Why I’m here; Why I’m Blogging again.

I have two main reasons for starting this blog:

1. A need to have some form of creative output;
2. I enjoy having a place to organise my thoughts.

Creative output
While I don’t have the greatest need to create, I do need something.

I used to make maps for Team Fortress 2. If you’re reading this then you probably heard of me through my maps dr_bank, dr_hourglass and dr_4halls.

I was working on a 4^th Deathrun map, which was going to be dr_islands, but that map was stuck in development hell for years. In short, I had the overall idea for the map for a long time, but no idea on how to lay it all out. I even tried writing a design document and fleshing out the idea and trying to work out how the whole map could/would fit together, but it simply never happened.

Unfortunately TF2 has since become an abandoned dumpster fire of cheaters and trolls. Even if I somehow managed to get back into mapping, I doubt it would be for TF2 ever again. According to Steam, I last opened TF2 in December 2020. I don’t think I actually played it though and I think I actually stopped playing around 2019, going by my last TF2 video.

On the note of videos, that’s another ‘creative’ output I cut out, for a couple of reasons.
First, I used to leave nVidia Shadowplay on and running in the background in order to make use of the DVR feature, where it’s always recording and the video can be saved at any time. I know I turned it off because most of the time I play I actually have music playing over the game’s audio, meaning if I did save any footage it would have the music as well. Any videos with music in it would get copyright claimed, so I stopped routinely recording my games. Case in point, my only ‘Among us’ video.

Secondly, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice. I know everyone hates their own voice, so if anything you should understand why I would hate having a microphone set up to record my reactions. Not that I react much anyway, other than a confused ‘what the fuck?‘ every now and again.

A complete unrelated image break. Prevents a wall of text.

In any case, my creative outputs for the last couple of years have actually been to do with martial arts, and in part due to covid.

I am a 2^nd dan in traditional/Japanese Ju-Jitsu, and I help run the class I was taught at alongside my Sensei. When the UK went into lockdown due to covid, our classes shut too. While many martial arts clubs moved to some form of online classes, we couldn’t. I did share some old archive kata videos on our clubs YouTube channel and share a series of martial arts glossary definitions weekly, but I wasn’t teaching.

In fact writing this I just kinda realised that teaching ju-jitsu is for me a semi-creative outlet. Different students respond to different goals or words of encouragement, so often I am improvising lesson plans on-the-fly or working out the best way to help a student understand how to do something.

But back to the lockdown. I wanted to still teach the students something relating to martial arts. I don’t recall how or why, but I chose to write an article on ‘The Unwashed Black Belt’ myth. It’s something I had seen written on other sites before, but they all fell into one of two groups; they either treated the myth as historical truth or told the reader it was a myth without explaining how it was a myth or what the truth is. That is what I sought to correct.

It took me a couple of weeks to do, but I did it! I properly researched it and cited sources, which I am really proud of! Seeing as that only took me a couple of weeks, I decided to write another article, this time on the different translations/spellings of “Ju-Jitsu” examining why there are different spellings and whether or not they matter. Again, it took me about 2-3 weeks to research and write up, all properly sourced and cited.

This became another creative outlet, taking facts and organising them into a timeline of events and making a story out of it. True historical stories, but with a clear A > B > C reasoning.

The 3^rd article I wrote? Well I decided that as I had already written about the belt, it was time to address the rest of the martial arts uniform. This one however is not like the other two. It is to date, my best work. The first two articles both clocked in around 1,000 words. The final version of this third article, came it at ~4,000 after I cut out the excess content. That one did take a lot longer to write however – 8 months.

Truth be told I’m still writing all three articles, in that as I become aware of new information or sources I’ve gone back and edited those articles to include them.

I have been trying to write a 4^th article, this time reflecting on the rank of black belt, or ‘Shodan’ to give it’s proper name, examining how it has become the icon of martial arts mastery despite the fact the word ‘Shodan‘ literally translates to “beginner rank“. At the time of writing this blog post, I’ve been working on this 4^th article for over a year, and while it sits at a decent 1,200 words, it’s far from finished.

What is slightly concerning me now is a pattern that has emerged. 3 successful projects, then a 4^th that languishes in production hell.

Another image to break a wall of text.

Organising my thoughts.
As you’ve no doubt seen in this very blog post, is that the act of writing something down helps me organise my thoughts. That’s why I started blogging the first time around, as I found it helped my mental health, albeit in a limited fashion. Rather than making be feel better when low, it allowed me to look back on how I was feeling and helped me to recognise changes in my mood.

I think it’s because I learned to predict my moods and ‘read’ myself, that I didn’t need return to blogging before. That does imply that my mental health has taken a toll again and I need to write again, but that’s not the case. Rather I see this as going to the gym now – it’s exercise to prevent poor health rather than to recover from it.

As mentioned in the last post I stopped blogging after I lost my previous job. Since then I’ve stuck to Twitter for sharing thoughts, and while the fact you only have 280 characters per tweet (or 140 as it was at the time) did help me focus on the making my thoughts concise.

The fact you can’t properly elaborate on a topic without it spilling over into multiple tweets is a downside. I enjoy the fact that I can include a link to something in the middle of a sentence that adds to or backs up whatever point I’m making without excess text.

To be honest, that’s why the tagline for this site is “My own ‘too long for twitter’“. Everything that’s not too long is still getting tweeted.

My Plans.
I suppose I will end this post talking about what I plan to do here on this blog.

• I have a couple threads on Twitter I keep coming back to share stuff on. One is for weird stuff that made me laugh the 1^st time I watched it but had no effect the 2^nd time around. The other is to do with the random types of email spam I’ve had over the years. I’m thinking I’ll create categories for these and maybe backdate some of them? I don’t know if WordPress allows you to set the publish date as before the site was launched. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.
• On my previous blog I was very much drawn to the view counter. As in, I fell for the trap of ‘must produce content, must get views‘. I wrote a blog post at least once a week, often more depending on my mood. I’d even start to feel guilty for not posting anything on time even though I didn’t have any timetable to adhere to. That said, I do remember one year forcing myself to write every day during lent as a sort of challenge.
  I realise now that was not good for me. Forcing myself to write for the sake of writing isn’t what I started in the first place. I’ll post what I want when I’m good and ready, and if there are a few months between posts, then so be it.
• I think it should be obvious, but I am going to show I have learnt my lessons from last time. There will be no talk about work or people I work with. There will be no talk about work or people I work with. In fact I won’t mention work again. All you need to know get to know is that I am employed.
• One thing I liked doing on my old blog was sharing music I liked, maintaining a dedicated page just for songs I had shared. I would like to do that again.
• I’d like to share anything that makes me happy, though I have to admit that I find prefer to be ‘neutrally content’ than happy. You could compare it to being more Vulkan than Human at times.
  
  To put in other words, I find that not a lot of things make me happy. But when they do, it’s the sort of weird stuff I mentioned earlier.
• I might use this blog to explore the limits of my own comfort zone. Subjects such as politics, where I have always felt like I’m not allowed to share my opinions on, or that no matter what opinion I share it would get ripped apart. But if blogging/writing can help me organise thoughts, why can’t I choose which thoughts I want to organise?

Anyway, I think I’ve said enough for now. Lets see where this new blog takes me.