Ah, tis April, and an even month and since I organise things in a particular way because of my particular brain in a particular stage, this is the month I dedicate to Talen Month. This is to say, the month where the only thing a topic needs to be deemed worthy is for me to say oh yeah I love talking about that. It’s a time for very specific silly niche interests, it’s a time to bring up old beeves, it’s a time to abandon what’s contemporary or current and instead reflect on the accumulated construction of mess and trauma and false memories that is me.
It’s really dumb that I need a reason for this!
There’s something fundamentally busted in my head, in terms of my personality and the way I envision ‘appropriate’ behaviour that on my blog, a platform I pay to maintain and which I alone contribute to (I guess I could have some more guests), but where I feel that hey, I should ease up on focusing on the topics that I personally find the most engaging, and the most emotionally satisfying. I shouldn’t write an article calling something crap and sucky, if you know, it wasn’t an appropriate time, like the one month of a year I dedicate it to my favourite stuff to do.
This is obviously a very silly habit, but it’s a big part of my brain. This blog is one of the largest single artifacts and projects of my entire life; I can think of one other intentional thing I’ve done that I could describe as a conscious and deliberate project that I’ve spent longer doing. Part of it is, I think that the way we talk about blogs is kind of fundamentally bored. I think about it a lot, about how I think the primary work that springs to mind about ‘putting stuff on the internet’ is a pair of Penny Arcade strips, which are about how ridiculous it is for dudes to put their opinions on the internet as a blog.
Yes.
I feel bad about showing my writing on a digital space because of something I was convinced of as a young man by the most successful English webcomic of all time, who wanted to argue that putting your creative endeavours on the internet for an audience is a boring shitty thing that you only do so you can bother your friends to engage with it.
I’m staring at that paragraph now, looking at my own mental process in public. Penny Arcade convinced me that nobody should post on the internet. That’s such a fantastically silly way to think about things! First of all, why the hell should I be listening to the Penny Arcade guys about how stupid it is to share your opinions on the internet? Those guys share their opinions, and on the internet, all the time, and it worked out really well for them! And that was something like ten years before this blog even started!
What’s more is that the Penny Arcade franchise is this long form exercise in guys a few years older than me thinking they’re funny online, and then riding the tiger that ensued in a part of the internet’s life that’s hard to think of as anything but tiresome. I do think of the early webcomic days as a tiresome time with bad jokes, but it’s a fact that I loved a lot of these comics, and they formed foundational parts of who I am now as an adult. I still use ‘wench’ as a joke insult sometimes, which isn’t even a successful webcomic thing. I spent a chunk of a week rereading Megatokyo this year and that wasn’t because it was unimportant.
And part of unpicking that and considering the nature of what it is to be me means that I have to look back at a history of the webcomic era and realise that I was part of this space and then I escaped it and it was only upon reflection that I realised how much I had grown from the time when I participated in those things. I think that part of this is why I was so bitter about stories that failed to end, or stories that didn’t have a reasonable handle on where they were going, or what was important to them, because for every 8-bit Theatre there was a Dominic Deegan, a thing that someone was pumping out every day, trying to make a story that became their job and build a fanbase and –
Oh no.
I don’t mean to compare myself to webcomics. But I do think that it’s worth remembering the origin of who I am. Yes, I bring up the cult experience and the weird, wonky, deformed childhood and teen years, where I basically turned 21 and had a tiny drop of experience of making friends, then had to try and catch up and did it badly. Sure. But in that same period, I was captivated by the mysterious potential of things that let people make things. I thought webcomics were cool. I thought web forums were cool. I thought that online roleplay and collaborative writing was important. I thought games that let you make things were fascinating.
And the webcomics I read were a lot of formative texts for me in how I told jokes, and it seems, how I look at myself, and look at how I approach making things. I have people talking about one of the most ephemeral bubbles of media space in my head as advice for how to make things, and there’s a lot of weird toxic failed hustle culture in there. Webcomics didn’t fail because the demands were too high for creators, or because the returns and support was nonexistent, they failed because people didn’t try hard enough, they didn’t do an honest good job, they fell into mistakes like filler arcs or gag-a-week stuff or lazy art days or…
… all the stuff that now, years later, I am using as guidance for making my own blog.
Which is dumb.
I need to be kinder to myself.