T w e n t y S i d e d
Logan is discovering the hard way that he isn’t good at…anything, really.
At least, not to his own standards.
Logan’s skills are based in socialization and leading. He’s good at a bake sale, or running his parents’ bookshop. He got high marks in most of his classes growing up, but ‘participation’ was always his highest mark and sometimes carried him through his less successful subjects. Isolated the way he has been, he has too much time to think. He’s failing over and over to write, bake, sew, paint, and all matter of other miscellaneous hobbies he picked up to endear himself to strangers. The thought crosses his mind that maybe he only ever got attention for projects because he was friendly. The thought then keeps crossing his mind as though participating in some screwed up game of Frogger where the goal is to have an anxiety attack.
In a moment of self-detrimental idiocy, he posts something he’d written for a composition class to be judged by people on Reddit. He takes it one step further and posts it under the guise of tutoring the author of the paper, so that people would be more honest about his work.
The project, which he’d gotten a solid B on when he was still in high-school, then gets ripped apart as though fed to lions.
Some people are helpful when offering advice. Some…aren’t.
‘I’m a teacher and if this got put on my desk, I’d not only give the student a failing grade, I’d also call their parents.’ – Pettyrage394
‘I’ll be honest, I’d drop this student, she’s going to fail that class and it’s going to reflect on you’ – Humptyatpog
‘Are you sure you meant tenth grade? Is there some weird country out there where ‘tenth graders’ are eight or something? Not trying to be rude I’m just not sure what you meant, thanks.’ – DinoSnail64
‘Look, maybe I’m just in the 99th percentile of intelligence, (I am, ask my own comp professors, I graduated from an ivy liege) but this kid’s work seems derivative and weak from my perspective. There’s some potential, but the standard population can only do so well. Eh, what do I know, right? Your his tutor.’ – AccuKronk
Man, that…didn’t help. Go figure. Logan is disappointed, but not sure what else he expected. He screenshots the last comment in the lineup to make fun of the guys use of the wrong ‘your’ and gets some positive attention from his tentative friend group for it. Quietly mocking people on the internet isn’t a long-term solution, but it helped with feeling hurt, at least. Someone else points out he said ivy liege and Logan gets to jump into a voice call as a pocket of the group begin roasting ‘his highness’ alive.
He eventually opens up a bit about how he’s been feeling to these people, and gets some legitimate human connection. His vulnerability turns into more of the group getting real about what’s going on in their own lives. Someone invites Logan to jump into yet another Discord server with a bit of a smaller group and invite-only system, where Logan might be more comfortable. Someone else offers to give him pointers in crochet, since his first project looked like a Bulbasaur subject to a hit and run.
He probably won’t try to write any time soon, he got all the ‘feedback’ he could handle on that front, but he is slowly finding his place in the new version of socializing he’s learning. His parents have no idea what he’s doing but they’re glad he seems to be doing it. They’re plenty techy for their generation but the internet has cultural differences within it. Kelly’s Sudoku group, Michael’s Lego builder club, and Logan’s ‘misc. Discord servers for lonely young adults’ might as wall be whole different universes.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
This is such a weird read for me because on the one hand I strongly empathise with the anxiety and the feeling of inadequacy and insecurity but on the other Logan is socially such a different creature than I am.
Like, when you write about “all matter of (…) miscellaneous hobbies he picked up to endear himself to strangers” it shows that he primarily picked these up as a form of socialization whereas I want to spend a lot of time alone with my hobbies and prefer indirect communication.
I also love the reddit thing. Like, he knows he got a B for this. B is a solid grade and even taking into account that a good teacher should be able to tell if someone is perhaps not ideally suited to the task but makes an effort and adjust accordingly the idea that it is not of passing quality or at the level of an eight year old is ludicrous and these people should either be dismissed as trolls or having completely unrealistic expectations at that level.
As a professional teacher of 69 years I give this essay a solid L.
-bullshit_artist_420
On a serious note, I like this in depth look on the kid’s life. My only regret would be not having this much detail in the previous people. I get that you have more material to draw from in the modern times, but hearing the lives of his grandparents , what they would be preoccupied with in those times would’ve been great, I’m a sucker for worldbuilding and slice of life moments like those.
That’s a great Frogger simile. We had a demo of Frogger 2, there was a room where a ghost chases you which was terrifying.
Ha! Relatable. My first project was a scarf – about as basic as it gets, pretty sure it was just single crochet back and forth the whole way – where my tension was constantly changing as I practiced, so it started at a certain width, got narrower, then wider than at the beginning, then narrower, and so on…
“all matter of other miscellaneous hobbies he picked up to endear himself to strangers”
I’m a little surprised at this, but maybe it’s normal now. You start doing something, and you normally don’t do it very well because you haven’t done it before. If you persist, you get better at it. If you don’t, you never will.
On the other hand, there’s video out there of people doing all sorts of stuff really well. I would say that for pretty much any activity, there’s video available of multiple people doing it well.
So you think that’s normal, and you are doomed to never be good at it. You don’t think that the ones on video started out by not being good – and they didn’t record video for those attempts. People mostly don’t post video of fails (except when it’s an *exceptional* fail in some manner). So there’s a survivor bias in posted videos.
I ran into this myself. I started to lift weights as a way to keep myself from getting fat (again) after losing weight for surgery. I’ve got to the point of lifting more than almost everyone at the local gym. But I don’t generally think of myself as strong, because when I see people lifting on YouTube or whatever, it’s with much more weight than me.
Never mind that for these people, *it’s their job*.
This is very engaging. Now I can’t wait for the next entry.
It sounds like Logan is going through a tough and relatable journey of self-discovery and learning to deal with his inner doubts. The whole experience with Reddit’s brutal feedback seems to have been a wake-up call for him, showing just how hard it can be to put yourself out there. But it’s great to see that despite the rough moments, Logan is finding a sense of belonging in smaller, more supportive spaces. It’s interesting how the internet, with all its diverse communities, can offer a place for real human connection, even if it’s in ways that his parents might not fully understand. It shows that there’s always a path forward, even when things feel overwhelming. It’s nice that he’s slowly finding his way, even if it’s through a strange mix of vulnerability, humor, and some quirky hobbies like crochet!