cider

I might have made one of these before but I think we didn't have pinned posts or whatever yet, and I also have a poor memory and no idea how to search back posts.

Hello, I'm Nico/Apple/Cider (I answer to any of these), and I'm a freelance media critic and sometimes-game journalist. My day job is shrouded in mystery as it is a very boring office type job in an industry I am not in, and has no bearing on my online life.

This is my main blog and I also run framerate which is my cinema blog full of my favorite film shots, film criticism from other users on the site that I curated or other film-related stuff I find amusing or thought-provoking.

I also have %sexuality, %gender (woman-adjacent, woman+), and have ADHD.

My passions in life:

• Overwatch
• Fromsoft games
• Thinking Fromsoft has a problem with writing women
• Thinking Blizzard has a problem with writing women
• Cooking
• Films, TV shows and other artistic mediums
• Food photography, architecture, and watching dudes woodwork or clean driveways on Youtube

Feel free to follow me for actual thoughts, writing, or actually just shitposting.

I think one of the places where I feel like my neurodivergency (oooh, I'm using that word) really flares up is when I write criticism publicly that goes out to a wide audience, that is to say for publication. I can say whatever I want on Twitter and it pretty much goes, but when I structure it all and research and get it through editing passes and people read it and go completely bugfuck about it is when I just have the hardest time understanding why people react like that.

I have been battling the presumption from people that criticism is negativity, or a desire to tear something apart when a lot of times it comes from a very deep place of passion, that I am often comfortable really pulling apart something I really like, or that I like media enough to want to make this my intellectual pursuit in life. I know that everyone here knows this, people reading me on a blogging site clearly are fans of my work, friends, other critics or writers, media people. But it's just a really hard thing to grapple with because underneath the tiredness I feel, have felt for 10+ years now, is a much more emotional reaction which is just feeling hurt.

It's really hard when I get excited about knowing things, and talking about things, and that excitement gets put into really thinking deeply about why something works or doesn't, and people feel like ascribing a lack of care to me. It feels almost as bad as someone squashing my enthusiasm in general when I express it, which feels like a stupidly common experience for those of us who have special interests.

Battling with that experience is the experience of thinking deeply about something and really trying to know what I am talking about, constructing a stable argument for why I believe things are that way, and having someone treat me like I'm stupid, but that's a conversation for another day.