Patreon Letter: 10th December, 2018 (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

It's the new year! Happy New Year everyone. Brand new year, brand new day, things are different. What do you mean it's still December?

Okay it's still 2018 somehow, the world's longest year, but we've ticked over to a new spreadsheet on the Abnormal Mapping google drive so that's good enough for me. (We do December-November because we record our Goty episode in Early December. It's smart, and good.) And honestly I feel incredible, my sins are cleansed, the road is open in front of me, surely this time I will play lots of interesting games and in no way get disillusioned with the medium or waylaid by crises at home.

It has been a strange year for me. I moved twice, spend three months staying in my sister's bedroom, and in the middle of all that I still managed to submit my final University assignment in August and graduated with a first! So I have a weird mix of emotions, on the one hand it's been a really hard year and now I live in the middle of nowhere and I feel basically more isolated than ever. On the other hand I didn't think I'd ever be able to graduate, and then I totally did and now I don't have any more school hanging over my head and can dedicate more time to working on things I'm invested in. 

Which brings us back to the spreadsheet. It's meaningless, obviously, because it's a spreadsheet me and Em keep of the games we've played, but we both stopped updating the one for the past year because that's how our lives were going. It is nice to have a symbolic clean start. So I'm gonna write up some goals for the next twelve months when it comes to Playing Video Games. Get them in writing. Just so you can all screencap these later when they don't turn out.

GOAL ONE: Finish Ocarina of Time

A couple years ago I made the decision to go through all the Zelda games. I was having a fantastic time, Link's Awakening is a masterpiece I could play the whole thing right now. And then I got to Ocarina of Time and bounced off as hard as it is possible to bounce off a thing. It's slow, and empty, and everything takes a million times too long and I know okay, I know you're yelling and I get it! I love Mario 64, there are old games I can go back to, but apparently Ocarina was not one of them. 

But it is Important and I really want to play the other Zeldas, yet considering that not only other zelda games lie in its shadow but basically the entire last twenty years of action gaming, it is something I should make myself finish as soon as possible. So it goes on the list. Saying it out loud. This is a thing I should have done already, and will correct very soon.

GOAL TWO: Play Games On More Consoles

Between consoles I have lying around and emulation, I have pretty good access to a lot of video games. This year I want to be a little more active and intentional about rotating the eras and circles that I'm playing in. I would like to spend more time with my Wii. I want to play some NES games that aren't Nintendo, Mega Man or Castlevania. What the fuck came out on the Genesis that wasn't Sonic? These are the questions I need to answer. 

GOAL THREE: Play less games, beat more games

One of the cool things about being an extremely cliche autistic person is that I get real into my fixations of the week and then swing hard and forget it ever happened. Remember that week I did nothing but play Dead Rising? I love Dead Rising! It's a masterpiece! But I played all three games in a week. Don't do that, don't be me. Anyway this leads to a lot of starting things and never finishing them. It happens all the time, it will continue to happen this year, but I want to do my best to finish things. And if I don't finish them, I'd like that to be an active choice and not just me forgetting about something. I won't be moving house multiple times this year so we cannot get worse on this front.

GOAL FOUR: Make Abnormal Mapping Gooder

Sometimes I feel like a big failure. It sucks because Abnormal Mapping, for a hobbyist project I do with my best friend, is incredibly successful. But also I'm disabled and unemployed so it is, by default, my job and I can't help but tie it to my worth in some way. Capitalism will always suck the joy out of the things you love like that.  I would love it to be big enough that me and em could actually live off but that's straight up impossible for a patreon unless you already Made It in some other sphere and are pivoting with an audience.  I am twenty five and I feel old. Not in a real sense because I'm twenty five and that's obviously not old, but I've also been hanging out and making stuff around the internet for like a decade plus and Abnormal Mapping is The Thing I have to show for that, I suppose. I never became a Writer, I don't do the pitch hustle, I am one half of Abnormal Mapping. That's me! So I want it to be good. 

I want to take some time in the next few weeks to make some changes to the website, I want to do something(?) with the writing - we don't update the medium, maybe it should be on the site?, and most importantly I think a more healthy relationship with both myself and also video games will make the episodes a lot better. As much as Hot Takes are fun, we make better podcasts when we're excited to talk about something, and I want to bring that energy up this year. We talked about this feeling on a recent Voip Life so consider this post a little of an extension. Still mulling it over. I'm glad the spreadsheet has been reset. Here's to a good year.