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it’s all stupid! it’s all cringe!

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ambercxc
@ambercxc

(i definitely missed a few days and i stopped when el*n took over, so idk the exact count)

(also, a warning: this post is long, though it does read pretty quick since a lot of it is just screenshots of tweets. it's a bit under 600 words, not including the tweets.)

so i had been tweeting "good morning gamers" pretty frequently in 2020 and almost every day in 2021, often with some minor variations like "good mondaying gamers" or with a different emoji after it, stuff like that. in june 2021 i had my first extended series of them that i'm still genuinely very proud of:

ten tweets of the entire fast and furious franchise list, including hobbs and shaw, except "fast" is replaced with "good morning" and "furious" with "gamers." this includes titles like "good morning five" and "GM9: the good morning saga"

then in 2022, i decided to tweet it every day with no exact repeats. i committed to the bit.

tweet says i always end up missing days but i would like to try and tweet some variation of "good morning gamers" every day this year if i can

it started out similarly to how the previous year's good morning gamers tweets had been: very very minor variations to my already-existing formula. then it started to get a bit more elaborate pretty quickly.

tweet says good morning gamers 10 hour version with rain, fireplace sounds tweet says pleasant dawn, players tweet says good horning i mean horning i mean horning i mean horning i mean morning, gamers i don't know how to sum this one up for screen readers i'm sorry i don't know how to sum this one up for screen readers either

for a long time i enjoyed making these "gmgs," as we started calling them. i was having a lot of fun! i decided i wasn't going to schedule them, i wasn't going to save any drafts, i was just going to make a new gmg as i thought of it. every morning. sometimes i'd use an image generator, sometimes i'd edit an image myself, sometimes i just had a really clever idea and the text post landed.

picture of mewtwo saying "i see now that the circumstances of one's afternoon is irrelevant - it is what you do with the gift of a good morning that determines the gamer you are" edited image of jane lynch saying "i am going to create an environment that is so toxic" but it says "gamers are going to have a morning that is so good" instead the disco elysium logo except is says good morning gamers

here's the thing though: 365 is a big number. doing something every day for a year can become an automatic activity, but it is quite a bit more difficult when it requires creative effort, and it's even worse when that creative effort is rewarded by likes and notifications. suddenly every gmg needed to be "good enough" and i started to feel worse when i posted ones i already knew were low quality. but i was running out of ideas. i was hitting a creative brick wall.

i started having a pretty unhealthy relationship with my gmgs. the image posts did better numbers but took longer to make, so after like a week without one my brain would start nagging me to do it again even if i was completely out of ideas. when i tweeted one that was low effort it was because i spent 10, 15, 20 minutes thinking with nothing to show for it. by october i was deleting gmgs immediately after posting them if i didn't think it was good enough, gmgs that would have been completely fine in january or february.

tweet says good morning gamers, please ignore the now deleted tweet that was just a shakespeare quote absolutely butchered for the sake of a bad gmg

i know people liked them a lot but they were taking a serious toll on my mental health. i'm sorry to the people who looked forward to waking up and seeing them. multiple people said it's a highlight of their morning in the replies over the last year. but i'm done, i just can't do it. i made one final gmg when i joined cohost:

copost says good morning gamers! i'm finally free

and i really meant it. i'm on socials a lot less now, i'm getting my mornings started better now, i feel like more of a fuckin person because i don't have to think about a funny gmg for 10+ minutes each morning. cohost is definitely a big reason why that is but another big reason is finally just being done with a bit that i overcommitted to.

so i guess consider this a cautionary tale. don't feed on internet numbers. if you're committing to a bit, make sure you can be healthy about it. that's all.

before i go, one more to share:

tweet says good morning gamers i have a vagina now

hope you enjoyed reading this retrospective. consider sharing it if you did!


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