Adventures in History and Video Games
Chats about teaching, playing and making.
I used to enjoy writing on the Internet.
Frankly I think a lot of the problems stem from things that objectively made the Internet better; or at least, that made it more efficient and more effective. I was never really a great audience for the arguments that corporate greed had destroyed online communities, if only because I was not really much part of online communities until after the corporate conquest of virtual realities - some time shortly after the term "cyberspace" became truly embarrassing - so I did not have something to look back to and miss. I don't really know what AOL was like. I'm old enough. I just wasn't online back then.
Nowadays I am "very online." Or I was until quite recently. I had long since reduced my twitter usage to mostly RTs of clever things other people said and smart things other people had written. It got to the point though, sadly, where I had to remove the app from my phone and just check in on a web browser now and again. Twitter made me sad.
Elon Musk buying Twitter has clearly had an effect. On me, on lots of people. I started again with Mastodon, a community (or community of communities, I suppose?) I first engaged with years ago but did little with. That has so far been very pleasant. Lots of people who are nerdy in a very particular way chatting to each other. Though yes, it is very online. Here we are.
I was surprised mostly that I actually wanted to use a service like Mastodon. I do like learning about things other people are doing. In particular, academics are streaming their way over there. How many of us will stay? It does not matter too much.
So, I wanted something that twitter was offering, at some point. It all became too much. A large part of my online life has been spent becoming infuriated that I was not doing enough to sustain a successful venture. In trying to make something of projects I did not actually intend to profit from financially, I got wound up in the need for regular updates or certain types of content or trying to find an audience. It's not... fun.
This week I've received a few updates from Substack, from people I enjoy reading or hearing from online. It seems that something in between a "newsletter" and a blog might be making a modest comeback. And I think that might be a good fit for me.
I enjoyed writing online around the turn of the century, when people would set up their own website and just write on it a bit, if they weren't too busy recording embarassing moments for posterity on Livejournal. I wrote about science fiction, and things I liked, films I thought were underrated. The whole thing was VERY 2002. I also used to write overly long emails to a little list of friends, none of whom had asked for long emails about things that interested me. It seems, maybe, that this idea could come back.
I'm not selling you on much, am I? Though, that is the point. This little newsletter will come out now and again, and I will write about things that I find interesting. This will likely often involve video games and/or history, as these are the two things that most dominate my professional life, happily.
Ian Bogost in his newsletter, from which I draw inspiration, describes his efforts as "an experiment in risk coverage": for Ian, this is a potential chance to keep some format of microblogging alive. What do short ideas left online for people to read look like, in the future?
I will be doing something a little different. I am going to write and see what happens. I am not going to worry, overly at least, about whether I am being consistent or if I am doing the best job at drawing people in, or keeping them (you?) or anything else. But hopefully we will have a bit of fun.
If you want a sense of the things I find interesting or what I think is funny or notable, swing by the History Respawned youtube channel, website or podcast and hang out a bit. Then maybe come back here.