when you credibly suspect the audience of being hostile, it becomes remarkably difficult to talk about things you like. that feels like exposing a weak point, something to attack. even if i don't think i'll care too much if someone picks on a thing i like... why give them a chance to take the shot in the first place, right?
and this was always hard for me in the first place. i guess the problem is that it's easy to define thresholds for basic quality. so i can criticize things for falling short of some bar, and it feels reasonable in the sense that it is based in reason, and perhaps that's not even entirely incorrect. but to like something is a very squishy concept. i feel like i can't justify it. and for what i'm sure is a big ugly thicket of reasons, if i can't justify what i'm saying, i don't expect anyone to listen to me.
of course this got worse five years ago, when i became acutely aware of a cluster of people glaring over my shoulder at all times for any opportunity to make a fuss about anything i said. i don't feel the constant breath on the back of my neck any more, but it happens just often enough that i can't forget about it. someone is always watching, waiting.
that feeling has been hard to shake, even though it might only be a handful of people at this point. it's not even worry about what they might do, specifically, any more — it's just the feeling of the eyeballs. it's hard to just forget about that sort of thing. i am slightly on edge rather a lot of the time.
like, i've had people sneer that i stopped hrt. i stopped taking a drug, into my own body, and this is bad. why would anyone even care about that, let alone gossip about it? i have no idea. but then, i've also had people blame me for my cat's death from an incurable disease. there are no lines that i can be sure won't be crossed. no matter what i do, someone might use it as an example of how i fail to live up to some standard they've often created for this exact purpose, which then justifies continuing to scrutinize me. it is bananas and nothing will ever make it stop.
this is almost certainly why i stopped doing the tech blogging thing. long-form writing takes a lot of fairly personal energy, and i could not summon up the willpower to spend that energy on... who? i didn't even know. some people. suddenly the loudest voices had become cruel and dedicated ones, and that has a way of drowning out the few folks going "cool post"
(i guess this is long-form writing though)
(and it wasn't entirely that stuff. i was kinda running out of steam in general. the posts were increasingly tending towards being a 101 overview of something i knew about, and it just felt increasingly impersonal, like i was summarizing a page of documentation someone could just as well actually be reading. and tbh i can only do that so many times before i run out of things to 101 about)
i felt it on twitter, too. trump's campaign had already turned it into kind of a hellscape of constant political bombardment, but i feel like at some point i had to used to tweet about things. things that were interesting, things i was doing, i don't know. but at some point it just turned into my being vocal about how the latest bad thing was bad. i kept promising i would talk about something else, but i kept finding i didn't have anything else i wanted to talk about.
something that sticks in my head from ages ago, pre-2018, is (i guess) my last interaction with @cathoderaydude. we had been twitter mutuals for a while, few years maybe, until i realized one day that he had sort of disappeared. turned out he'd blocked me.
i tried to find out why, and it had been over a blog post i'd written about music theory. i was trying to get into composing little ditties for my games, and i'd found music theory (or, more broadly, "the way everyone who knows things about music talks about music") to be largely impenetrable for this purpose. i don't remember what he said exactly but the gist was that i was insufferable and just bitched about everything.
but the post had been titled "music theory for nerds" — because it had finally sort of clicked for me what the fuck everyone was talking about, and i thought that would maybe be helpful for other people in my position.
maybe i was too critical, but i don't think my underlying frustration was unreasonable. i was mostly working with trackers, but everything everywhere that talks about music assumes you have a solid grounding in the sort of stuff that you pick up from playing an instrument. and i'm not trying to do that. so even basic stuff like calling the notes A, A♯, B, C, C♯ etc adds a lot of friction, because i have to keep stopping and thinking about how far apart they are, because i don't have built-up muscle memory for that. i just know playing two notes N steps apart sounds good, so i wish i could just have them numbered, because my background is less in playing piano and more in... modular arithmetic. so my takeaway was that this kind of indirection was very annoying when i just wanted to know what notes go together so i could go try them out and see what happens, and it felt like everything everyone wrote about music was written in a foreign language. often literally.
and sure, whatever, someone didn't like my blog. but this in particular stands out to me because we had seemingly been on good terms, and then he did a complete 180 and was so incredibly bitter about it. (well, and also because y'all keep mentioning him.) and... why? i'd found a thing hard, because that thing wasn't designed for what i was trying to do, and i wished it was less hard, and i was writing about it to try and help make it less hard for other people. i didn't expect anyone to change sheet music. i didn't think everyone who could read sheet music was, i don't know, wrong. and most of my posts were written like this — i hoped readers might come away having learned a thing. that was the whole idea.
it's been so long that i don't even remember any other interaction with him now. this was just so jarring that it floats to the top whenever i'm reminded of him.
the only other thing i remember is that the last time i heard about him before cohost, it was because he'd written a 30-tweet thread complaining about gimp's text tool. (which isn't even, like, catastrophically bad.) i don't understand what the rules are.
and, i don't know. i like to write with a bit of a dramatic flair, because it's funny and entertaining to me, and it seems to be funny and entertaining to at least some number of other people. i don't think of myself as any kind of authority on anything, and i don't ever expect anyone to take a blog post as a serious call to action. but sometimes people read my writing and interpret it like it's a callout post, like i'm definitively stating how the world ought to be and rejecting anyone who doesn't already adhere to it.
i guess that happened with the piracy post... which, ironically, i cranked out in a bitchy tone because i knew the people i was annoyed with would have no reason to listen to me or change what they were doing, so why effortpost about it? let's just vent.
but some people took it as a scathing critique of... whatever they were personally doing, maybe? one reader thought i was gatekeeping leftism, which feels like the polar opposite of what i thought i was doing. at least one or two thought i was condemning everyone who consumes mega-corporate-produced media and thought they had caught me out by observing that my name is eevee. several people called me bad-faith or an instigator, suggesting that i am some kind of fake person.
and that all sucks because i don't want to upset people for no reason, of course
but i'm just now realizing that it also sucks because the venting was, itself, a form of vulnerability — here was a thing that had gotten under my skin, and by griping about it, i was admitting that there is a nugget of a thing i care about in there. maybe that's part of the problem; i don't want to be too vulnerable so the post comes out kind of vague and distant, and that makes it somewhat open to interpretation.
the upshot though is that now my primitive fish brain thinks "oh i guess was wrong to care about that then", even though i know rationally that doesn't really make sense.
i don't know what to do about this
there are some weird dynamics at play with posting too that i don't really know what to think about but
for one, i have absolutely no sense of who my audience is here. i don't even know how many of you there are. it could be 50; it could be 5000. and unless you followed me in the last 15 minutes, i don't know who you all are or what you're like. i don't know who of the people i know are following me, either. i can't even check out profiles to get a vibe check very easily, because a bunch of you followed me while you were still in time-out. so i'm writing to an unknown audience of unknown size, which is kind of like writing on my own blog, except it's much more convenient for people to yell at me if they don't like it.
it's also kind of weird to react to a post like it were something inflicted on you. i'm certainly guilty of this too, but it doesn't... really make sense. as the author, i didn't choose to put my post on your screen. you did that, by following me, or by following someone who also thought my post was good. on cohost, i don't even know you're there!
and then a bunch of people left similar angry comments, which do go directly to my screen. something about this feels asymmetrical.
sort of the opposite thing happened with the itch stuff. someone in my discord even said they thought i was trying to ruffle feathers with my very first post about it.
i was not!
what i saw was some people freaking out because they perceived the following chain of causality: "itch has taken action against several adult devs' accounts" → "this is probably because they don't like adult work, as per usual" → "therefore itch is coming for all adult games soon"
so what i wrote was an explanation of the position i thought itch was in, because that provides an alternative to the second link. if you can't think of any other reason for itch's actions, then "they hate porn now" is all you're left with. i wanted to give different possible reasoning that wouldn't lead to "and we're all doomed". i thought that would be reassuring? i guess @bigg did not think so
and again this is a kind of vulnerability, because i do care about itch, and i've interacted with some of the people who make it, and i think it's good and precious and one of the few platforms not run by a gigacorp beholden to investors demanding infinite exponential growth. i think that's important and i care about it a lot. so i was sad to see people treat itch like it's just A Corporation and instantly assume it was tossing people overboard for some arbitrary reason decided by the board of directors somewhere.
so that seems to be the opposite problem, actually: when i admit i care about something, i become incapable of shutting up
hm.
every so often i resolve to post more little tidbits from fox flux, and then i don't do that. i wish i did, i think.
i'm not sure if that feels like exposing vulnerability or not, exactly. i think it might feel vulnerable in a slightly different way — that if i post too many of the elements from a puzzle game, wily readers might catch on to every trick i will possibly come up with, and then the game will be very boring for them.
that seems highly unlikely but it's a feeling that's a bit hard to shake
i guess also, all i can really share are these tiny one-off elements out of context, and i don't know if that's... interesting. a puzzle game is about puzzles more than individual mechanics, surely, but if i show the puzzles then i'm giving away the game?
i have a similar problem with narrative games, where even if i could share bits of them in an accessible way, i'm basically playing part of the game in front of you
maybe i'll scrounge up some recent gifs and put them in a post and see what happens though
