Change or Rest?
I haven’t used this site in way too long. I haven’t really been working — or writing — games in even longer.
I had a Patreon. I thougth that’d inspire me to create things, the chance to make some money off my weird ideas. It didn’t. I posted here about maybe changing course to more generalised writing. That was a year and a half ago, and it didn’t happen.
But I’ve been inspired to do something about it again, to try to get words from my brain through my fingers and out into the world again. Let’s see if that lasts for longer than it takes to write this post…
Partly, this is down to wanting a change. With the implosion of social media over the past year thanks to Apartheid Clyde’s desperate quest to be the Most Divorced Man on the Internet™ I don’t have Twitter to vent ideas onto. I do have Mastodon, but I’m more passive there. I read and I think but I rarely write. Again, much like I was on twitter.
Julian Simpson has been blogging about changing up both inputs and outputs, and the app stack used to do that. Which is interesting, but is getting close to the “knowledge management” wankfest when it comes to someone who doesn’t spend his life creating for money. But at the same time, it did inspire me to change up what I’ve got going. For too long my RSS feeds1 have been a combination of news (depressing), tech articles (frequently also depressing, also mostly no longer of interest), media crit (actually interesting, infrequently updated), interesting feeds that haven’t updated in years but I keep around as local archives, and toy review youtubers2.
I’m mixing that up. I’ve added Bellingcat and Byline Times for news, and removed the larger agencies. I’ve also got a bunch of generally interesting feeds in, including things like Marginalian, Respectful Insolence, and The Spaces. I’ve stripped out a bunch of tech ‘news’ which is 80% recycled press releases. I want my feeds to surface things I find interesting, rather than what I’ve thought of as “important”, because the web — and the world — should be about what’s interesting.
I thought for a while that I might dive into podcasting3, but let’s face it, that’d be another example of a project that I start and don’t finish. I need to focus on creating things, rather than burning out on an idea while still working out what platform it should go on4.
Instead, I’m going to try to do more here over the next year. Not just stuff about gaming, not just fiction, but long- and short-form pieces about whatever strikes me at a given moment. I have some pieces about the occult and chaos magick that need a home, and having a place I’m OK just dumping half-formed ideas will give me the freedom to write more.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Yes, I still use RSS. I’m old-fashioned in that regard. I’m still salty about Google Reader being shot in the back, though these days I use Inoreader and NetNewsWire to do what it used to do↩︎
Amongst my other interests, I collect Transformers and related toy robots. Yes, I’m over 40. I’m finally at the point of not caring who knows.↩︎
Me and every other white cis male with an over-inflated sense of his own importance…↩︎
Surprising no-one, I’m ADHD as well as bipolar. Explains a lot.↩︎