Category: Uncategorized

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Year Three (Plus Change)

It’s been a while! Not that I went anywhere. No life-got-in-the-way spiel. I mean, it didn’t, at least not to any extent that prevented posts or videos being made had I tried. In terms of games, I just wandered back over to RPGs after lots of deckbuilding – it happens! The Shrunken Shrine project is, at best, one of passion, and when I fall off the horse, I have to trust I will get back on sooner or later. This is relatively niche stuff, after all. Importantly, I’ve apparently finally overcome the version of myself that would have felt such shame about ‘my old stuff’ a year or so down the line and then scrubbing the evidence. I’m chalking that up as a minor victory.

What have I been doing, then? Mostly, experimenting with unexciting but important life-structure factors that I’ve struggled with for years. Things like a sustainable gym routine that works with my hypermobility and maintaining motivation in a job where that often has to be self-directed. They call it mindfulness, but I think of it as checking in on myself that I’m not constantly on autopilot. It’s a work in progress, as is life.

A dream was fulfilled earlier this month. I’ve been playing bass on-and-off for a long time, but never to the extent that I was comfortable identifying myself as a bassist. I was invited by a coworker to accompany several guitarists for a song for a local festival. It’s as low as these kinds of stakes get, but I’m trying to get away from minimising myself. For years, playing on a stage was something I’d both daydreamed about and imagined I’d fall to pieces actually doing. I practiced well, the performance was well-received, and it was fun. Would do again!

To supervise such efforts, here’s something I just ordered for myself. It’s a figure of Kasuga Ichiban, one of my favourite characters ever. Without spoiling anything beyond the opening set-up of the game he’s from, he’s a yakuza goon who willingly takes the rap for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s released 18 years later, at 42 years of age, to a society and criminal underworld that hasn’t so much forgotten him but simply rejects him as someone for which they no longer have a need or place. In his efforts to find his own, what really stuck with me were the moments of mundane struggle and how he faced them. The frustration of going to the job center. Studying at vocational school in middle age. Feeling tangibly out of touch. Even when the world stacks the deck, Ichiban faces everything with a naive yet inspiring sincerity that could make an opsimath out of anyone, given the chance.

Also, he really bloody likes Dragon Quest, so you know he’s good people. See you next year!

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Year Two

The second year of the site. There’s been fewer posts this year (11) than there were in the first (15), but I haven’t fallen off completely or deleted everything in a fit of unsatisfied despondency, which means a lot on a personal level. I’ve been playing other genres and pursuing other interests outside of the blog and games. 2024 was an awful year for the games industry, with massive redundancies and shutdowns for developers and journalists alike. It seemed like a good year to get back into books, film, music, all the other things I enjoy. Most relevantly to this blog, I think I’ve finally been bitten by the physical TCG bug. A minor childhood dream was realised earlier in the month when I completed a little binder of Pokemon cards from a recently-printed set of the original 151 monsters. This in tandem with running a little lunchtime club for students of mine with several starter decks has given me a taste for physical cardboard, so to speak. This is a slippery slope that either ends in bankruptcy or finally getting into Magic aproper. Either way, there’s a lot of games to get around to before that.

A new project was started in the form of the Playdate Season One reviews. At a lower word count than the RDBG posts, they’ve made for a nice little palate cleanser between the card games, as well as something that has a much smaller and more achievable end goal. No promises, but I’ll endeavour to finish that up before this time next year. I’m actually using a Playdate game called Pomo Post as a little timeboxing tool while I’m writing up this very post, funnily enough!

Last year, I mentioned I was using social media less. Another year on, I now barely use it at all for posting. About 10 years ago, I used to run a Facebook page with friends that, at one point, had more than 10,000 followers. Then Facebook kneecapped unpaid reach and it withered overnight. Since then, I only use it as a matter of course for contacting small businesses – a far cry from the place where I made some of the closest online friends of my life. Instagram is the one that feels most transparently like a Skinner box for someone like me who doesn’t use TikTok. I do enjoy a good inscrutable reel pull, but only in the same way you can’t just eat one jelly baby. It’s rare to come across something that goes beyond a quick laugh or isn’t bait for an established interest it knows I have from data scraping. Cohost, one of the original post-Elmo Twitter contenders, just went read-only. I will give Bluesky a go starting today, as I’ve been hearing the name crop up more and more from podcasts and people I follow. I just want the Twitter experience with less culture warfare, though I do appreciate that’s a lot to ask in an election year.

I don’t mind sharing that I actually have no upcoming plans for a third Shrine Offering video. They’re quite time-consuming to script up, and I’ll only make them when I have an interesting unifying theme for the pieces of media they cover. These are certainly to be the least regular of my already quite irregular output – once in a blue moon, only when I really feel I have something to say.

So, the coming year? More interviews, more roguelike deck-builders, and possibly even more mention of media outside of those. I’ve found it increasingly easy to delay updating my usual ‘annual media’ threads on Twitter, given that at least 75% of my followers are bots, so I may just make that a seasonal thing in long-form posts here. We’ll see. Happy Halloween to one and all!

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Shrine Offerings #1 / Year One

Shrunken Shrine, in the sense of it being my ongoing online presence, has been going on for a year now. There’s no special significance to me having chosen Halloween, besides liking it as a time of year.

This first anniversary was a nice little motivator to get my first YouTube video in roughly 15 years out the door. It is amateurish. I put a lot of effort into it, I learned a lot, and will continue to learn more. If you have the patience to sit through these little thoughts on some media, I’d like to know if you like the anthology format or if you think these would work better as short standalone videos. I like them together like this – sort of a grab bag of films, websites, poems, paintings, games and writings that may never be unified in a loose context like this ever again.

So, how was this year? A good start. The Roguelike Deck-builder History has been a little inconsistent in terms of regularity, but honestly, there’s only so much of a genre you can take before you want to dip into something else. The key point is, it’s still ongoing and has lasted longer than a lot of other things I’ve given up on, and I think it’s pretty unique.

The year has suggested that I’m a lot less addicted to social media than I thought I was. I can’t even be bothered to open Twitter in the downtime I get that I usually associate with its usage anymore, and I was never much of an Instagram person in the first place, so that’s just relegated to interesting drinks as and when I come across them. Tumblr, pffffffuhgeddabahdit.

With the completion of the video and the accumulation of posts on the blog, a sense of creative fulfilment has slowly begun to re-enter my life. If you’re reading this, there’s an extremely high chance I know you personally, and you had some hand in helping me get all this done. I can’t thank you enough for your love, patience, support and knowledge. I can’t explain how important this is to me, because it has been a long fight with myself and my circumstances to do even this much, but I’m feeling optimistic and looking forward to what else may be here by this time next year. A lot of Slay the Spire knock-offs, I’m guessing!

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Stop, Blog and Roll

With every passing year, you could say starting a blog becomes exponentially more futile. However,  this is late 2022. Twitter feels increasingly like a death cult chanting about its own demise until it finally comes about, and with Meta spending irresponsible sums on glorified Zoom calls that take ten times more effort at incalculably more expense, who knows how much longer Meta will be about. Gradually, we are wandering back out into the wild, exploring alternatives like Cohost and returning to long-abandoned haunts like Tumblr. Me, I’m hoping this might be a good time for people, me included, to get back into non-microblogging. Macroblogging? — ah no… just blogging.

Well that’s OK, I thought. I’m sure blog-making sites are probably pretty good by now, I’ve dabbled in the past. I got a WordPress account going again. For fun, I thought I’d whack in a blogroll as a sidebar, as you do. I could not. The easy widget functionality to add such a thing is just straight-up gone. I’ve just spent an hour and can’t do it, and the infinite and immediate gratification of social media is still right there, that’s not good. I’m in danger of having my goldfish attention span and willpower gone before I’ve even made a post worth reading.

Blogrolls were great. Half the stuff I ever found online worth sticking with as a teenager were found hopping from one blogroll to another. Found a bunch of great writers, retrospectives, webcomics, and album fileshares without even really trying, and it felt like a much more social and organic means of finding new stuff without the clumsy, ever-felt hand of the algorithm driving things to you, and by the way here’s an inscrutable foreign mobile game you ought to try and seeing as you’re worried about your hair lately, try some of this VPN—

In themselves, blogrolls were the spiritual successor to webrings, and also served a similar function as a nice hat-tip to blog authors you respected. There was also a sense that your posts could well be part of someone else’s breadcrumb journey of random blog-hopping. Blogrolls were like a bookmark bar that you shared with others; you were more likely to stay on top of them more regularly than passively clicking a ‘follow’ or ‘subscribe’ button (themselves now transparently nothing more than engagement measurement tools, now that you also have to click a bell or whatever nonsense to even get them to function like how they are named). Now that you yourself were wearing a link to something like a band patch, you had a tiny stake in keeping current with it, making sure it was still great or even just updating, because someone may associate it as being something that you endorsed, or was at least in your sphere of interests.

Anyway, blogrolls: no match for recommendations made on the back of trillions of gathered impressions – but then again I’m a human being, not an advertiser. The thought that I’m nostalgically romanticising a very small part of my early internet experience isn’t lost on me. If only I could get one going again just to make sure.

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Bagsy

This is a start – taking the cellophane off a new TV, so to speak. More to follow.