Hey are you new here? Statistically speaking, no, but I’m still going to act like you are.
Long and short! Decemberween is here! All normal article content is suspended! Story Piles are going to be about Christmas movies and Game Piles are going to try and focus on things good for social experiences around family gatherings!
You can press more to read more about the kinds of things you’re going to see this month, or you can just go ‘oh okay, I’m not going to get a weird long-form story about a magician who lied about attacking the Nazis.’
Every December, in honour of what I will generally refer to as ‘everyone is tired,’ but which, as a person with a job in education and in a very white culture really just means ‘The Christmas Season’ I take a step back from the regular writing. It’s not really a religious thing but it’s a time of year where everyone doing their jobs is very clearly expecting a long holiday coming up and therefore, nobody wants to start on any new or hard projects. Those are problems for January. On the other hand, if you’re in Retail, you work your ass off during this month, and you probably don’t have a lot of time for anything.
It’s a period where people turn to The Cultural Zeitgeist and you tend to get year end of lists, wrapups, things with a more chill vibe and I like that idea. Instead of articles about making characters in D&D, and closely examining game mechanics, or worldbuilding in a world you’ll never visit, or maybe places as they relate to materials and capitalism, or you know, the occasional article where I talk about how I’m probably more like John Wayne Gacy than I want to consider, I instead talk about just media. Specifically, free media, that you can consume, for free, hence ‘free media.’ It’s mostly online media, but there are some books and fanfictions mixed in there
I operate on the assumption that in December, you might have more free time, or interest in starting something long-form. That means podcasts with a lot of episodes, for example, or Youtube channels with big backlogs. I know the cruel pain of how I once recommended people check out Hannah Gadsby’s Youtube Channel only to find at the time, they’d made four videos total.
There’s a real concern with actually sharing this kind of thing here, you know. As a person who Makes Things On The Internet there’s a very real feeling hazard of letting you know the kinds of things I look at and share on the internet, because in so doing, I’m potentially exposing source material, and sending my audience away from me (the person offering a version of something) to someone else (the people who made the version that inspired my version). This is an anxiety that is also quite silly, but it’s not without some basis in reality.
Like, sometimes I’ll learn something from a random youtube suggestion, and talk about it on a place like Cohost, and someone will say ‘ah, you’ve looked at [thing].’ It irritates me because so often it feels like rather than someone trying to understand what I was talking about, they’re going a step beyond and trying to work out why I was talking about it.
That’s a really dumb concern on my part, but it still persists and it still irritates me, because man, I put a lot of work into putting words on the internet. Thousands of words a day! And feeling like that is being ignored and treated instead, not as the things I say, but rather as things to decode to determine what my media diet is can be awkward. It makes me feel ignored, and y’know what?
I don’t like that! I really dislike when someone’s response to what I say is ‘ah, but what if I ignore that?’ I get enough of that from students, and they’re paying me to put up with that!
I aim to put this out of my mind.
The disicpline I put my hand to in my PhD is autoethnography. Autoethnography is a way of examining culture through examining the individual’s experience of that culture, and it’s very deliberate in how focused it is on what you, as a person, do, with what you’re experiencing. You write about yourself and because that’s what your subject is writing about you treat that like it matters and like it’s worth respecting. Then, with that in mind you go back through and critically examine that writing.
This whole exchange therefore requires honesty, and part of that honesty is a need to be fearless. I need to admit ways I suck in order to do good autoethnography. And not just ‘I suck’ but rather being willing to specifically account as best I can and as actionably as I can the things about how I behave that are the problem.
Like how I just described ‘I don’t like it when I feel ignored’ in the above section, ya see?
With that honesty, then, and with a bountiful desire to share with you, I want to use Decemberween as an opportunity to talk to you about things that you can partake in. You don’t need to analyse them in depth, you don’t need to come to it with a particular mindset, it’s just stuff I like, and I talk a little bit about why I like them. It’s also going to take the form of some gratitude journaling: talking happily about people in this year, things that have been part of my life and reflections on what that means for me.
I think this is good practice! I like doing it! I recommend doing it. At least once a year.
Now shoo Coach Z out the door and let’s get to it!