2022 Wrap-Up

[xyzzysqrl]

As I write this (and will probably post long before the -actual- end of the year, as is tradition) it's around 4 AM on Christmas day 2022, and I've been thinking about the post I made last year, where I called 2021 a year in stasis. If nothing else, I can't accuse 2022 of that. I felt every minute of this year, I think. I am acutely aware of the time between then and now.

I almost don't feel like the same person who wrote those words, which is absolutely ridiculous because very little has -really- changed, not outwardly and hardly inwardly. I posted less personal business this year than ever before, which feels like a bit of a shame and is perhaps the only thing I want to change going forward. In general I think I want to take longer with things, dwell on them more.

I miss being able to write for extended periods of time, and I'd like to try to train myself back into that. I'd like to continue expressing my inner thoughts in writing somewhere, and with Twitter going at its own legs with two blazing machine guns and Mastodon being the place you go to get smugly lectured about why you're not using Mastodon more, I have to have SOMEwhere to use as an outlet for my dumb nonsense. Might as well be here!

Speaking of ego-massaging self-indulgent pap, this year in April I picked Twitch streaming back up and started to get serious with it. Not like "This is my career now" serious but "I want to convince people to pay attention to me" serious. That's hard for me, because I feel like when people pay attention to me things go wrong. Most of my life has been spent trying to avoid attention, to hide away in corners. I'm finally opening up, finally standing up and presenting myself. It's absolutely goddamn terrifying, I'm gonna be real with you.

I've been extremely lucky, though. Each night I stream I spend about two hours cracking dumb over game footage with around 3-8 people in the chat. I've even somehow made money doing this, which feels incredibly illegal on some level. I don't really get it, and I know Twitch doesn't get it either. Twitch is now so fed up with me streaming classic Sierra/Lucasarts adventures and mediocre Playstation games that it's devoted an entire section of my analytics page to informing me I'd get more views if I would stream something normal that people actually want to watch, like Vampire Survivors or Super Metroid.

However, I super turbo do not care what would make me Stream Popular. I've found my niche and I very much enjoy streaming a mix of great and terrible games. Please look forward to me streaming a badly-translated Czechoslovakian point and click adventure about dragons, how do your analytics like THAT?

Of course, I couldn't have done it without Celine and the Woodlings and Seirea. Celine got back to streaming before I did, and became a fan of Sei, who became a fan of Celine, and when I started streaming they both started showing up. We quickly banded together into a supergroup of dinky-ass smalltimers with ambition.

I no longer feel like the concept of a community is fake. It is in fact possible for people to come together and deliberately elevate each other, not out of self-interest but out of collective interest. I hardly believed in this as a concept before. It still feels somewhat unreal. Still, Celine and Sei have been powerful in rolling a sort of small-streamer katamari around, and I often no longer have to wonder who I'm going to watch when I'm bored because there's enough cool people adjacent to them that I can just tune in and check them out.

Also when I say I want to take longer with things, I mean I'm starting to chafe against the two-hour stream time limit I've set myself in places. I want to set one night of the week aside as a marathon day where I just plow at a long JRPG or open-world game or the like for 6-12 hours, with periodic breaks. This'll give me the willpower and drive to go through some of those games I set aside as "I'll never have time for this". I will use my focus to make time for this because that is something I am allowed to do. I'm setting my own rules for myself, and that's something I need to come to grips with here.

Speaking of games, let's go to the year in review. The usual block gets pasted here:

First, previous years in review:
2012 - 38 Complete, ?? Abandoned
2013 - 21 Complete, ?? Abandoned
2014 (No post, I had a bad year) - 29 Complete / 4 Abandoned
2015 - 67 Complete, 6 Abandoned
2016 - 44 Complete, 5 Abandoned
2017 - 102 Complete, 13 Abandoned
2018 - 88 Complete, 16 Abandoned
2019 - 44 Complete, 6 Abandoned
2020 - 30 Complete, 3 Abandoned
2021 - 35 Complete, 1 Abandoned

And then there's 2022, where 39 games are tagged Complete and 2 Abandoned. I don't really have any notes about that except that I'm proud of where I am and I hope to strive for more over this coming year.

Honestly, "I'm proud of where I am and hope for more" is the whole statement. I'm in a good place right now. I'm out of stasis. I'm moving forward. I'm doing what I can to support my loved ones. I have some hope for the future. It's been a long time since I had any. I'm doing my best not to run out of it. I want more.

I want more for myself. I want more for the people I love. More than hope, more than a good place, I want success. I want happiness.

I will not be satisfied with merely surviving, I want my dear ones and myself to thrive, and that's what I'm trying to push for this coming year.

...it's going to be a very uphill push.
[END OF YEAR]

Comments

[rowyn]

Go you! ~waves pom-poms, cheers you onward~