Still Here

Hello to all four of my loyal regulars! It’s been pretty quiet around here lately, so I felt the need to address my uh…public regarding the reasons for it.

The main reason I haven’t been writing too much lately is that I am still reeling from the fiasco that was everyone at Deadspin walking out, thus effectively ending the life of the site as we know it. I am incredibly proud of the Deadspin staff, almost all of whom I deeply respect, admire, and look up to as a writer, for telling those venture capital jerkoffs to stick (to sports) it where the sun don’t shine. I look forward to tracking all of them down wherever they end up so I can continue reading their stuff, but the walkout bummed me the fuck out, even though I saw some version of this coming a mile away, and left me unsure of how much I want to keep doing this.

When I started this blog last November, I was freshly unemployed in anticipation of changing cities, and coming off a rough year, professionally. Without getting into it too much, the company I had worked for had been bought out, and so I had spent the last 10 months at that job getting my shit rocked by a terribly organized, terribly implemented transition that seemed to exist primarily to strip our office down to the studs. Coworkers I respected professionally and like personally got laid off, many of my job functions got stripped away, and I spent my days trying my level best to explain to our continually dwindling base of clients, who didn’t know what was going on and were justifiably pissed as a result, that I also didn’t really know what was going on. By the end, I was both burned out and bitter, feeling that the new bosses regarded our office and our work with little more than greed-driven contempt and a pinch of cowardice.

So once I had my days to myself, I decided to start writing and blogging, with the goal of writing professionally for somewhere cool and interesting, like Deadspin. While I’ve tried my best (and often failed) to be cool with the fact that this blog is not going to rocket me toward relative internet stardom simply by existing (if there’s one thing I can’t stand doing, it’s self promotion; by the way, follow me on Twitter, or fucking don’t, I’m not your supervisor) and appreciate the intrinsic value of writing and publishing my own material, I still had that goal in mind. Therefore, I was quite dispirited both as a writer and as a person to see a bunch of venture capital jerkoffs attempt to wreck everything Deadspin was for no reason other than greed-driven contempt, with extra heaps of cowardice thrown on top for good measure. Even though I wasn’t there, it felt all too familiar.

That’s the main reason. The other reasons are a melange of more normal stuff. The end of the GBBS season left a void in what became a pretty regular schedule, and while I’m constantly thinking about resuming semi-regular Obscure Metal Roundups, I have yet to summon the industry to research or write one. And then there’s the even more normal stuff, like routine depressive episodes and Baldur’s Gate addiction (I’m almost at the end of Shadows of Amn!).

Anyway, the plan is to resume semi-regular posting in this space. Thank you all for your support and encouragement, it does mean a lot. I’m still around, I swear.