When I was about 8 years old, one of the things I liked to do was to go on the internet, look up images and gifs from my favourite video games, and save them to my computer. I’d even copy of those images onto floppy disks and bring them with me to school. Why? I just… wanted to, the same way I liked keeping stickers in sticker books. Even though I couldn’t see the images unless I put the floppy disk into a computer, I liked just knowing that they were there.

In a way, a lot of my online writing since then has kinda followed that same impulse. My motivations may have gotten more complex, but the desire to collect things, I think is something more fundamental for me. I’m reminded of a video of a “domesticated” beaver making a “dam” with household objects and soft toys. I feel like that sometimes.

And… I also feel like I haven’t done a great job of honoring or respecting that impulse in recent years. I feel like I want my collections to tell stories about who I’ve been at various stages of my life. Not necessarily impressive or grandiose stories, just… honest ones. And lately the feeling I’ve felt is disorientation. It’s possible- probably likely- that I’ve been trying too hard to be more “professional”, more “adult”, in ways that have clouded my innermost impulses, and left me feeling dissatisfied, disconnected.

I do still believe that I can “find my way home”. And that everything will make more sense once I do. Or the need for “sense” will wither away, and I’ll just be content with what is. Maybe that’s a naive, self-indulgent delusion. But I think I can afford to try inhabiting that for a while. Let’s see what happens if I try. The change I’m talking about is pretty subtle, maybe imperceptible to readers. But if I feel the difference within myself then that’s all that matters really.

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edit: so I wrote this note really as an excuse to post a King Of Fighters gif, and I let it flow along an idle sort of thought-stream. This is easy for me to do, I don’t have to put in any effort into it. But having done it I’d like to take it a step further and think more about specifics. So. My corpus is kinda big, which I’m both proud of and kinda intimidated and overwhelmed by. I wouldn’t claim that it’s good. A lot of it is a big mess. I wrote a couple of books (FAN and INT) as ways of tidying up areas of it, consecrating little temples amidst the sprawling junkyard of words I have lying around. There are some memes here and there, most notably the Dominos meme and the Ayy Lmao meme. And there are a whole lot of YouTube videos and podcast episodes I’ve guested on. I thought “Frame Studies” was going to be my next big thing, and maybe it still is, but I’ve been demoralized from struggling with it impotently while also being a new dad (and soon to be dad of two). So… what’s next?

I’ve had many ideas; one that comes to mind now is the idea of thinking and talking in years, trying to put a particular character to particular years. This feels like it should be easy in some ways- I can pick out tweets, photos, songs, events, etc and try and consolidate them into something. But then I also find myself thinking that a year isn’t a very “natural” chunk of time. If I did a roundup at the end of each year, that might feel natural, but trying to retroactively do past roundups feels a little forced? Well, I should drop the “roundup” framing and not feel obliged to stick to the precise dates. What, then? I could do a timeline of my life. 2007 played in bands, 2010 served in the military, blogged about local news, started a tshirt biz, 2012, got married, 2013, started job, 2018, left job, twitter started taking off, 2020 wrote FAN, pandemic happened, made 100+ youtube videos, 2022 wrote INT, 2023 had our first baby, 2026, ‘bout to have our second.

…okay…? What do I do with all of that scaffolding? Does it really matter to me how 2021 felt compared to 2019? I mean, kinda. I’m not claiming that’s the most important thing in the world, but I’d like to have some things I can click through and inhabit for a while. I’d like to have floppy disks of those years. And if there’s a different angle that’s better then I can always play around with that, too.