Do You Like My Content?

How did you get started in content creation?

I was going to skip this prompt. I mean, "content creation"? What even is that? Then I read Tipa's post, where she explained what it means:

"Content creation, as I understand it, is stuff generated to be ranked highly in search engines in order to entice people to follow it to your website, at which point they will be monetized and you will eventually get paid."

Seriously? That's what it is?  Well, I guess I never did get started in it, then.

What I thought "content creation" meant was "doing stuff that other people can see or hear or share somehow".

I don't mean "doing stuff " as in cutting your hedge, even though your neighbors and everyone passing by in buses and cars can see you doing it. Although, when the guy across the road gets out his step-ladder and his power-trimmer, puts on his gauntlets, his full-visor protective mask and his goggles and spends four hours getting every last leaf just so, you have to see it as a performance for the benefit of the neighborhood, so I guess anything can be content, if you want it to be.

If Tipa's definition is too specific and mine too loose, maybe we should ask Baby Bear what he thinks. ( Why is it that Baby Bear always a boy bear, by the way? Just askin' ).

Baby Bear in this context shall be Wikipedia:

"Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts" for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, article writing, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. A Pew survey described content creation as the creation of "the material people contribute to the online world."

Okay, we can work with that. And, hey, look! Blogging's right up there!  Second example after - guess what? - "maintaining and updating websites". Partial, much, Wikipedia?

I'm pleased to see the idea of being paid has dropped out because if that was in there this would be a short piece:

Q. "How did you get started in content creation?"
A. I didn't. No-one's paid me yet.

Yeah, okay, so maybe that's not strictly true. For sure, no-one's paying me to ramble self-indulgently about ancient multiplayer games and singers I like. I wish! But back in the early '80s I did, briefly, get paid for writing reviews of videogames for a print publication called "MicroAdventurer". They would send me cassette tapes of upcoming games and I'd play them and send back a couple of hundred words on how much I hated them. Don't think they ever sent me a game I liked. Certainly they never sent me one I can remember now.

I also wrote a couple of other pieces for U.S. comics prozines that I thought I was going to be paid for but never was. The pieces got printed and I got sent a copy but any cheque mysteriously got left out of the envelope. One of them did offer me a regular position as a U.K. based interviewer of comics professionals but I figured it would cost me more in train fares to and from London than the gig would pay, so I declined. Plus I had that whole "don't meet your heroes" thing going on, even then...

If we drop the money requirement, then I guess my first content creation, or at least the first I can remember, was writing music reviews for the school magazine when I was maybe twelve years old. It's also where I learned the value of fact-checking. I can still recall my mortification when I finally realized, a week or two after publication, that the Argent single I'd reviewed was in fact called "Tragedy" not, as I'd written "Try To Believe".

In my defence, I'd only ever heard it played on the radio and the diction of the average Radio One D.J. in the early seventies left more than a little to be desired. Also, listening to the song for the first time in what may well be fifty years, it bloody well does sound like they're singing "try to believe", doesn't it?

Although that error kickstarted my commitment to checking my facts before going to print, I also followed what would become a consistent pattern and kept my mistake to myself. And, since my peer group of the time was, all things considered, even more ignorant than I was, I got away with it.

That was the beginning of a lifelong interest, arguably an obsession, with creating content by talking about content created by someone else. As an adolescent and going all the way into my twenties and thirties, almost as many of my idols were critics, reviewers and essayists as artists, writers or musicians. Although, of course, many were both.

Over the long years of my life I've dabbled here and there with fiction. I have a couple of unfinished pieces, clocking in around thirty to fifty thousand words each, that I'm thinking of dusting off, tidying up and introducing to the internet.

I was never much of a fiction writer, though. I can't do plots. Instead, for most of my teenage years I genuinely believed I was a Poet. If you'd asked me to define myself then, "Poet", with a capital "P",  might well have been the word I'd have used. I certainly wrote one hell of a lot of poetry, all of which I still have, but I was extremely reticent about letting anyone else see any of it, which, unless you happen to be Emily Dickinson, is tantamount to proof that you are no poet at all, just a diarist who can't parse a full sentence.

Fine. Have it that way. But I always could parse a sentence. That's probably why I was a lot happier to let people see my prose. And my opinions. Pretty much no-one going to get clear without hearing what those were.

Tipa hails "having an opinion" as the key requisite for successful content creation. I often wonder what it would have been like for my eighties' circle of friends, had we had today's social media back then. I quail to imagine the things I would have said and done. Still, I'd swap. It would literally have been living the daydream. 

I remember vividly, sitting in the darkened, closed bar of some convention hotel in the small hours towards the end of that decade or the start of the next, speculating wildly about the future of what we certainly never spoke or thought of as our "content creation", as it might look in the light of the miracle new technology some of us could see glimmering beyond the silicon event horizon.

Thankfully or otherwise, the slow tide of change took too long building to carry us along with it. By the time it arrived most of us were off the beach, watching from the promenade. I had the means but I no longer had the motivation. I still have opinions but they don't scald and burn the way they did. I can hold onto them for longer without feeling the need to throw them at anyone else.

All of my most opinionated "content" is safely locked in ink, scattered across various fanzines and prozines and apazines, most of them, if they survive, by now deep under dust in someone's loft or garage. By the time I was concerning myself with games my outlet was the ephemerasphere of forums and comment threads. My juiciest opinions might still lurk the cobwebbed corners of the interwebs but good luck finding those, either. I posted neither under real my real name nor the blogging handle I go by now. Even I can't remember what I called myself then.

So, that's a thumbnail of how I got started in content creation. In a nutshell, I soaked up what other people were creating and couldn't keep quiet about what I thought about it for fear of exploding. These days I fancy myself a little more louche, a little less strident. I do still fancy myself, though, as must be uncomfortably obvious. Knowing you have a problem, though. First step, yeah...?

But Tipa's right. If I wanted to create content for people to consume, I'd troll out those opinions. I'd stop using stupidly obscure titles and tailor myself some clickbait instead. I'd say what I believe and if that didn't get enough attention I'd think of something else to believe and say that instead.

And I might, yet. I'm kind of keeping that one in reserve. If I make it into, let's say, my nineties, I might fancy some late-flowering notoriety. You have to be either very, very young or very, very old before having opinions makes you a prodigy instead of a pariah. Or a prat.

For now I'll poodle along as I am, thanks. Every internet persona is a front but it's nice to front up as someone you think you might like rather than someone you think other people might like. I create content for me, mainly. I like to imagine me reading it and thinking "yes, that's what I think, too".

Not always as easy as it sounds.

Again Again Again

Today's Promptapalooza starter is

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

Talk about shooting a barrel full of fish through an open goal while riding a very high hobby horse. I could bore for my country on this one.

But  I won't. I'll just state my case, of which I'm certain: doing something only once is tantamount to never having done it at all. Going back to that earlier prompt, the one about favorite quotes, I could so easily have gone with Mark E. Smith's "We dig repetition". It could be the motto of this blog. Maybe it is!

But I've said all this before, haven't I? I'll leave it at that. Wouldn't want to repeat myself.

Instead, since this used to be an MMORPG blog, maybe I'll list some of the games I've stopped playing but might get back to, some day. It's not like I've done that before...

Blade and Soul - This has been on my mind recently. Not sure why. I don't think I've returned to it once since my first run ended, back in 2016. Which is surprising, because at the time, I seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit:

"I've played Blade and Soul almost every day for a month now. My Summoner is level 30 so I'm averaging about a level a day. It's just a fun MMO. It isn't very deep or complex or  sophisticated or subtle - it's just fun to play".

Probably worth another shot, I'd say.

Star Wars: the Old Republic - I was enjoying  this one enough to sub for a while. After a month or so I'd put in "around a hundred hours so far, taking one character to Level 57 and another to 35".

The main problem I had was the incessant voice acting. It was okay in the spring but when we got to the summer and I wanted to have the cricket on in the background I had to mute the voiceovers, which kind of seemed to be missing the point a tad. Then I went on holiday and it just felt like a good time to take a break.

I was always planning to come back but as yet it hasn't happened. And it's cricket season again now, so it won't be happening for a while. Maybe in the autumn.

Twin Saga - I have actually been back to this one several times. I really like it a lot. The problem is... it's too hard.

Seriously, I stopped because I got stuck. Couldn't progress. Was dying too often. I waited a few months, then a couple of years but each time I went back it hadn't gotten any easier. Quite ironic, given my initial assessment:

"Twin Saga is a very comfortable game to settle into, with a very shallow, gentle learning curve."

Yeah, I think they call that "bait and switch".

Lord of the Rings Online - I took the trouble to log in and claim my compensation. Only fair for the extreme inconvenience I suffered, being locked out of a game I wasn't playing. Shame I wasn't on the server that had the huge rollback - I might have gotten recompensed for losing the progress I hadn't made as well. I'm sure I would have deserved it.

Now that the mysterious and elusive Standing Stone Games have decided to give just about the whole of the game away for free (and yes, I logged in that other time too, to claim my permanent free quests. Of course I did.), I sort of want to give Middle Earth another run. I think playing a Guardian might be the drag anchor that stops me ever getting very far. Perhaps I should try another class. They can't all be that dull, can they?

Also I guess I need to decide over the next week or so whether to buy any of the expansions on sale for 99 LotRO points. I probably have enough left for two or three. I should at least check that before the offer finishes at the end of August.

Final Fantasy XIV - And while we're on the subject of improved free trials...

Elder Scrolls Online - Hang on, wasn't I playing this one, like, a few weeks ago? I thought so! Talking about its prospects of staying on my "Currently Playing" list (it's notional - don't look down the side of the  page for it) I did say "I can't see ESO hanging on for long." I wasn't wrong.

I'm going to stop now because the ESO thing reminds me it's less than two months since the last time I did this. For years I've been making a practice of putting up posts where I tell myself which MMORPGs I might be playing, should be playing, could be playing but currently amn't.

Sidebar - I've always wondered why "amn't" isn't the commonly-used abbreviation for "am not". It turns up in the odd high-Edwardian novel, now and again but mostly everyone just jumps to "aren't", which is just plain wrong, now ain't it?.

Hmm. Now that's what I call a sidebar. A good editor would blue-pencil that entire paragraph. Shame I don't  have one. A blue pencil or an editor. Nor any shred of self-restraint, apparently.

Ahem.

I like writing posts like this because a) they do quite often nudge me into patching up and  logging into at least one of the games in question. Last time it was ESO. This time I'm really hoping it's going to be Blade & Soul. (Spoiler: downloading it as I type...)

And b) they're ridiculously quick and easy to write.

Also, as I believe I implied at the top, in answer to the prompt, yes I do come back to the same things again and again and again...

This post is the proof of that.

Meeting Your Heroes

The Promptapalooza train rolls on! Yesterday it stopped at Poppy and Easha's place, the wonderful Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming, where the talk was all about that post they'd always wanted to write but never gotten around to.  Tomorrow the caravanserai moves on to visit Nogamara at Battle Stance. Be sure to follow.

Today, though, the buck stops here and the burning question of the day is this:

If you could meet any person you look up to, who would it be?

No-one.

Next question.

Hmm. That was short. I guess I'm going to have to fill for a while.

As luck would have it, the topic that popped out of Bel's randomizer and plopped onto my lap just happens to be one I've spent a good, long time thinking about over many years, so I do have a little more to say on the subject.

Let's take it in two bites. There's the looking up to part and then there's the meeting. I have issues with both.

"Look up to" is a very interesting choice of phrase, isn't it? When I've heard this question framed before (and it comes up quite often in dinner-party conversation) it's usually framed more neutrally, something along the lines of "someone you admire". Either that or, more forcefully and evocatively, "one of your heroes".

I'm not sure I "look up" to anyone. It's an expression redolent of dominance and submission, freighted with centuries of class envy. It's almost impossible to hear the phrase without also hearing Ronnie Corbett's passive-aggressive response: "I know my place".

I don't think I even have heroes or idols in the conventional sense. My admiration, respect and even love for people I don't know comes almost exclusively through their work. It's the creation I admire, not the creator.

I suppose if I were to sweep my net beyond the arts, into statecraft or the humanities, I'd stand a better chance of scooping up individuals whose life was the work. Maybe. Not really my thing, though. I'd just show my ignorance so I'll stick with what I know.

With all those caveats, I could still put a handy Lifetime Favorites Top Ten together with hardly a moment's thought. The problem would be stopping at ten.



Oh, let's do it, why not? Without thinking. Just plucking from the air.

• Lana Del Rey
• Lou Reed
• J D Salinger
• Lloyd Cole
• Philip K. Dick
• Jodie Foster
• Scott F. Fitzgerald
• Robert B. Parker
• Ysabeau Wilce
• Rainbow Rowell

Not a very balanced list. An awful lot of writers. If I gave it a while to settle I imagine some variety would bubble up. At least I hope it would. The last two might be a little bit of a stretch, too, in that they haven't really been around long enough to test the "lifetime" part. That's what happens when you deal from the top.

For argument's sake, then, let's say I "look up" to those names, although, god knows, no-one ought to "look up" to Lou. You'd be lucky to get a sneer in return, if he even deigned to notice.

Would I want to meet any of them?

Hell, no!

I totally subscribe to the advice "Never meet your heroes". How is it ever going to be a good idea?

What are you going to do? Gush? Tell them how great they are? Describe what effect a song they wrote thirty years ago had on you when you were going through a bad break-up? Ask them what that one character meant that time they did that thing in that book that you remember like you just read it yesterday because you just read it yesterday, only to have it turn out the writer who wrote it can't even remember writing it, let alone what the characters were thinking?

Meeting your heroine is going to be a big moment in your life. One of the biggest. What's it going to be for her? An opportunity to make a new, lifelong friend? You're going to be buddies now? Going to take her on a revelatory journey to the heart of who she is as you explain to her what she's been doing all these years? Is that it? Your unique insights are going to surprise her, thrill her, hold up a mirror in which all the things she's been saying to the world shine back, glorious and golden and new?

Or are you going to be just another fan, to be handled, hopefully with patience and grace, then handed off to a handler before the next in line takes their turn?

Even that empty, embarassing experience scarcely counts as a worst-case scenario, especially if the star in question happens to be Lou. Maybe you'll get an ashtray thrown at your head.

Of course, it could all go very differently. You could miraculously hit it off. Maybe you really are different from all the other gushing stans. Maybe you do see something in the work that the rest never get. Maybe your hero just happens to be someone not all that different from the kind of people you already know and it all feels surprisingly familiar and comfortable.

Do you want to take that risk? If it goes wrong, will it taint the work? Spoil it? Ruin it, even?

Look, it's a big enough risk just paying attention to what creators say in public. Do you really want to know what they come out with in private? Honestly, if you want to keep enjoying the work, probably best to stay well clear, if you possibly can manage it.

I thought the first two instalments of His Dark Materials were some of the best fantasy storytelling I'd ever read. I was super-stoked for the third. Then one morning I switched the radio on at breakfast and heard Philip Pullman pontificating about something or other, I can't even remember what, and that was that. Never read another word by the man. He's dead to me and I don't even know why, or care. Damage done.

Avoiding contact with your heroes, or at least people whose work you enjoy and would like to go on enjoying, isn't always as easy as switching off the radio, though. Not if you work where I do. We have "famous" people trooping through the workplace like commuters through Oxford Circus tube station, or we did before the pandemic.

I do my best to avoid meeting authors I really like but sometimes it's tough. Becky Chambers just happened to drop in one day, asked me if we'd like her to sign some books. So did John Irving. They were both lovely. It was a joy meeting them.

That kind of thing happens quite a lot. Luckily for me, those kinds of meetings are serendipitous, unexpected and highly contextualized. The authors are there for a reason but also present as private individuals. There's no performance. Luckily for them, they encounter me as the professional, not the fan. It makes for a good experience on my side and, I hope, on theirs. The difference is, I remember it. They won't.

Scheduled events are very different. When we have someone booked to appear for a reading or a signing and it's someone I like, I do my best to be elsewhere. Can't always manage it. I was press-ganged into looking after an SF author almost all of whose books I've read and enjoyed. That went very well. He was good company and nothing went wrong. Retrospectively I'm happy it happened but I'd have wriggled out of it if I could.

And sometimes fate just won't play nice. When Frances Hardinge, one of my absolute favorite authors of recent times, came in, I was asked if I wanted to do the event, since everyone knew how much I liked her books. I politely declined. If it turns out I have illusions I'd rather keep them, thanks all the same.

And then, guess what? There I was, sitting in the staff room drinking a coffee, when Frances and the minder from her publisher walked in, sat down across from me and proceeded to have a half-hour discussion.

I could have got up and gone somewhere else. Maybe to my locker to get my iPod so I could block out the conversation with music. That might have looked a little... obvious. So I sat there and concentrated on whatever I was reading and tried not to listen. Mostly I succeeded. I don't remember what they talked about, only that it was business and not very memorable. Thank god!

It's kind of been that way for me, most of my life. It's seriously easy to meet the people you admire, at least if the kind of peopel you admire are the kind I do. All you really have to do is go to the bar after they do whatever it is they do.

It was like that when I used to go see amazing bands in the back rooms of pubs and dives. Even more so when I was hot into comics fandom. In the eighties I met a ton of people whose work I liked. Some of them I sat and drank and ate with in bars and restaurants or snarfed dubious substances with in hotel rooms. Okay, maybe that was just the one time. Twice, tops.

Some I interviewed or introduced on stage or worked security for, keeping back those crowds of fans who wanted to meet their heroes. I even played on the same bill as one or two. I'm not in the slightest averse to name-dropping but I'll refrain, this once. I'm sure I can work the details in some other time. I usually do.

The thing is, nealry all of the "heroes" I've met turned out to be really nice. I'm fairly sure that, if I'd met them at college or at work or at a party I'd have had a few laughs and maybe ended up being friends. Kind of almost was like that, once or twice.

But mostly I didn't meet them that way, on an equal footing. I met them in contexts where they were doing a job, of sorts, and so was I, or else where they were Honored Guests and I was Lucky To Meet Them.

Meeting your heroes doesn't make you special or clever. but it can make you feel quite good. If they turn out to be nice. If you don't make a prat of yourself. If they don't. I don't regret meeting the people I've met that way.

I wouldn't want to make more of a habit of it than I already have, though. It's too big a risk and there's too much at stake.

Sleeping Behind Memories Are Beasts

I was going to skip posting today but then I read Paeroka on her first experience of Guild Wars in response to the Promptapalooza prompt Syp was given:

“What is your earliest memory related to one of your core fandoms?”

And I thought "Hey, I can knock that out in a hot minute" so here I am, knocking it out.

I began reading American comic books before I could read, if that makes sense. Comics famously have a lot of pictures to help carry the narative, after all. It's always been kind of their USP, even if no-one had learned to call it a "USP" back then. Happy times!

Pictures were all very well, but even at five years old I knew those funny marks in the bubbles told you what the heroes were saying, so I made my mother read them out loud for me. She loved that, as you might imagine.

It would certainly have been easier for her to teach me to read them for myself and I was keen enough to learn but she was equally keen that I shouldn't. She had a theory that it would cause me problems if I arrived at school already knowing how to do the main thing the rest of the class would be spending much of their time on for the rest of the year.

She may even have been right. Hard to tell. No-one in my class could read when I started school, so there wasn't a sucker subject available to test the theory. Maybe it was how every parent thought back then. Anyway, since she was determined to make me wait, she was hardly in a position to complain.

My funds at the age of five were limited to absolutely nothing, naturally, so she also had to buy the comics for me. Sometimes my grandad would buy me a few but mostly the responsibilty fell to my mother. She must have bought me quite a few because I had a fair stack of them before I was old enough to start buying my own, but the first one I remember was Challengers of the Unknown #35: War Against the Moonbeast.

I remember it for two reasons. Firstly, where I was when she gave it to me and secondly what happened when I read it.

We'd gone away for the weekend, which was something we almost never did. We'd driven down to Devon, which was somewhere we never went. It was me, my mother and my Auntie Mary, who wasn't an aunt at all but my mother's best friend.

We were in a room in a hotel (or more probably a guest house or a bed and breakfast, I imagine) in Ilfracombe (possibly) when my mother produced that comic from her case and handed it to me.

I have a strangely vivid memory of her giving me the comic but no real memory of reading it immediately or on the holiday. I don't remember anything much about the holiday itself, either.

Like most memories, it all starts to fall apart when you look at it closely. The only things I'm certain of are that it was that specific comic - I still have it - and that I got it on that trip. 

I'm also positive it gave me nightmares. That's the other reason I remember it.

I was an imaginative child. Over-imaginative. Quite a lot of things gave me vivid dreams, most of them the traditional kind of entertainments about which grandparents loved to say, with relish, "He shouldn't be reading/watching/doing that. It'll give him nightmares".

I don't recall the comic giving me any bad dreams on that holiday but it certainly gave me a few when I got home. At one point I seem to remember having to get out of bed, find it and turn it over so the cover wasn't showing, because just knowing the Moon Beast might be watching me was enough to keep me awake.

It was the cover that did it, of course. I mean, just look at it. That bizarre creature with the gaping maw and that evil, knowing glare in its eye. Bob Brown, the regular Challengers artist of the time, knew perfectly well that cover would give kids nightmares. He clearly meant it to

We weren't far past the horror comics scare of the fifties at that point. The industry was still recovering from the panic that had taken comics as far as a televised U.S.Senate hearing. The Comics Code was extant and in force. Comics were, supposedly, safe for kids to read once again.

Yeah, right. Like it takes a full-on EC Comics barrage of injury-to-eye motifs, hypodermic needles and zombies to scare a five-year old. You don't think a bloody great flying monster with jagged fangs and a lolling, red tongue is going to do it? Thanks Bob!

Did it put me off comics? The hell it did! No sooner had I stopped annoying adults around me by begging them to read the speech bubbles than they had to get used to bodily dragging me out of newsagents when they found me sitting on the floor, reading them for myself.

I could happily spend all afternoon spinning the display, looking at every comic in turn, over and over, as I tried to decide which one would best reward the shilling in my grubby paw. The older I got, the more comics I bought and the more time I spent reading them.

I took a brief break in my teens, when I crazily believed for a handful of years that I was "too old for comics" but that insane notion soon proved itself to be the nonsense I always secretly knew it was.

If I had any lingering doubts, they were crushed to oblivion when my new girlfriend (later to become my first wife), visiting my room for the first time, spotted a large stack of Superman comics I'd failed to hide as well as I thought I had. Rather than pointing, laughing and leaving, as anyone might reasonably have predicted, instead she asked if she could borrow the whole lot. No wonder we got married, I guess, although sadly a mutual love of comics isn't always enough to guarantee a happy lifetime together.

Video games, on the other hand...

A Room With A View

I'm running a few days behind the pack with the Promptapalooza posts. I'm beginning to think August may not be the best month for this. It's a great month for the regular Blaugust because, as is painfully obvious right now, game companies see the dog days of summer as a fine opportunity to grab the attention of bored gamers.

Under normal Blaugust rules that's perfect. If you're trying to bang out a post a day it really helps to have lots going on so you can mine it for ideas. I have getting on for half a dozen posts in mind based just on things I read about yesterday. But when someone's already feeding you an idea a day, maybe it's too much of a good thing.

It would be fine if Belghast hadn't come up with so many really intriguing questions. I could happily write something for just about all of them. Even with work on hold and the whole day to myself, though, I haven't got time to cover that and all the non-Prompt posts I want to write as well.

There are a few I don''t want to miss, though, and this is one of them:

Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation.

Krikket at Nerd Girl Thoughts fielded this one with a brave and thoughtful examination of her own
less than ideal circumstances. I'm going to be a little more upbeat than that, although my own "creative space" certainly leaves something to be desired.

The negatives, briefly listed: smallest room in the house (maybe 9' by 7' at a stretch) ; no heating ( there is a radiator but it leaks so I duct-taped it shut a decade ago and it's never been used since); very limited ventilation (there's a window but it faces a busy main road and there's one of those air vents high on the wall beside me but I've had to tape gauze over it because spiders have been known to drop through it onto my desk).

All of that means it's too hot in the summer (as in right this minute as I write this) and too cold in the winter. I've been observed wearing a scarf and hat at the keyboard. I'd have worn gloves if I could type in them. In the coldest times, and almost always from November to March,  I keep a furry throw over my legs.

The thing, is, though, I don't have to be in this room at all. We have a much more suitable room downstairs. It's three times the size, has a fully functional gas fire, large windows that open and is generally much more comfortable than the one I'm in. I know that for a fact because I left it to move up here, years ago.

Why it was that I moved into this box room, I no longer remember. I'm sure I must have had a good reason at the time. The other room is still available, just as it was. I could swap back any time. But I don't want to.

For whatever reason, even though I live in a large house (far too large for just the two of us, really, now the three children have long left home) I spend most of my time in this small, confined, limited space. It's comfortable. Cosy, even.

It's cluttered but not nearly as cluttered as it was. I spent a day or two last month sorting things out and this is the neatest and tidiest it's been for years. Draw what conclusions you will from that, given what the pictures show.

The second part of Bel's question is the zinger: how does this space influence my content creation? I've honestly never thought about it but I guess it must.

I do know that I sometimes scan around the room abstractedly when I'm lost for inspiration and my gaze will fall on something that will trigger an idea or, more likely, a memory. More commonly, I'll be deep in a post and realize I need to research something and I'll find the details of what I need on a shelf somewhere close to hand.

Having the window in line of sight when I look up is significant, too. There's not much of a view - the top of a hedge, the main road, the barely-used green space opposite, some more trees and houses - but there's green and a lot of sky and weather. In the supposedly more suitable space downstairs all I could really see was the room. It has big windows but at ground level they don't reveal much. Being upstairs and looking out makes me feel at least a little like I'm in the world.

The big, swivel chair I sit in used to belong to my stepfather, a man I had little affection for although we were polite enough to each other. My mother asked me if I wanted it after he died, which was many years ago and I said yes because I knew he would have bought a good chair. He didn't have great taste but he was an engineer and he knew how to choose things that would do a job and do it well.

In the time I've had this chair Mrs Bhagpuss has physically worn out three. They've actually fallen apart. Mine is still pretty much the same as when I got it and it was far from new even then.

The desk my monitor stands on is another story. I bought it for cheap and it looks like it. It's very
small and the sliding shelf the keyboard sits on has broken sliders that no longer slide. At the beginning of the lockdown that shelf fell off entirely, the screws having sheared. I fixed it with elephant tape and it's been sturdy enough ever since. It just slopes to the right. If I take my hand off the mouse it drifts slowly sideways. Not a problem. I almost never take my hand off the mouse.

Under the chair is a completely unsuitable furry rug that continually rucks up when I push the chair back on its castors. It makes me swear quite volubly sometimes. I need the rug because the movement of castors on exposed wooden floorboards is erosive. Mrs. Bhagpuss has worn quite a hole in her floor and I'm keen not to do the same to mine.

From where I can sit I can see so many things that, in the incredibly irritating, yet even more irritatingly useful, phrase made popular by Marie Kondo, "spark joy".

There's the chorus-line of foxes atop the radiator, all gifted me by Mrs. Bhagpuss, as were the more miscellaneous fuzzed-up wildlifes, scrunched together on top of the bookcase.

Above them there's a poster promoting a children's picture-book. I brought it home from work many years ago. I don't even know what the book is called. I just loved the image of the three creatures, a duck, a squirrel and a cat, looking bemused and apprehensive on what must be their first trip to the big city. That poster tells a story that, I suspect, is darker and more disturbing than the book itself. At least, I hope it is.

Beside the foxes is a DVD-Rom I bought mail order from the Phillipines last year. It has scans of every comic featuring The Legion of Superheroes published between the start of the 1960s and the mid-90s. The seller claimed it was legal but I can't see how it can be. It cost £6 including postage. The comics would cost thousands. And fill the room. I'd like to have all my comics stored this way.

On the wall above, next to a weird, framed collage-cum-painting, made and given to Mrs. Bhagpuss by someone she once knew, hangs a portrait of a character from the first of two unfinished atempts at long-form fiction I essayed in the nineties. Or maybe it was the eighties.

My friend Steve Whitaker, an excellent artist, very sadly no longer with us, who worked for some years as a freelance colorist, drew it, ironically in black and white, after reading the first instalment in an apazine we both contributed to at the time. It's his visualization of my character, Cado Babe Harley, but since the moment I saw it it's always been how I see her, too. I have that story on 3.5" floppy disc somewhere. I just need to buy a floppy drive and maybe I can finish it...

Behind me, on the top of a packed and stacked set of shelves, filled with everything from computer components to film magazines from the nineteen-nineties, you can just about see the EverQuest and EverQuest II RPG hardbacks I've slowly been collecting. I have almost all of them now. Don't imagine I'll ever use them but they're settling to own.

Less settling are the reminders of our current situation. A bottle of Vitamin D tablets. Some anti-bacterial, 70% alchohol hand wash. A fox hand-puppet wearing a mask. The mask is printed with foxes. Mrs. Bhagpuss bought it for me. Hers has sheep.

And so it goes. Everything contributes to the whole. The space around us and that which fills it. Always, there's room for more.

It is getting a bit warm in here, though...

And The Cat Came Back

Another day, another Promptapalooza post. It's the gift that keeps on giving, which, if you think about it, makes absolutely no sense. I mean, it's the gift-giver who'd have to keep on giving. The gift would keep on being given. Does no-one know the difference between the active and the passive voice any more?

Anyhoo...

If you had a mascot to represent you, what would it be?

Interesting hypothetical. It assumes I don't already have one. I kind of do, though, in the context of this blog. It's that cat, right up there in the masthead.

I believe I've told the origin story of the cat on the red velvet bedspread before but no-one's going to remember even if I have, so let's go round again.

I've said that the picture's a detail from a screenshot I took during the EverQuest II beta back in 2004. Not too many of the screenshots I took in my first five years of playing MMORPGs have survived. I have a selection of shots from EverQuest that go back to when Lost Dungeons of Norrath was the current expansion, so sometime around late 2003, early 2004. That's about the earliest I can find.

I know for certain sure I took shots of the insanely overcrowded starting areas when Frogloks were introduced as a playable race in the mini-expansion Legacy of Ykesha six months earlier but those and everything before are dust in the wind. As for other games I was playing back then, there's no evidence at all to prove I was ever there.

All of my shots from the EQII beta in the late summer and fall of '04, though, those I still have. I didn't take that many, not by the standards I'd go on to set for myself. Just forty or so. And almost all of those are from the final few days.

 The earliest I can find is dated October 26, just a couple of weeks before launch. It may well be that there was no screenshot function available before then. Maybe I was testing it. I can't remember now.

Most of my shots were taken on  the very last day, when I was documenting the end of a world. More so than most betas I've been in, the EQII beta felt very much like a "Live" game. Not because it was polished or finished. Far from it. It was buggy as hell right until the last day when, as I've written before, the one and only genuine "miracle patch" I've ever seen fixed most of the issues we'd been complaining about for weeks.

No, the reason that beta felt so real was that it was all any of us played for months. A bunch of us left EQ in September to try it out and most of us never went back. I did, eventually, but not for almost a year. From the day I made my first character in EQII I was hooked, just as I had been five years earlier in EverQuest itself.

One of the main reasons I stayed was that EQII gave me something I'd been missing the whole five years I'd been playing EQ: a home. Somewhere my character could come back to after a hard day's adventuring. Where he could settle down on a comfortable bed. With his cat.

OMG! Seriously! My character had a cat! Can you believe it?

Yes, well, of course you can, now. Everyone has imaginary pets these days. In some games even the pets have pets. But then? Well, if I'd ever had an in-game, non-combat pet before, I don't remember it now.

But, half a dozen years later, when I came to create this blog, I remembered that cat, then.

Yeah, no I didn't. I'm lying. I might have remembered the cat. I just can't can't remember if I remembered. More likely I was trawling through old screenshot files, looking for something that would work. But you can bet I remembered that cat when I saw them.

I spent so much time with that cat back in beta. Having an actual in-game home with furniture and pets was such a buzz. I know EQII was far from the first game to have housing but it was the first game I'd played that had housing that felt like somewhere I could imagine wanting to live.

Every session ended with me heading back  to my room, feeding the cat, sitting on the bed and logging out. Every session began with me logging in to see the same room and that cat, stretching, purring, demanding to be fed and entertained. Happy to see me.

When the world ended and we all gathered next to the Claymore in Antonica to watch the sky burn, in the last few minutes I couldn't stay with everyone else. I broke and ran, back to my room and my cat. We met the end together.

If the cat had a name I don't know what it was. I can't even recall whether you could name pets back in beta. I can't say if it was male or female or both or neither. I do know you shouldn't feed it pepper. I never did.

 And now, there they are, up there at the top of the post. The top of every post. My mascot.

Which would be a sweet story if it was true. Only it's not.

I do still have all my screens from beta, that part is true. I probably did look at them for inspiration when I was trying to decide on a look and feel for this blog. I might have wanted to use an image from beta because I'm pretty sure I'd have thought that would be cool.

Thing is, I can't remember. All I can say for sure is that I ended up using a picture of the cat I made after launch instead. The cat that was the spiritual successor of the one I had in beta. When EQII went live I recreated my exact character from beta, a gnome Templar, got him the same inn room and the same cat.

Only as time went on he got better furniture than the beta cleric ever had. Like that red-quilted bed and the picture you can vaguely see in the background. It obviously felt like a better match for the color scheme here. Beta was pretty colorless. So that's what I went with.

What happened to the screenshot I cropped to get just the cat on the bed, I have no idea. I was going to show the full, unedited screen here but I can't find it. I can't find any shots from any period of EQII between the end of beta and about five years ago.

I still have the cat, though. My mascot.

Expedite The Process

 "What’s your process when creating a blog post?"

That's today's Promptapalooza post.  Paeroka set the ball rolling with a focused and approachable take on what can be a notoriously difficult subject to handle.

Interviews often go awry when actors and writers try to explain how it is they do that thing they do. Don't you just love it when they talk about their "process"?  Doesn't it give you just the most amazing insight into their magical world of make-believe? It's like you're being gently guided past the velvet rope and through the curtains to the wonders that lie beyond. Isn't it? Isn't it, though?

No, it bloody well is not! It feels more like being dragged along on a tedious, alienating, self-important tour around someone else's workplace. Would you take time out of your day to listen to quantity surveyors or limousine valeters (is that a thing or did I just make it up?) talk you through the intracacies and subtleties of their metier? No, I thought not.

Isn't a shame, then, that it's so much fun to do? Reading about how someone writes may be tedious as hell but writing about how someone writes is hella fun - for that someone. And today that someone is me!

I can't get enough of writing about how I write. It's kind of a semi-subtle way of talking about myself and god knows there's nothing I like better than that. You know those scenes in police procedurals, where the cop starts in on the questions and the suspect moans "I told the other cop everything already"? I see one of those and I hear myself saying "Oh come on!" I mean, it's a chance to talk about yourself all over again. And someone's asking you to do it! What are you whining about?

Yeah, well, that sets the tone. Don't say you weren't warned. Feel free to skip the rest of the post.

Oh, you already do that?  Whenever I start banging on about things that don't interest you, which is most of the time? You just scan the first paragraph and check what the pictures are showing, then bail if it's bloody EQ or Lana sodding del Rey again? Yeah, well, me too, if I see Warframe or Destiny. Providing I can hit the X before I fall into a coma.

So, for the couple of people who were too slow to click away, here's my process:

• Decide if I'm going to post today. 

• Does the day have a "Y" in it? If so, yes I am.

• Have a think about whether I already have any ideas. Did I think of something while I was playing yesterday? If so, can I still remember what it was. because you know I didn't bother to write it down. Did someone else post something I can steal? Did I start writing a comment somewhere then realise I could get a post out of it? If so, we're set.

• If not, start typing. Something will come.

• If something doesn't come, look at all the little icons on my desktop. Anything? No? Try opening a few screenshot folders and looking at the pictures. Anything?

• Okay, so somehow or other something clicked and I'm up and running. Now for the very, very easy part. 

• Write the post.

• Seriously, that's the super-fast, super-easy bit. Just sit there, bash out 1500-2000 words. Done.

• Just try not to think too much about what I'm writing as I'm writing it. It's like all motor skills. If you think about how you're doing it you'll wobble and fall off. Or, in the case of writing a post, end up spending two hours doing "research" that turns out to be way more interesting than writing the post. And then have to write a different post altogether, one of the tough ones with lots of facts and references that you have to get right. The ones that take all day and no-one comments on. So don't do that. It's not worth it. 

• When it's written, read it back.

• Doesn't make sense, does it? Doesn't flow, either. What happened to that idea you were developing in para three? Just forgot about it, didn't you? And this bit here. Does it have anything to do with anything? I thought not. 

• Then there's that convoluted, twisted piece of "wordplay"? Is it funny? Did you think it was funny when you wrote it? Of course you didn't. You just thought it was clever. Thought it made you look smart. Well it doesn't. Can you even follow what it means, now? No, you can't, so who else do you think is going to get it? No-one, that's who.

• Kill your favorites. It hurts but it has to be done. I was going to say "Kill your babies", which is funnier but also really gross. Had to kill that one.

• Okay, that's the first edit done. Now for the pictures...

... an hour passes....

....talk among yourselves...

• Okay, that just about works. I'll just drag this one up to here...

• FFS Blogger! What the..? Geez. Can't you just move a fricken picture without screwing up the entire layout? Mumble mumble gripe cuss...

• Time to re-read the whole thing, check for typos and cut-and-paste screw-ups, any miscellaneous weirdness...

• Aaaand we're done! Now, what to call it?

• Hmm. No, seriously, what? Gotta have a title that works.

• Here's one. Oh yeah, that'd be... no, wait, didn't I use that one already? Blast! Yes, back in 2014. And again in 2017.

• Okay, let's run a bunch of relevant keywords through Lyrics.com. Only take a minute...

• Hmm. Nope. That's not gonna work. Geez! You'd think every post I wrote was about Livin' tha Life.

• Let's flick through the music folder... oh, hey, I haven't heard that one in forever...

An hour later...

• OMG! Is that the time? Where'd the day go? Sod it... just pick one. Okay, that'll have to do. Just check there's a bearable cover I can link to when the monthly music post comes around...

Two hours later...

• God, if I don't stop right now I'll never get my dailies done. Okay, just bang in the tags... try to stay awake... seriously, this bit takes like thirty seconds but it feels like thirty days. I hate tagging posts.

• Hit Publish and that's it. Finished!

• I'll just read it once more, now it's really real.

• What the hell?! How did I miss that? And that! And this paragraph makes no frickin' sense at all! Gimme a moment to fix that...

• Oh sod it. It'll have to do. 

• Read it through one last time...

• Okay, that's pretty good. I'll put my name to that.

And there we go. That's My Process. Okay, there's the odd post that doesn't come off (and this might be one of them) but it pretty much always works.

At least, it works for me. For the readers, assuming there are any, maybe not so much. But that's not really the point, is it? I write to please myself and mostly I succeed because, yes, I am that much of a narcissist.

But, hey, be your own fan and you'll never let yourself down. Amirite?

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Replying to a post over at The Friendly Necromancer on the recent Promptapalooza topic of favorite quotes led to an interesting exchange of comments with Stingite yesterday. I was going to continue the conversation there but I sometimes feel that going to and fro over a topic in a comment thread can feel a little intrusive so I thought I'd spin my thoughts on the subject into a post here, instead.

The quote in question, which you can find in full at the original post, together with a video clip of pro wrestler Al Snow saying it, makes the point that fans think they know but they don't, something that leads to false assumptions and ultimately to conflict.

I think that's true but I think it's fully reversible. In my comment I said "professionals have the experience of producing the content but they really don't have the experience of consuming it. It's never going to matter to them in the same way it matters to a fan."

Stingite replied with details on the due diligence a good, responsible developer employs out of a desire to make the best game they possibly can and to understand as fully as possible how that game will be experienced by its players. He concludes "This behavior should be the norm, not the exception" and I agree with that, too.

And yet, no matter the good will and resolution on each side, neither party can truly hope to know the experience of the other. Or can they?

There is one obvious difference between the two positions. As Al Snow says, fans "think they now have knowledge and an understanding of a business that they've never been in" but fans can and do transition into development. It may even be the most common route.

I wouldn't know. I stand in the position of knowing ignorance outlined by Snow; I've never worked in the video-game industry so anything I say is supposition.

It would surprise me, though, if it turned out that a majority of video-game professionals hadn't passed through a period of game fandom at some point prior to making gaming a career. It's not exactly banking or insurance, after all; a steady, reliable choice made out of pragmatism and a desire for security.

Anyone can play games and obsess about them; it's a lot harder to steep yourself in the magical world of insurance as a teen, although I'm willing to bet someone is doing it right now. Chances are, though, that most game-makers played games before they jumped the fence.

That could lead them to believe they understand what it is to be a fan. And it kind of does... only, really, it doesn't. It lets them understand what it was like to be a fan when they were a fan. But fandom isn't what it once was.

There was a time when just knowing the names of people in a creative industry qualified you as a fan and Xeroxing a few pages to share the information made you a superfan with fans of your own. Roy Thomas got his start that way. Hell, so did Francois Truffaut. That's how hard it was to know anything, once.

Things aren't like that any more. The bar has moved. The internet reveals all and social media shares. The fan/pro barrier is porous to the point of dissolution. Twitch makes fans more famous than the creators they feed off.

For many, being a fan is a lifestyle. For some it's an identity. For a few it's a full-time job, with pay. Where it gets awkward is when it becomes the key, defining, most significant thing about you. What makes you who you are. Knowing more about that one thing than anyone else. Wanting it, loving it, needing it. Owning it. Being your obsession.

I knew someone back in the 1980s who would buy the same copies of comics he already owned, over and over again. Not variants or reprints or different editions. The literal same, identical copies. He wanted, needed to re-experience the surge of pleasure that discovering and possessing those comics had given him first time around. He had to re-own his own life. Vicariously.

That's what being a fan does to you. It makes you feel your identity is bound up in the object of your obsession. That's why "toxic" fans behave so irrationally, so bizarrely. It's why they take everything so personally. Being a fan isn't just what they are, it's who they are. Threaten the thing they idolize and you threaten their sense of self.

Which is terrifying. Change is scary enough when it's the outer world that changes but when it's you're interiority that's shifting... well, that's going to trigger a reaction.

A reaction which everyone else is going to see as wholly disproportionate, if not just plain wrong, based as it is not just on a false premise but a complete misunderstanding of reality. Fans, as Al Snow says, " have no actual experience" of how things work. All they know is how they feel.

Seasoned developers, conversely, have plenty of experience. They know exactly how things work, even if it's only in their particular area of expertise. They know why changes are being made, what the outcome ought to be, where the compromises are. They also know it's not forever. If change doesn't work, change can be changed. And if that doesn't work, ultimately, there'll be another job. A chance do better with a new challenge.

Fans have none of that. By definition, a fan believes what they worship cannot change. It has to stay the same or the world will come to an end. Their world. Ironically, when their self-constructed, tissue-paper world does inevitably crash and burn, some fans just stepping-stone to another. Loyalties can transfer. But not always. Not for everyone.

Fandom doesn't demand stasis, of course. More of the same is always welcome. And more of the same can be something different. If you were a Bowie fan in the '70s and '80s you had to be ready to scrub off the glitter and face paint and start wearing suits.

But mostly fans like things to go along much as they were before. If there's too much change at first they resist and then they recoil. The object of identification becomes the nexus of contempt. It's not enough to ignore it or hold it in disdain. It has to be destroyed.

At least, I guess that's how it works. Again, it's supposition. Not being that kind of fan, I don't - can't - have that experience.

If it's not like that, though, why would forums and chat channels be filled with ex-fans throwing their time and energy into tearing down everything about the games they used to love? Why would people make accounts and characters for games they don't even play, just to log in and tell everyone how terrible those games are and how dumb everyone is for playing them?

Developers can observe that level of obsession, of connection, of identification. They can monitor it and moderate it and try to minimize it but they can't share it. At least, not if they're any good, they can't. There are professionals who do cross that line. I could name one or two. I'm not going to, because naming people like that is like calling up the devil. Pretty sure we can all think of examples, though.

Of course, all along here I've been talking about obsessive fans. Stans, if you will. I know some people don't like that term but it has value.

As bloggers we're almost certainly all fans of something or someone. Probably lots of somethings and someones. It's painfully clear from even a cursory reading of this blog that I'm a fan of EverQuest and Lana Del Rey, for example. I keep writing and posting about them, along with a few other things, even though it must be self-evident that I'm doing it because talking about my interests interests me, not because I expect it to interest anyone else.

That's fandom. It's also why fans can be really tedious company if you don't share their enthusiasms and sometimes even if you do. It's not toxic fandom, though. Al Snow didn't use the expression but I imagine that's what he meant. I don't think he was taking issue with people who subscribe to services that show wrestling matches or who buy magazines or even wait outside venues hoping to get an autograph or a selfie with their favorite.

That's the kind of experience creators, be they pro-wrestlers or game developers, can and do share with their fans. The cuddly, friendly, fun face of fandom. And, of course, creators can be fans in their own right, full-fledgedly outside their professional arena or, with limitations, inside it. When game developers say in interviews that they're fans of other developers' work, play their games and enjoy them, that's what they mean. Or at least I hope it is.

We can all share in that kind of fandom and understand it. We can all be fans, that kind. The other kind, though, the kind Al Snow is talking about, theirs is as unknowable an emotional experience to a working professional as that pro's actual working life is to an obsessive fan.

I'm not seeking in any way to explain obsessive, toxic behavior, far less to excuse or justify it. It's bad and it shouldn't happen. But bad things do happen. Understanding why they happen, that's the hard part. That and doing something about it. Hardest of all.

All I'm saying is, if it's hard for a fan to understand the experience of a professional, well, it cuts both ways. As for me, since I'm neither a stan nor a pro, clearly I don't understand anything at all.

Don't stop me talking, though, do it?

Now Denial And Legislated Nostalgia

Today's Promptapalooza prompt is short and to the point:

What is a favorite Quote/s, and tell us why.

Wilhelm drew that card. Here's his post.

I have a number of favorite quotes, most of which I've trotted out here numerous times. I won't go back to that well.

While Mrs. Bhagpuss was away the other week I started re-decorating the kitchen. It's a work in progress. When I came to repaint the wall in the picture above I noticed those five tiny frames above the window.

I put those up when we moved into this house, more than a quarter of a century ago. They've been there ever since. There were others scattered around the house but those five are the only ones that survived.

They all feature quotes from what was, at the time, one of my favorite novels, Douglas Coupland's Generation X. I read it when it was first published, in a peculiar, square-shaped edition with huge margins spotted with line drawings and definitions of zeitgeisty phrases
of Coupland's own invention. All of which were dropped from later editions. A mistake.

I was extremely taken with many of these tidy packets of snark. Enough so to take the book into work and photocopy some of the best, then go out and buy teeny-tiny little frames to put them in. I did a lot of stuff like that back then. Still do, when the moon is high.

Re-decorating gave me the perfect opportunity to get rid of the

ridiculous things. The concepts are long outdated, about as zeitgeisty now as Segways or Starbucks. Coupland, whose books once defined a generation, now writes stuff that makes Brett Easton Ellis sound like the voice of reason.

Instead of taking that opportunity I cleaned the plastic glass and put them back up.

They still sound like truth to me.