oh whoops i disappeared for like three weeks

Hello everyone. You remember how I said I needed to stop abandoning my web site, only to come back to make posts about sad? Yeah, well, that turned out to be a lie. After what felt like an eternity of build-up, I had me a big old nasty breakdown last week. I was mad. I was frustrated. Frustrated about not being able to get work done. Frustrated that my gamedev stuff has been taking too long, thanks to a combination of knowledge limitations and a massive fear that what I make won't be "good enough." Frustrated that I've been having a hard time even writing about games, struggling to make a compelling argument for why a cool game is cool, and also being worried that it too will not be "good enough." Good enough for who or what? The voice of self doubt in my head! The voice of self doubt that has only grown bigger and bigger over the years, thanks to my life being placed under a microscope that I never asked for!

[video width="888" height="500" mp4="https://www.lonelyfrontier.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/pac.mp4"][/video]

The reason this voice has made such a roaring comeback is something I've mentioned before, but I will reiterate: I deeply, deeply fucking resent all these assholes at places like Kotaku trying to make Gamergate 2.0 an actual thing. The same motherfuckers who loudly proclaimed Gamergate 1.0 to be over and that people should "pay attention to the real issues" coincidentally the millisecond Milo Yiannopolous worked himself into a shoot and started writing hitpieces on a trans woman instead of the rich republican ones he was trading text messages with the whole time, dedicated years of their lives to getting other trans women fired from their jobs and kicked out of their homes for committing the crime of getting more death threats than them, and spent the last few years acting as Jeremy Soule's personal ball lickers, suddenly want the world to grind to a screeching halt because some dope with a stupid name like Captain Dumbfuck called them "woke" in a YouTube video or some shit. Go cry me a river.

Believe it or not, I don't appreciate an event that brought a lot of pain and trauma to me and my friends, leaving me with major trust issues and bouts of paranoia, is being remade just in time for its tenth anniversary by a bunch of cynical fucks who need to make their jobs seem more invaluable amidst all the layoffs. I also hate the fact that for the last seven goddamn months, the only "games writing" anyone seems to care about is an up-to-the-minute update on whatever offensive shit Mark Kern said today. Unless that asshole is holding public office, I do not give a fuck what Mark Kern has said today. He's a D-list hate monger and a fake game developer old enough to get a seniors' discount at the grocery store. Fuck giving him constant attention, and especially fuck threatening to sell his merchandise during Pride Month! PROTIP: if you're so hell-bent on pawning off some shit by a hateful also-ran from 2014, consider selling Mercedes Carrera's porn DVDs instead. People would get a lot more use out of those. Fuck, I haven't used X Dot Com in over a year, and yet I am still unable to avoid being exposed to all this stupid bullshit. Honestly considered embedding Mark's X Dot Com feed into my site's sidebar, just to make a joke/point about how fucking stupid and insulting this all is. Pay attention to the real issues.

This shit really just brought back a lot of bad memories I was really hoping to forget, which pisses me off, and only compounds the feeling that what I do is a Sisyphean task performed in front of a world that is getting increasingly hostile towards art (among many other things, obviously, but this is more immediate and also my wheelhouse). You start to wonder if it's still worth it. Do people actually care? Am I wasting my time with long-form writing instead of being a "podcast" person or a YouTube "essayist" or logging back on to X Dot Com to share obscure facts about the regional differences in the Mega Drive port of Klax to that site's audience of white supremacists with rocks in their heads? You start to feel inadequate, and that sucks. I know that I said that I didn't care about having a large audience, preferring a small audience that will understand and appreciate what I do, and I meant that, I do not wish to be some pseudo-celebrity with a parasocial audience of thousands, but it does sting that I am held in less esteem and respect than like, plagiarists, transphobes, racists, and dudes with allegations. Eventually your dignity has enough and declares that to be bullshit, even if your brain worries about sounding entitled. Like, this isn't a popularity contest, but maybe I should be more popular than some unrepentant predator, you know? It does still hurt a little bit that after all this time, I'm still looked at as the nazi faggot who literally murdered every black writer in the business via psychic attack waves. It's hard to get over, especially when time is a fucking circle and everything that let to this point is happening again. I know that the feelings of inadequacy are all in my head, but this shit doesn't help!

I've been debating on whether or not I should even make this post in the first place. On one hand, I really don't like being negative, since that only contributes to this whole "everything needs to be a conflict" environment that I hate. On the other, if I don't put my thoughts down and say that I'm tired of all this bullshit, it stays in my head and causes me to disappear for another few weeks, so here it is.

Anyways, it's not all doom and gloom and existentialism. In my time trying to recover, I have done at least two things I've been meaning to do, watch more than four episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and get some major headway done on some game stuff. Evangelion? Yeah, that's a fucking classic, and just as good as I had been led to believe this whole time. My game? Well, take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgAuO9hGIs

This may look a little bit different than what I posted last time, and for good reason: I had a realization that instead of making something that looks like an 8-bit computer game, what if I actually made an 8-bit computer game? What you see in that video is being run on an actual ZX Spectrum...emulator. If I get this thing done in a reasonable amount of time (something that actually seems feasible for once), I can finally release a game for this first time in four years, and I can make history as the first American to develop a Spectrum game. If that last bit turns out to not be the case, then I'll make history as the first American to lie and embellish a personal accomplishment. You know, like that time I hooked up with a popular trans pornstar in 2021; getting high and jerking off in a Discord voice call together is totally the same as a hook up.

This is getting long, so I'll wrap it up. I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing about games again, or even writing at all (three weeks feels like five years for me and I have to reacclimate myself). Look forward to something this week!