#oneaday Day 481: Gratitude

I feel I haven't mentioned lately how grateful I am for all of you who have made the choice to support me and my work here on Patreon.

I know for most people on the Internet, committing to even a dollar a month for the sake of someone else is a lot to ask, particularly in a world where the widespread belief is that most things — if not everything — should be free. And so I'm continually touched by the fact that there are a bunch of you kind enough to slip me varying amounts of your hard-earned each and every month.

MoeGamer and Atari A to Z aren't my job. I'd love it if they were, but they're not. However, that doesn't mean I don't take them seriously. When I "rebooted" MoeGamer back in March of 2016, I made a commitment to myself: to produce something that I would be proud to call my own, and which would be something a bit different from the million and one other "me too" (not that kind of Me Too) gaming sites out there.

And I'm not talking about the big commercial sites, either — though a lot of them have become practically indistinguishable from one another over the years. No; I'm talking about the small-scale operations run by people who wish they were working for IGN or Gamespot or whoever — the sites churning out news article after news article day after day in an attempt to attract those who, for one reason or another, fell out with the big names of the biz.

I've done the daily news cycle. It's fun and it's always changing, but it has little in the way of lasting value. Something I wrote one day and was particularly pleased with would be pushed off the front page by the next, likely never to be seen again. Reviews and features tend to have something of a longer tail — they're the things that tend to come up in Google search results when you're looking for something — but can still easily be lost.

That's why I decided to do what I do now with both MoeGamer and Atari A to Z: to write and produce videos that can be enjoyed any time. I make a deliberate attempt to "date" my articles as little as possible — where it's unavoidable for context's sake, the little phrase "at the time of writing/recording" is a godsend — in the hope that people will stop by maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years from now, and find something that they find interesting.

I don't focus a lot of viewing figures, but I do keep an eye on them every so often. And it always pleases me to see the disparity between the number of specific visitors and the number of page views: it suggests to me that people stopping by for a visit are sticking around and looking at other things. That's super-cool, particularly as I do a lot of things in multiple parts.

At the time of writing (see) there are 1,463 posts on MoeGamer, 412 of which are videos, 226 of which are Atari A to Z videos.

Each and every one of them is something that I'm glad I've shared with the world, because they've allowed me to express my feelings about the things that are important to me — not something that always comes easily to one On The (non-ZX) Spectrum — as well as provide what is hopefully some helpful, interesting or at least entertaining information about a wide variety of games and visual novels, many of which don't get anywhere near the attention or love they deserve.

I'm super-grateful to all of you for supporting me in that. It's become something that's really important to me, and having people who believe in what I do or at the very least want to show some appreciation for my efforts is very welcome.

A sincere thank you, to all of you. And I hope you continue to enjoy what I do.

(Making this post public, as looking over it, these are thoughts I want to share more broadly. Thank you!)