to answer a lot of questions, I just don't want to spend an hour thinking about one question and, you know, and not only that they've thought-provoking questions, they're not even questions that would require me to write a lot once I write the answer. It just takes a long time for me to come up with the answer, just to think through and think, you know. So I try to answer as much as I can, you know,

that I'm able to answer, that I have easy answers for, or not even easy. I mean, sometimes I'll answer harder questions, but it's just a matter of, I mean, like, really my goal on Bloggetog is, hey, you have the ear of the head designer. As much as I can, I will tell you things. One of the interesting things is people who just don't believe me,

There's a lot of like, oh, like, I'm lying or I'm making up things or I'm, I mean, the one caveat I say is I have to answer questions without quote-unquote knowing the future, which means is I don't answer things with actual knowledge in the next three years. Because I can't, the goal of this is not to like tease upcoming things or to give away information that I'm not supposed to give away. So if somebody asks something, let's say somebody asks, are you going to do thing X? And I know we're doing thing X. I'm working on ThingX or I have worked on Thing X. My answer is not, yeah, we're doing Thing X because I can't tell you that. And if at the time I'm writing, like, for example, let's say we're doing something that I don't think we, I've given any knowledge that we're going to do. For example, once I knew we were going back to Kamagawa, I had years of answering.

I don't think we're ever going back to Kamagawa. So I couldn't start changing how I answered those questions because I didn't want to give away we're going back to Kamagawa. So I just ignored I knew the future. is kind of how I answered the questions, and just answered as I would, not knowing the next three years. That is the only where I'm saying something different from what I know,

only because I can't give away, I can't give away what we're working on. Now, normally, if I know we're working on something, I don't traditionally say, we'll never do it because I know in my head that we're doing it, but I will say it's unlikely, you know, I will give the answer

that I would have given had we not started working on it, is usually started in my head. But, barring that, Barring not sort of, you know, giving away the surprise party sort of, I don't know what to call it, but, you know, there's a certain amount of me not saying something because I don't want to give away information that's supposed to be a surprise. Other than that, I don't, everything I say is the truth.

I know people, I mean, I know people want to somehow believe that like I'm making things up or, you know. For example, I give a lot of background information. I see a lot of data. Now, I'm not allowed to share the exact data. it's a business, we have competitors, like, you know, but I will give the general vibe of things. Because I just want people to understand, like one of the things that's really interesting is,

as someone who actually, you know, works on the game, who's behind the scenes, who's seeing information, there's a lot of things that people might not realize. And I try as much as I can on my blog to sort of let people fill people in about how something is doing or not doing. And there are such, like, it is sometimes very hard to gauge from the outside,

whether a set did well or not. Because the only criteria you have to go on is, you know, the general consensus of the public and maybe whether it's still on sale in your store or not, you know. There's not a lot of things to judge how something did. And we, on the flip side, we have lots of data. You know, we have sales data. We have play data.

We have market research data. We have lots of data. So I have a pretty good sense of whether or set did well or not. and be aware that not all data is necessarily correlative. Like, sets could have a big pre-release, but not sell as great as you would think. Or have a poor pre-release and so way better than you think. That there's a lot of things that the audience will think, well, this is the sign, and it's not as correlative as you think.

In general, I mean, I'm not saying there's zero correlation, but it's not as correlated as you think. And so I'm trying to sort of let people in and that the hard thing is that, well, one of the tricky things is magic is different for every person. Every person, there's things they enjoy about the game. And to you, that's what the game is.

And part of my blog is trying to say is, look, I don't design for one player. I'm not trying to make one section happy. I got to make every magic player happy. And every magic player don't all want the same things. some of it is contradictory things and so we do a lot to try to make every, like the idea

is I don't expect you to like every card in every set, but I expect you to like some cards in every set, that I want every set to excite you on some level. I want us to be doing something. And one of the ways magic works is we keep, I say, pushing the pendulum. We keep just doing different things

on the idea that, well, maybe this is your thing, maybe it's not, but it's somebody else's thing. And if we keep doing different things, at some point we hit upon the thing that really engages you. And we're trying to do that for everybody. And so a lot of my blog, I like the blog. My goal on the blog is to both be educational and be entertaining.

My background is in writing and entertainment. Like I understand that part of what I want this blog to be is I want the blog to be something that people enjoy coming and reading every day. And also, look, it's behind the scenes information. I actually am trying to, like, one of the cool things about my blog is I can tell you things that you're not going to read anywhere else because no one else knows. No one outside the building knows a lot of the things I'm saying. And while I'm not free to say everything, I'm free to say some things. And as much as I can, I really, I want people to understand how things work and behind the scenes.

So let's go into those two things. We talk a little bit about how making an entertainment and making education, what impact it has on making the blog. Because to me it's very interesting. So entertainment. So first and foremost, one of the things that's important to me, or well, I want it to be both educational and entertaining. Probably entertaining is slightly more important than education, only because if people aren't enjoying reading it, it's hard to be educational if you are not also entertaining, because

educational but boring, no one will read. So one of the things is I like to have a lot of back and forth on the blog, meaning if I answer a question, that question will shape future questions. And so one of the things that I enjoy in the blog is, for regular readers, we'll know this, that they're kind of our themes for the day. It's not a conscious thing.

I mean, well, every once in a while I do an active, like, gimmicky theme. I do do that from time to time, where I say to them, okay, I'm doing this today and you can ask me questions, and every April fools, I make up answers, and, you know, like, there are certain things I do that are like a day-long thing. And then, usually other than the April full things I just do,

and you figure out soon my answers are crazy. But most other things I'll announce that's what I'm doing. So every once in a while, I, like, for example, one day I said, list two things, whatever two things you want, and I'll say what's more likely to happen. And people just gave me lists of things, and the list could be whatever they wanted to give, and I would just say what I think is more likely to happen.

I did another day where, one of the days that I do, I'm now blinking, I'm thinking about that. I've done a bunch of different ones. A lot of times just me giving information on things, you know, me giving my vantage point on things. So I do like the idea. I lean into themes. And what I mean by that is not the ones where I say,

today's this theme, I do those. But more common is I answer a question. And I give an honest answer, something that's interesting. And then that provokes other people to ask questions about the same thing. And then I start answering those questions. And that once I start, I don't need to do that a lot. I answer three or four questions on the same topic. It'll start becoming the topic everyone talks about for the day.

So I do like having themes. The themes are kind of organic, which is fun, meaning I don't necessarily answer questions assuming this is what everyone's going to talk about today. But it's clear once I do it and watch the responses, when I hit upon something, I realize pretty fast they've hit upon something. And what those themes are, like for people who don't listen to the blog, there's all sorts of things going on. The other thing I try to do is I'm a comedy writer.

I have different characters that have been on the blog. I have an evil twin. I have a little squirrel that talks sometimes. I mean, I occasionally will lean into similar things. People also ask questions that are tangential to magic sometimes and will go off on topics that have nothing to do with magic, although usually they're magic adjacent. And sometimes they're just literally,

about magic itself that there's some thing people care about. We dive in the weeds on something. I have the ability to do polls. So I do polls a lot. A real common thing is somebody who asks a question. I'm like, oh, I wonder what you guys think about it. I think my, I have somewhere, like, I'm between 70 and 80,000 regular readers, I believe, right now in my blog.

Probably if you, those are people who are signed up, I think, to read the blog. You have to like, so I believe that's how many people at least are who follow my blog, I guess. There are other people that visit. So I'm not sure the actual number of total people that read. It's a lot. A lot of people read my blog. And every once in a while, and when I mean every once in a while, every other day, somebody will post one of my comments to Reddit. That happens a lot.

And sometimes other social media, I've seen it on Blue Sky and Twitter. I've seen it on Instagram. I will answer something and then people will use that as a jump. Also, people make videos all the time where I said something. They're going to make a comment on it, you know. So my answer will inspire all sorts of things. And I'm well aware. I know, for example, when I write an answer,

I have some, well, I should say there's some things I answer that I'm pretty confident will end up on Reddit. And there's some things that end up on Reddit. And there's some things that end up on Reddit that I have no idea. For example, sometimes I'll answer the question, giving facts that are not new that I've said before, that I'm not, I'm just, you know, I answer the same question a lot, meaning I understand that not everybody reads the blog every day. So I answer the same questions from time to time. If something's a pressing question, I'll answer it more than once. And there are definitely questions that I've answered 20, 30 times.

So sometimes when I answer one of those questions, and it gets to Reddit, I'm like, okay, I wasn't even sharing new information. But to that person, they didn't know it, so they go put it on Reddit. So it was interesting to see. Reddit definitely is very Reddit-ish. They're very skeptical. So they like to call me Marketing Rosewater. There's really this on Reddit concept that I'm just spinning everything, and I'm the corporate mouthpiece.

Anyway, that's the... The thing that's funny to me is, look, I mean, I don't have freedom to just say everything. I have some restrictions. I do work for the company. I'm not going to dunk on my company. I'm not... It's obviously, look, you have to take who I am.

I'm the head designer. But within that context, I am... I don't know of anybody else of any other gaming company that creates the amount of volume. where I just answer questions from the public. One of the things about blogger talks that I'm very proud of is,

look, I'm super transparent. You want to know something? I try to answer the questions. Once again, I get way too many to answer them all, and I can't answer everything. But I answer a lot of questions. I've answered over 150,000 questions. I don't know of any other, you know,

forget head designer, just designer of any other game company answering the volume of things I answer. And that's not, I also write a weekly column, I do this blog. I mean, I make a lot of content. And the most, the reason I do it is I want people who love magic to want, who want to know more about how magic is made. I want to share that. I love behind the scenes.

Like I, on my own fandoms, I love behind the scenes information. It's really cool. And as much as I can provide that, I like to do that. And I know it's really fun to ask a question and I answer your question. That's one of the reasons I try to answer so many questions is, you know, I see people on other media get so excited as I answer their question. And there's some topics that I'm fascinated by. I love the color pie. I can talk color pie to my, you know, until I turn blue.

Like, it's really neat. What are you doing? What are you thinking? Why do you do this? You know, is this in pie? Is this a bend? Is this a break? You know, I get really into that stuff.

And so, I'm starting to the informational part. There's a lot of things that I care about and there's a lot of time and attention. One of my general beliefs. So, many years ago, when I got to, to Wizards, even in the very early days of Wizards, back on Usenet, I like to answer questions from the public. I used to, even before my blog existed, I would answer questions. I would just find a place where I could answer questions and answer questions.

That's why I sort of drift into blogger talk. I like answering questions. I like explaining things. It's why I have my column. It's why I do my podcast. I like explaining how we do things. It's fascinating to me. I think magic design is super, super cool.

And not everybody, I mean, for example, you can drive a car and not. not understand how the car works. You can play the game of magic and don't need to know how we make it. But for a lot of people, it's super enjoyable. It's a fun part of it. I know a lot of people like making

their own magic sets and magic cards, and it's great. I think that's awesome. And so I want to do what I can to sort of... Like, when I was coming up as a game designer, back before I was a professional game designer, just an amateur game designer.

I was so intrigued. I wanted to read about game design, and there was like nothing. There was so little on game design. And that when I got in position to say, oh, well, I like to write and I like game design, I really made an effort to share a lot.

That's where the blog really comes from. Although one of the things about the blog is fun is, I don't make the question, so I get to answer very bizarre questions all the time. And you guys come up with some really creative questions. Like, for example, this was a couple weeks ago, someone was talking about what plane can you get the best pizza on? And I think I said, oh, okay, I knew Kepenna,

and Ravnica and Theros, I said. Not Theros. Nupena, Ravnica, what's my third one? Oh, Fiora. Fiora. And I said, okay, those are the three, I think you get the best pizza. And then someone said, oh, well, what guild would make the best pizza? And I shared that with R&D, and then there's a giant, like we have the big pad we have on the wall where we ask questions where people can answer questions.

And that became a question for the day. and so you know the oh and the other big thing about the blog that I guess I should mention is that I get information from the blog.

People tell me things. It's one, I mean, it's not my only source of information, obviously, and it's more anecdotal than doodle, but, doodle than data. That,

and so I learn a lot of things. Like, for example, one of the reasons we went back to Kamagawa, or at least one of the reasons I helped steer in that direction, was because my blog was so loud about how much they want to go back to Kamagawa.

And I'm like, okay, I mean, maybe that's just the enfranchised players who are in my blog, but there's a group that really wants to go back to Kamagawa we're doing another Japanese theme set. It could be Kamagawa, and I spent a lot of energy trying to make sure it was Kamagawa because of that. There are a lot of smaller themes

I've done. There's like a wizard theme in Dominaria because there's a lot of talk about, like I did a poll and people really like wizards. So there's opportunities where I see things and I take advantage of them. Not every poll goes anywhere. a lot of it's just for entertainment and sometimes just to see what people think.

Sometimes I know the answer, sometimes I don't know the answer. Or sometimes I think I know the answer. I don't always... When I see the data, the thing about my blog is, my blog is not representative of magic as a whole. It's a much more enfranchised crowd. It's really interesting for me to learn from that crowd. We care a lot about the enfranchised crowd.

But it can be non-representing sometimes of larger magic because I'm not seeing everybody. I'm seeing people that are into magic enough that they're on the blog of the head designer. The other thing is, so every once in a while, I write a long post. It's just I get inspired everyone. I mean, I'm a writer in my core. Like, one of the reasons that I do the blog, to be honest.

I mean, I want to be educational. I want to be informational. I also enjoy writing. There's something about being a writer that you've got to write. And so I just need, like, I have to write somewhere. I have to take the energy and write something. And so one of the things that the blog is really good for is all the outreach to the audience to me makes me better at my job. Like, how do I know what players like?

Well, if I read, you know, like I said, I, and I've answered 150,000 questions. I've read way, way more than that. Like right now on my blog, I believe I have over 750,000 unanswered questions. In fact, I'm getting really close. It'll happen this year, maybe next year, where I hit a million. I've gotten a million questions, not answered a million questions, but I've received a million questions. At some point, I'm going to answer like $200,000 and maybe $800,000 will be unanswered. So, by the way, I think I answer about a fifth of the questions.

It's my rough estimate looking at unanswered versus answered. I answer a lot. What else can I say? Oh, I like to do the long-form things from time to time, just because I'll let me. lets me get more in the deeps and it gets to be tap into my writer sense. And there are some topics I think are really important and there's nuance to them. Like I did a topic on the importance of diversity and the importance of letting people see themselves that don't normally get to see themselves that I believe really strongly in, but it's a complex topic.

Oh, the other thing that I do try is I try very hard to treat everybody who writes to me with respect. I don't always receive respect. I mean, one of the things I ask in my blog is I like people to be polite. You can disagree with me. I have no problem with you not liking something we're doing. But you can be polite

about it. But I do answer to people who aren't polite. There's a lot, I mean, a lot of my blog is trying to, with a straight face, answer real criticism. I do not try to avoid criticism. Regular readers in my blog, no. I have people who are critical all the time.

And the funny thing is, because I spend more time responding to criticism than not, that a lot of times it seems the criticism is the majority opinion. And most often it is not the majority opinion. But it is what it makes for good content. And I'm honestly trying to address what people are saying. If somebody doesn't like something, I want to explain to why we're doing that thing.

And more often than not, usually the answer to why are you doing this thing that I don't like. The answer is because other people do like it. That you might not like it, but other people that do like, and I'm doing it for the people to do like it. Just like there's things that you like that other people don't like. You know, whatever you think is the best, most awesome thing about magic,

there's somebody out there that hates it. That if they could banish it for magic, they would. And it's the thing that brings you the most joy. And the reverse is true. The thing you hate most, somebody brings them the most joy. And that's one of the tricky things for us is, look, I'm trying to make everybody happy. And I'm trying to use my blog to explain that my job is to make everybody happy. And the other thing that's really hard is what I call the line. Everybody has sort of their line in the sand where on one side, that is what magic is. It's lovely. It's great. And the other side of the line is, that's not magic. You know, stop doing that. What you're doing isn't really magic.

And the challenge is that line just isn't, everybody has in our own line. And so the thing for you that just isn't magic for somebody else completely is magic. And so a lot of what I try to do, and once again, I really try hard. I treat every answer very seriously. Oh, I'm sorry, there's silly answers. Silly questions. I treat silly. But what I mean is if somebody, I don't try to diminish what people are saying. I'm trying to give honest answers. Now, one of the challenges, if my answer is, like sometimes people are like, I like thing X, why aren't you doing it? And my answer is, well, enough people don't like it.

We don't do it. Or I don't enjoy thing X. Why do you do it? And my answer is, well, the people that really do enjoy it trying to do it. And so, in short, people do not want to hear we're doing something. It comes across to some people as, well, I don't care. I don't like this thing. Why do you do it?

Well, you obviously don't care about me. No, I do care about you. For starters, I'm answering your question. And to boot, look, I, there are a lot of magic players, and it is not, I have to care about all magic players, and that if you enjoy something that the majority of magic players really dislike, that leaves the unfun gameplay and just is something that isn't good for the game, isn't making enough people happy, look, here's why we're not doing it. We don't do everything. There's things that aren't good for the game and or, I mean, I would argue that of enough people, people dislike something as bad for the game because enough people dislike it. But there are also some things that cause problems for us. Like sometimes we don't do things, not because it would

upset players, but because it's bad for the game. I want to explain that. And I want to explain things of why we don't do things. But the challenge is if you write to me and say, I don't like thing you're doing. And my answer is anything other than, okay, we will stop doing that thing you don't like. It comes across some people as like, I just don't care. You clearly told me what wanted. I clearly am ignoring you, you know. And it's not, I'm not trying to ignore you. That's why I spend the time and energy. It's why I answer so many critical people. I want to talk about why. The thing you hate, why do we do that thing you hate? Well, let me walk you through why. Or why don't we do the thing you love. Let me walk you through why. And like I said, I, the other challenge is I ask

questions as they are asked. I do not assume what people mean. Um, And so that's another, it's probably a quirk of mine, meaning I ask what people ask of me. And, like, for example, there's a lot of terminology in Wizards. I'm very open on what the terminology is. If you ask me something using terminology, I will answer using that terminology. If you want to talk about flip cards,

I will talk about flip cards. It's a mechanic from Kamagawa that we made, that the cards rotate 180 degrees. Now, if you mean double-faced cards, you say flip cards, sometimes, sometimes, out of context, I understand you mean double-faced cards. I go, well, you said flip cards,

but I think you mean double-faced cards. But a lot of the time, I will answer the question. A real common one in our blog is, Kindred is the creature type that used to be tribal. Typle is the theme of using creature types as a thematic thing. We do not use Kindle to mean typo. We use typel to mean typo. So if you ask me about Kindred,

I will answer about Kindred. of what R&D talks about when we say Kindred, which is the cart type. And if you mean typal, well, you need to ask me typal because that is, I mean, on my blog, I ask you to refer to things as R&D refers to them because that's how I talk. On your own things, call wherever you want. I'm just saying when you're talking to me, I'm going to be very technical and I'm using the R&D terminology. That's the language I speak in.

And so if you want to ask me things, if not I will answer the questions as asked of me, And I will use R&D terminology. That's the language I speak in. And like I said, it's very, very clear to me somebody means something different. I can catch that some of the time. But also, the other thing that people kind of miss is I'm answering so many questions. I'm just answering moving on.

Sometimes, by the way, one of the things that I, another big question is, people sometimes ask questions in which I can answer some of the questions about all of their question. I try to answer some of the question if I can. If I can't answer all the questions, sometimes I don't answer them. But sometimes they ask more than one question and one of the questions is really interesting. And I'll answer the one that's really interesting. In general, people writing to me if they can ask one question and they write a set, like, multiple questions on one thing. Oftentimes I have to ignore because I can't answer them all.

I don't answer it most of the time. Every once in a while if there's a really interesting question, I will answer it. I also do it quickly. I'm doing this oftentimes in my spare time sometimes while I'm, you know, multitasking, meaning my attention, the only way for me to answer the volume of questions I do is to kind of use downtime when I can find it.

But that doesn't always mean my attention is, you know, like sometimes I'm shopping and I'm waiting for my wife to get something, so I answer two questions. But I'm doing things quickly, and so I do admit sometimes I miss some nuance of questions or sometimes I assume someone means something, something's not quite what they mean. And I, so, you know, like, I, it is tricky answering a lot of questions.

And even things that might seem obvious to other people, what they meant, sometimes I interpret it a little differently. And I answer the question, I think they're asking. And so I never mean to not answer questions. I mean, every once in a while, someone asks multiple questions, and I'm answering one of them. I do try to answer all the questions when I can. And I'm not, I'm not trying to be evasive or anything.

there are things I can't answer and most of the time I can't answer I don't even answer the question but sometimes there's an element I can answer and I will so we have traffic today which is why we get extra content here on Bloggetog. I mean the thing that is really interesting to me is

I enjoy I actually enjoy getting tough questions. I have no problem with people wanting to understand things. Like I said your tone can be friendly. And I, I, one of the things that's really hard about being a public figure is that there are a lot of people

that want to assume the worst of you. And, you know, it's challenging sometimes. We're like, literally answering questions on my blog is not my job. If tomorrow I stop answering questions, nothing would happen to me. It's not, it's not an official part of my job. I do do it. They're aware I do it. Part, I mean, another thing that you guys might realize is sometimes I have to answer

a question and I need to make sure I'm allowed to answer the question. You know, there are people I will check in with. If I'm answering a question about a certain section of company that's not really my area of expertise, I will double check with people. Sometimes I ask about a question and then they're like, eh, let's not answer that one. So sometimes, you know, like I answer a lot of questions, but some of them, depending on the question, look, I have to make sure it's okay to answer the question. And I have people I talk to to double check because as much, I mean, I have a pretty good

sense of what I can and can't answer from doing this for a long time, but I still like having a second pair of eyes and there's other people I'll go to. And sometimes, for example, I'll have a question, I'll have an answer. I need to run the answer by, and it takes them a while to get back to me. So if you ever asked a question to answer days later, that is why that happens, where I have an answer. I'm, I'm, clarifying, make sure I'm not saying something I'm not, and the person who's getting back to me just takes a long time to get back to me, and I post it when I

can, but that's how that stuff like that happens. You know, like I said, it is oh, have I ever gotten... Sorry, let me drink my water. Have I ever gotten in trouble for things I said in my blog? I have. It doesn't happen very often.

I've been doing this a long time. Like I said, I answer a lot of questions. And the number of times I've gotten sort of I'm in trouble. I don't know quite right word. I mean, where someone's come to talk to me. It's, I can count it on two hands. It's under 10. And most of them are, okay, I see why you answer this, but in the future, can you try not to do thing A or thing B? I've gotten that. I can't get the details. I had one where I got

in, about as big of trouble I've ever got into anything. You know, I had the, I had to have a conversation with the VP about it. So, And, you know, the, you know, one of the big things is understanding what I can and can't say. And that was an example where I said something I can't say. And I learned I can't say it. And I will not say it again. Once again, I can't get into the details. But the very idea, one of the things that is good on my end is, even though I've gotten in trouble, I said things that shouldn't have said, I've definitely had people talk to me about things.

No one has ever stopped the blog. No one has ever said, don't answer the blog. they recognize its important thing they recognize the outreach to the audience is cool they do understand that like I mostly know what I'm doing barring a few rare occasions I don't really say things I'm not supposed to say have I ever given away future information

I have very subtly one of the times I said something that by itself was not giving it away but in a separate interview somewhere else another R&D person said something else and our true information together gave something away.

That happened. And then I have a couple cases where like there's one time I meant to say dragon and I said dinosaur and we were working on Ixelon and nobody at the time picked it up. It wasn't until Ixelon came out and someone said, you know, like a year ago

Mark said dinosaur, not dragon. You know, but no one picked, they already picked it up after the fact. So I, most of the time that I said something that no one caught onto it or didn't catch onto at the time. You get the pressing questions. What is my favorite part of doing the blog? I really like the camaraderie.

I like that there is very much... So I call the people on my blog question marks because they question me, Mark. And so there is a community. I enjoy the community. I do recognize a lot of the people who ask questions all the time. I have some curmudgens that like taking, you know, no matter what we do, here's the most negative take you can take on it. I have people that are very flowing.

Oh, another thing that's important to understand is a lot of people will write to me on the blog and they don't want to, they're not trying to get information out of me. They just want me to know something. And so a lot of the stuff I read is important. Like someone will go, please don't answer this, but I just want to let you know. I get a lot of people writing to me. You know, I've used the blog. For example, one of the things I've taught the question marks is,

if you see magic out in pop culture anywhere, let me know. They do. So that's why, like, a lot of the things about the blogs really interesting is, I usually know things before anybody else in R&D about magic just because the second something breaks, I get questions about it. So, oh, something's going on. People are mad about something. I know.

One of the interesting things is sometimes people are asking me about something and I have to go figure out what they're asking about. Like, what's what? What? They're mad about something. Okay, let me figure what they're mad about. Like, I have to go figure out what happened. Or a leak happened or something happens. And I'm like, what's going on?

So sometimes in R&D, like, I'm the one that goes, okay, guys, something happened. We need to, you know, and I'm like, okay, something. And other times, it's, you know, it's broke on Reddit or somewhere, but just, you know, because I don't read Reddit every moment of every day. You know, I read my blog much more. Someone will say, oh, this happened, you know, I saw this on Reddit or whatever. Or I saw this somewhere. And so that's why I learned things.

So the blog also is very informative to me of just keeping me up to date on what people do and don't know. And whatever the topic of the day, like, some days people are mad about something and that's what people want to talk about. And I'm like, okay, people are, you know, another interesting thing about the blog is I have people all the time coming to me to ask how, what the bellwether of the people are. Because I talk to, I mean, once again, it's more enfranchised audience, but okay, what's the in franchise audience thinking about? I know my blogs.

They're asking me questions about it. And so the blog is a really interesting tool for me. And like I said, one of the reasons I do the blog, A, I enjoy doing the blog. B, I think you guys enjoy me doing the blog. And C, it's valuable. It helps me in my job. I honestly believe I am much better my job because the blog exists. So while it's not part of my job in the sense that I'm not required to do it, I don't get paid to do it, it is something that I think makes me better at my job.

And I do enjoy it. So, but anyway, I'm now at work. That is, hopefully, more about BlogGatog. I tried to add on to the first Bloggetog from 13 years ago, the first podcast. Anyway, I hope this was enjoyable. If you've never been to my blog, it's on Tumblr. I believe you just Google Bloggetog, you'll get there. I answer questions all the time.

Oh, people ask all the time. If I don't answer your question, can you ask it again? Yes, I don't see all the questions. Now, maybe I'm not answered a question on purpose or for many reasons. But you can ask questions again. Feel free to repeat. Like I said, I get so many questions.

I just don't see everything every day. But if you've never been to blog talk, it is fun. And like I say, I make a lot of content. So it might not be, I'm not even saying you should read it every day. I'm just saying every once in a while, go and look, and there's fun things. Just R&D read my blogger talk. Many of them do. Although most of them don't read everything because I write so much.

anybody else in R&D start a blog. Other people have tried. I think Gavin did for a little while. Doug Byer did for a little while. All the play design did for a little while. But there's something about my personality of my inability to get tired of doing the same thing again and again and my desire to constantly write

that makes it perfectly suited for me and not for most people. So I don't expect other people doing what I do on blog a talk. but I do, so you have a chance to come see it. But anyway, guys, you got a little extra content today because we have some traffic, the only podcast is where traffic means more content for you. But anyway, I am at work, so I all know what that means.

It means to the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys all next time. Bye-bye.