For a while now, I've been doing "lore trains" in FFXIV. For context: the game has, as one of its massive number of systems, "The Hunt". There are big monsters out in the field, too strong for one person to take down, with some special rewards if you happen to get folks together to defeat them. There are the B-rank ones that are actually really easy, A-rank ones that just show back up after a while, and then there are S-rank ones that can only show up once every few days and only if you do some obnoxious crap like trick one enemy into eating three other enemies and then trying to eat you and that's not a gag or exaggeration that's how you spawn Gunitt.
A-ranks are the sweet spot: there's 12 for each expansion, they spawn reliably, and except for the really old ones, it's best to get a gang together to fight them. So folks do: they'll go around, figure out where all 12 are, then call a "hunt train". Bunch of people show up, knock 'em all out, everyone gets rewards, hoorahs all around. You get a lot of the same folks doing them over and over, and a culture forms, and someone far more clever than I could probably do an insightful read on that phenomenon. So, just like in any other sort of social construct, there are popular folks and reputations and all that, and if you want to stand out, you gotta do something different.
Hence, "lore trains". The game has its own in-universe lore for the hunt marks, but I wanted to go one step further. So while folks are in Lakeland smacking around Nuckelavee, I'm in the chat telling them about its origins in the Orkney Islands and how the in-game monster both does and doesn't reflect the demon of myth. I did research, y'all. And by "research" I mean I pulled up a Wikipedia page
But hey, people like it, and now I have a reputation as "the gal that does lore trains". Neat! But now I'm "the gal that does lore trains". Suddenly I feel guilty if I don't drop the lore in chat, even if it's the same stuff I've used two dozen times before. I feel like I have to keep updating and outdoing myself, since so many of the same folks come on the same trains, and you don't wanna bore them, y'know? It's the classic problem for people who make things and get an audience, you simply have to keep making the thing, else you lose the audience.
Only now, five paragraphs in, do I get to what I initially thought of writing about. (Blogging is back, baby!) See, if I'm gonna be putting out more text stuff across ye olde interwebs, then maybe there's a home for all that "here's what this thing in this game represents" digging I've done. That's what @KarnakAcademy is meant to be, but you'll notice it's empty. Why? Well, for one, I don't have the forcing function of a hunt train that prompts me for what to look at, and the game's macro system to constrain my write-ups, forcing me into something compact. Constraint breeds creativity, and with no constraint I don't know where to start. But two: even if I work a way around all that... now I've got another project. Putting all that stuff here, or even in a Mastodon bot or something more automatic, doesn't change the presence of the audience equation. It's still a thing to maintain. I'm barely moving on Vapormage, can I really put in the effort that a second project would need to gain its own traction?
The answer to that is probably "yes, if you stop being such a goddamned perfectionist", but HOO DOGGIE is that a whole other kettle of fish