in 2020 i started writing about games on this blog, it was about experimental critique. i got some minor traction from some minor figures in a trillion dollar industry and wrote some stuff about how popular indie games are bad that is still my most read stuff. this was due to having a twitter presence around that time.
i’d just graduated out of uni and had no job experience, the continuing covid-19 pandemic had begun.
i used that traction to get gigs writing about games for small sites at between $15 to about $200 a go.
most of what i write here is poetry and fiction about the conditions of games, play, fun and violence, sometimes a polemic, sometimes i’ll feel like a game’s interesting enough for me to have something to say. 5 years and i’ve drifted away from where i started, but not too far.
i reckon i’ve changed. i guess. started taking hormones last year, started a part-time job as an editor in late 2022 which will end soon, moved a bunch of places (3), believe more radically in anarchy, piracy and community care. in disconnecting our networks from large companies and states. and yet i’m still lazy. i still get spam emails every day.
these are things. time has happened. in that time, bad things. people died. many millions, due to the failure to care.
i feel that this blog ran aground in about 2022 maybe. that’s okay. actually better. no longer featured writing in roundups of the best and smartest, and if it is i don’t care. i got burned out writing guide articles for a bullshit website about games and really started to hate all of it.
same time i left twitter as well. i really don’t get people still on it like either ‘for work’ or ‘for fun’ like. idk. but whatever, i joined bluesky. i have a mastodon. etc etc. really it was the nazism and transphobia that made me need to leave. this feels like a standard reason that doesn’t need explaining further.
i guess i was 23 when i started this site lol, now i am 28 which is like, i feel like nothing has happened in between, except, everything has. i just haven’t been able to become gainfully employed perhaps. stable, for a while, but gainful and out of poverty, nope. i have seen people die and be intensely impoverished, close people to me, because of the world of money stealing what they are owed. what we all are. food, shelter, life, safety.
i think that that all makes me depressed. like. but my friends, they make me happy. and playing games, ones that bring me moments of unbridled strangeness, that still makes me happy. having a beautiful boyfriend also. and dancing and music and even the melody of words. love. this is good stuff. even when it’s love for the painful and distressing, that at least is loaded with emotion.
i don’t know about you but the dull ache of pleading with people, companies, capitalists, fascists to ‘be better’ will never, ever succeed.
people who i end up listening to in the UK and US showing amazement at yet more rank incompetency and far right action without any material response. yes. the people in charge are totalitarians who want us either dead or as a loyal soldier. this has never changed. the fact it’s embarrassing to you is part of its marketing. smash it with hammers.
recently i stopped playing and buying games on my xbox series s, deleted my youtube video account and a bunch of other services on Google and Microsoft. their part in the genocide of Palestinians and in right wing extremism in the USA and elsewhere is so disturbing. yet, unhooking completely is more work than that. so it’s… cognitive dissonance and laziness i guess, that allows us to continue making profits for people doing the most depraved things possible.
if you have resources and aren’t sharing them in order to help save people from death on planet fuck, you should have it taken from you.
the pleading must stop. we must take. together. and share between us. whoever you are. to take back the world, is the only important thing.
another 5 years? who knows? the important thing, is what we do together. in all that time play will be just as important as anything else. as ever. as love and as hate.
¡No pasarán!
GlitchOut 