This is my 1,000th daily post on this blog

Well, there we are. 1,000 days of non-stop daily blogging. I am the best, I win, etc. Sorry this post is so late, but once you’ve read it you’ll hopefully appreciate that it took a bit of time to put together. I felt I should make the effort, you know. Special occasion and all that.

Of course, I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to reach a thousand days — as I mentioned a few days back, Mr Ian Dransfield got there first due to… well, starting before me. I joined the initial #oneaday crowd a little late, on January 19, 2010, whereas the people who actually started the whole thing off began closer to New Year’s Day. As I noted in that post I just linked to, however, I am officially the Last Man Standing and I don’t mind admitting that I feel more than a little proud of that fact. Through thick and thin, I’ve stuck by this self-imposed project with no end and no goal, and I have enjoyed the experience immensely.

And, more importantly, I plan to continue enjoying it from this point onwards. Post number 1,000 — that’s this one — is most certainly not a fond farewell and a hanging up of the… whatever implement best exemplifies blogging. (My computer keyboard, I guess.) No; it’s a significant milestone, for sure, but I see no reason to stop. There are plenty of things to write about. And while they may not always be the most interesting or universally appealing, as I’ve noted on this blog a number of times before, the original intention of #oneaday was not to be interesting or universally appealing. It was simply a kick up the bum to get those of us who enjoyed writing to do more writing. Writing for ourselves, rather than for someone else. Writing without limits, without the necessity of sticking to a style (though those of us in it for the long haul naturally developed our own personal styles), without word counts, without anyone deciding whether or not the thing we were writing about was worth writing about. And, of course writing without editing.

Yes, these are the pure, unexpurgated contents of my brain you’re reading every day. Unfiltered, uncensored, completely truthful. (Well, okay, regarding the latter, I might omit to mention a few things, but that’s not exactly the same as lying.) A couple of people have commented to me over the course of the past thousand days that they’re impressed by my ability to just lay my soul bare on the page like that, to confess to things that others might find difficult to talk about. For me, though, it’s actually something of a relief to be able to talk about a lot of these things, be it my depression and social anxiety or my enjoyment of visual novels that, in many cases, have bonking in them. This blog has been a good “friend”, as it were, providing me with a place to empty my brain of all the thoughts that have been floating around with it over the course of each day, and in the process I have made a few actual friends who have either related to the things I’ve written or just found them interesting. Which is, you know, nice.

More after the jump — it’s a long one. (That’s what she said, etc.)

Continue reading “This is my 1,000th daily post on this blog” →

#oneaday Day 895: Clip Show, Part 2

That’s right. Not only am I doing my own personal “clip show” (which actually proved a surprising amount of effort to compile yesterday), I am also making it a two-parter. Oh yes. Today’s look back looks at some posts from my first forays into daily posting and beyond.

For the uninitiated, the whole One A Day thing came about towards the beginning of 2010. A number of writers from diverse corners of the Internet decided to try their hand at posting something on their blog every single day. I came to the whole thing a little late — my first post was on January 19 — but have kept it up ever since, which, it has to be said, is more than can be said for the vast majority of participants in the 2010 experiment. (The only other one I’m aware of who is still going is Play Magazine’s Ian Dransfield, who remains consistently ahead of me in terms of “number of posts”, though has resorted to the “miss a few days and catch up later” strategy a few times.)

Anyhow, the guiding principle of One A Day was very simple: just write. No rules, no minimum length, no set topics, just write. For you. If other people happened to enjoy it, so much the better, but it was primarily an exercise in churning out content on a regular basis and keeping those “writing muscles” well and truly exercised.

It’s been an interesting experiment for me, as the things I’ve talked about on here have grown and changed over time according to my life situation and my own mental state. In the early days, for example, I was very much of the opinion that my career in the teaching profession was probably going to kill me, but I was also excited by the fact that I was going to escape my (temporary) position in time to go to PAX East. PAX East, as it turned out, was an amazing experience and remains, to this day, my Favourite Thing I’ve Ever Done.

It was around this time that I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. I’d left my job and didn’t have anything else to go to, and I was (foolishly, as it turned out) hoping that I’d be able to support myself with freelance writing and private music teaching. I got a bit of income coming in thanks to the fine folks at Kombo.com (most of whom I now count among my most beloved online friends) but that, unfortunately, didn’t last forever.

Neither, to use a hideous segue that I don’t particularly like thinking about, did my marriage. I was an absolute fucking wreck as a result of the events which came to a head in May of 2010, though in retrospect it helped me produce some fine, emotional work such as — bear with me — this rather personal ode to a bacon sandwich. It also encouraged me to unscrew my head and put it on a different way just to try and stop myself thinking about Bad Things. Or just to get really, really pissed and then take stock of the disastrous attempts at texting and social media I’d made while inebriated. Let’s do itcagsin sometime.

Fortunately, I had Stick-Pete to keep my mind off things. (His first appearance was here.) Stick-Pete was a conscious decision to try and give my blog a distinctive aesthetic, and I make no secret of the fact that my decision to incorporate poorly-drawn visuals rather than the stock photography I’d been using previously was entirely due to my discovery of Allie Brosh’s rather wonderful blog Hyperbole and a Half, which I extolled the virtues of here. I was initially worried that people might think I was ripping off Brosh’s work, but I developed my own distinctive look over time which has, itself, changed and adapted as time goes on.

Stick-Pete and a series of characters I plucked out of my imagination seemingly at random were excellent ways to clumsily illustrate the things I was writing about, and a number of posts were designed with illustration in mind, such as this guide on How To Laugh on the Internet. Certain characters were, I noticed, making appearances more regularly than others, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to start drawing a comic to illustrate my posts. Here’s the first post in which that appeared. I kept that up for a surprisingly long time, though eventually guilt at not being able to post if I went away for a weekend (my comic-making tools of choice were on my non-portable Mac) got the better of me and I eventually stopped. Now I just feel guilty that Alex, Lucy and Phillipe aren’t getting regular outings and opportunities to insult me, so it’s entirely possible they may return at some point in the near future. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this post from the start of 2011 helpfully reintroduced them all.)

As time went on, the years passed and my life situation started to gradually improve once again, so I tried a couple of things, some of which you’ll find linked to in the sidebar. Wasteland Diaries was a 30-day “improvised narrative” experiment, for example, in which I attempted to write a coherent(ish) story over the course of a month, similar to what those NaNoWriMo people do. (I had wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo for a while, but various circumstances had always made it impractical. This was my less-structured, less-disciplined approach — but I saw it through.)

I also cemented my view that writing on this ‘ere blog was a good personal outlet. Obviously I don’t mean that in the sense that I use it to badmouth people (I don’t! You can look back and check!) but rather that it was a good place to get things out of my head and onto “paper” — things that other people might feel somehow “ashamed” to talk about. One such subject was the visual novel Katawa Shoujo which is, for those of you who don’t know, a rather wonderful interactive love story set in a Japanese school for the disabled. It was a fascinating, well-written game worthy of some deep analysis and criticism, so not only did the Squadron of Shame take it on for a lengthy podcast, but I also felt inspired to write about it a great deal. It touched me deeply, and the subjects explored therein resonated hugely with me. I’m not disabled, but a lot of the underlying themes in the game’s various narrative branches were actually nothing to do with the characters’ disabilities, and really got me thinking.

As you can see, I’ve been busy. And somehow there’s been something to write about every day, even if it hasn’t been very interesting. (For that I make no apologies. Although I seem to have picked up a small but dedicated readership over time, I’m still writing this primarily for my own benefit.) There’s plenty more interesting times in the future — good and bad, no doubt — so I’ll look forward to sharing them (or avoiding thinking about them) via this page for a long time to come yet, I hope.

Now, to just resist the temptation not to post tomorrow and make everyone believe I’m dead…

Hah. Just kidding. Writing this blog is so entrenched in my daily routine now that I’m not convinced I could give it up, even if I wanted to. So like it or not, you’re stuck with me. (And thanks for sticking around this long. Incidentally, if you want some more links to past material, here’s another “clip show”-type post. Enjoy.)

#oneaday Day 894: Clip Show

Clip episodes are TV shows’ way of making a low-budget episode and not having to worry about being the slightest bit creative.

After 893 previous daily blog posts and having just been on my Couch to 5K run for the evening, I’m knackered and can’t think of much to write about, so I’m going to do my very own clip show. In the process, I will highlight some posts from the past that you may have missed. There are likely to be a lot of these, as this blog currently has 953 posts on it (893 of which are, as previously mentioned, posted at daily intervals) so you would be forgiven for having not seen some of them in the past. (If, on the other hand, you have seen each and every one of these posts because you’re good enough to read them daily, first of all, God bless you, and second of all… uh… thanks.)

I started blogging on this site back in July of 2008. I’d tried keeping a blog on a couple of other sites in the past — here’s one from 2005 (composed almost entirely on a Nokia N-Gage, believe it or not) and here’s another from the year prior on the subject of my experiences as a secondary school teacher. (The latter was a spinoff from a series of emails I used to send family and friends while I was training to be a teacher.) I did used to have a self-hosted blog on my own personal domain, too, but that is long since defunct. This ol’ WordPress site here is probably my most long-standing web presence that is still actually updated. Which is nice.

Prior to starting posting things daily… well, things were pretty much the same as they are now. I’d post on a range of topics from video game-related business to board games, the death of a beloved family pet and even trying my hand at music review blogging. (The linked post there actually led to me being specifically invited along to another band’s performance a short while later — the “review” in question is here.)

I’ve spent some time in curious virtual world Second Life over the years, and in February of 2009 I wrote a couple of posts on the subject — firstly, on the subject of virtual worlds in general, and secondly on the subject of how your on-screen persona can affect your own self-perception. You’ll doubtless notice some parallels with my recent post on why I play as women in video games. I still find Second Life fascinating, sleazy elements and all, though I haven’t paid it a visit for a very long time. Some of the people in that crazy world provided great comfort to me in lonely periods and just writing this is making me feel a bit bad that, to them, I must have just upped and vanished one day. Perhaps I’ll return sometime — though whether it’s as my male “real me” or female “total escapism” avatar I couldn’t say! I certainly used to enjoy the whole “CG artwork” aspect of it, where I’d take pictures of things in the virtual world and then mangle them beyond recognition in Photoshop. (A great way to learn how to do crazy things in Photoshop, incidentally.)

In April of 2009, I revisited a game I used to play on the Atari 8-bit: Alternate Reality: The City. When I originally played it, I had no idea what a role-playing game was or what I was supposed to be doing. In 2009, I was armed with The Internet and a map I’d printed out, so was much better-equipped to go on some adventures. This post chronicled one character’s ill-fated expedition into the cheerily-named city of Xebec’s Demise, and I like to think it gives the reader a good feel for what this unusual game is all about.

A month later, I remembered that the “pictorial story” idea I’d done with Alternate Reality was rather fun (if time-consuming), and decided to give it another shot, this time with The Sims 3. Remembering my previous post on evil in games, I figured it would be interesting to see how messed-up it was possible to make a Sim. Very, as it happens; the many and varied mundane adventures of Lars the Bastard will attest to this fact.

You may remember the spammers’ craze for sending bizarre narrative emails with unsubtly-embedded pornographic exhortations within from around September 2009. I took it upon myself to compile some of them and see if anything coherent came out. Nothing did, as you can see.

In December of 2009, I discovered Warhammer Quest. I also discovered the joy of writing down the emergent narrative which comes about during a game session of a theme-heavy board game such as Warhammer Quest. The result of this initial experiment was The Adventures of Count Kurt von Hellstrom and Company, a saga which hopefully will continue someday — though I haven’t had the chance to play Warhammer Quest since writing that post, I don’t think.

And in January of 2010, I started posting entries daily. But that’s another story. And I’ll compile a selection of my favourite One A Day posts for tomorrow’s entry. I bet you can’t wait.

#oneaday, Day 300!

Other people may have made it to this milestone before me, but here I am: day 300. I am going to resist any “This Is Sparta”-type quotes here, largely because I haven’t seen 300 and also because that whole meme is kind of played out, really.

So, here we are. This day arrived with little in the way of fanfare and, in fact, a bunch of tweets and posts ranting about things which happened to other people. But I think today of all days I’ve earned the right to be a bit selfish, to say things about me. So that’s what I’m going to do.

This is very much the home stretch now, of course, with just 65 days remaining until I’ve completed a full year of non-stop blogging. Well, not non-stop, but daily. You know what I mean.

It’s been one hell of a journey, as those who have been following from the start (and prior to that) will be able to attest. And it’s not, naturally, the course I would have chosen this year to take had I the opportunity to decide my own destiny on a moment-to-moment basis. But, unfortunately, sometimes the consequences of the things you do and the choices you make aren’t immediately apparent, and it’s not until months or years later that you realise you were heading down one road when you thought you were heading down another. A big step in life’s journey is accepting that sometimes things don’t go the way you expect them to, and thus you will have to learn to deal with them, for better or worse. Most of the time, you do have choices, although they might not be clear at the time. And, decisions to murder, rape and pillage notwithstanding, there are no “wrong” choices per se, so long as you’re just willing to deal with the knock-on effects that your choices have.

Back on January 19 of this year, I made the decision to take on the #oneaday challenge. It’s a decision I’m glad I took, as it’s a habitual process now; it’s something I enjoy doing every day and if nothing else, it’ll provide an interesting record of a particularly difficult year in my life. It got me to thinking, though; does every year contain as many “events” as this one has? In my 29-and-a-bit years on this planet, is every year so filled with things that are “interesting” and affecting? Quite possibly; it’s just that most of the time, things happen, they pass by and you forget about them. And making a note of them may make some things seem bigger than they actually are. But on the flip-side, looking back at things that happened with the benefit of hindsight can make you feel better about them.

I’m not saying this is how I’d have chosen 2010 to go for myself. If I had completely free choice, I’d have won the lottery, bought an exciting car, be living in a nice (but not excessive house) with at least one cat and maybe be doing a bit of freelancing. Or possibly I might have invented faster-than-light travel and gone into space. I couldn’t say. I didn’t have completely free choice, sadly.

But here I am, 300 days later, and I’m at a stage where I can look back in a contemplative manner, stroke my beard and go “Hmm”. This is a better state to be in than I have been in the past. So here’s hoping that over the next 65 days that things only continue to get better.

And to all of you who have been following this blog, however long you’ve been reading it for, thanks for coming along for the ride. Your thoughts, comments and support have been very much appreciated. Here’s to that final push.