Making Some Changes

The month of May was challenging. Actually, this first half of 2024 has been a whirlwind.  Last month though, I spent the majority of it in bed from a pretty tough illness. What started as just a cough, very quickly ended in pneumonia. It was the first time in my memory (I had pneumonia when I was an infant but don’t remember that) that I thought I was going to end up in the hospital.

I didn’t even feel that way when I had Covid. 

It was a scary thing to go through and I am just now starting to finally feel like myself again. I have more energy and I can sit down and write this blog post.  Everyone in my family got pretty sick.

My boys also got sick - and probably due to their age - it wasn’t as bad as everyone else. To be fair, my oldest still struggles with a consistent cough at night time.  He’s getting better though.

With this time away, I have had time to think about a lot of things. I am thinking about this blog and where I want to take it. 

Honestly, I don’t want to take it much further than it is now. Years ago, when I started blogging, I wanted to fulfill a writing career that never really materialized for me. There are several reasons for that but with blogging, I found myself writing for various blogging groups and trying to please advertisers that I lost my passion for it (not to mention some of the asinine drama and attempted bullying in some of the blogging groups - FROM ADULTS).

So this blog was purely as a hobby for me to express some of my writing creativity. My short stories get the least amount of attention so I stopped sharing those. Now, it’s mostly about gaming but even that has slowed for me.

The reason for that has nothing to do with gaming. It has more to do with losing the will to write. 

As I said, this year has taken its toll. I knew 2024 was going to be challenging but the twists and turns that the year has given were more than I was expecting.

But that’s life, isn’t it?  Life never gives you what you expect. It’s always about the things you don’t see coming.

So going forward, I will probably only make one or two blog posts a month. One of gaming and one of whatever else pops into my head at the time.  I have needed to take a step back and not just from blogging. I have needed to step back from most of my social media presence. 

Twitter - or X as it is now called, though I will never call it that - is a cesspool of toxicity even in what should be the most tame of topics. It seems that everyone on that platform only goes there to bitch and complain And Gatekeep about EVERYTHING at any given moment about any given topic.

On Twitter, I can’t scroll for more than 5 seconds without some asshole posting some bullshit about how Astarion Ascended (BG3) is the worst choice and anyone who chooses that is a horrible person (The Gatekeeping is horrendous) - or watching cat videos and seeing some douchebag in the comments getting offended by the video for some lame ass reason.

So I turned off my notifications and have been considering deleting the app. If it wasn’t for Twitter being one of the only ways I get some gaming news directly from devs, it would have been gone by now.

I have also taken a step back from Twitch and YouTube. Before I got sick, I would stress about not streaming or not posting a video by the deadline I gave myself.  I still do that to an extent but I have started to think about the level of stress I should take on with two platforms that I only use as a hobby for expressing my creativity.

I do love making the content that I make but I am still unsure how far I really want to take them. I just don’t view them as money-making avenues at this point. Yet, every now and then I will get - mostly on YouTube - “Oh you’re almost as 1000 subs!” or “You should consider monetizing your channel now”. 

They don’t seem to comprehend that I don’t do this for money. Yes, I know a lot of YouTubers are doing it for money but not all of us are.

I had considered possibly making a Patreon account. I can put more content on there than I can't on YouTube due to their very strict rules. 

But then, I think: what would I even put there, and who the hell would even pay for it when I put most of my stuff on YouTube anyway?  I see all these YouTubers advertising their Patreon but I don’t pay for any of their content over there. Why should I when I can watch whatever they put on YouTube?

So if I’m not willing to pay to watch content, why would I expect others to do the same?  

So, at least for now, I have decided not to do that. It just doesn’t make much sense to me. I will continue to do what I do but I will do less of it.  I need to take more time for myself and my family rather than worry about the online world.

Like they say, go touch some grass.

That’s exactly what I plan to do.

Thanks so much for reading!