There's nothing more authentically old internet to me than apologizing for not updating my blog for months. I always *meant* to, you have to understand, but things just keep happening and they don't stop happening and I don't even know where to begin with everything. Let's just do a bullet points recap of the last ... damn it was OCTOBER when I updated this? Christ.
- Somehow, inexplicably, I'm still waiting to find stuff out about my medical bills. It's been truly the world's slowest nightmare. Some stuff will hopefully get cleared up next week, with a few phone calls. Other stuff just sits, eternally pending. Insurance denials are truly hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
- I started HRT. I made the appointment like two weeks before the election and then spent a lot of the time after that feeling like fate conspired to punish me for deciding to finally go for it. It's been a little over three months now, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing to report other than hey if you want to cry WAY MORE in life, I highly recommend the potent three hit combo of nearly dying, working on a lot of your trauma in therapy, and starting estrogen. It's like at least once a day with the waterworks now. Supposedly it'll even out over time, just the most obvious and intense effect so far.
- I went to Chicago in January! Mostly to see my girlfriend, but I did visit other friends too. Relevant stuff has already been told as stories on the various podcasts, but it was great, even if it was a short trip. Hoping to go back in the fall after some surgeries I need this year. Traveling in my current physical state turned out to maybe unbalance me more than I was expecting, and between that and the illnesses going around I've spent the last six weeks veering between physical maladies. I don't recommend getting old and having your health decline like this, it sucks.
- I got my ears pierced. Part of the whole gender exploration thing. I meant to tell the story on a podcast but I was sick the week I would have told the story and never circled back around to it. I'm like three weeks into that, so when my lobes are healed up I think I'm going to go get another one, and I'm sure that will find its way into a show (ALF probably). It was so easy, truly painless, so I'm probably going to go get a helix piercing next time and step it up at least a little. My current day job is a bit regressive about piercings in general so I can't go too crazy but maybe someday, idk.
- I got my legal name change. I would love to do like a gender marker change as part of that but I don't live in a place that supports anything other than binary so nothing really suits (also y'know... the current situation is a mess). It's been nice to slowly peel off the rind of my dead name in aspects of my life. The paperwork is really annoying SPECIFICALLY for credit cards, but honestly most everything else has been pretty painless so far. Nearly done getting all my accounts updated, it does take a while.
Anyway that's the big stuff. Most everything else shows up in my shows every week, because frankly I'm podcasting too much. The one two punch of starting Cosmo Champs and guesting on Ghost Divers really just maxed out my capacity for homework in this really alarming way all of the sudden. Didn't help that I've also been fighting being sick and everything else, and the dead of winter doldrums really bad. Hoping heat will fix me when the warmth finally returns to the world. It's trying its best. I just feel like I vaporized my free time all at once and while I'm having a great time, I'm feeling the strain of just not knowing how to fit it all in. If we could figure out how to make the days 28 hours long, or to give everyone a three day weekend, it would really save me right now. Just saying. Someone should make this real.
The thing that compelled me back to writing the blog tonight was actually podcast related. Anyone who listens to my work knows I love to talk shop more than nearly anything, there's something about thinking about the act of podcasting that just really gets me excited. Eleven years of this will do that to you, I guess. But I mostly wanted to talk about my feelings about the way my Podcasting Style, if you will grant such a thing, has shifted in the last year/year and a half, and really got supercharged in this new direction after the cancer mess in July of last year.
I think the Abnormal Mapping house style has always strived for a sort of openness and curiosity about the works we cover, at our best I want to be open-hearted and take things in both their context but as valuable works even in their own right. I never subscribed much to 'good for the time' sort of thinking, I think understanding why things might be a certain way is valuable but I think good things are generally just good, and it's more about willingness to accept what they are and aren't without a lot of shoving things into boxes. On that front, I think this is what AM as a network has always excelled at. With games we tended to often be a little more formalist about things, talking about movement feel and level design and what the buttons do vs what you might want them to do, more than we were like narrative critics (though we've certainly done a lot of that).
But there's been a real shift in my approach, and I mainly have two things to thank for this: doing a lot of work in therapy, and Around the Long Fire developing into a podcast that is only about 20% Sagas by volume. The therapy thing is hard to summarize, beyond the scope of this, but in short: i've been in therapy pretty intensely since 2019. How often I go drifts a lot based on need (usually every two weeks) but when I do go I am very diligent about making sure work gets done. And there's just been a lot of things to unpack: a mess of parental trauma, acknowledging and starting to actually process some grooming and abuse I underwent when I was a teen, figuring out I had an eating disorder and doing a bunch of work to try to learn healthy ways to cope with that, and lately a mess of like abandonment issues (more parental trauma stuff, ultimately) and BDD that has been ruining my life (the mixture of transness and ED? potent in an awful way. don't recommend. I'm sure many people reading this can relate). Anwyay, there's been a lot of work being done, and I'm very serious about making sure I spend that time effectively, so I'm constantly deliberately going through a trial by fire about myself and my emotions and my past and all the other things. This didn't slow down after my nearly dying thing, if anything I've gotten more serious about trying to tackle my problems with both hands, because I had to really sit with maybe not making it in July, having a nebulous and potentially still fatal road ahead of me with survivorship, and realizing I was deeply deeply unhappy with how I had spent my life up until the point I was waking up in the hospital with my guts in pieces. Many things to do, and I'm not getting any younger and while my odds are good, truly I don't know what the next few years are going to bring for me. So it's never been more carpe fuckin diem over here.
Add to that ALF, the strange little podcast that could, starting from a real niche just because I wanted to do something with Niamh and didn't have any better ideas and knew that fae wanted to do this sort of podcast specifically. So I agreed to a one season plan, we'd see where we're at, and then reassess if we wanted to keep going after that. I honestly didn't expect it to go as well as it did, both in terms of what the sagas brought us, but also during the end of season 1 when we were reading the awful Heimskringla we started filling the podcast with us talking about other stuff because otherwise the show would have been 30 minutes long and it was meant to be an excuse to hang out. So we started putting our lives into it, which meant I started talking about a lot of this stuff, and even before Last July that meant often I was working through a lot of my mental health stuff into a microphone on Around the Long Fire every week. It started serving as a sort of second therapy, and became a place where I could test being more honest and vulnerable because it was a relatively unpopular show. But then, people started really responding to it?
Not in droves, I still think ALF is a relatively obscure show, and people don't know what to make of our main coverage topic, but the people who do listen often message and tell me how much certain things I talk about mean to them, how they rarely hear people talk about these things in these ways, and how my problems remind them of their problems, and often that they draw strength from this. Its a really heartening thing to hear, frankly. I've always been very fearful of openness, in part because of all that parental trauma and abandonment fears, and to know not only do people not mind me talking about my private life but it might actually help others? Whew. That's potent.
So I leaned into this. And Niamh has always been game, fae is a thoughtful and compassionate cohost, someone with a great reserve of strength and a contemplative empathy that is a nice antidote to my flailing emotionally heightened perceptions of things. I know we have the Serious Critic label applied to us sometimes, but I really tend to just go with my gut and operate from a place of emotion, and that's only gotten more dramatic as I've shifted this style.
There's a second project that deserves special mention here, which is Em and Dia's Let's Plays on Dia's youtube channel. I just blanket refer to those as Dia Time to my friends, and I will mostly do so here. We started with Dia just wanting to drag me through some dusty old games that I would never play, and I wanted an excuse to hang out with my friend especially after she had her own infamous brush with near-death a few years back. So I would have said yes to anything, but we were doing that. And then somewhere in Space Quest ... IV? We had this one episode where we were just exploring a future mall, and talking about our memories of malls and shopping as we looked at all the goods and stores, and I realized that we were doing something much greater than Criticism or Playing a Game, we were sharing ourselves with each other and to the audience, and it was intense and real even if it was also The Epitome of Hanging Out.
Dia has always been much more casual about things than me, at least to my estimation. I tend to get worked up, and take everything very seriously, and attach a lot of meaning to stuff. Dia is more of a vibes based lady, at least in my experience. But we both realized we had something, and shifted the tone of our work together into different directions. We played Gabriel Knight 2, a very silly FMV game sequel to one of the best adventure games of all time, and it truly changed my life. Its like outside the scope of this blog, but GK2's camp queer story, and getting to just react to it and be led around by my coolest friend, did a lot to remove a lot of my hangups about doing Queer Reads in my work. Watching Gabe fumble the evil European eugenicist and being able to just laugh at it but be compelled by it showed me a way to authenticity and willingness to accept a thing for what it is and not what I expected or wanted that I just hadn't ever experienced so potently.
We continue to do these, and they aren't all Gabriel Knight 2s. Sometimes they're Gabriel Knight 3s. But nearly every week we are making memories together, and it's mostly just laughs and hanging out with my cool friend, but also sometimes we read the Lospass Guidebook for 90 minutes and I think it's some of the best work I've ever done. Sometimes we run around as Boku during one balmy summer in the 70s and wonder why he can't tell anyone he has the gold but also reflect on our own childhoods and ship the adults and have a great time being wistful. Dia Time is not criticism, but it is an aspect of this aspect of myself, something that is heart-first and earnest and trying to really create memories and meaning out of the stuff that surrounds our lives. It always means a lot to me, and our small but dedicated watching fanbase always delight me. I'm always happy when people tell me they're watching the LPs. They're a type of thing I never thought I could make, and certainly not like that.
And then, of course, July happened. And October happened. And November happened. And January happened. And things keep happening. And I find that this new style has started to become the main way I interface with a lot of my work now, as I really try to find the emotional core that draws me into things and engage with them with my whole heart and really wring truth and identification out of things. And that means putting a lot more of myself into how I respond to things, being really honest about what works and why, where I'm finding sympathy and empathy in a work, and what parts of me respond to that. I have offhandedly referred to this as a confessional style of podcasting to my friends, because it invariably requires putting a lot of my shit out there. I can't talk about Utena without talking about being groomed. I can't talk about 1000xRESIST without talking about my estrangement from my parents. I can't talk about The People's Joker without talking about my complicated feelings about my gender. They're high friction, both exhilarating and exhausting often at the same time, and I just put so much of my heart and energy into this work and I find it very rewarding, but it is strange that I have fallen into this new style as my main mode, and its begun to follow me into all the shows. How I feel about Eureka Seven in 2025 just couldn't have existed in 2023. I wasn't the person who could believe the things I believe, or process my feelings the way I process them now.
I say this as almost a full positive, I like this new me and I like the ways I am engaging with art, and I feel like I'm fighting every day to be caring and authentic and open to people and possibility. It's not always easy, and it doesn't always work, but given this multi vector crisis point and being offered motivation to re-invent myself, I've really tried to make the most of it. If anything, I regularly experience anguish because I can only go so fast in my reinvention. Change is slow, I have to wait for so many external factors, I ultimately have very little control over a lot of them and the world grows scarier every day. I am not a brave person in any way, and I've had to learn to emulate the bravery of those around me, and do things despite my constant and all-encompassing fear. I'm simply doing my best, worried in six months I'll be dying, and trying to make sure next time I'm in the hospital not sure what my future holds, I don't feel immense regret that I've wasted all my time, even if what I do week to week hasn't change all that much.
I still love art, and love talking about it, but the ways I find meaning in that process have changed a lot. I care much more about who I'm doing something with, and what we both bring and take from the exchange, the relationship of a podcast is so centrally important to me. When I was in the hospital, learning to eat solid food again and struggling to even get out of bed much less do laps, it was my closest friends who were all my podcast cohosts past and present who kept me sane. They were there in the morning for me, they would share their lives in my group chat and remind me there was normalcy outside of my hospital room, they were taking care of the shows while I was in the hospital and weeks away from being able to sit in front of a mic. It isn't enough to just have opinions about art, I need people in my life to share them with. I want a support system of people I love and that love to deepen *because* of the work we do. One begets the other, and reinforces it, and the cycle begins anew.
It's changed how I think about a lot of my life, even if the shows haven't ultimately changed much in formal structure. My critical lens, such as it is, has been fundamentally altered. The way I approach my job has shifted dramatically. And I wonder how far it'll go and how much tolerance for it the audience has, worried I will hit a wall someday where the interest just isn't there or I stop being relatable or I lose some aspect of my authenticity or whatever. Could be many things. I have a lot of fear. But I know that week to week, people still tell me the New Way has moved them, or inspired them, or just given them energy and feelings they didn't have before. And that feels really fucking good. I want to be strong for people, I want to share the breadth of my experience, and I want us all to be enriched for having gone on whatever journey we're on together. The audience is also experiencing a relationship, and it's more one-sided and there's a lot more distance, but I absolutely have my own relationships with the shows I love and the people who make them, even the ones who are not my friends. I think that's very human, and ultimately good for people most of the time.
I don't have a big conclusion. Around the Long Fire low key changed my life, and it happened when the Kings harried and all we wanted to do was talk about anything else. Now? ALF is a sprawling weird mess of a show, regularly 2+ hours of manga and movies and games, explorations of personal politics about queerness, dusty roads of memory about our bad upbringings and how we're handling that as adults, and it makes me want to be better and bolder and bigger in every other aspect of my life. Not bad for a little book club about the classics. Me and Dia keep trucking along. We have a lot of weird games we want to play, and some normal ones too, and not every week is a huge winner but even the bad weeks have White Grace show up in leather pants inexplicably.
I think I'm doing some of my best work in my life right now. Hell, yesterday I recorded episode 3 of the Ghost Divers Chobits season, and that's not even my podcast, and I felt like I found a new gear I didn't know I had and we did some goddamn work both doing criticism and finding ways to do this Confessional Mode and talk about what art really means to me and what I respond to and how this speaks to the human condition. People gotta look forward to that one, it's something else.
And I really need to be doing my best work. In case I'm dying. In case the world is ending. In case I end up back in the hospital with worse news. In case a lot of things. I really want to be able to look back on this time and say I did my best and have no regrets, because that's all anyone can get in this rapidly shrinking time to be alive. It might not seem like it, I'm just a humble podcaster, but I'm fighting to my best every day. And I hope that some of that, somehow, can bring me closer to others and help them if they need it.
That's it. I won't promise regular updates, but I never forgot about this humble blog.
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