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Okay, time for a better, more substantial update. I'm honestly not sure how many people are still reading these (I know at least a few of you), but a lot of my posts - when I post - are kind of vague, a little negative, and generally lacking in body. I think I come off as in a worse place than I really am, maybe, and I know that I've hoped to post things like reviews or critiques and just haven't. A big part of that is that my situation tends to be complicated - not, like, emotionally, but generally with a lot of moving interlocking parts. It's just a little difficult to get a clear picture across so I often begin, realize that writing has become a much bigger job than I thought, and either delete the post for later or post something pithy.
So, regarding personal projects that I've teased in the past, for starters. If you're cynical (or just enjoy feeling superior), you're probably assuming that I've just never bothered to finish whatever I start and haven't updated because whatever I said I'd like to do never happened. If you're an ass, then you might assume that the things I do aren't good enough or nobody would ever care, so I didn't bother to link to whatever I've done. That's a mean way of putting it; both are true, but I prefer a different spin.
I'm legitimately busy, and very often depressed or anxious. This isn't a post about that, but it's true, and it takes a lot of my mental effort to do the things I need to do, and those things - even when I'm not exhausted - take a lot of time in their own right. So, I've read a lot already this calender year (and semester). Most of it's literary theory, but one's an acquaintances' novel and the other was 1Q84, and it was okay. I'm reading Spivak right now. French deconstructionists take time, and Derrida was a pompous shitlord of a writer, so this stuff takes time. Reading as work can be frustrating because when I'm done with a text, nothing is actually accomplished, and that makes me feel guilty (as I've said). I just finished a rough on personal experiences with digital literacy and how it pertains to the idea of digital literacy being valued through the lens of a cost-benefit analysis, which sounds simple (it is), but that was the prompt and it's a five pager for baby schoolers. I've got a 10-pager for 502 on how Spivak frequently undermines her stance on hard line deconstructivism in order to build her arguements framed from the perspective of a third-world feminist woman of color and how there are traces of the Foucaultian constructed identity there.
I mean, that's what I'm doing. Those aren't personal projects, that's just my work. There's a strong case to be made that a good scholar who's done their homework should be able to sit down and knock that stuff out pretty quickly. My excuse is that I'm currently doing that homework, basically - that's exactly what this is. So for me, it takes time.
I said I was probably going to write something about 1Q84, but I haven't. Murakami, who I usually like, wrote this big, sprawling novel that was large enough that in a collector copy, they broke it up into three. (I haven't checked how the book is handled in other printings.) There are a lot of words, a lot of divergent plot elements, and it doesn't really go anywhere - then it's suddenly over, resolved. Murakami's too clever a writer to have done it by accident and it's not really fair to say I didn't enjoy reading it pretty well, but as a literary experience I would say that I'm not in the right place now to appreciate it. I couldn't do it justice, so I didn't write anything about it. Maybe I never will. There's something there to be said, for sure, but I don't know who's going to be the person to say it.
I also wanted to write about Dragon Age: Inquisition. I played it for, like, 100+ hours and it certainly was a game. People seem to love it. It's not very good.
So, I still want to write about it and it's pertinent to my Digital Lit. class, but I really want to get into the mechanics and how the game works, what it incentivises, what it focuses on, and the illusion of choice, as well as character relationships with players. Unfortunately, that's way more than a simple review. (The review: Astoundingly mediocre. Gameplay resembles one of those old west ghost town sets where the buildings are all cardboard cutouts. Weak, re-heated combat mechanics, glitchy, lots of pointless time sinks disguised as quests, lots of pointless time sinks disguised as menu options specifically intended by EA and developers to inflate time spent to hit arbitrary hour marks in gameplay. But it is playable, strictly speaking. Best for people with lots of time and nothing to spend it on.)
I wrote part of a story for the Exalted game I'm in with my Starmetal Alchemical Exalt, Proof Against Obsolescence. I'm writing the next part of it, which is a fair priority for me. I finished the bulk of my write up for my WoD game which is predictably taking forever to finish because Kay and I do have time, but it's often not at the same time - or when we do, we're running errands and/or exhausted. People still want me to host a panel on what Homestuck actually is at a convention that's coming up, and i've done literally nothing for it. (And stated I don't really want to, but the pressure from others is fairly constant, so I might write something up for someone else to do.)
I've already gone on for a while. Another aspect of my lack of updates is feeling like I'm not at home with this format so much, anymore. I've scrapped about a dozen plans for what I'd prefer my writing space to be online. Standard blog formats are something I've tried repeatedly and I actually hate them. The pressure to create blog content is really high and I also kind of feel like blogs are very early-mid 00's. I don't like the social-media formats at all. LJ really is the least objectionable, and I feel like moving to a personal site would mean I'd literally lose all my few readers, but I also feel like that's less of a concern for me. I've been working with Google Sites to create something like a digital workspace environment, but I've not been happy with that, either. I've said stuff about this before and I just haven't had the time to do more then brainstorm or create a few flowcharts and design documents. That kind of thought process seems wildly off topic past what I've described here, so I'm not going into it more for right now.
So, regarding personal projects that I've teased in the past, for starters. If you're cynical (or just enjoy feeling superior), you're probably assuming that I've just never bothered to finish whatever I start and haven't updated because whatever I said I'd like to do never happened. If you're an ass, then you might assume that the things I do aren't good enough or nobody would ever care, so I didn't bother to link to whatever I've done. That's a mean way of putting it; both are true, but I prefer a different spin.
I'm legitimately busy, and very often depressed or anxious. This isn't a post about that, but it's true, and it takes a lot of my mental effort to do the things I need to do, and those things - even when I'm not exhausted - take a lot of time in their own right. So, I've read a lot already this calender year (and semester). Most of it's literary theory, but one's an acquaintances' novel and the other was 1Q84, and it was okay. I'm reading Spivak right now. French deconstructionists take time, and Derrida was a pompous shitlord of a writer, so this stuff takes time. Reading as work can be frustrating because when I'm done with a text, nothing is actually accomplished, and that makes me feel guilty (as I've said). I just finished a rough on personal experiences with digital literacy and how it pertains to the idea of digital literacy being valued through the lens of a cost-benefit analysis, which sounds simple (it is), but that was the prompt and it's a five pager for baby schoolers. I've got a 10-pager for 502 on how Spivak frequently undermines her stance on hard line deconstructivism in order to build her arguements framed from the perspective of a third-world feminist woman of color and how there are traces of the Foucaultian constructed identity there.
I mean, that's what I'm doing. Those aren't personal projects, that's just my work. There's a strong case to be made that a good scholar who's done their homework should be able to sit down and knock that stuff out pretty quickly. My excuse is that I'm currently doing that homework, basically - that's exactly what this is. So for me, it takes time.
I said I was probably going to write something about 1Q84, but I haven't. Murakami, who I usually like, wrote this big, sprawling novel that was large enough that in a collector copy, they broke it up into three. (I haven't checked how the book is handled in other printings.) There are a lot of words, a lot of divergent plot elements, and it doesn't really go anywhere - then it's suddenly over, resolved. Murakami's too clever a writer to have done it by accident and it's not really fair to say I didn't enjoy reading it pretty well, but as a literary experience I would say that I'm not in the right place now to appreciate it. I couldn't do it justice, so I didn't write anything about it. Maybe I never will. There's something there to be said, for sure, but I don't know who's going to be the person to say it.
I also wanted to write about Dragon Age: Inquisition. I played it for, like, 100+ hours and it certainly was a game. People seem to love it. It's not very good.
So, I still want to write about it and it's pertinent to my Digital Lit. class, but I really want to get into the mechanics and how the game works, what it incentivises, what it focuses on, and the illusion of choice, as well as character relationships with players. Unfortunately, that's way more than a simple review. (The review: Astoundingly mediocre. Gameplay resembles one of those old west ghost town sets where the buildings are all cardboard cutouts. Weak, re-heated combat mechanics, glitchy, lots of pointless time sinks disguised as quests, lots of pointless time sinks disguised as menu options specifically intended by EA and developers to inflate time spent to hit arbitrary hour marks in gameplay. But it is playable, strictly speaking. Best for people with lots of time and nothing to spend it on.)
I wrote part of a story for the Exalted game I'm in with my Starmetal Alchemical Exalt, Proof Against Obsolescence. I'm writing the next part of it, which is a fair priority for me. I finished the bulk of my write up for my WoD game which is predictably taking forever to finish because Kay and I do have time, but it's often not at the same time - or when we do, we're running errands and/or exhausted. People still want me to host a panel on what Homestuck actually is at a convention that's coming up, and i've done literally nothing for it. (And stated I don't really want to, but the pressure from others is fairly constant, so I might write something up for someone else to do.)
I've already gone on for a while. Another aspect of my lack of updates is feeling like I'm not at home with this format so much, anymore. I've scrapped about a dozen plans for what I'd prefer my writing space to be online. Standard blog formats are something I've tried repeatedly and I actually hate them. The pressure to create blog content is really high and I also kind of feel like blogs are very early-mid 00's. I don't like the social-media formats at all. LJ really is the least objectionable, and I feel like moving to a personal site would mean I'd literally lose all my few readers, but I also feel like that's less of a concern for me. I've been working with Google Sites to create something like a digital workspace environment, but I've not been happy with that, either. I've said stuff about this before and I just haven't had the time to do more then brainstorm or create a few flowcharts and design documents. That kind of thought process seems wildly off topic past what I've described here, so I'm not going into it more for right now.