Big Life Update/Big Complaint Post

I should probably open this up with an apology for all of my radio silence on here. Not just in the last couple of months, but for the last couple of years. I keep doing this thing where I post something, disappear for a lengthy period of time, then post something again, repeat. Sometimes I might do a post where I say, "I am going to post more," and then I don't. Might be a good time to explain why I'm being like this.

I admit that I finally gave in to despair and negativity. There's just so much of it floating around these days, moreso than any other time in my life. That's not even getting into global events that change from week to week, all terrible, all things that nobody with a heart actually likes or supports that I try not to talk about because I'm not interested in fear mongering and also the last time I tried to use what little influence I had to help the world, a lot of boot-licking libertarians who pretend to be Communist for Twitter likes and clicks on their Aftermath articles told the world for ten fucking years that I'm evil and should die in hell for having the double whammy of Pronouns In Bio and Autism, so now I just write about old pop culture because nobody can hurt me while I watch an episode of Inuyasha uploaded by somebody who included commercials for Sears Air Conditioning and Pokemon The First Movie after the mid-episode eyecatch, or load up a Playstation ROM and play it with a CRT filter turned on.

I sat back and did nothing while terrible people erased me and my friends from history, as if we never existed or ever mattered. Having one of the worst years of my life constantly relitigated forever by shameless grifters at Kotaku does not feel good! Let me just say this: I had to deal with Gamergate bullshit when I was 28. I will be turning 40 this year. Let me move on with my life. Some hack writer at the worst gaming website decided to get into a kayfabe battle with Mark Kern, a man who lost all relevance in 2016 before he got the HD remaster treatment two years ago, and rewrote the history of Gamergate to exclude every single trans person affected by it. All the death threats we had to deal with, the doxxing, having to literally talk people down from a ledge, it means nothing. May as well have never happened. That shit really fucked me up for a while. You go through a hardship, and you go through it with the hope that it sucks now, but it will be worth it when it's over. And it's not. Ten years of my life rendered meaningless, me and everybody else rendered irrelevant almost immediately. I'll admit that I have felt real fucking bitter about that. I already knew that games journalism was full of the worst boot-licking libertarian assholes that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, and now I just hate them even more! Good job, everyone! Maybe we aren't the ones that need to "have some dignity."

Felt like writing and posting on here didn't matter, because it seemed like trying to find a deep understanding of a great medium like games was overshadowed by shallow bullshit like HEY EVERYONE GUESS WHAT RACIST SHIT ASMONGOLD SAID TODAY ISN'T IT FUCKED UP!? or HITLER_GUY_420 WITH 15 FOLLOWERS CALLED FOR THE DEATH OF AN ENTIRE RACE FUCKING LOOK AT IT. Some asshole who pays for Twitter giving people a cheap dopamine hit to laugh at or be offended by someone with reprehensible views that probably wouldn't be nearly as popular if they weren't being platformed and broadcasted every five fucking minutes.

For all these years, my whole thing has been writing about the power of games as a medium. How they are not, no matter what Ian Bogost told you in a racist Bluesky thread, meaningless children's toys designed to occupy the time of the mentally impaired. How they have meaning. How they have a point. How they have power to bring people together in a way that other mediums cannot. Actually giving some fucking thought to what I'm playing. Doesn't matter if it's a so-called "basic" shooting game, a densely-packed RPG full of political intrigue, or extrapolating the possible disability of a Silent Hill protagonist, it means something, and here is what that means to me. My confidence was already through the floor because of the whole erasure of my life, plus a much bigger thing that I will get to later, and now I just didn't feel like writing. Not that I'm doing all this because I'm treating it like a popularity contest, but it does suck that you put in time and work, and people seem to care more with obssessing over some racist asshole, turning them into some "lolcow." Then proceeding to completely ignore all of their racism because it turns out that, oh my god, they like foot porn, too! Not someone having a sexual kink! That's so much worse than wanting to enact a white ethnostate!

This constant broadcasting of hate. The proliferation of AI. The closures, takedowns, and censorship of what remains of a free internet. I don't use the internet as an escape, but I do use it because I need to take my mind off of certain things, and there aren't any spaces in my local area where I can hang out; no arcades or anime clubs that don't require me to go nearly an hour out of my way on some of the worst roads in the state, so I spend a lot of time on the 'net to try and take some stress out of my offline life.

So why do I need to take my mind off of things? Long time readers will remember that at the end of 2023, my mother had a stroke, which left her permanently disabled, and I've been acting as her caretaker ever since. Last Summer, her health got worse. First, she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, something that has left her with severe physical pain that comes and goes. Having to literally carry her out of her bed because she was in so much agony that she couldn't move, her screams of pain and worried cries that she might be paralyzed ringing in my ears are a memory that will most likely stay with me for the rest of my life. That period of time where I couldn't hit a bump in the road while driving in case it caused her pain in her neck. Helping her use a walker so she go back and forth to the bathroom. A terrifying, stressful time, to say the least.

While she has been taking medication that has drastically improved that situation, doctors diagnosed her with something else while doing more check ups: cancer. I rang in my 39th birthday and ended 2025 with the knowledge that my mom has cancer. She got another biopsy a few weeks ago that came up negative, which is good, but she still has some stuff in her that needs to be taken out. It not being emergency is either a sign that maybe things aren't that bad, or she's so far gone that doctors are going to take their time with her. Who knows? I never had much family to begin with, and as time goes on, I have less and less, and eventually I won't have any. Wasn't really expecting it to possibly be so soon.

So now we're here in March of 2026, and I'm tired. Tired of all the damn bullshit, and tired of feeling too sad and depressed to do things. I exist, I matter, and the things I make have had an impact on other peoples' lives, even if that impact is a small one. I refuse to be erased, I refuse to have my struggles rendered meaningless, and I refuse to let this second home of mine go to waste any longer. Can't guarantee that I'll go back to the weekly update schedule that I had from 2019-2022, but I'll fucking try, dudes.

Anyways, I'm going to end this post with more feet, because fuck you, I pay for this site and I can post whatever I want on it: