January – A Month of Looking Forwards

Happy Brexit day, everyone.

blergh

Now that we’ve got the puking out of the way, hi! January often feels eternal, especially monetarily, but the post-festive drought is almost over. Before we get too far into what I’ve been doing this month, 2019 Kristian has reared his time-travelling head in the form of a project which he thinks will last an entire year. Well, he makes it about halfway, if I recall. Nevertheless, I’ll respond to Past Kristian’s weekly blog posts in the form of my monthly ones for the duration of this project.

I’ll usually put this bit at the end, I think, but this post is an exception.

A Journal Through Time #1

There’s no too much to talk about here given that this is mostly an introductory post, so I may as well provide some background. A couple of weeks in to 2019 I realised that I hadn’t set myself a year-long project as I had done for the last few years, so I combined my old weekly blog post format with an idea from a Youtuber I was watching at the time about talking to yourself across two different years, one prospective, the other retrospective. It was a decent idea, but it fizzled out due to the sheer quantity of content I had to write vs the content I actually had to write about. The old weekly blog post format worked far better when I was a uni student, constantly being assaulted with new philosophies and writing techniques. Given my quieter life nowadays, all this project did was serve to make me feel ashamed about how uninteresting my life seemed to be.

A Journal Through Time #2

Speaking of which… by the second week, I’d already begun to doubt my ability to write interesting content. When it comes to life writing, I had this idea that there were two types of lives I could write about – an external life and an internal life, though I’ve never actually quantified it that way until just now. Writing about the external life would be about experiences I’ve had out in the world, going to see friends, visiting places, that sort of thing, the thing I’m rubbish at motivating myself to do. Writing about the internal life would entail the content I’ve been consuming, such as games and shows and music, my opinions on them and the like. I avoided the latter for two reasons; the first being that I have a gaming blog already, the second being that I shamed myself for not having much of a life by way of going out, getting content for the external writing.

Something I’ve come to understand about myself over the last few months is that I am determined to see myself as inadequate. If I fix the thing which I shame myself about the most, I latch onto a new thing within the week. And running throughout all of this is idea in my brain that the lifestyle that I have as an introvert, and a gaming enthusiast, and a narrative junkie, and all of this, that it’s something to be ashamed of, because so much of that is experienced by myself. I think I’m actually more concerned with people seeing me as lonely than I am of being alone.

Anyway, the second point I was going to make about this entry was that it slightly overshared, but I’ve possibly just gone and done that again. I suppose there lies that dangers of blogging with honesty!

January, 2020

Let’s wrap this up with a brief glance at the present, then. I was originally going to simply say that I hadn’t been up to much, but then I wrote that whole thing about how I shame myself for not having much of an external life and realised I was doing it again. So, to explain the blog title, this has been largely a month of looking forward to things. Of hype. Sheer, and unadulterated. I’ll let my 2020 Anticipation Post over on my gaming blog do the bulk of the heavy lifting for me here, but I’m also looking ahead to a range of shows, services, and other stuff in the coming months, which I won’t get into here.

Recently, I’ve finally gone out of my way to finish DOOM (2016) in preparation for Eternal; I’ve outlasted my slightly-too-expensive phone contract for my Pixel 2 and invested in a SIM contract with 60gb better data for £12 less a month; I’ve been provoked into sending my friend daily selfies, a task which I undertake with full sincerity; I’ve continued my descent into the rabbithole that is Pokémon, preparing my old saves for the imminent launch of Pokémon Home; I’ve renewed my focus on livestreaming by freeing myself from the idea of sticking to one game for a full series; oh, and I finally got a damn haircut, boosting my self-confidence levels to something that’s almost healthy, I’m sure.

See you next month!

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #2 – The Quiet Life (28/1/19)

One of my concerns regarding this series – as with any series I make documenting parts of my life – is that it’s going to be boring. Truth be told, I really don’t get up to much in my spare time. I just had a week off and I only went out to once, to see a friend. Much of the rest of my time has been spent in the world of Tamriel, via MMO The Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve just hit level cap on my first character, and I’ve also created my evil character, Veris Evermourn. See, I could go on about ESO for paragraphs, but when it comes to what I actually did last week… it boils down to little more than sitting in front of my PC and stuffing my face.

To be honest, my self-esteem is not at an all time high. Logically, I understand that I’m an introvert who enjoys his own company, and a creator who is often enamoured by fictional worlds far more fascinating than our own. But when you have a little voice at the back of your head the criticises your every action, it’s easy to become convinced that your nature and the things that bring you joy are instead an unhealthy lifestyle that’s indicative of your failure to fit in with the rest of society. Sometimes, I’m able to ignore those feelings, but the reality is that on many days I am not, and I wouldn’t be surprised if future Kristian still wrestles with these insecurities as well. It’s just who we are.

I think the reason this has crept up on me now is because at the start of the week I decided to start posting to my Instagram / Facebook story feed for the first time. It’s something I like the idea of doing, and something to please my distant relatives who have noted my absence on Facebook proper (I only use Messenger nowadays). But I’ve only made three posts, two of which were about my cat and one which was about my lunch. It’s made me take a look at my life in comparison to others, and realise that there’s really not much going on to post about.

One thing I have been doing, though, is curating (compiling? collecting?) a playlist on Spotify of my favourite soundtracks in movies, TV, and videogames. This has been an ongoing project since November and is, as I mentioned last week, part of my obsession to turn every one of my hobbies into a creative outlet. To be honest, though, I’m just passionate about soundtracks in a major way, and deciding to create this playlist is definitely more personally rewarding than it will be outwardly interesting to any kind of audience. That being said, if Spotify does still exist in the far-flung future of January 2020, you can find my playlist here. At the time of writing, I am currently listening through the Elder Scrolls Online soundtrack, so it’ll be interesting to see how much gets added between writing and publication.

I must admit, I’ve been looking forward to writing this entry all week. I’m still in love with the idea of this project and I hope that my passion for it will see me throughout the entire year. As with my soundtracks playlist, though, I’m aware that something like this may be more of interest to future Kristian than to… well, anyone else. In fact, that might be the case with a lot of my hobbies-turned-projects. But I’m trying not to see that as a bad thing. Writing these blog posts (I still need to come up with a permanent name for them), putting together the soundtracks playlist, creating the Weekly Deathmatch, these are all things which legitimately spark joy and give me a sense of fulfilment in life. Sure, I may not get out much or be particularly successful in my creations, but doing what I do makes me happy, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what life is all about?

I did briefly consider the idea of scheduling these posts up to 5 or 10 years in advance, as the farther ahead in time I write for, the more fascinating the possibility of change becomes. When it comes down to it, though, I don’t think I can wait that long to reap the rewards of this long-term project, and a future Kristian ten years down the line might see this type of writing as fundamentally flawed in some way and simply delete it, instead. We can’t trust 33 year old Kristian. We’ll stick with 24 year old Kristian, instead.

 

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #1 – My Secret Writing Project (21/1/19)

Greetings, internet! Welcome to a brand new series of blog posts that I’ve been working on for exactly one year to the day. My current plan is for these to release weekly, each post scheduled to publish exactly one year from the present date of writing. Return to this blog every Tuesday for fresh news as to what I was up to a year ago today, typically covering details about my personal life (though hopefully not too personal), what games I’ve been playing and what other media I’ve been consuming, as well as some fun contextual information about the world back in 2019.

Basically, these posts will cover whatever is on my mind at the time, a little like my old weekly blog post series, but with the added quirk of time travel. Strictly chronological time travel, but time travel all the same.

So basically I’m ripping off Youtuber Bing for this idea, although he admittedly has the more ambitious goal of making the videos daily (alternating between Past Bing and Future Bing). I don’t really watch him, but he is a friend of a Youtuber I do watch called Thomas ‘TomSka’ Ridgewell, and they recently released a video discussing a point of enmity between them which was recently finally buried, prompting me to try his Past Bing Future Bing series. I’ve decided to adopt a similar idea in blog post form, as writing a blog is not as time consuming (I do have two jobs) and will get me back into the habit of writing regularly.

I do want to keep my work on this series completely secret until their publication, so if this took you by surprise then I was successful at keeping my trap shut for an entire year. Woo, go me! I’m sure I confided in a few people or made references to a ‘secret project’ throughout 2019 because I just can’t help myself, but I currently have no intention of doing so. I’m currently a little concerned that I can’t do one creative thing without shouting from the rooftops about it, like I’m trying to prove to the world that I’m not a waste of space, or that I’m trying to prove to past Kristian that I’ve not completely abandoned his dreams of becoming an author. By working on this project for an entire year in secret, I’ll have successfully proven to myself that I’m capable of having self-worth without seeking validation from others.

That being said, I am currently enjoying turning almost every hobby I have into some creative outlet. For gaming I have my Weekly Deathmatch Youtube series, my current go-to for discussing my general thoughts and opinions on games, movies, etc. I’m also in the middle of re-watching Doctor Who, but I’m reviewing each episode in blog post format and posting them series-by-series on this very site, though I’ve taken a small hiatus to watch Titans and season two of Marvel’s The Punisher. Even music isn’t safe, as I’ve been compiling my favourite soundtracks into a playlist on Spotify named Superb Soundtracks. Plus, at the start of 2019 I created a giant spreadsheet wherein I’ll list every single piece of entertainment media I’ve consumed this year, alongside a rating out of 5 and a brief comment. The general idea is that I’ll be making more end of the year blog posts regarding my top 10s, but only you, dear reader, know whether this idea came to fruition or not.

I’ll try not to make these blog posts too self-referential, and while predictions are fun, I don’t want to depress future Kristian when he reads these back and discovers how little his life has changed. (It’s happened before.) For now, all I’ll say to him is to take it easy on himself, and that if nothing grand has changed in these last twelve months, then that’s not entirely bad considering the current state of past Kristian’s life isn’t all too terrible.