The Patreon Letter - 29th Nov, 2020

Hello everyone! It's Em here, and it's the end of November. Not only does that mean that it's letter time, but it means that on a normal year (i.e. before this one) we would be locking our end of the year lists at the rollover in December to begin prepping for our end of the year podcasts across our various shows. 

This has not been a normal year.

Last year we did game of the year and year in review stuff across all of our podcasts, and I ended up feeling like I was so deeply exhausted by the idea of the year ending weeks before it actually did. It is indeed possible to catalogue too hard the last twelve months, and that's before you even consider that last year we really had to work to get lists together for Abnormal Mapping and our top games were, if I'm not totally mistaken, top fives instead of top tens.

This year is so much worse for just intaking things to talk about. I might be feeling better about video games finally, but I essentially played nothing but podcast games for the first seven or eight months of the year, and was quite happy to just not think about games as much as possible. I dropped most of the podcasts I listened to, other than the really good ones made by friends. I didn't read nearly enough books, not even a big manga project like Naruto last year that would boost my goodreads numbers. I just didn't do a whole lot in the frame of November 2019 to November 2020. 

There's a pretty good reason for this, obviously. Covid has fucked up everyone's whole deal, and I'm not immune to that, but it's also thrown into stark relief the things I was just doing out of inertia over the things I was really interested in. It became much easier to just sleep more and drop my time into youtube when I've been more actively suffering the effects of depression as the ambient stress and anxiety gets turned up for all of us month after month without end. It really wasn't important that I buckle down and keep up with the Bombcast and finish Dragon Quest XI, was it? So I didn't. Easy to give up your obligation goals when it feels like the world is ending in slow motion.

So we decided early on not to do a Game of the Year for Abnormal Mapping and instead just cover a game (it's Suikoden, btw, coming soon!), but that also extended to not doing a bunch of celebratory lists and stuff for two reasons
1. we don't have enough stuff to cover, as expressed above; and

2. this year is a total motherfucker and doesn't deserve one bit of celebration, because none of it is better and is in fact getting worse as we rocket into 2021.

Not to be super bleak but I don't feel like there's much cause to celebrate a calendar rollover when as I'm writing this, Trump still hasn't conceded, Biden is walking back even his empty bullshit liberal policy promises, I live in a state with a 30% Covid postivity rate and yet the city literally two blocks away is still 'considering' a mask mandate. 2020 is going to be bleeding poison into 2021 and hell probably 2022 onward. It feels ghoulish to act like we've escaped anything other than the new console releases, I guess.

I think we are uniquely positioned to be find with dropping end of year gimmicks, because timeliness has never been our focus. But I also think it's a good experience to think on why we hold onto this stuff and do it. Yes, the cynical answer is it's easy content and everyone loves a list, but also does anyone benefit when I tell you the ranked list of the anime I've talked about on GGP every week for the prior 12 months? We mention basically every game of note every time we sit down and do Abnormal Mapping. What is the thing that is worth salvaging out of the nature of end of year stuff? We don't even have like a vacation week to fill, we record every week because this is a bedroom operation. 

I don't have a good answer for this, and it's one of those things where I will consider when we're on the other side of this year if there's anything I felt was particularly lacking. Sometimes you just need closure, right? It's good to clear the slate and start a new to-do list even if you're carrying over stuff from the old one that never got done. 

But also, sometimes you are expending a lot of energy on drawing very arbitrary and meaningless boxes to define shapes in the nebulous continuity of personhood. December isn't going to feel much different than late November does, January probably will be much the same. That's partially covid and the latent fear and siege mentality I'm living under. But also that's just life. Changes are gradient ranges of new habits and new focuses or sharp tears where life gets interrupted without anybody's input. The lines are just for show, the rules are made up and the points don't matter. Which is freeing, I suppose, in a 'why would I make a new year's resolution when I can just start something now?' sort of way. 

Material conditions might not change, but that just means you can live in the hell year now and in 2021 and whenever you decide it goes until.

On the other hand, you can declare your personal decade of Geass whenever you want, nobody can stop you. If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. You can change the future. I'm mixing anime metaphors.

The Abnormal Mapping game of the year is Umurangi Generation, we'll cover it somewhere, we just want more people to play it first because the switch version isn't out and we want to talk spoilers. That's it, that's the list. One game.

Until next time, I hope you're all well, and I'll catch you around Christmas,

Em