Decemberween: You
There’s a want, an intuitive reaching, for the idea of calling this schmaltzy or cringe. To say, oh, that’s embarrassing, or oh, that’s not worth doing as a subject.
At the end of each month I write a ‘wrapup’ of the month. These serve as a guide for reading, encouraging people who only check the blog sporadically for particular articles I think were very good, or which I felt work well when you link them together. The wrapups are also a chance to reflect on my life in the month and have a moment of diarying. You know, hey, here’s what’s happened in my meatspace life, what that might have done to the blog. Ostensibly, that’s what would go here, today, on the blog: What happened this month? What articles were interesting to me in hindsight?
I think that works against the spirit of Decemberween, a festival of looking at the whole year, an exercise in sharing and gentle content. If you want fanged writing, you can go check the rest of the year, and lords knows there’s stuff that got missed up there. There’s an article about Shadowcaster, I doubt you read that.
I did a year-end wrapup for the Story Pile feature, and tomorrow, you’ll see a year-end wrapup for the Game Pile. Which means that this is the most natural place to wrapup the blog as a whole, and maybe the whole year. Point out some faves, tell you how great these articles were, all that…
But I kind of feel it’s more important to make it clear, how much, in general this blog has been driven by people reacting to it.
There’s a joke I made, last year, about Touhou, that it was a ‘fandom that predates Dark Souls – as in, could hunt and feast upon it.’ On Twitter, a long-term reader (hi Dana!) said that it was ‘one of those lines’ that made her get up away from the computer and laugh. And … I think about that line regularly. I think about it because it implies that there’s multiple times I make a joke like that, that that’s something that can form a pattern.
That excites me.
That fills me with joy.
You, the people who engage with this – either a little or a lot, either reading or just talking to me about the things you want to see me write, you are all part of this process. I don’t want to disappoint you, and I don’t want to bore you.
Your time, as always, is a gift.
And I am grateful.
(I am also grateful for those of you who decided that not just time, but money could be given to you, and those people are extra-awesome, but I don’t want to frame it so that you feel like your money is worth more than your attention. Trust me, I want both.)