File this one under “Chris writing about the blog he barely updates” but, fuck it, I wanted to get October off to an optimistic start.
As we all know, the past nearly two years hasn’t been all that great — Covid has been a constant pain in our ass and we’ve seen stupidity on top of stupidity with oh so many people. It’s kind of amazing everything hasn’t gone completely to shit when you think about it.
Let’s narrow our scope here to just me, and my day to day life and how it relates to this site. Right as 2020 got going things got a bit rough, and one of the things I cut back on to help take the edge off was my near daily writing. I just didn’t have the energy, and so I switched to sporadic entries with an intent to get back to more regular stuff sooner or later.
That never happened. Every time I would try I would decide “eh, this isn’t worth it” and not actually get anything written, and as the months passed it became less and less common that I would even want to write. It was a kind of negative feedback loop with the end result being only maybe 1 entry a Month when I’d normally get out 20+! Quite a content decrease, and one that certainly annoyed me.
That being said, I didn’t waste the time — I’ve worked hard on many other projects, and the time away from Xadara has really helped me take stock of what I have here, and what I should be doing.
See, the problem I made, which has caused what amounts to another pretty bad burnout phase, is try to treat Xadara itself as more than it is — trying to make it into something special when that’s not actually my goal. Yes, I want people who may be interested to read what I write, but I write it for the sake of writing it — not to make money, to be popular, or anything like that. I’m not a “professional” blogger, and I don’t want to be, just like I don’t want to be some kind of “professionaly” YouTuber or anything like that. This is all for the fun of sharing opinions, knowledge, and experience — not simply to “make money” like virtually any and all big time content creators in any field are, in the end, doing what they do for. That may be a broad brush to paint everyone else with, as I know many successful content creators certainly do it for the art and not just because of the money, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that many in the long run when you really look at it.
An annoying side effect of my mistaken focus was that I avoided many topics that would have been perfect to cover simply because they didn’t line up with video games or funny online videos. Some entries have been written — I did do a piece on the centennial anniversary of the World War 1 Armistice, I’ve written many pieces about the Chernobyl disaster, and touched on some other “dark” events, but I never have gone as deep into many other topics I care deeply about.
On the same page, I also made way too much of an effort to make the site and its content seem, well, like more than it is. Such is common in the never ending SEO and Social Media battle, but I found myself being worked up over having X keywords, Y formatting, Z number of images, and the like, when all it really did was cause me more stress.
Fuck that. Fuck all of that. I’m taking this place back to what it started as – just another pointless blog where some random person online writes about topics that they feel the urge to write about. Nothing special, just like the blog, YouTube Channel, social media platform, or whatever, of any other “content creator” out there. The difference with me being my focus is, as mentioned above, the sharing of information – not the almighty dollar.
…and yes, I’m fully aware of the incredible irony of this site having rather heavy advertising on it and me saying the previous statement — the trickle of money earned via those ads goes into helping, as little as it can, with hosting costs. Spare me your comments claiming hypocrisy.
Enter Project Phoenix — my haphazard plan this month to get things back to some kind of stability. October is one of my favorite months of the year and I felt now would be as good a time as any to try to make some kind of concerted effort with this place, even if the content is on a whole less focused and individual entries may appear more casual, it’s still content.
Get ready, things are about to get a little crazy.
