Hello there! It’s been a while since I said hi.<\/p>\n
I know these days the only time I come in here is to sulk, and I do try not to (hence the prolonged lack of anything on my part) but I don’t like sitting here silent. So I thought i’d just talk about things. ‘Things’ being m0stly my dad. And a bit about why I personally haven’t taken part in the site for so long.<\/p>\n
It’s a bit of a gloomfest, so if that’s not what you’re looking for this year, I wanna wish you a very happy new year right here. I’m grateful you’ve all stuck around as much as you have, you’ve been a wonderful part of keeping this site alive and we’re all so grateful to you.<\/p>\n
Thank you.<\/p>\n
Now onto the moping.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It’s very odd to realize it’s been over two years since dad died.<\/p>\n
It’s gotten hard to write things for the site for a bit now. It dawned on me at a certain point this year that all the things I was chatting about were conversations I would have had with my dad. And while, thanks to you all, there’s certainly not silence, the particular kind of conversations I would have had with him are gone. The call and response is only a call. Which makes it hard to come in here and make jokes and chatter about my own projects and\/or whatever aspect of RPGs he was talking about.<\/p>\n
Not that the gloomies are the only reason I’ve not had much to say in the margins, I have a very taxing full-time job. And a life to learn to live as a young adult in a very, very complicated world. Which doesn’t leave a lot of room for writing or other projects. But the ‘I miss my dad’ thing makes it a lot harder to sit down when I do have the time and engage with the community he spent so much time fostering over the years. As much as I genuinely do enjoy writing for the blog. It’s hard to think about the reason I’m doing it, and how my uninterrupted rambling will remain just that.<\/p>\n
Not that you guys responding doesn’t count as conversation, but talking to my dad was different. If you’ve watched his YouTube videos you might be surprised to know that’s almost exactly how talking to him went. You went to his office, sat down, and you talked about whatever the hell you were both interested in until he remembered he had work to do. Sometimes it was mostly him, sometimes it was mostly you, and sometimes it was both of you and sometimes he’d spend half the damn conversation interrupting you<\/span> going on for hours about whatever topic you’d glued yourselves onto. If you want to imagine what we sounded like, just stick some of my chatter from the margins between his parts of the conversation. You’ll get the idea. We were very, very similar people.<\/p>\n This wasn’t really intended to become a surprise new years gloomfest when I started writing it, but rambling’s an inherited trait I’m afraid. Like I said, similar people.<\/p>\n I like to think he would have liked the man I’ve become, even if my life so far hasn’t ended up as creative as his. He was proud when I came out, he was proud when he found out how long I’d worked my last job for. He would have been damn proud when he heard about this one, the money I’m making, and the fact that it’s better than retail. I dunno if he would have been proud about me rambling in the margins of his website, but he’d sure be flattered.<\/p>\n I don’t think it ever occurred to him we would want to continue his legacy, he always lived like whatever he did next was going to be the only thing that’d be left of him. He worked with the manic energy of a man being chased by the concept of mediocrity. He told me himself once that one thing he feared was when he died was to never have done something, to never have been able to finish what he felt like he needed to do. Whatever that might have been. The goal shifted a lot, the ideas that would make him remembered never seemed to stay the same for long. He wanted to be everything at once,<\/p>\n In the end he expected his site to be like a memorial. As excited as he was to see us take interest in taking part however critical he might have been with some of the results; I think he forgot he was working with teenagers<\/span> I don’t think he ever imagined a future where we would want to keep it alive. But here we are. Maybe it’s not as populated as he kept it, but it’s here. Still living on even when he’s not.<\/p>\n Maybe he never figured out what he wanted to accomplish in the end, never found a way to leave a mark in the history books like I think he wanted. But he was known, he’ll be remembered. And we’ll try to keep doing what he loved.<\/p>\n Have a happy new year my friends, and many, many happy returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello there! It’s been a while since I said hi. I know these days the only time I come in here is to sulk, and I do try not to (hence the prolonged lack of anything on my part) but I don’t like sitting here silent. So I thought i’d just talk about things. ‘Things’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58322","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\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58322"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58330,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58322\/revisions\/58330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}