I'm Not Always Feelin' It
Blog
I have been missing post-by-post roleplay forums for years. I've had experiences on a few, and I think that I can identify the general trajectory I experience in about three stages.
Stage 1: Honeymoon. I've decided This Is It. Enough lurking, I am excited and ready to invest time and effort into joining in the fun here. It's time to set up an account, choose the avatar that will inevitably be the first impression anyone really has of who I am and where my interests lie, and get to posting. It's a time of endless possibility, and it's time to let my creativity loose. If this turns out not to be the place for me, I can just ghost out with no reputation here and few stakes. I am the new kid, looking for attention and approval. I want to be the guy that just comes in out of nowhere and blows everyone away. Hit them hard with an original character idea, and do some quality posting.
Stage 2: The Golden Age. If my passion for this place survived the Honeymoon, this is a very exciting time. People are starting to notice me. I am identifying who's becoming a good friend, who's interested in what I have to say, and who's reliably active. I'm not just playing bit parts in other people's threads anymore. I'm making my own threads, with their own internal continuity. I'm confidently working around and even adding my own flair to the canon setting, and other members might even at this stage start accepting my headcanons for their own writing. I get the in-jokes that have come before me, and I'm part of the in-jokes being created now. I'm on the forum every day, and getting caught in a cycle of eager writing, and impatient waiting for replies.
Stage 3: Ennui. It is such a quiet thing, to fall. Sometimes it's just the realisation that most of the forum doesn't write at the level I do, and nobody is interested in the subtleties. I'll see my threads quietly grind to a halt, whilst the thousandth 'you all meet in a tavern' thread hits its tenth page. Other times, interpersonal drama consumes everything. This member won't ever write with that one. The staff have decided to ignore and exclude certain members from 'main storyline' threads. Accusations fly. Administrators go missing, permanently. Sometimes, the entire forum just gets taken down, the owner no longer able or willing to keep up the bill. A few friends might talk about building some enclave to continue writing, but it never lasts for long, if at all. It's another dead forum, its carcass being picked over by johnny-come-latelies who don't understand yet that the good times are already gone.
I think the last stage is inevitable, as all forums I have been on are, or were, the passions and hobbies of individuals, and individuals move on. It's unfortunate, but I guess you really can't expect to be on the same forum forever. And I think it's worth it. I recall some writing I did on a couple of forums that I am still quite pleased with today. That's the part worth remembering and keeping.
So, what's this got to do with Twitter? Well, Twitter has become, at least in my life, the inadequate replacement for experiencing something like a forum community. I've been frustrated for at least the past year, not only with my extreme reticence to reply to anyone or make posts there, but the inevitable feeling of being ignored once I do. I will know the answer to someone's question, but there is no interaction once I answer it. I don't even know if this person was able to see my response. Hell, I don't even know if they intended to look at responses at all, or if they were just shouting into the void for the fun of it. They reply to a few friends, then the 'thread' gets buried and forgotten in less than 24 hours. So what's the deal with Twitter and why do I feel so alienated and alone on it?
1. When Everyone Is Part of the Community, Nobody Is. On a forum, it's possible to tailor posts to follow not just the rules, but expected social conventions. I know the 'feel' of the forum, the kind of sense of humour that's fitting, the in-jokes, etc. I have a very high upper-limit character count for posting in discussions, so I can be as eloquent or rambling as I like. On Twitter, I have no idea who is going to be looking at my posts or replies, because those things are determined by nebulous algorithms and an unseen cadre of fellow 'followers' (I'll get to them), respectively. I have the feeling that a lot of people who are friends on Twitter are actually also in Discord servers together, so I'm not privy to the majority of their interactions, and I won't get the in-jokes. It feels like we are all here to perform being friends in a public space, whereas the actual meaningful interactions happen in private. If I am going to make a reply, I have to squeeze clear meaning out of every letter due to the low limit, because misunderstandings are unforgivable. Particularly as I am a permanent stranger, who can be dismissed or scorned without any social repercussions. This leads me to...
2. Forums Have Members, Twitter Has Followers. Forums are not averse to forms of elitism. Post counts, updoots, badges, unlocking coloured usernames or bigger avatars, etc. There's all kinds of ways people want to signal that they've been here longer, built up a repuation, and therefore their opinion holds more weight than anyone under 1000 posts. This made sense to me when I was 15 years old, but these days just strikes me as meaningless posturing. So I won't try to romanticise forums too much here. But Twitter handles this so, so much worse. On a forum, everyone is a member of the forum. That's it, the baseline thing every account, from the noob to the administrator, has to be. On Twitter though, to participate and keep up with conversations with other users, you have to 'follow' them, and thus become a 'follower'. I feel like the implications inherent in the English language actually do make a difference here. A follower is a subordinate. A lackey, a hanger-on, if you want to use some nastier synonyms. Not only is this linguistically putting you in a subordinate role, but that's exactly what the system does. The account being followed speaks, and the follower listens. You didn't see this thread and decide to join in, you were told about it. You gave the other account the power to control, at least partially, what you see on the webpage. And it's not reciprocal, at least not necessarily. Yes you can reply, but nobody has to look at other posts before replying themselves. An entire conversation could occur in that thread with you not just being ignored, but literally being unseen. If you make your own tweets, unless you're being 'followed' in return, that account won't see them. They won't even know where to look. If you have no significant base of 'followers' of your own, you're effectively silent, just some random anonymous account that's helping pad out another person's statistics. Yes, you can be followed back to be 'mutuals', but this never gets rid of the underlying account-to-account relationship.
3. Bump! Threads keep the conversation alive. I feel like no conversation ever stays relevant on Twitter. On a forum, a discussion thread can go for pages, being bumped up to the top to remind you that it's ongoing, and people have brought in some new thoughts about it. Eventually threads do die, and necroposting is usually frowned upon. Again though, Twitter takes this to a new extreme. Nobody can ever work off what someone else has posted for long. I'll give you an example. I posted a short review of why I didn't like a certain movie that came out in late 2023. On a forum, even if a lot of users didn't know me or talk to me much, that thread would still be the jumping-off point for other people to write their own reviews of the movie, dispute points, bring in new ideas, and generally Have a Conversation. That could go on for days, maybe the whole damn week. Hell, we might get to know each other better by the end of it, at least as far as movie tastes go. On Twitter, it's more like everyone is going to start their own little thread of their opinion on the movie, receive a few likes, some meme reaction images, and in less than 24 hours it's all been buried.
I don't know if I'm grousing about nothing. Maybe this all works totally fine for people that understand it better. But for me, there doesn't seem to be much of a way to 'break in', to find an opportunity to make friends on Twitter. I'm always just a 'follower', barely on the same level of personhood as whoever I'm following. I feel like I can't really express who I am or why anyone would want to know me, when anything I say has to be reduced down to choppily-cut bullet points, or sentences so short and punchy it feels like I'm trying to write political slogans. Forums can and do often become shitshows, but at least they're not this vast, impersonal network of patrons and clients, whom I can never please, or get close to. I've read some convincing arguments that 'communities' themselves are the problem, and maybe forums would last longer if we all just focused on creating great things, rather than devolving into cliques and competing for updoots. I'd like to give that a try some time.
I'm writing for myself in the future, when I need reminding that the days that passed weren't wasted. Click on the banner or any fractal image for the full size render.
I have been trying to think of things from my past I am 100% not nostalgic for at all, and the answer seems to be Age of Empires II. AoE II came out (and I played it to death) in 1999, and while I feel very nostalgic about the PC Gamer guide magazine that I bought to read along while playing, the game itself has lost its nostalgia value in a very positive way. With the release of the HD Edition for modern computers, it can be played without much hassle, and more importantly, it doesn't feel old. AoE II honestly could pass as a lot more of a modern game than it is. I can still access AoE II with much the same satisfaction as I experienced in 1999. I can play with my friends, and create new memories with it. It still 'lives', so any sense of it being some golden part of my childhood that's lost in the past is negated. And I think that's the crux of nostalgia - inaccessibility.
I'm nostalgic for my friend's old house, that was pointlessly demolished to build some ugly smooth modern home. I'm nostalgic for the nook under the staircase where the family had fit a couple of computers and we could play Warcraft 3. I'm nostalgic for my old school, which has been totally smashed up, and enormous fences constructed around the fields to make it a fortress of Child Safety. I am occasionally nostalgic for my childhood home, and grateful to my childhood self who, when given his first digital camera, decided to test the 360 degree panorama feature on parts of the house, and inadvertently made a valuable record of the place. Physical inaccessibility leading to a sense of a lost past? Check. I won't even go into how badly Blizzard handled Warcraft 3 'Reforged'.
Anyone who can tolerate listening to me ramble knows I miss my experiences with the 'old internet', basically my online presence from after September 11th 2001 (such a colossal event helps me focus memories of endless online debates about it), up to around 2014 at the latest, which is when I'd finally fell out of contact with most of my old forums and communities. I feel like I have to make a distinction between being 'nostalgic' and 'missing' these experiences though. Even though that period is now inaccessible (those communities are dead, forums have gone down), what I really want is not to relive those moments, but to create new ones. I liked post-by-post forum roleplaying and collaborative writing. I am sure that it's not dead, and somewhere there must be a good outlet for my desire to write, and have people care about and respond to what I'm writing. I miss doing that. But it's not nostalgic until I am 100% that can never happen again. It's still 'accessible' in some way, so it offers me hope for the future, rather than feel mournful for the past. Also I feel like I could do a better job these days, I'm not so nostalgic for some of my bad writing.
I'm sure there's some research about how other senses better trigger nostalgia - smell for instance, I'm sure is a powerful one. But music in particular seems to be able to, with a few tricks, generate a 'nostalgic feeling', even from music that is entirely novel and new. I noticed this recently when I caught the flu, and found time to brainlessly click through the sentence-by-sentence visual novel 'Echo', which has apparently become a cultural icon in the furry community, or at least the section of it that I lurk around. Echo deserves its own post really, but for the moment I just want to look at the soundtrack. It's a combination of royalty-free music and a few tracks made specifically for the game, but what I find remarkable is how many tracks seem to fit well together and create an entire soundscape of nostalgic wistfulness of the past, and how, good or bad, the characters shared something together that they can't get back.
Listening to the tracks, and various 'nostalgic' playlists, I tried to hone in on exactly what makes it... sound like that. Slow pianos with good reverb seemed a common theme, though the acoustic guitar also gets a fair hearing. It's good to have a little warbling in there, like you're listening to a damaged tape. Maybe some sound effects to really sell the 'you've put a long-lost, loved cassette tape in your scratched up old Walkman' aesthetic. Some pops and crackles, maybe even the sound of someone physically putting the tape in, at the start of the track. A few soft synth pads, plenty of reverb, and maybe some ghostly, distant voices saying something indistinct. Boom, instant nostalgia track. It's working for Echo, I only played it this year and already I feel my mind drifting back whenever I hear the sweet lullabies of Kevin Mcleod at his most free-to-use.
I don't mean to sound sarcastic or anything. I can't fault composers for doing a good job, or the game designers for nailing a feeling of having Conflicted Feelings about growing up in a small town. And I didn't even grow up in s small town! It's second-hand nostalgia, and that's something I think we'll be seeing more and more. How many people my age (I was born in 1992), or current teenagers and young adults (let's say born in the early to mid 2000s) have in recent years (it's late 2023 at the time of writing) been gifted second-hand nostalgia from shows like Stranger Things, or movies like Ready Player One? These are homages to growing up in the 80s. And I suspect, seeing games like Hypnospace Outlaw (a tribute to the aesthetics of Web 1.0) and Five Nights at Freddy's (spooky nostalgia for Chuck E. Cheese), that we will eventually get a wave of 90s childhood nostalgia from creators. Get ready for a resurgence in fond reminiscences of Goosebumps, Animorphs, and Hey Arnold.
I'm losing the will to meet people in real life if this is what it comes to. Whenever I'm on my way over, I'm thinking of all the things I'll say. All the things that have interested me, the books I've read, the plans I've made, the topics I'm mulling over. Something goes wrong though, by the time I meet up with a dear friend or friends. The words fail me. There's awkward pauses, an uncertainty of what topic can safely be broached. There are distractions. There's phones, or Discord messages. There's some semi-serious suggestion of playing video games together. It's laughed off, or there's a bit of shuffling around a computer or console. Nothing happens. Then, by some unspoken agreement, we take turns scrolling through our Youtube histories or liked videos, trying to find something we hope the other will find entertaining. Usually, our tastes do not quite align enough to elicit more than a polite chuckle or an obligatory snort at the right places. I've never been in hysterics playing this game. I never really remember what anyone else put on, I just retroactively judge my own choices and feel like I wasted our precious time together doing nothing. We could have linked these in Discord and saved a trip.
To be clear, I'm not angry at anyone. This has happened multiple times with different friend groups, so I'm not singling out one incident either. I'm just disappointed in myself. I believe I am at fault as much as anyone else, and I certainly will be more at fault if I put up with this in future, now I'm conscious of what we're doing. We're cringing at ourselves. Whatever we're comfortable with talking over in text or in voice chat has become suddenly the realm of sheepish grins and meaningless murmuring when we're face to face. I get it, we're socially awkward nerds. But we're also supposed to be friends. If we're not interesting to each other, if we're not able to be open and honest to each other when we're together, then what the hell are we doing? Am I seriously worried that I'll bore my friends because I want to tell them about a book? Or that they'll somehow feel uncomfortable and miserable if I tell them that I'm trying to make a website for myself because I'm afraid that everything I do and accomplish and enjoy in the present will fade away in time? Is this not an interesting point of discussion? I'm happy to drop notes in the group chat gossiping about the ongoing Chair War drama at work, or silly everyday things I see in public. Why do we need to play this stupid game that nobody really likes, as if we're total strangers, when we should be talking to each other? We don't have to be making each other laugh like we're desperately trying to entertain some slightly unwelcome house guests. We should just... be friends.
I'm not saying a video can't be watched when we're together. Or multiple videos if it comes to that. I fondly remember being introduced to the 'build up speed for 12 hours' hilarity of the 'Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses' video when I was hanging out with friends. What I'm talking about is specifically this ritual, the unspoken understanding that we are doing this because we aren't talking, or playing games. Because we feel obliged to do something together, but nobody in the room is willing to take the lead, because of this actual, real, unironic, I-am-not-joking, fucking mindworm that is 'cringe'. We're becoming afraid to stand out in front of the people we should trust the most. Hell, we have discussed some of the most private aspects of our lives together in open honesty and good humour in voice chat. What the fuck are we afraid of?
So, that's the theme of the image for this post. I'm not sure of the source, but as much as it's a joke, it's also real wisdom. I am rejecting this fear that if I open my mouth in a face-to-face meeting I am going to be boring or unpleasant in talking about the things that interest me, when I can rant and ramble to my heart's content in voice chat, and apparently do so in an entertaining manner. My friends spend time with me because they like me. I spend that time because I like them back. So let's stop the Youtube Game. I like you guys better than that.
I am imagining now a point in the future in which this page is well filled. So well filled in fact that I'll have to create an easy way of flipping between pages of blog posts. Okay don't go on too much. It's a Saturday afternoon, the laundry's up to dry, and being caught in the middle of several interminable projects, I picked this one to continue. What do I really want to accomplish? Reviews of some books, for one. I'm finding it frustrating that the last several books I've read had me wanting to say many things, but either I didn't get them down, or tell more than one other person, or half wrote-up with a mind to post it to a review website, only to realise that the book in question was hardly topical anymore and had its legions of fans that would drown any reasonable questions I had about it.
I've gotten more novel reading done this year than the last four combined, I think. It may have even been longer than that. A full time job was not amenable to long periods of reading. Certainly there were the consistent 20-30 minute periods last year, when I was driving part time, when the bus was laid up in the dark and I had moments to read some e-book by the light of the phone. That seems like such paltry time to me now. I understanding what J meant when he was telling me how many books he got through. Even before I got the bus job, my reading had been on the decline. I was on the streets by day, then exhausted and apathetic the rest of the time. Did I even study in university?
J asked me about the kinds of things I studied at university. My mind went blank, I was stumped to recall any specifics. The history of the Julio-Claudians. Some primer on how all religion is fake, which somehow made me question being an atheist after all. Dreadful creative writing courses. I have memories of an education, but I'm hard pressed to recall what I actually learned.
Anyway. Reading. I have missed being able to identify myself as an 'avid reader'. It feels like a reclamation of my time, my personality, and my life. If you leave certain skills, like writing, making music or art, etc. by the wayside, eventually you stop identifying yourself with them. I once claimed to be a self-taught 3D modeler. I don't do it anymore, so now that's all evaporated, I'd feel compelled to take a proper series of tutorials and make some rather substantial original creations in a recognised industry piece of software like Blender, rather than muck about on a creaky ancient copy of Cinema 4D, which wasn't even primarily known for its fantastic modelling capabilities.
Speaking of art though, I'm going to try and get some more images in this place. It's feeling a little too dry at the moment, and it's about time I put that 'occasional dabbler in fractal art' part of my identity to use. I'll make something appropriate for the homepage that really says 'I'm Feelin' It', and something nice and eye-catching for the blog. That's as good a start as any. The wacky animated gifs and bitrate-crushed mp3 versions of my synth music can come later.
Alright, I've made the fractal, but it's not exactly cropped to be a good banner. I'll work on that.