Last month I mentioned a small breakthrough I had in regards to having faith in my own opinions. This month I found myself putting this faith to the test by confronting my boss about the pre-emptive scaling back of social distancing measures at my workplace. Now, naturally I shouldn’t go into detail publicly, but the long and short of it is that I failed to make a difference. That being said, my conscience is a lot cleaner for me having tried, though my blood pressure may be a little higher for it.
It’s a balance. Towards the first half of this month I was proud of myself for standing up for my values, on multiple occasions, but as July dragged on I found myself becoming standoffish about smaller things – phrasing, edgy humour, the mere suggestion of not questioning the news – and while these things are important to keep in mind, I’m also not going to win anyone to my point of view by pitching a fit about what they see as part of everyday life. I think, going forward, I need to consolidate my newfound efforts to drive change with patience to be effective.
I, along with many others I’m sure, found that what I considered to be the true north on my moral compass was unsatisfactory after the events of May 25th. As my Twitter feed filled with everything from peaceful protests to calls for blood, I, a self-proclaimed pacifist, didn’t know where to stand, because here in front of me was direct evidence that words alone did not always prevail. Core to my values was that anger should not drive reaction, but here I was agreeing with many of those I saw. My belief in right and wrong was shaken, and if I’m being perfectly honest, it still is. Doesn’t matter. This isn’t about another white guy’s feelings. What’s important is that what I took away from this is that inaction is as good as condoning injustice, and alongside my growing confidence in my own opinions, I’m using that as a motivator to speak out against things that are wrong, even if it leads to dreaded confrontation.
On the off chance future Kristian is reading this, here’s something I hope to never stop reminding myself: learning never stops.
In other news this month, I’ve started a creative project I’ve been wanting to get to for years – I’ve started my very own podcast! Pictures Without Pictures, which you can find on such fancy places as Spotify and Apple Podcasts (not hard to get on to but let me have this), is a podcast where me and my fantastic friend Reece discuss movies I’ve likely never seen and he likely has. We’ve started with Phase 1 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we’ll be branching out to realms as-yet undecided in the weeks to come. This coming Monday is Avengers Assemble, thank you for asking, and you can catch the recording live at 5pm BST on Mondays right here. I’ve also set up another podcast feed which is on at least Spotify called Kritigri FM, and it’s where you can find audio versions of these very blog posts (soon), alongside audio versions of my gaming blog posts and the occasional 10-minute ramble. I am having a delightful time of it, and you can find the Spotify version of that feed here.
Also, the weekly Year to Year blog posts unceremoniously died. You’ll notice there’s two this month rather than the usual four-to-five. I basically lost motivation, as having to write something new about my relatively-uninteresting life each week was tough enough without the gratification of publishing them immediately to be read. I was going through a downer of a month by the looks of it, and though I did write out one more entry, it was so glum I didn’t even bother to schedule it to be posted. Probably for the best. Well, once more unto the breach, then:
Ooh, and interesting tidbit in here: I quit one of my two jobs in this week’s post, and it was an important reminder that I’m in charge of my own destiny. A reminder which I need to remind myself about, still. Well, anyway, solo-job has worked out for a year now, though I do miss my old coworkers at Job #1. I used to visit them, before Covid.
And my final entry is… me venting my frustration at toxic gamers making craters out of molehills, a problem which has only continued to get worse as time goes on. I mean, just look at the horrific things a select group of people said about The Last Of Us 2. It’s a little heartbreaking to see such poison at the roots of your favourite escapist hobby, especially when you know just how brilliant gaming can be for bringing people together, especially during our current world state. I wish we were any closer to hearing about the last of this (no pun intended), but we’re not, and we need to continue fighting against hatred wherever we see it.
Well… thanks for your 26 entries, Past Kristian. I suppose I should do something of a postmortem on the project, but let’s keep this short. To put it simply, I like how the premise of this blog post shook out during the 2020 half, but over the course of this year I’ve learned just how superior monthly entries are to weekly ones. They’re easier to write because there’s more to discuss in a month than a week, especially in my life. And with this tying into the Tombstone Project it doesn’t necessarily make sense to delay publication dates by a year, so we probably – though not definitely – won’t see a return of Year To Year. But hey, I’m happy I at least tried. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll all stick around for these monthly entries I’ve been making. I’m having a blast.
Perpetually Perturbed 