A Place With No Name
It’s been a very busy few weeks. A lot of good things have been happening in my life, but they are things that come at a cost, and that cost has been time and energy.
Running a blog like this with this particular style is tricky. I have always injected a lot of who I am into these things, probably because my favorite writers tend to do the same. You not only get a perspective on the topics they address, but also an insight into who they are. I was watching an interview with a content creator that I like last night and he was asked who his greatest inspirations were, and answered, “basically everyone I meet.” It sounds a little hackneyed but coming from this person, was probably the one and only time I one hundred percent believed it because in the context of what he made, his live streams, and other things he has made, it made perfect sense.
There are people in this scene I have learned a lot from. I’ve followed their examples, I’ve experimented with their suggestions, and I’ve found myself confirming what they say to be true. So they have gained a lot of respect from me for the virtue of being right about the ideas they propose. But I also find myself completely unable or unwilling to connect even on a superficial level with many of them. And it’s because for whatever reason, a lot of them seem to possess a number of similar traits that I find really difficult to reconcile.
Somehow I essentially found myself in what may be considered a fandom, or so like a fandom that it’s almost indistinguishable from one. And for whatever reason, the TTRPG space seems to be uniquely volatile and divisive to such a degree I just don’t think I can really deal with it anymore. I’ll be brutally honest - a lot of it just fucking disgusts me, and I genuinely despise the personalities of a lot of people in it with a deep, loathing contempt even when I find what they have to say genuinely clever or useful as it pertains to the theory of the game. I don’t want to get into who, because it doesn’t matter. That’s my own problem and no-one elses.
I want to make it very abundantly clear what I’m referring too because I don’t want to alienate the people who have read my work and supported it, and everything else along the way. I think it’s important to show there is a very specific problem I have and that there is a very good chance it does not apply to most people.
The bloviating, ego-driven narcissists who have no shred of empathy are precisely who I want to cull from my presence with extreme prejudice. Especially those who are bearing a shield of self-righteous deus-vult bleating nonsense as a replacement for any kind of nuanced personality. The ones who use “fag” as punctuation, who equate everything in their hobby lives to an occult culture war - I have not an ounce of love or sympathy for you. Both ends of the political spectrum are deeply annoying to me, but perhaps due to overexposure to one side more than another due to being on X, at this point, I’ve become far more exhausted by one than the other. Because for every annoying Portlandia-esque feminist caricature I’ve dealt with twice the number of people who joke about racial genocide, reduce human beings to the level of cockroaches, treat women like inferior garbage, and do so all under the guise of some unique esoteric religious slant.
And I’m going to be very honest here - I’ve seen multiple sides of life. I have engaged with, worked with and for, befriended people from all over the spectrum of what you can find in the real world. And when I hear this kind of talk, the only thing it says to me about these people is that they are uniquely sheltered from the diaspora outside of their particular comfort zone of living. And that this poisonous bunch of horseshit we call social media, and the way information is presented, influencers, the whole lot, has rotted their fucking brains to a point that they cannot help but view everything from a completely black and white, absolutist lens. And I just cannot tolerate this anymore.
And I am not saying I don’t have preferences. I prefer my people to be somewhere in the neutral zone. I don’t particularly like armchair theorists. I don’t like the super nitpicky good-guy types who turn every single political incorrect thing into some tirade of righteousness. I don’t buy into a lot of the theories espoused by the far left about microaggressions, or whatever fucking guilt du jour they are prattling on about from one day to the next. Part of the last six months of my life has been making some real difficult admissions to myself about who I am, my personality, some of my social hang-ups or frustrations, but my head is in a clearer place than it has ever been. And it’s come down to showing more appreciation and reaching out more to the people I do really care about, and being less concerned about the people I don’t. And the people I don’t often embody some form of ideological extremism.
But I have met people and made acquaintance and friend of people from so many walks of life. Like most of you, I have an extended family. I have friends. I have kids. One of my best friends I met through church. One of them I met in a record store, and we have spent hundreds of hours of our lives in grungy bars around drugs and alcohol and cigarette smoke playing our instruments for people, some of who I came to know and care about, who would be considered by that crowd to be “subhumans” and “degenerates”. I’ve had friends die. I’ve had other ones pull themselves out of the mud when they were drowning in it and no one had any hope left that they could change, and they did.
But you - you would write them off as hopeless. Less than human. Undeserving of any love or care. Some of you, who may read this, would consider them food fit for dogs. And on the other side, there are people who would think the same of you. People who cheered and celebrated and made memes when people on your side were shot and killed. And then you were so inflamed - how dare they?
Well, my friends, I’m sorry to tell you this - you get what you give. And you all deserve one another because all of you have bought into a divisive schism of mutually assured destruction. And you will all burn for it, one way or another. And I won’t be anywhere near any of you when you do.
You don’t need to be liked by everyone, but I also don’t want to go out of my way to be disliked. And I’m sure I have some followers who are categorically in the camps I am referring too, probably one more than another. That’s okay. Be on your merry way, or don’t, but just know that an adjacency of game philosophy does not equate to an adjacency in worldview. I want to establish this very firmly so that I don’t repeat the mistake of entertaining those kinds of people again in the future. I wash my hands of them, now, and forever, until the tides change and some normalcy returns.
Who the fuck am I kidding - it’s always been this way. I was just too young and naive to notice it.
The good news is, as interesting as the discourse of RPG’s is, simply because it’s been going on so long and is still managing to evolve and change, as I’ve said before, I don’t require that sort of engagement with it anymore. To kind of repeat myself, I have everything I need from it. That only leaves a lot of things I don’t really need anymore, and therefore, it no longer makes sense to centralize my work exclusively around a Substack called Compleat DM. I guess I pigeonholed myself with that choice, but it certainly made sense at the time since that was the exclusive focus of my content. The problem is that it has set me up to be cordoned into a space I just am not really interested in being directly engaged with anymore, at least not to any level of exclusivity.
No regrets, that said. This place acts exactly how I wanted it too now, as kind of repository of things people can find in a drip feed while they are perusing Google or whatever. And I know that my words have engaged people because I have been told directly, and they have demonstrated that they’ve taken something away from it when they share their own work with me. So any goal I may have had has been achieved.
To make it clear, this site isn’t going anywhere, and when I do have something to say about RPG’s, I will post them here. But for the rare or maybe non-existent group who followed me more for my style, or what I had to say about other things, or just how I said things to begin with, I’ll be making another blog under this account that is a little more decentralized in the kind of things I am going to write about. I’d imagine the majority of them will still have something to do with games, because games are just kind of in my blood. But I’m hoping that by creating a blog where I talk about various interests that it might be a little easier to find people who I can genuinely relate too, at least a layer or two deeper than just as mutual interest in tabletop roleplaying.
I’ve been writing publicly to some degree since about 2003. Most of that writing is part of a dead internet, or was destroyed as websites disappeared, or done under pseudonym, and it was sporadic and usually came in bursts as I had new ideas, pursued them, and very often realized they weren’t working and went on to do something else. Compleat DM has been vindicating because it was the first significant thing I did after the website I worked for was taken over by corporate zombies. And it’s given me the confidence to do more.
So where Compleat DM goes into a kind of maintenance mode, something new comes in its stead. A place that is a little more honest, a little more varied. It is a A Place With No Name. I welcome you to join me there soon.
