These last few weeks I’ve had Peter posting to the site, and before that, I was doing some lighter content. The podcast, some venting about VR, but nothing really substantial. The long and short of it is: it’s the holidays, and I really, really miss my dad.<\/p>\n
Pumpkin carving was enough to leave me out for an entire day, recovering from the smell of fresh-cut pumpkin; a smell I associate with my dad. He used to do the pumpkin carving for us every year. We kids would draw out our designs, and he’d do his best to cut them out. It’s been a really long time since any of us carved a pumpkin with Dad, I suspect however many years it’s been since I’ve been old enough to hold a knife on my own. But still, the memory sticks as ‘how it’s done’ and leaves Halloween feeling wrong and unfinished.
\n<\/p>\n
Opening my Steam library makes me feel nauseous. I’ve mentioned I’ve been without a computer capable of video games for a good long time. I want to be excited, a little bit, to be able to game again.<\/p>\n
The last time I held a computer that could run anything fancier than Facebook, I couldn’t be torn away from Skyrim for three months. Now, I can’t even open the damn launcher without feeling a bit sick.<\/p>\n
This site is really, really important to me. I want to keep it going, and I want to write! Fuck, I want to write. I was a late bloomer to reading and writing, but like how my dad took to programming with a love and passion, I took to writing. As soon as I could do it, I would not be stopped. I have a finished book of poetry I need to publish, and an unedited but completed manuscript of four hundred thousand words that I need to get out of the draft stage. I’ve been writing columns for my own blogs since I was a teenager, and in different circumstances, I would have just landed my dream job.<\/p>\n
But, a bit like the computer I write this on, it’s hard to really enjoy, due to the circumstances surrounding them both. It’s the worst-timed thing, which, by its very nature could not be at a ‘good time’.<\/p>\n
It’s like facing creator burnout the first day on the job. I haven’t earned sick leave yet, hell, I’ve barely proven myself capable of not making a total fool of myself during the interview process. And, even if I had earned sick leave, and earned the trust of my audience, the internet isn’t an employer with a union and a handbook, it’s people. Jerry might promise to stick around through thick and thin,\u00a0 but five other nameless readers will inevitably stop checking in with enough radio silence.<\/p>\n
I find myself wondering if this will happen to other people, in the age of the internet. You see it with businesses of course, and some celebrities, children riding the coattails of their parent’s success isn’t new. But, damn if a blog isn’t a weird place to find it. Inheriting an audience feels like something that, as an outsider, I’d be fascinated by. If it does become a phenomenon in the next fifty years, people in the future will know how we should have dealt with it, and think it’s obvious in retrospect.<\/p>\n
‘Well of course<\/em> you don’t take over a parent’s blog after they die! Haven’t you seen what happened to ___ and ___?’ or, maybe, ‘Well you can’t just let the audience die out! You’ve got an opportunity! Think of ___!’<\/p>\n I suppose people of the future will just have to snicker at my expense because I have no goddamn idea what I’m doing. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a ruthless cycle. I can’t game, because I miss my dad, so I can’t write about gaming <\/em>which is something I want to do, because I miss my dad. Gah.<\/p>\n I don’t have an answer here, yet. I need to think of things I can\u00a0<\/em>do to make content while allowing myself time to grieve. I mentioned posting about The Sims when I was introducing myself, pretty much as a joke, but maybe I need to actually do that. Just, create what I can, even if it sucks, for a while, and hope when I can cope with it all again, this place is still here.<\/p>\n I won’t shut up about Phasmophobia, maybe I should lean into that.<\/p>\n I suppose this post is a few things, an advanced apology, a warning, and a bit of a tribute. Dad was always transparent online about when things were hard for him, and for that, I’m really, really thankful, because it lets me do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These last few weeks I’ve had Peter posting to the site, and before that, I was doing some lighter content. The podcast, some venting about VR, but nothing really substantial. The long and short of it is: it’s the holidays, and I really, really miss my dad. Pumpkin carving was enough to leave me out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54916"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54969,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54916\/revisions\/54969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}