I think I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with media consumption. As a child, I was almost always staring at a screen. Whether it was my Gameboy Color or a TV in the house, I was glued to it. As I grew up, my tastes changed, but my time management skills stayed ever stagnant, like I was still a seven year old with not a single responsibility. I can’t remember every gaming session, nor can I remember every movie. Entire episodes of shows I used to quote constantly are now just a blur. However, if there’s one thing I remember vividly, it is the feeling I got when my friend got me into Runescape around 2006.
This was the same person who got me to buy my first Pokemon game so we could play together during recess and after school. Needless to say, I took his recommendations as gospel. The majority of games I find myself nostalgic to, are that way because of him. I am eternally grateful for the memories I shared with him on these games.
Of course, there’s always a “but.” Time marches ever forward and I am but an unwilling foot soldier, stomping in sync with the rest of the world. I have responsibilities, a job, friends, hobbies, and my own mental health to take care of. All things I neglect on a regular basis depending on which version of myself decides to wake up that morning.
I have tried on multiple occasions to make a New Years Resolution that would improve my quality of life. I have tried on multiple occasions to center my resolutions around creation, so that I may fill the void with noise that will echo back to humanity for an amount of time, becoming the version people can come to know, even after my vessel on this Earth has ceased operating. Around 2014, I made a goal to write five songs that year. I was relatively new to guitar and my garbage poetry entertained me when my college classes did not. Truth be told, I was a bad student because I couldn’t care about anything I was being taught. I always thought I had the better lesson on the tip of my tongue, being scrawled out on paper meant for note taking. That year, I wrote next to nothing and I refuse to go through my old notebooks.
In a sense, this website has been my failed New Years Resolution at least two times. When I made this website, my eyes were still bright with optimism over what the world could bring and how my career could thrive. Oh how I wish to be that naive again. At the time, I was interning as a script reader for a production company. I absolutely loved reading and writing, a thing I would grow to question by the end of my tenure there. As the year came to a close, I posed the idea of starting a website where we could talk nerdy things until we were blue in the face. I knew he’d be the perfect partner for this project because after we went and saw Venom at the local theatre in Kutztown, we walked to the bar and proceeded to do just that for hours. And it was glorious. A moment where the details fade, but the feeling of the moment was worth preserving. It was like how I felt when I understood the charm of Runescape all those years ago. It was effortless, a ton of fun, and time didn’t matter. Time of course, does matter. While we began strong with recording monthly episodes, it soon became apparent that these things take a lot more effort than watching a movie and talking about them. And the only thing harder than dealing with one adult, is two. Now armed with a co-host, it would become a challenge of scheduling. There are movies from our first google document that may never be reviewed because our lives have changed so drastically from the night we conversed in that bar. We are adults with full time jobs now. We barely have time to game most weeks, let alone ramble on about movies and then edit it down to something people would want to listen to. No, that day we made promises we knew our future selves couldn’t keep, but we wanted them to.
At the end of the day, this website is a labour of love. It does not make any money, and why would it? We’ve posted maybe a dozen things in two years. It’s a truly terrible business model on my part and I’m totally ok with that. This is my outlet, and I write in full confidence knowing that for once, I don’t care about my noise echoing back from the void and entertaining the world. Instead, I scream into the void, loudly and proudly for me and me alone. This project is mine to screw up in the ways I want to screw up. I worry about my media consumption being the wrong kind. I have fallen into the mindset where time I spend on YouTube is a waste. I feel that I must be watching a show or movie, playing a game, or reading a book to be working towards that goal I set for myself as a self-centered teenager wanting to make music on a time frame I felt was important, not when the art was ready to be crafted. I have no idea what this website will bring in 2021, but I’ll be damned if it’s nothing. I would love to sit here and lie to myself. Oh how I wish I could say that I would post weekly reviews for all the media I’ve been consuming, how I’ll read a book every month and start making progress on my own, or maybe the podcast I’ve been brainstorming for over five years. But I know I can’t. Lies I tell myself are only good until I realize what I’m really saying.
2020 was a bad year by basically every metric you could measure a year by. But there is one thing that stands out when it comes to that forgettable year. I consumed media like I was a child again. I joined a sub reddit where you watch 100 movies in a year. I got re-addicted to games that raised me and shaped my interests. Zane got me into Dark Souls, a franchise that has arguably been the driving force behind my resurgent love of video games and the open world adventures I can experience with them. I spend way too much time on media now, but I’d like to funnel those experiences in a semi regular stream of consciousness.
In 2021, I have the intention to start writing more. Writing about my experiences, both with media consumption and my attempts at storytelling. I cannot promise you a schedule or even what these posts will look like because for the moment, I choose not to lie to myself. I choose to let the art decide when it is done. This website is my journal and I plan to doodle on it, like I did my notebooks in school.
I hope that my experiment this year will lead to a more productive me. One who won’t get sucked into YouTube rabbit holes when I want to turn my brain off. One who feels like he has accomplished more, simply for the fact that I said my thoughts louder than the voices I listen to. Perhaps I will make something that I am truly proud of. I cannot know until I do. And when I do, it’ll be too late to worry about how I started. So here is me starting. I start loud and proud. Knowing that nothing I do may matter, but I do it because I value the attempt to not go quietly into the night. I may have an unhealthy media consumption, but they are still the moments that shape who I am. And I aim to scream my thoughts into the void until I have nothing left to say. Wish me luck, not in what I say, but in that I say something at all.
