Welcome to Talen Month here on press dot invincible dot ink!
A pattern has formed, a groove has been worn, and I treat April as a month in which I’m going to focus on writing about indulgent, entirely self-serving nonsense. No topic is too niche, no character exploration too unnecessary, and no corner case complaint about some other nonsense is too specific for me to do it if it tickles me distinctly and doesn’t also fit better into another theme month.
Like, c’mon, there’s gotta be something for Dread Month and Tricks Month. October and August if you’re new here.
But what does this actually mean?
The whole question of making a blog which is literally just my own daily writing, and then having a month dedicated to talking about myself or my interests seems when viewed at arm’s length like nonsense. Everything on this blog is stuff I care about. I’m always going to talk about things as they relate to me, duh. That’s the whole point, I didn’t train myself to understand and deploy autoethnography relentlessly because I wanted to pretend I didn’t exist.
If you go back and read earlier parts of the blog, you can find my posts from when I was trying to position myself as a neutral observer of videogames, and even then I found the idea of it stifling. Early Game Pile entries would include a list of reasons I could imagine someone wanting to play a game, and of course, that list was going to be filtered through my imagination and opinion. On the one hand it’s not that hard to have some empathy for a potential or imagined reader, and what might help a game or piece of media interest them. It’s hard to have empathy for every possible reader, and that’s where we start to get into the shape of you – the reader – that is in my head.
In my mind, you’re probably queer. Not necessarily, but probably. You at least are adjacent to queer spaces, since you got to found me. I don’t have an assumption that you’re a boy or a girl, though I think I probably joke around as if you’re a girl or girlthing more likely than you are a boy. I think I do that because I don’t think it’s interesting to joke about my reader being a boy — everyone does that. It’s much funnier to — accurately or not! — crack jokes about not liking girly games like Bloodbourne and Dwarf Fortress.
You’re younger than me. You watch anime and you play videogames, but you don’t read as many books as you like. I think this because I think that I think of reading books as interesting and a way to broaden your horizons, but I also don’t read as many books as I’d like. Sometimes this is because my day can consist of choking through six dense chapters of four different books and sometimes it’s because it’s a lot easier to put the TV on and let twenty episodes of Bluey happen.
You’re more of a console gamer. I can talk to you about old PC games from the 1990s and I need to explain how they work or what life was like for people interested in that play space, because you don’t know what I’m talking about. Not a cruel thing or a ignorance thing – I don’t think less of you for not knowing, but I think it’s worth explaining it. I think that part of that is because I think it’s interesting. When I dig into how Commander Keen works, being able to explain how the EGA processor worked is really me teaching myself something I half-understand, and then share with you because I … I like talking about it?
I definitely think there are words and topics you’d rather I avoid. I think that you don’t like seeing me be mean to things, or about things. I think that you’d rather not see me using generative media for bumpers in my posts, and that you either don’t care about my using of alt text or you care about it in hypothetical. The fact I’m trying to get in the habit for it is something you probably think ‘oh, that’s nice, that’s a good habit’ and that’s the end of it. I think that if there are people reading this who benefit from good alt text, there aren’t many of you, maybe one or two. I also think that that one or two are worth doing a good job for, as a matter of principle. But I also think if I screw up, or my alt text is bad, I’m not going to get told about it.
I think you used to be on twitter.
I think you think I’m interesting, but not cool.
I think you think my writing is engaging, but not deeply affecting. I think you’re really glad to see stuff on a website that’s being made and maintained and not being used to advertise. I think that if I started promoting or doing calls to action, you’d find that unappealing. You wouldn’t necessarily hate me for it, but it would be something that you didn’t have to deal with here, previously, but now you do have to deal with it, and that’d be a bummer.
I also think there’s a good chance every single thing I’ve looked at and thought ‘wow this sucks’ is someone’s favourite thing. I think, if I rubbish an anime or a game, I have pretty good chance that you are either really relieved to see someone finally talk critically about it, or you’re super bummed to see someone you respected talking about something you love cruelly. I think this is part of why I keep a mix going on: I think that you might tolerate a few sassy posts about something you like, but if I let my natural impulse to complain overwhelm me, you’d have a blog that’s grumpy and mad for several days in a row and that might just be enough to make you give up on checking.
I don’t think you check. I think you’re either using an RSS reader because you’re smart and cool and better than me with computers, or you see my work linked other places. The idea that my blog lives in a space like someone’s daily webcomic link folder is kinda nice but I have no idea if anyone else even does those any more.
This is mostly just anxieties, of course. I’m concerned about being seen a particular way. I’m afraid of behaving in a way that’s too much. I don’t want to make you feel like you shouldn’t bother checking. I want to share things that are funny and exciting with you. I also want to get better at writing and part of that is forcing variety, because otherwise I will default to cliche phrases and reusing jokes from a more successful Adams, whether that’s Douglas (very good) or Scott (very bad).
This month, I’m going to try and talk to you with less of the anxiety. More willingness to talk about things I normally skirt around. And yes, that means I will probably spend a lot of words focusing on some extremely niche nonsense or maybe diving way too deep in something I think you’d find dull.
Sorry.