January Wrapup, 2023!

It’s not the end of the month just yet. I’m looking down the barrel of the end of the month, and seeing what’s coming in the last week or so, and phew. I better write this month’s wrapup now because at some point I’m going to be helping someone move house and that’s not fun at the best of times.

Let’s check out first of all, what I wrote this month about games in the Game Pile:

  • Keep The Heroes Out: This was a really fun cooperative board game that I enjoyed playing a lot. What’s more, playing it, I kept thinking about the way that the game used its particular structure of iconography and a rulebook to displace the game systems away from a lot of reading. It’s beautiful, it’s indulgent, there’s not a lot of time waste in the box on something that isn’t adding something cool to the game.
  • Speedrunning the Swindle: I wanted to make something that suited the theme of GDQ that was running at the time, and I decided to make a video about finally getting off my butt and making a speedrun archive page for The Swindle. As of right now? I’m still the world leader at The Swindle which means, odds are good, you can probably get the record off me.
  • Crystal Caves: There’s always space for something small and weird from gaming’s history, and it seems that if you ask me about the old games from the Apogee shareware catalogue, you’ll find me eventually bringing it back to assumptions about the world and what working class people look like. What’s acceptable? What’s normal? Turns out: working for huge piles of money and still always needing to do more work!
  • A 2023 Channel Trailer: With the dissolution of twitter’s importance in my life, I decided I wanted to redo my channel trailer. This meant using most of the existing audio, but redoing it to both refine it down to exactly 2 minutes long, and using it to present my new animated avatar. I got to do a lot of improvement from this video, like how to make it lip-sync to audio without needing to prop a microphone into my headphones!

And this month’s posting in the Story Pile:

  • Goncharov: I wrote an explainer on the giant consensual play experience of funning around with the gimmick fake movie, Goncharov from November 2022, and the strangely condescending way everyone who wasn’t enjoying it thought it should have been done.
  • The Rendezvous: There are a lot of pieces of media that relate to speedrunning of sorts, you know, almost anything built about a race, documentaries about speedrunning, all that good stuff. But I love finding ways to connect older things to current things, and this is one of my dad’s favourite movies that happens to be an IRL speedrun that just happens to have also been really illegal.
  • Megatokyo: This article is over four thousand words long. Read aloud, it’s over forty minutes. Do you want me to make a video version of this?
  • Children of Time: I loved this book about cat-sized spider culture! I don’t talk much about books I read (because a lot of the books I read are more academic than fictional) but this was a really cracking one that I read last year and actually kept putting off because I wanted to write about it when it would be fun to do so.
  • My Hero Academia, Season 1: Oh hey, you know those huge sprawling TV series that are hard to examine as a single, big chunk? I’ve decided to try breaking them up into separate articles so I can examine them in terms of the kinds of time commitment they ask of you!

This is a month for maintenance. I’m trying this year to do more with each post; fewer posts that are really brief and don’t feature a solid amount of words and images. Generally, a thousand words, or five minutes of audio, or an image made for the post (as is the exchange rate for words, I understand). I’m trying to make it so I don’t pad things out much, and use each potential space to say some stuff to do so – like the ‘welcome to 2023 post‘ this year was also a consideration of what it means to blog for ten years and why I started.

There are articles I hold off on writing until I can dedicate time to being sure I’m happy with them, comfortable with how they read and I can run them past people, spoken aloud — and for me, this month, the example is the article about ‘Losing’ Bridget. This grew out of considering the challenges of two different axes I know can feel really rough: Being a wrong kind of fan and being a guy in a space where it feels like people are celebrating something you didn’t think was hurting anyone. I thought this was a worthy topic to think about and talk about, and to try and serve as a guy, as a positive example to other guys about how to relate to this challenging space without hurting other people out of defiance or thoughtlessness.

If you like me talking about my D&D setting, and why I made the choices I did, I wound up telling the story of the founding of a goblin city and how it put the King’s Highway through the nation of Dal Raeda. This year I’m doing a big project with my Magic: The Gathering custom cards, creating a whole set with flavour and worldbuilding. It’s called the Usurper’s Palace and I wrote about it in a little more detail, and you can follow it now throughout the year. I wrote a bit about Josh Lyman (first time being here), the character from the West Wing, and one of the many instances in which he was a shitty dude who sucks. It’s pretty important since Josh Lyman is a fictional character who was able to will himself into an embarrassing real existence. Finally, during GDQ I wrote about The Grasshopper, a book I like a lot because I find its definition of games and how we play them interesting, and how that book relates to the idea of a speedrun.

This month’s shirt is a simple text-on-field kind of design about what it’s like to exist in my head at the right time and place, where the phrase I’m fine, and you? is something resting atop and keeping you safe from an extremely extensive kind of haranguing that wants to talk about specific, intriguing media events that excite and frustrate me. You can get it in white text and black text!

This month featured a return to PhD meetings, my niblings going on an international trip, one of my best friends being away from home, GDQ, Fox getting a vaccine booster and reacting to it poorly in the pharmacy, the build-up for Cancon, then the actual running of Cancon, Australia day, and a housemove. This is a month where two absolute bastard Catholics dropped dead, I fucked up pretty badly and then I spent weeks trying to unfuck the upfuck.

I am writing this a week out and I feel good about what I’m trying to do, but I’m also just feeling that constant low-key jostling watery stomach feeling. I find myself talking to the air around me like here’s why I made the mistake I did, which isn’t helpful and doesn’t do anything beyond get me dwelling on the mistake again, and that makes me feel stupid, and that’s not a good place. I try to respond to this feeling when I notice myself doing it by just getting to work on the thing I fucked up and trying to address it.

Right now I am looking at it in another tab and I want to make sure I don’t fuck it up while trying to unfuck it.

Also, funny thing? I was really interested in working on board games while I was at Cancon, but I didn’t have the time. Everything was way too bloody busy for me to sit down and spend time talking with people about game designs! And that’s normally a time when I have heaps of time to look at games, look at game designs and things in the library and ask myself ‘how would I approach that? How would I implement that?’

No chance.

I’m shocked at how busy this month has been but god damnit I am going to get this done.