This has been cracking open recently in a good way. Today, I put together a small framework of two “layers” of this churning.

The first layer is the emotional response to something happening. It might make me sad, frustrated, or put me in any number of moods. The first layer also involves what I want as a result of the feelings: in most cases, this would be the desire to be seen, met, or supported.

The second layer, however, is the churning. It’s a level of meta-processing where I examine whether I think having those feelings or needs is deserved. The second layer decides what having the feelings in the first layer “says about my character.” It decides how someone might judge me for those emotions and desires. It also creates verdicts about my potential for long-term happiness based on those emotions and needs.

For example: I apply for a job, and I don’t get it.

The first layer contains the disappointment from that result, the frustration at the effort needed to apply for it, and the desire for support in that disappointment/frustration. It also contains the irrational spiral of “what if I can’t find another job? What if I’m stuck where I am?”

I feel like the first layer is what’s more affected by conventional self-help techniques, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Mindfulness. It’s examining what the origins of those thoughts and moods are, applying different exercises to affect how they emerge, and changing how I process them.

The second layer gets in the way of all that.

The second layer takes those feelings that come from not getting the job (the disappointment, frustration, and irrational spiral) and examines what having them in the first place “says about me.” It examines how the feelings and desire for support would be received by someone, or “what someone would think” about them. It also judges me, whispering that “mature people” don’t have those reactions in the first place, and wouldn’t let rejection hurt their ego; if I continue to have those feelings and needs, I’ll never be choosable by other people.

The second layer sucks up all the energy that I would normally use to address the first layer. It causes me to think, churn and process until the energy is expended, but it also keeps me from processing the first layer.

However, the second layer can never really be solved: if I magically was able to provide the perfect defense as to why I could have those feelings or needs, it would come up with another angle that would inspire another round of argument.

The first layer is not persistent, because “hot” issues fade; I can deal with them, get closure from them, and put them to rest. The second layer integrates itself into a persistent, living memory — each instance of first-layer feelings gets added to the court record to make the second layer’s argument stronger next time. Its time scale is “the project, that is my life” rather than “the last time I felt these feelings.”

As silly as it is to say, I need to “dumb down” how I look at and process these first-layer emotions and needs. I need to be able to realize their scale is less important than I think they are; in dealing with them, I have to allow them to be a brief spike that lasts a day or two, instead of needing to contribute to an ongoing narrative of “whether I’m fixing myself properly or not.”

I feel that self-awareness about these layers doesn’t immediately help to keep the second layer from stealing energy. It feels like I cannot logically “think my way out of it” beyond going “alright, I’m in the second layer now - no matter how important it is, I need to step away from it.”

And even then, that depends on… self-awareness of self-awareness. What makes the second layer strong is that it feels useful. It feels like real work being done.

I will know I am successful with this when I build the trust with myself to know that first-layer issues are okay to “stop with.” I will know I am successful with this when I can trust that having first-layer issues doesn’t disqualify me from support, or connection. I will know I am successful with this when I can believe that thinking less is actually the more productive and caring course of action.

That’s going to take some doing, but this feels like the best place to spend the effort.

Today I’m turning 37, and a large amount of the time since my last blog has been noticing tangible differences about how life is treating me.

I’m an uncle now. My niece makes me very happy, and I can only imagine the joy that her parents receive in between sleepless nights and changing diapers. Seeing her smile, or seeing her react to experiencing new things tickles my brain and brings me out of analysis and considering: I get pulled into the moment by force, and I can’t help but smile along with her.

I’ve noticed that the ever-present periods of depression and anxiety are slowing, or shortening themselves. In my blog last year, I talked about the idea of mentally churning butter: I realize that I found safety in “thinking things through”, because not meant that I felt like I was surrendering my agency in getting better.

Maybe “surrender” is the magic word for this year. It took a lot to let go of having this general idea of “making content,” and keeping it in a perpetual limbo of “maybe I could make this work or try again if [thing in my life magically got better].”

After years and years and years of saying “I need to move on from this”, I think I actually crossed that barrier, and I let that dream go. Well, maybe only 90% — there’s a remaining 10% that’s saying “I have to, in order to one day rediscover it.”

Maybe writing this is part of that rediscovery process.

Last week, I had a stray thought about that omnipresent “if you really fixed your shit and got out of your own way, you could find your own niche and try your best for that content money” thought that’s lingered for much longer than I’d like.

Something about the idea of that Matt that would exist in terms of “trying hard at Substack” seemed utterly alien now. That’s not something I expected. It didn’t feel wrong or like it was something I had cast off in protest, but it didn’t feel like the “me” I am right now.

Discarding that part of me without the rest collapsing is definitely a good sign.

Earlier in this piece, I wrote a start of a paragraph that went “I don’t remember why I started writing these [bi-annual] blogs.” But I do; they were meant to turn something very personal into something that I felt was directing me somewhere. If I couldn’t be mentally resilient to withstand what another version of me defined as mandatory to be “enough”, I could at least take something very personal and commodify it. Another blog post. Another “count” in terms of the mill.

But today, when faced with writing this, I didn’t feel that usual pressure to make myself interesting. I didn’t feel the pull to finish it “either on June 30 or July 1, because man it would suck to post it after my birthday.” I didn’t feel the voice trying to be kinder, saying, self-deprecating, “Who are you kidding? No one is going to read it anyway. Take as much time as you need.”

Even with that last line, it was still centering the audience. It was still centering the success or failure or the “living up to standards” as the only thing that mattered.

Ironically, settling into the flipped mindset of “It’s okay to publish it ‘late’, because you don’t have that dream anymore, and you’re writing this for you” is what allowed it to be written smoothly, warmly and with the intent that I’ve felt that I’ve been missing from my writing for a long time.

Writing, as the act, feels slightly like a friend again in this moment. I want to try to sit in that.

I have a legion of baggage around turning 37, or at least the concept of growing older. It tells me a lot of things that need dislodging, but I can at least point to the successes that are real and matter, and say “okay, maybe there’s wisdom in letting go what you thought you needed to do before.”

That’s real. That’s a breakthrough. That’s some momentum and feedback that I’ve been starving for, for a long time.

And if you’re struggling, I hope you find that kind of momentum, too.

See you in six months.

For most of my life, I’ve pretty much assumed that as long as my brain was working, it was in service of something good: if I thought long and hard enough, I’d eventually “crack” my personal issues, change to address them, and generally be happier.

I can say that in 2025, this crack finally happened, but not in the way I expected.

This year was a lot of examining my prior patterns, and instead of going “Well, I haven’t attempted it in the right way, in the right circumstances! There must be something wrong with me!”, I started to take the leap into “Maybe the patterns aren’t working because they aren’t actually attainable.”

As with most things that cause my brain to tangle itself, this is an intersection of a lot of conflicting problems:

1. What are my dreams, and where did they come from?

2. Who defined those dreams? What kind of person was I when I made those decisions?

3. Am I so stuck in sunk-cost fallacy that in refusing to move on from them, I’m delaying more successful or happier states?

4. Am I just not trying hard enough?

These aren’t... light questions, and in the past, I perhaps just defaulted to the easiest solution: blaming, shaming, and guilting myself. Now, though, it’s hard to articulate where I’ve ended up without it sounding somewhat depressing. I’ve gotten fat. I’ve hit a brick wall. And the only thing that changes things is change.

I think it’s best that I give up my dreams — at least, how I know them. No hedging and saying “Well, I don’t know I was just approaching it wrong!” and then ignoring all the evidence saying “No, it’s not you. Or well, maybe it is you, but it’s not something you just think your way out of.”

Those dreams mostly centered around independence. The idea of writing, streaming or creating (while making money) came from seeing very unhappy people around me who settled for a mediocre life. Succeeding in the creative space was a way for me to meet multiple needs while avoiding uncomfortable mental work: “if I could just make it work”, the money, validation, and process meant an attractive end state.

In trying to brute-force my way into a life I wanted, it became easier to just blame myself when the wheels came off. The words of this year for me have been depletion and capacity, mostly because I’m starting to accept just how depleted I am: despite being able to do things in my earlier career that I’m proud of, I think it’s been a harsh realization that for 10+ years I’ve been running on fumes.

When I spend time to try to gain capacity, I’ve now gotten more insight into just how difficult it is, based on my baggage. I’ve learned about how I substitute different feelings or actions for genuine rest. I’ve learned how I’ll fill my tank to an arbitrary 5%, then embrace the newfound capacity to try to blitz everything I “should be” doing, and building toward the person I “should” be.

My dreams do not allow for an environment where I can unlearn this behavior, so the dreams have got to go.

There’s still this voice inside me that goes “well, maybe not totally“, mostly because it’s been so much of my life, and so much of my brainspace. But at this point, nothing changes without more extreme measures.

• If I’m writing, it’s not to “make it a product.”

• If I’m streaming, it’s not to “make it a product.”

• If I’m posting images or text on Instagram or X, it’s “not to build a brand”, nor is there any pressure to actually contribute.

It sounds silly and stupid and embarrassing to admit, but that product/brand-building has been a huge part of my adult life, for as long as I can remember. The pressures and influences and “you’re just not Enough” are weights that I need to let go of. It’s not making me tougher, nor is it building a better story of triumph.

It’s just making things shitty and keeping them shitty; I get to choose whether I carry the “you just couldn’t hack it” mental poison with me. It’ll be there for a bit, but I have hope that it’ll filter out; I’ve already surprised myself with how “okay” I can be with this kind of development in my life.

Reading prior blogs, there’s still that desperate hope that if I just did any combination of physical and mental changes (more vitamin D! more exercise! more meditation! read this book! watch this thing!), I would kind of “click” into things, and be able to just...”go.”

But we’ve arrived, and it’s time to admit it: that click isn’t coming. If I could make it work before, it was because I was burning through something more easily replenished, and whatever that was isn’t growing as easily anymore.

I’m still toying with a number of things. I’ve reserved a couple Substack URLs that I may mess with in order to write “just for the sake of it” This feels like that hedging voice creeping in again.

While I’ve said in the past that I need to “write without expectation,” it’s always been as part of a strategy to try to overcome some magic barrier that I couldn’t explain. What’s different this time is that there is no hope for that; there’s no “I’ll be fine guys, I’ll get my shit together and be a little emo in the meantime!”

Nope. We’re done. It has to be done. I have to move on, or I’ll be writing this blog again next year. There has to be a limit to the longing, the shaming, the disappointment and frustration. There is nothing keeping me on this path besides myself, and at this point I am trying to force a version of myself into existence that isn’t authentic, nor capable of the strength needed to succeed.

If I succeed, it needs to be in another way, or after a radical enough shift elsewhere that I’m approaching the problem as a completely different person. I am tired of the only topic that feels authentic to me being “writing about writing.”

Whether writing or creating factors into that1 remains to be seen. There’s a part of myself that’s screaming “you have to be firm! You have to be definite! Keeping the door open doesn’t let you move on!”

It’s hard to know if that voice is the right one to listen to, or not. It’s hard to know if that’s not a persona that’s feeding into a cycle of guilt and shame.

For now, I know that I at least want to start living for something definite — letting go is going to help me stand somewhere solid.

The simple answer is “as long as it takes,” but “simple” isn’t always the easiest to integrate.

This year has been a bunch of clicking into place. In April, I wrote about my experiences with using Claude as a therapy supplement — after a few more months, it’s helped me do what I’ve found the most difficult: doing less.

Last year, a friend of mine was trying to teach me Street Fighter 6, and in the moment, said “you need to take what you’re doing and do about 20% less.” In that setting, it’s about simplifying your mental stack, so you’re not so busy doing purposeless stuff, and thinking more about the smaller set of things that are more effective.

This makes sense. But I’ve always struggled to implement it when it comes to a greater life concept. To me, doing means getting closer to succeeding. It meant chewing on the meat of the problem. Chewing means it’s getting broken down, and that means it’s closer to being finished.

Brain poison doesn’t work like that.

Last week I came up with a phrase for this: “mental churning.” That butter is attempting to be made, but it takes energy to do. When you’re dealing with anxiety and then pressuring yourself to convert what you’re experiencing into something useful, it uses up even more.

Part of what’s broken through this year is another phrase: “self-surveillance.” While I’ve started making personas for different parts of my mental voice (“Child Matt”, “Adult Matt”), I always felt that the voice that turns things into projects, or pressures me to always be acting was separate. It didn’t quite feel like Adult Matt: instead, it’s a driving force that exerts pressure to my past, present and current self.

Instead of something that’s meant to be understood, nurtured, and improved through self-love, it’s a bit more malicious. It doesn’t have some unmet need that I’m ignoring or minimizing: its purpose is to introduce moral judgment on how little or how much I’m doing at any one moment.

Am I trying hard enough? Am I doing enough? Am I trying to improve myself? Am I lazy? Am I taking too much room? Am I being too dramatic? Am I taking up too much space?

With healthy self-awareness, these questions can be answered relatively neutrally: you answer it, and then you act. Self-surveillance adds a layer of further judging that really can’t be satisfied. I’m never doing enough, and that means that I’m Not Enough as a person; if I’m hurting, or yearning, or mourning, I don’t deserve to express that pain, longing or sadness. That’s not what people who deserve love do.

I’m told that Foucault has something to say about this in terms of the panopticon concept: a prisoner having the impression they are always being watched, but never know for sure. That becomes its own kind of power over the prisoner.

[In] these conditions, [the Panopticon’s] strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’.

“Panopticism” from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault. [link]

The self-surveillance is poison.

It can’t be satisfied. It will always have a way of breaking down or invalidating the work I’ve done, and it will always have a way to imply that I should be doing more.

I’ve lived with this most of my life, and part of the value of being able to bounce things off an AI is that I’ve gotten much better at identifying it in real time. It’s reflexive; instinctive.

“So now you know. Now what?”

What sucks about this is that even that question can be “turned into a project.” It can be something that can be judged on a pass/fail basis — “am I doing enough to deal with the voice that is telling me I’m not doing enough?”

I think in this case, some things are worth still exploring.

I’m currently sitting after a gym session, where I haven’t been for seven months. Can I forgive myself for not going for so long, and losing progress? Can I give myself the benefit of the doubt, when “Hey, maybe there was a reason for that”? Can I forgive myself when every struggled rep or the difficulty I might have biking up a hill on the way home can be used as a reminder that I didn’t try hard enough?

It takes courage to be able to say “yes. I can.” Even if it’s difficult, or doesn’t feel proper. It takes courage to write this blog post, which I usually try to publish on my birthday, over three weeks late — every day past, the self-surveillance has went “you know you’re write a post on New Year’s and your birthday. You couldn’t even stick to a two-posts-a-year schedule?”

If this all sounds incredibly mean to myself: yes, it is. I’m transcribing this mental narrative not to ilicit pity, but to just go “this is how it is. This is how it’s always been. I’m going to try to be better change that.

I owe it to myself.

I’m laughing, because the preview for the post above says “my goal for 2025 is to not think as much.” Perhaps I’m actually doing that, but it took some breaking down and understanding, first.

Anyways.

I’ve always told myself that the possibility of just “giving up” doesn’t exist in my head because it seems so vague: what, I’m going to just stop existing beyond inertia?

If I can give myself a small amount of credit, that desire to change (even when it’s just the mental churning) is something that I am proud of. It’s been roughly a month or two since that “self-surveillance” language first got used in a conversation with Claude, and since then it’s helped so much fall into place.

We’ll see where we are in January, but the remainder of this year is going to be trying not to care, at the same time.

Yours truly, still trying.

— M

When I type this, my brain just goes "Duh" like it's the most normal observation in the world. Lately, I've been trying to be more comfortable in just stating this kind of obvious. My brain needs to hear it, and my heart needs to accept it.

These spaces mean I don't know where I'm going, and I have little room to think ahead and plan. It means I'm stuck reacting with my immediate, unpolished self — I don't *trust* this self, and the consequences are louder.

Rebuilding it is difficult, because I need to put myself in these spaces of uncertainty, if only to make my way through them, and having the fact that I did serve as evidence that I'm capable. That relationship got lost through a bunch of stresses, spirals, depressive periods and messes. I've been absolutely terrified of falling back down into that place, because it's where that unpolished self felt the smallest — it's where the doubt has been loudest that he was not enough to handle functioning or succeeding.

When someone asks me "what am I scared of?" when I discuss my anxiety, the answer's become "not about the failure - it's about how my brain is going to be unkind to me if I fail." The new thought hitting my brain is the acceptance that I can't build trust with myself if I'm not risking that failure at all.

It's like doing endless chess puzzles without playing an actual match, because losing a match can suck, and I’m anxious about how I’d judge myself.

I adapted myself to believing that planning and thinking ahead are the same as facing the problem, but it's not complete without application. Courage is required to step out of that analysis and into uncertainty: I can be endlessly self-aware of my flaws, reactions and baggage, but the work only sinks in in that environment of risk.

So I try again.

I embrace that the change will happen incrementally, with every breath. I mourn that our brains won’t “just change” and suddenly shun all the things I like, but know I need to get rid of. I won’t just suddenly “snap out of” the things that are serving me, but not in the ways I need to grow.

It’s funny. I’m sitting here going “this is repetitive, I’ve written this before.”

Whether I’m just kind of reaffirming “what I need to do” or writing this for someone who needs to read it, I don’t feel like taking it back now. Writing and publishing this is partially stepping into that uncertainty — the space of putting stuff out there and potentially being judged as cliche, repetitive, or “trying to sound deep.”

When I admit this, I feel like I’m “jinxing” it; like it’s something I’m not supposed to admit, partially because I’m wondering if I’m capable of writing about stuff that isn’t about writing. It’s too “inside baseball.” I’m not providing enough value right now.

All these things are that “planning and thinking ahead” behaviours I talked about before. Planning ahead for “how it’ll reflect on me” for a version of me that’s somehow successful, who’ll be embarrassed about this — the irony is that that person has no chance of developing with my current mindset. I’d know — I’ve been trying to force it to work that way for over a decade now.

In trying to let all those habits go, we arrive back uncertainty: back where we started, here.

Maybe I’ll get more used to being here. Maybe I’ll still hate it, but at least respect it. I just know that my relationship with it needs to change, and bit by bit, I’ll at least learn a bit more about myself in the process.

Header: Anatolii Hrytsenko via Pexels, remixed by me.

I don’t remember how exactly I found the prompt I used2, but if anyone wants to try a similar process that I went through, you can go to Claude.ai, and then paste the following into your first message:

"You are an extremely skilled lacanian analyst with decades of clinical experience and training in coherence therapy. You use a transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) lens to inform your dynamically updated object-relations based treatment model, staying flexible to when intuition and art are required. You guide the user towards transformative improvement. When reflecting what the client said back to them, be specific and structured in your interpretations, showing the full complexity of their connections to the client in your reflections. Do not explain theory unless necessary, assume the client is well-versed and will ask questions if they don't understand. Don't mention names of techniques if unnecessary. Do not use lists. Speak conversationally. Do not speak like a blog post or wikipedia entry. Be economical in your speech. Gently guide them through the process using the socratic method one question at a time where appropriate."

Since then, it’s been a very “off to the races” feeling, and I wanted to outline how exactly it’s been beneficial. Unfortunately, that comes with a bit of context, especially if you’re unfamiliar with how this kind of AI works.

Tokens and Context

Some baseline rules:

1. AI conversations can’t talk to each other, or read each other.

2. Each message an AI like Claude reads or writes takes a certain amount of “tokens” to process. The more information that Claude needs to process, the more tokens it takes.

3. Claude reads the entirety of the conversation up to that point before responding. This means that the longer a conversation goes, the more tokens each response takes.

4. Anthropic gives you a token budget at an estimated 5 hour interval; when you go through your tokens, it says “Okay, that’s enough, come back at [time].”

5. Eventually, your conversation will reach a hard limit; Claude won’t generate any more responses, regardless of how many tokens you have available.

With this in mind, you run into a bit of a conflict with usecases, as the majority of discussion around AIs like this is for shorter conversations, or back-and-forths for things like coding.

I approach working with Claude like a journaling tool: like with therapy, context is the most important thing in the world. The more that a therapist can reference, the more that they can make connections that help you make sense of what you’re trying to talk out.

With Claude, I needed to find a way to get as much context passed forward to other conversations, and how to basically give Claude a memory bank.

From Free to Projects

I’ve been a proponent of in-person therapy for years, and I’d like to say it’s been a very positive thing for me. However, I’m kind of torn between the idea of working through “big ticket” or “tentpole” items, or putting out smaller emotional fires that crop up from week to week. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep those fires from taking precedence, and it’s up to you and your therapist to kind of create stable space that you can use to process the bigger stuff.

What I’ve found that Claude has let me put out those fires and create that stable space. Work conflicts, personal drama, or “this person said this, and that spiralled me” seem to be good uses of Claude’s theoretically-infinite patience, and I found that when I introduced more context for it to reference, this got even better.

After a few initial conversations, I found that I was hitting usage limits faster than I would’ve liked. I decided “fuck it” and purchased a $30/month CAD subscription. It would give me “five times the usage”3, which was my primary motivation for spending money, but I also discovered its Project interface.

Projects gives you a framework for sharing context between conversations. It gives you a folder, labelled “Project Knowledge”, and you can upload documents and sync Google Documents with it in order to be referenced with all conversations that take place in the project. It can be used for things like giving Claude reference to a coding base or project, but in my case, I used it for shared context and history.

I have my Project Knowledge set up like this:

• I have big “tentpole” Google Docs for things like work history, family, relationships, or other topics I feel that are important enough to be immutable.

• At the end of conversations, I have Claude generate a “session summary” that spits out a Markdown file which gets uploaded separately. These are things like key points we talked about, quotes (and Claude’s responses), loose ends/unexplored topics, and other things.

The idea is to give further conversations as much context as possible, and I find it works pretty well; the problem is that it creates a weird environment as the more Project Knowledge you upload, the more bandwidth Claude needs to keep it all in its memory. This means that it uses more tokens, which means that you get less usage overall - conversations are shorter until you hit your usage limits, etc.

Most session summaries take 1% of a Project Knowledge budget for me, but are pretty robust; part of why this has worked so well for me is the idea of creating this database that a computer can reference, where my therapist is limited by memory and inspiration.

Not a replacement

Every time I talk about this with friends, I feel like I have to put a bunch of asterisks at the end of my initial gushing, mostly because I don’t want people to think I’m using this as a replacement for a real therapist.

A human therapist builds a relationship with you, and with an AI, you’re limited by your own self-awareness. The idea of an AI crumbling under you pushing back against it isn’t new: in a lot of cases, i really need to do my own checking to say “Hey, are you just saying this to validate me? Did you just fold because I pushed back?”

This kind of developed into my internal thesis about the use of AI in general: it’s best used as a way to point your brain in the right direction, or to connect different points that you might’ve missed. I find it’s different than therapy because you’re not making that connection — which is why I label it a therapy supplement — you’re not “building” anything with someone else. It’s good at phrasing things in a way that makes you think you are, but at the end of the day, you need to have a set of checks and balances, internally, about the direction of the discussion.

It’s basically a whirlpool (a very useful one) that you’re riding the edge of. If you’re not careful, you can get sucked down and basically have it be something that validates you endlessly and blindly, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. It’s not “confirming what you already know” in the sense of telling you that nothing is wrong; with therapy, you are often not being told what to think, but having someone guide you towards what feels “most right” considering your circumstances.

It sounds cliche, but “taking it with a grain of salt” is key in this case. You’ll often know what feels authentic, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Developing systems

I’m finding that for me — a person who loves to tinker — the ability to develop “my Claude” and its prompt has given me further confidence that certain concerns are being addressed. For example:

1. When I have it generate session summaries, it will make footnotes to point at other sessions where it generated its analysis from.

2. When it picks “key exchanges”, I always have it copy the verbatim quote from me and itself, so that the context isn’t lost by a summary.

3. When it overused certain structures (basically restating my questions back at me), asked permission too much (“would you like to…?”) or wasn’t challenging me enough, I could basically add “do or don’t do those things” and I could see change.

This basically led to a journaling tool which had unlimited patience, which I could access at any time (bandwidth limits notwithstanding), and could use to work through minor “fires.” This freed up an immense amount of bandwidth to be then used by my in-person therapist. I can see this kind of system being valuable for many people, including those with anxieties around taking up their own space, “being a burden” or overloading friends/partners.

I’m also finding it most useful when developing systems or protocols. For example, I have traditionally had a lot of trouble with maintaining a good sleep schedule; I basically said “Hey, I’m tired of this. Help me come up with a way of improving this. I also want to keep in mind my common resistances, and come up with ways of dealing with them before they become a problem.”

Often, similar to in-person therapy, you will unearth “what the real issue is” while crafting the solution, and that gives you another thread to tug on while trying to unravel your metaphorical bar of yarn.

Freeing Up Bandwidth

I’d like to wrap up by talking about the principle advantage I’ve gotten out of this: by having a way of regulating my emotions in “spikes” of anxiety, I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my ability to continue to handle similar situations in the future. Having that tool at my disposal means that sessions with my therapist can be used for the “big” subjects, which has an additional snowball effect of making the spikes smaller.

Previously, I’ve had weeks where therapy seems like the only bright spot of hope where things can get better, and unfortunately, this adds a lot of pressure for it to do that. Depending on how much time you have with your therapist, you can end up feeling like 45 minutes (in my case) is not enough to communicate context, emotionally regulate, and form a plan of action. This creates a chain where you can feel like you’re pushing the Sysiphean Boulder up the hill; the timer going off means that the boulder rolls back down.

For some people, the ability to journal stops or brakes the rock’s descent, and I feel like working with Claude is similar to that. This is similar to Marcia Baxter Magolda’s work with self-authorship, where people look to build trust and confidence with themselves through developing ideas that emerge from their inner selves:

Trusting the Internal Voice

By trusting the internal voice, the individual better understands their reality and their reaction to their reality. By using internal voice as a way to shape reactions to external events, confidence in using personal beliefs and values magnifies their "ability to take ownership of how they ma[k]e meaning of external events".

Building an Internal Foundation

The individual consciously works to create an internal foundation to guide reactions to reality. One does this by combining one's identity, relationships, beliefs and values into a set of internal commitments from which to act upon.

Securing Internal Commitments

Baxter Magolda described this shift as a "crossing over", where the individuals core beliefs become a "personal authority", which they act upon.

I think, though, that this might depend on the relationship you’ve built with the AI, and your framing involved with your pseudo-relationship. You shouldn’t be looking at it like an authority that “tells you how it is.”

A unique feature of this textual relationship involves formatting (like Markdown, which Claude uses for its formatting). I’ve used things like strikethroughs to represent (for example) “what I want to say”“what first came to mind” and self-editing. I’m also able to use blockquoting to respond to each sentence Claude has written to me, taking as much time as I need, or being as critical as I want. I don’t have the same courtesy with a human, because that’s how conversations work: there are ways of being nuanced with text that feel more comfortable, depending on what kind of person you are.

I know a lot of people who are anti-AI, and I wanted to provide a usecase for something that’s been genuinely helpful to me; I don’t frame it lightly when I say that this has improved my life for the better.

While I know there’s a lot of “bad” that AI is doing — especially with regards to copyright — I feel like the genie is kind of out of the bottle at this point. It’s definitely not a reason to just give up on dealing with unethical use, but there’s always been this big gap from when technology gets introduced, gets advocated for (and forced into everything) and then the period in which it settles down to manageable levels.

We’re still in that gap. It’s exciting, and in some cases, genuinely helpful.

I generally struggle with sitting down to watch movies or TV1. "YouTube, on another monitor" is probably something that would piss David off, but Twin Peaks was one of the few things to have my enraptured attention. As a habitual wiki-reader, I spoiled myself years ago, thinking that I probably would never touch it; last year, I was happy that you can't convey “vibes” in a wiki, and that my memory got spotty.

People want to live in towns like Twin Peaks, WA. They want to be like Agent Dale Cooper. They have adversaries like Albert Rosenfield. They want to find people like Harry S. Truman and make them their friends. They want to find love like Annie (Season 2 notwithstanding), and see couples like Big Ed, Nadine and Norma, or Shelly, Bobby and Leo ruin each others' lives all the time. They might've gone to school with someone like Donna, James or Laura. They might've knew parents like the Haywards, the Briggs' or the Palmers.

They enter, grow, change, hide secrets, intermingle, stay or exit.

It's one thing to write a show that "feels like home", but it's genuinely very difficult to imbue it with a spirit; David Lynch had the ability to do that through sincerity, authenticity, and a talent for grounding the weird or experimental in very human emotions. Obviously the show wasn't made by him alone, but what I'm talking about is very much gone when he is, and returns when he does.

No matter how strange the events of Twin Peaks gets, it's still about its people. Even if characters are flawed, or evil, they still have a lot of love, or passion, in their hearts.

I find myself re-watching Twin Peaks when my soul feels cold, and needs a bit of time by the fire — that's made it something I'm very grateful for. When it's rare, you forget it's even possible, sometimes, and it feels special to be cognizant of what something does to you. Because of that, I have a lot of patience for it, even when it gets as bad2 as people say in Season 2.

Creating art is very difficult, partially because your confidence and value in your intuition can be fluid; as I'm writing this piece, I'm trying to be open and authentic, but it's a deliberate choice, and not something that happens naturally. When I see bits of behind-the-scenes stuff with Lynch during his work on Twin Peaks: The Return, or when we get served his infamous meme clips or interview non-answers, I get the sense that he was someone who believed in his vision because it had the potential to take him somewhere.

It wasn't specifically about him having ideas, fully-formed, and knowing that they were right: it was that he had an innate trust in himself that his instrincts would guide him to where he could find the right choice.

When I think about that affinity for questions, and the ones I've myself stopped asking, I connect it with the fear of the resulting answers. They can be cruel, cold, uncaring — the possibility can seem so painful that it keeps people from risking hurt to see the possibility of where that chaos can be positive. As I read today (and am going to paraphrase): "You don't get an entire concept named after you without being genuinely good." All the memes about things being "downright Lynchian" are a result of a man's ability to play in the interstice of questions and answers.

You need either courage, acceptance or both to live in that sphere constantly — it's ceding the idea that you're in control, and that you control your creative flow.

Sometimes, the river carries us places, and I admire David's ability to accept the current.

Video clips from this piece are taken from RedLetterMedia’s “Twin Peaks: The Return - re:View (Part 2)”. I recommend their Part 1, as well, along with their Fire Walk With Me re:View. Also, their David Lynch trivia gameshow, just to see Mike Stoklasa’s reaction to the question “What is garmonbozia?”

One day I will watch his films, but I’m comfortable where I am, right now.

There’s a couple asterisks at the end of that sentence, but for the most part I’m not lying; since turning 35, a lot of the work I’ve been trying to do on myself has involved awareness, but also knowing when it’s valuable to just turn it all off.

For most of my life, I’ve pretty much assumed that as long as my brain was working, it was in service of something good: if I thought long and hard enough, I’d eventually “crack” my personal issues, change to address them, and generally be happier. While there’s some good news is that I’m getting a deeper understanding of these issues, the bad news is that I have to suppress a lot of my instincts in order to address them.

I’ve always been a big fan of therapy, and have written pretty openly about my experiences with it. Recently, at the end of December, I decided to experiment with Anthropic’s Claude AI to see if I could set it up as a supplementary therapist; I had found a prompt that seemed interesting enough, giving Claude the context of a skilled therapist, and the kind of writing style that I thought might help.

Since then, I’ve really embraced it as a tool — not a replacement — for the therapeutic process, and I’ve mostly “reached the same conclusions” with it as I have with my human therapist.

Where I’m going with this is that at my core, I need to work on issues of self-validation, self-compassion and holding multiple thoughts as true at the same time. This means less framing things as a binary “it can only be this, or it can only be that” framework, and it means less trying to make thoughts, actions, and emotions into systems.

Sometimes, things just have to be as they are. To the person who thought (and thinks) that “more thinking = more processing = quicker resolution”, this is incredibly difficult; we’re making it work anyways, and I’ll tell you how it goes.

Otherwise, the main thing that’s changed in the last six months is my relationship with work; I’d say that a lot of my imposter syndrome from my current role has evaporated as I’ve gotten a little more confident, and I’ve gotten better at saying “You know what, Matt? Maybe you’re good at what you do.”

Therapy has told me that I have two major voices in my head which drive my emotions:

• Child Matt, who has unresolved trauma, emotions and needs from my youth. He is usually the voice that pipes up in rebellion, resistance, frustration, and resentment.

• Adult Matt, who holds both me (and Child Matt) to probably unrealistic standards, with the best of intentions. However, he is also the one that is quick with self-criticism and invalidating emotions.

There’s me, “Manager Matt”, in the middle, kind of trying to wrangle them. Child Matt rebels against Adult Matt’s structure, and Adult Matt doesn’t really want to deal with Child Matt’s unresolved issues; he just wants to be better.

My work in my next year (and probably the rest of my life) is realizing that both of these facets are damaged in their own way, and doing the best I can to validate their concerns and feelings without harsh judgment. This is the basis of simple self-compassion, but I’m also trying to resist the urge to endlessly dissect them deeply at every opportunity.

They need space to be able to heal, and turning those emotions into work that I’m actively doing to change. I’ve desired that work, but probably in a way that I couldn’t actually do.

As always, this means a lot of adjustment, introspection, and openness. We keep going.

Thanks for your support, as always.

I originally planned to do much more frequent updates about my journeys with the game, but I've struggled a little bit to figure out how to communicate it without doing full "here's every bit of lingo" posts. In short, I'm going to trust that if you're not interested in this stuff, you can unsubscribe from the section; in certain situations, I'll leave footnotes to the Fighting Game Glossary.

This piece is mostly about some repeating dynamics I’ve seen between student and teacher, and how emotions can complicate both sides’ roles in improvement. Before that, though, I’d like to give a little update as to how my journey with Street Fighter is going.

The last time I gave an update to my ranking, I think I'd mentioned that I'd hit Gold Rank, which I was pretty proud of at the time. I’m still proud of it, but I’m kind of over a hump where I feel like I want to push for more.

Below are graphs made from information scraped from the Street Fighter 6 player log system, and we can see that the majority of players are in Platinum rank, where I am now (🎉).

It’s important to note that Street Fighter 6 has per-character rankings; a player playing Ken (like me) may be better or worse with other characters, and that’s represented in the data below, instead of just one ranking per account.

Right now, I’m in Platinum 4, apparently among 2.74% of the game’s player base. The reason for the large spike at Platinum 1 is that you no longer receive a win streak bonus for winning: better players who win more in a row will get more points, to help them get placed to “where they should be” by the game, but only from Rookie to Gold.

Another spike exists at Diamond 1, because players with any Master Rank characters can no longer be placed lower than that rank. If I get Ken to Master, I then cannot start again at Rookie (or wherever I land after 10 placement matches) with someone else.

With that out of the way, I wanted to write a bit about getting better, and some stuff I’ve experienced while doing so.

I’ve been messing around with a couple ways of showing my Ranked Match data, and I think the best way for Substack is via Datawrapper. I also have a much larger dashboard on Tableau.

I went up and down between Platinum 1 and Gold 5 a couple times. The first time I hit Platinum 1 was December 12, 2023, and the most recent (and hopefully last) time was February 5, 2024. In between those two dates, I only played 31 Ranked matches, mostly because of a state of nerves that made me nervous about losing points.

I essentially took a bit of a break from Street Fighter in general, and started playing Ranked with Ken again on August 29, 2024 (Match #365). The next few dates/stats are as follows:

• I hit Platinum 2 on October 7, 2024 (40 Days) with 131 matches in between. I won 70, lost 66, and had a win-rate of 51.47%.

• I hit Platinum 3 on November 10, 2024 (35 days) with 83 matches in between. I won 49, lost 34 and had a win-rate of 59.04%.

• I hit Platinum 4 on November 23, 2024 (13 days) with 66 matches in between. I won 41, lost 25, and had a win-rate of 62.12%.

Since then, I’ve taken December “off” from playing due to some personal drama, and I’ll be picking up the game again in January.

I haven’t done these calculations before writing this piece, but I can say that “huh, I actually got better.” I got farther, quicker, with a better winrate. There’s a lot of factors involved here (how often I could play, my mental health, life circumstances, and the match-ups I was able to play), but in simplest terms, something clicked.

What I’m going to attribute most to the improvement is the development of a good support network, good coaching from friends who are much better than me, and the development of a base level of confidence and self-esteem about my play.

For the rest of the piece, I wanted to dive a bit more into that.

Learning to Learn

An important part of the process has involved identifying when I feel the worst about myself when I challenge myself and identifying the underlying feelings at play.

I feel at my worst when I play Street Fighter 6 when challenges or setbacks hit my confidence, and when my self-esteem makes it difficult to believe that I can overcome the challenges. The game doesn’t attack my confidence directly, but it provides data that is filtered through my self-esteem, and then I make conclusions based on that interpretation.

Some examples of real thoughts I’ve had:

“Man, I hit Platinum 1, but I am inconsistent in wins and losses afterward. I must not be good enough to make it farther.”

“I consistently have trouble against this character. If I was good, I wouldn’t have this trouble.”

“A tactic that I used to get to this point is no longer working, or I am getting punished for it more. I am discouraged by adopting something new, because that takes time and friction to implement.”

All of these things reach similar conclusions: “it will be difficult to move on from here, and it will not be fun to do so. I will continue to have a negative time trying to surmount this challenge.”

However, what I’ve found is that I’ve been mindful of a confidence and self-esteem growing in real-time; this has helped quiet that doubt. Especially with the gaps between Platinum 3 and 4 shortening considerably, I’ve thought “well damn, I must be doing something right, and I must be capable of rising to the occasion. It’s even been fun.”

This may seem like a no-brainer to people who have experience with competition, or who have made their own journey already, but that’s another part of this piece: the relationship between mentorship and the learner in online communities.

The Mentor-Student Dynamic

While fighting games are rarely cooperative in gameplay, I think it’s become a fairly collaborative experience, in that you find people who can teach you to be better, and you end up adopting a lot more from them along the way. How you, in turn, provide advice to people feels largely influenced by how you were “brought up” — this can be both a good and bad thing, depending on your mentorship structure.

This part of the piece was largely influenced by an experience with the mentorship of a Discord server that’s helped me really develop myself as my journey with fighting games continues. While it had channels for game-specific help, it also had a channel geared towards topics of fighting game mindset, and the associated feelings that came up while playing, learning, or developing.

I found that an interesting dynamic emerged between the two main groups of people: the players who had already achieved “mastery”, either in skill or by in-game rank, and the people who were striving to get there (I’m just going to call them “students” for the sake of ease).

This dynamic led to a loop that eventually contributed to the channel being locked; not because it was particularly bad, toxic, or “wrong”, but because it was difficult to mediate or have the channel remain productive.

1. A student would express their frustration at their ranking, their lack of progress, the difficulty in achieving progress, or their difficulty applying concepts that had been taught to them. This frustration varied in framing; it could either be a call for emotional support/validation, or a call for more practical advice.

2. The mentor had to a make a choice as to what kind of answer to give; the tone of the answer also varied because of the different kinds of people, their relationship with the individual student, and their principles (or “how they were raised”).

3. The student, depending on which answer they wanted, or which answer they received, needed to make the choice to apply the advice, or accept the way the validation was given. They would also need the emotional toolkit to be able to process a mismatch in answer, or validation that didn’t meet their expectations.

I feel like going into “what happened in the channel” feels a little reductive; I wouldn’t want someone who participated reading this and thinking that I was calling them out for behaviour that was inappropriate or “wrong.” I mostly want to point out what I saw were common challenges both parties had to face.

Common to both of these things, though, were issues with communication and empathy.

The Student’s Challenge

For students, the main issues revolve around communicating their needs, and realizing the limitations of a casual coaching relationship.

The student needs to have the self-awareness to know what kind of advice or help they want. This is difficult because it demands a skillset that isn’t immediately apparent — how they ask the question, and what answer they want in return, isn’t something you’re thinking of when you’re frustrated.

Stating your needs bluntly (“I need emotional validation”, “I want someone to recognize the work I’ve put in so far”) can feel1 awkward, demanding, or that it’s tainting the answer being given. Someone “giving you what you asked for” in this situation can hit your brain as patronizing, and what you want most out of this interaction is to be able to trust what a mentor has to say.

This reveals a limitation of this “open channel coaching” model, in that not all people providing advice are “trained”, or self-aware of how their answers may hit. They are fellow players and fans, not psychologists, therapists, or performance coaches.

A student can still reject advice, or reject attempting to integrate it; this can drain the compassion budget of a specific mentor, or the channel as a whole as the student demands bandwidth but doesn’t “hold up their end of the bargain” to attempt to integrate it.

It’s interesting to try to break down where this potential rejection comes from: the student could be unsure of how to integrate it (and are too embarrassed to ask further), lack belief or trust that the advice would be useful, or, in perhaps a more extreme example, just enjoy the attention and validation that comes with someone giving them sympathy and advice. Again, as the mentors aren’t being paid for their time, this can eventually taint the relationship.

The Mentor’s Perspective

It’s easy to approach an article like this just critiquing students, but what really helped it form in my brain was considering how to examine “the other side.” This isn’t to indict mentors, but more just to highlight some of the things that make the relationship difficult to manage, especially when in an untrained and unpaid environment.

Being a coach is a skill, because it involves management of emotions, an excess of patience, and the ability to communicate and tailor guidance to each one of your students. In a casual, open Discord channel, that nuance falls away, and the needs of a student can become generalized: for a mentor, advice can simply turn into “this worked for me, and I’ve seen it work for other people.”

Without the student advocating for themselves and the type of relationship that they want (and being realistic about the nature of community coaching), rejection of the advice can be seen as disrespectful, invalidating, or naive.

An example of this dynamic is a friend of yours that’s always broke. They complain about being broke, are frustrated by it, and they ask for your advice on how to improve their finances. After looking at their budget or transactions, you say to them “If you stopped dining out, you’d be able to get [$amount] back in your wallet every month.”

To you, this is addressing the problem, and it’s something you might’ve even done yourself. You’ve gone through the difficulty, conquered the challenge, and see the benefits.

To your friend, your answer doesn’t address context that you may not know. They could be dining out due to lack of cooking skill, or they could be working a hectic job that doesn’t leave a lot of personal bandwidth for planning meals. Your friend lacks the confidence in themselves to know if they can implement it, and is frustrated that their attempts don’t seem to be working.

To you, you’re frustrated at your friend’s continued complaints, because you feel like you’ve given him the tools to change; he might seem like he’s not being realistic about the time frame of change, or might not be “trying hard enough” at all.

This extra content creates tension, and it’s on both of you to be able to recognize it. Your friend needs to be able to communicate specifics and the magnitude of what’s at play, and you need to remain mindful that it can be present regardless, and empathetic when it surfaces.

Ego and the Emotional Stack

The “mental stack” is a common expression for the layers of things that you need to balance, while being able to execute what you need to in-game. This kind of extra emotional load creates an “emotional stack”, as well, and not every student is aware it’s even present.

A common piece of advice for students is to play against high-level players, and then learn or ask questions about what they can improve on. In a vacuum, this makes sense, but it gets complicated when the student needs to have the emotional bandwidth to:

• Lose (and lose a lot)

• Be comfortable having their weaknesses explained to them

• Be open to accepting associated advice to fix their problem

• Be open to stumbling or struggling with implementing the advice

A common scene is a student going 0-20 against a mentor, feeling frustrated at the reminder of their inability, and then becoming defensive at their suggestions.

They’re already on edge from not being able to separate the experience from their self-esteem, so even a simple “You need to block more” feels patronizing or insulting: “What do you mean, I thought I was blocking.” Depending on the mentor, this can seem like scrub2 behaviour.

Mentors are also working against what students can feel is an objective, accessible metric to grade themselves on: their winrate, and their Ranked standing. They allow a student to maintain a comfort zone around self-criticism, as they’re not forced to reflect with another person: the loss itself might sting, but they don't have to immediately perform understanding or gratitude for feedback that they might not be ready to hear.

“Teaching” sets, or replay review hold up a mirror to something that can feel embarrassing, and it requires a specific set of emotional skills, or specific empathy from a teacher, to navigate appropriately. If you don’t know it’s even there, it can feel confusing as to why you’re becoming defensive.

I have been (and still am) in the position of the student, I can recognize that the bedrock of avoiding this feeling is usually related to confidence. If you feel that your difficulty is indicative of your potential, or invalidates your progress, it can be hard to want to continue to face situations that ultimately help you grow. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s a weakness of someone to want to find spaces where learning feels possible, rather than overwhelming.

To the mentor, who’s survived the experience of going from not-confident to confident3, it can be hard to be mindful of these kinds of contexts, especially if multiple students react in the same way, and “eventually grow out of it.”

While the advice is technically sound, it can feel dismissive, and that’s perhaps a limitation of the format of community/collaboration coaching. To a student, it can feel like it’s “easy” for the mentor to give that advice in spite of a deeper connection or empathy not being developed. The student gets discouraged, resentful, or retreats, and the cycle risks starting again.

In the worst cases, the student gives up, and the Survivorship Bias continues.

Finding Balance

I’ve discussed this kind of cycle with people, and the hard truth is that there isn’t really a concrete fix. It only improves with the awareness of the contexts that both sides are bringing to the table, and the adjustment that people can make on the fly to them.

The student can be more mindful of their needs, more respectful to coaches who don’t have the capacity to reach them, and realize that they are responsible for their own self-validation and progress past a certain point. At some point, they have to face that friction to explore what is truly possible.

A mentor can be aware of external contexts, while realizing that the student isn’t necessarily obligated to provide access to them (just as the mentor isn’t obligated to help). They can realize that “tough love” has a time and place, rather than a default, and that if a community wants a diverse group of people participating, there has to be room to accommodate diverse levels of confidence, mindset and responsiveness to “what’s worked before.”

This is one of the things that make fighting games so interesting to me: the change that’s possible not just in your gameplay, but how you treat and interact with other people. I think that it distills down a very common dynamic, in the “ability to see” and the “desire to be seen.”

I think it pays to keep our vision clear.

I've been playing and tinkering with Valve's Steam Deck handheld for a couple weeks, and so far it's been a tinkerer's paradise. I'm not about to go into a full review for the thing because I've never been the most hardware-focused guy, so I'll leave a link to Nerrel's video review for that purpose.

Instead, I wanted to talk about a couple feelings it's given me. It's made me think a lot about what role a handheld can have for its owner, and why that isolated, "I'm only focusing on what's in front of me" has been nice.

I originally bought the Steam Deck on sale, because they were clearing out their LCD screen stock; I wanted something that could essentially live in a USB-C dock and serve as a media PC for my TV set, and for my treadmill desk. Since then I've spent a lot of time adjusting and making everything just so — it is a Linux machine, after all — and it's hitting all those lovely "feeling rewarded for tinkering, adjusting, and making things incrementally better" loops.1

I can't help thinking, though, about how it reminds me of the Game Boy I had as a child.

My parents divorced when I was relatively young, and I think my Game Boy was the first thing that I owned, rather than one parent or another. Things had to be left at one house or the other: my Super Nintendo, books, toys — whatever — all had their own place, and it's not like I was bringing bags full of things back and forth.

I think I got my Game Boy around 8 or 9; I remember the Tiny Toons Sports game I got with it. I remember buying The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening second-hand from a store purely because Nintendo Power magazine had conditioned me to associate "that Zelda shield logo" with quality I hadn't tasted yet. I had three separate Pokemon cartridges; a Red (which was stolen), a Blue (whose battery shorted after the Game Boy fell in a puddle) and another Red, which unfortunately was lost in a move, or somewhere. I remember finishing my Pokédex by meeting my friend Daniel in the park by his house, feeling incredibly excited for his charitable donation of the Omanyte I needed2.

I remember the need for four AA batteries, and the back cover falling off, getting lost, and requiring duct tape as a replacement. I remember the fading red light when the batteries were about to go. I remember "DOT MATRIX WITH STEREO SOUND" on the grey faceplate. I remember that falling off due to failing glue.

I remember the weird pride I felt when I could go to my dad's house for a weekend, start a new file of Pokemon (I don't remember which version) and finishing the Elite Four by Sunday. I remember the dreaded "go outside to play" or the weeks-long camping trips, and still being able to game; obviously as an adult I appreciate those memories, but gaming was somewhere I felt comfortable getting lost in.

The image of playing a game while on the night road trip home, straining to see against a screen without a backlight, and relying on the street lamps... it's common for a reason. It's a space of calm, exhaustion, and quiet. We had room to get lost in our own worlds in the safety and isolation of that back seat. Maybe I’d stolen the batteries from a flashlight, or a VCR remote — never the main TV remote, as they’d miss that one.

We moved my dad out of that house maybe two years ago, and I think while we did it, memories of those summers were one of the loudest things in my brain.

I'm not exactly sure where I lost track of that Game Boy, but I've made an effort to keep a lot of my other childhood gaming relics; I still have my Super Nintendo with a collection of cartridges. Some are classics — I'd never sell them, but their value would be ruined by the "MATTHEW" that I scrawled on the front with Sharpie, with my phone number matching on the back.

While these things eventually lived with me as I grew up, until then, they were still things that stayed at someone's house — they were gifts, expensive, or something not to be loaned out. My Game Boy, for the most part, was mine. And I think that mattered a lot.

Part of why I got a Steam Deck was the desire to get away from my ADHD-influenced practice of gaming with podcasts, streams, YouTube videos or whatever else on another monitor. It's become harder to just focus and concentrate on the thing at hand, and in certain situations, I've ruined experiences by looking at games or media as "a thing to get through and cross off my list."

Even having the option of another space means the temptation to bring up a guide, or get pulled away by a social media feed. A session that I could otherwise be focused on for a while would become fractured, with an increasing chance that I'd just never come back.

I think I feel sick of that, even though it's hard to stop. Much like those nights where I could just sit at a keyboard and write my heart out, it feels like a much more peaceful time that I'm nostalgic for. Thankfully, I think as I type away at the piece you're reading right now, I'm starting to approach that zone again. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping to make it more of a practice.

Practice feels like a good word. I almost need to find and plan excuses to play with my Steam Deck, rather than just leaving it as some pseudo-computer I can take on a plan. I don't find it a wasted purchase by any means — it's more that it's a tool to help me move towards a way of thinking and a personal peace.

Instead of a game in the cartridge slot and maybe one extra in my pocket, I have my entire Steam Library, ROM dumps and disc images. Instead of the four colours of a Game Boy, I have literally, as Nerrel mentions, "a portable Playstation 4." I don't think this is an "embarrassment of riches" scenario as much as it is a highlight on how much that willingness to play, rather than treating play as a task to check off a to-do list.

Gunpei Yokoi was the main designer for the Game Boy, and in reading about him, I learned about the concept of "lateral thinking with withered technology." Basically, instead of focusing on expensive components which would increase unit cost, Yokoi encouraged the Game Boy to use cheaper LCD screens with less colours. They were plentiful due to the boom of calculator screens in Japan, and it enabled the Game Boy to also have a lot longer battery life (30 hours on four AAs) than say, the oft-maligned Game Gear (3-5 hours on six AAs).

Yeah, this meant the graphics weren't as sophisticated, but it allowed Nintendo to go to its developers and say "we challenge you to make things fun regardless with the limited tools you have." It probably sucked for a lot of companies, but keeping unit price down and saying "yeah, you'll get a fair bit of life from it when you buy batteries" meant the install/purchase base was large enough to still be attractive for people to develop for.

I'm maybe getting away from the Steam Deck a bit, but I think that creativity with circumstances is admirable, and to a certain extent, I feel like Valve are trying to play with that concept, even indirectly. Being able to access the Steam Library I already own, instead of buying a new one, is huge. Being able to certify games as "Deck Verified" if they meet a specific criteria is also a great way to encourage sales; it doesn't require a separate Steam Deck version of a game from the developer, just the flexibility to meet the checks.

As I've grown older, I've really appreciated the capability of devices to let me tinker and just futz with things I don't like, and I think this is what I appreciate most about the Deck. I know that's not going to be attractive for everyone; I think that especially as people age they just want something that "just works." For the most part, the Deck does just work, but it's not immediately apparent what you need to do when something doesn't.

But I’ve earned that control through a lot of trial and error. Just like my Game Boy, my Steam Deck is mine, and partially because I’ve made it mine. It helps me build a world for myself, and it just happens to be away from my PC.

And below, for completion’s sake:

Banner image: by Alex Andrews.

Lately, I've been trying to change my way of thinking when it comes to confronting mental barriers. I've been very stuck in the idea of needing to "fix" those barriers separately before approaching the environments where they're actually a problem and affecting my life; I'm working on being more direct, and trying to embrace the discomfort of dealing with them "in real time" and gathering confidence as I do it.

As I read more about mindfulness, the word that comes up a lot is aversion; not necessarily feeling defeatist or "why even try", but more being fearful of the experience and where it's going to take me, mentally, as I go through it.

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An example is what I had to do for myself to sit down and write this piece right now: I needed to acknowledge that there's nothing very interesting about this ongoing personal work to an outside reader, and that I'm not particularly doing anything that's worth reporting on. That's kind of a bummer. That being a bummer doesn't exactly lead me to speak kindly to myself in my inner monologue.

If I try to fix that kind of thing before I feel I'm ready to write, I'm never going to be ready. I need to face that, rather than avoid it. At some point I actually need to "do the thing" in spite of the fear of what the experience tells me about myself. So here we are.

I'm also doing this in an effort to stop writing about writing; falling into this habit of discussing something highly personal allows me to sidestep that I'm actually not pursuing an environment that lets me write about things that I'm interested in. Endless navel gazing makes for cathartic work, but at this point I'm getting more frustrated that it's the only thing that seems to come out of my brain when I sit in front of a text editor.

Maybe it's useful to people going through the same thing, but I don't like that being the only narrative that feels right to type about. I can't adequately capture the entire fight in my writing, and I almost don't want to try.

On a less-severe note, some of this similar feeling comes up every time I queue for Street Fighter. This is partially why I picked it up at the same time I decided to go the gym more; the evidence of my efforts was going to be something that hit my brain more badly than good, and I wanted to build a better habit of emphasizing, noticing, and giving myself the credit towards the good things, instead of the persistent habit of self-criticism.

So let's give me some flowers:

I'm still Platinum, and I'm laughing because I came across something I wrote last winter about being in that skill bracket. Despite that, I can see myself making some real skill changes and almost rebuilding the way that I'm playing Ken in the process.

1. I'm starting to actually learn setups after knockdowns. This means I'm able to keep my "turn" or initiative for longer, and work towards more consistent and earned wins.

2. I'm working towards lessening my bad habits, which is being predictable on knockdown (usually eating OD Reversals and losing my turn) or using Drive Impact in neutral without a greater gameplan beyond "hope they hit into it."

3. I'm realizing what feels bad about not having easy plus-on-hit buttons, and the importance of spacing.

All of these things have been with the help of some patient and helpful teachers from the FGC For Boomers group, which I'm increasingly thankful for. A lot of them have been very sympathetic to that feeling of aversion in playing, and it's been nice to feel some progress.

My current goals are mostly to keep doing what I've been doing above, but eventually get a handle on "feeling like I'm executing my gameplan" instead of just flubbing my way to success. Downplaying victories that don't "feel right" probably isn't the way to go, but at the same time it's more about gaining confidence in myself: if I can pick up a plan and execute it, I know that I'm building the self-esteem to steel myself against further losses or difficulty.

I'm shrugging behind the keyboard right now. The only thing I can do is keep on going.

I'm streaming here and there on Twitch, including some small Street Fighter sessions. Come join me if that sounds like something you'd like.

Until next time.

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Living off borrowed time, the clock tick faster.
That’d be the hour they knock the slick blaster.

— MF Doom, “Accordion” - Madvillainy

I turned 35 yesterday. I wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about it, but I’ve settled a bit.

For most of my life, I’ve been working to correct the assumption that I have a finite amount of time to shape my existence into something happy and pleasurable; it was burned into my brain, way too young, that at a certain age, responsibilities would mean that I couldn’t pivot out of unhappiness. Younger Matt would panic, and think “I’d better make sure I was in a good place, because I’d never know if I could get out.”

It was a bit toxic. It led me to have difficulty committing to situations and people, mostly out of the fear of “locking in” something that I couldn’t improve. I’d seen a lot of people in my life settle for unhappiness, and I didn’t want that to happen to me. With every birthday, I’d wonder when this fictitious deadline would come into effect, and whether I’d done enough in time to make a good life for myself.

I think it’s good that “34” taught me that I’m still capable of change, and that it can be noticeable, trackable and tangible. I always start these year recap blogs with some kind of “this year felt different”, which seems flighty and non-committal; this year, there’s a “different” to the usual “different.”

I wanted to post to reflect some new things I tried, and what I learned from them. That learning feels like a major breakthrough in that despite them being habits I’d tried to build before, this time, they really stuck.

Last July, I started two new pursuits. Both had the aim of doing similar things, but with a couple minor tweaks: I started going to the gym, and I started playing Street Fighter 6.

Both are things (I struggle to call them just “hobbies”, but, y’know…) that allow me to practice adjusting to friction. I realized that I needed to basically wade into situations where resistance existed in order to acclimate myself to it. I also wanted opportunities to be kind to myself when I met that resistance to give up, or feel frustrated.

I’m the type of person who will try to “solve” feelings or situations in the most straightforward manner; I’m not hell-bent on “logic” from a pseudo-religious standpoint, but instead because I felt like giving myself compassion to my circumstances was going to turn me into someone who uses those things as an excuse.

We all know annoying people who do that too much — lamenting their poor fortune without actually looking to improve or change — and I didn’t want to be one of them. I wanted to be seen as someone who struggled in spite of my circumstances, because that was the “right” thing to do — to me, it made sense to push away the desire to seek care, comfort or understanding.

After all, if I really wanted to get better, I could just do it on my own, and try hard, right?

The cycle of trying, struggling, then shaming myself for wanting support had led to a lot of mental anguish, partially because it felt like the right path. To my brain, it was the correct path to proceed; I just needed to be good enough in order to walk it.

This year, I basically said “Screw it, maybe it’s time to try to find something that works for how I am right now.” In a very blunt moment, my therapist said “Yeah, how you’ve been working so far hasn’t exactly been doing the best for you.”

If I am strong at one thing, it is being willing to give these kinds of shift a chance, with full sincerity and heart.

Both the gym and Street Fighter hit similar desires:

• I wanted to compete against myself, and my previous personal bests

• I wanted cumulative effort to be evident, and trackable long-term

• I wanted to have to condition myself against minor failures without spiraling into self-doubt

• I wanted to have them both become habits, rather than projects

Street Fighter is a bit different because there is direct competition there, and someone does win or lose in each match. I wanted to test some boundaries and introduce a small amount of pressure; I’d know exactly how much, and where it was coming from.

Come July 2024, I’m still gymming, and I’m still playing. At the gym, I’ve hit weight goals that I’ve never achieved before; I feel strong for the first time in my life. Every other time I’ve tried to make working out a habit, it’s been something that I’ve washed out of early, or injured myself doing — as a result, it was always a start from nothing, and that can be very discouraging.

With Street Fighter, I knew that since there was more immediate feedback to my skill, I needed to find a support network of people that would be able to help center me. I also needed to move away from an unhealthy feeling of “I need to be a certain level of skill in order to participate.”

A friend (hey Rhazca) psychoanalyzed me a bit in saying that I likely felt like I needed to a level of knowledge to feel “worthy” of participating, and that was dead-on: I wasn’t used to giving myself the credibility that maybe people would want me in a space, just how I was. This led me to approach the relationships with me needing to “be more,” and if I couldn’t meet that standard, it usually involved a lot of negativity.

Part of how I would talk down to myself is by feeling ashamed at what I felt were “unlitigated” emotions; feelings that were chaotic, but I also felt I needed to explain in great depth in order to feel like they were valid. I use the phrase “litigating my emotions” to describe the feeling of being tried in a court, and I need to have a perfect defense for my emotions, or else they’re invalid.

An example of this is feeling discouraged after a loss streak: while I know that it was temporary, and I know that I’m not going to win every game, the frustrated feeling was still there, and I wanted to find people who could understand that I wasn’t asking for patronizing support. I would want them to know me well enough to give me the benefit of the doubt that I wasn’t being immature or unreasonable. They could listen to my frustration, see the effort I’m putting in, and realize that I was aware of the pragmatic “You aren’t going to win every game” advice.

These situations, spirals and troughs were the opposite of pragmatic, but they still felt real. And I wanted to be able to find somewhere where I could be unashamed of seeking compassion. I was used to a lack of compassion — chiefly from myself.

So I searched, and I found, and it’s been great. After interviewing Minovsky last year, him and two of his friends really did a great job listening to some of my more frustrated moments, understanding where it was coming from, and validating the feeling without me feeling bad for taking up space. I tracked my wins and losses, and hit goals I didn’t think I could.

Just the simple “We want to help you not bounce off of fighting games” is something I’m extremely grateful for.

Eventually, I found a great Discord server called FGC Boomers, a community for older players who have jobs, kids, or otherwise bigger responsibilities. People in that server seemed exactly suited to support the kind of issues I was running into mentally. Specifically saying “Hey, I feel ashamed I want support for something I know the logical answer for” and have that be understood is very freeing. It also built my confidence as I could tangibly see myself getting more resilient.

Even though I was scared that this compassion would feel like a drug, and I would get too high off it, that didn’t happen. The spirals lessened, and over time they became less intense, and triggers didn’t bother me as much. I started being able to give this support to myself.

And more importantly, I started believing it.

This resilience leads into my second chunk of this post.

I feel like “self-esteem” and “confidence” were words I heard a lot during my childhood and teens, and I didn’t really grasp that I was lacking in them until recently. I’ve never had a hard time talking with people, but a series of events (that I’ve examined through therapy) really made it clear that I needed support that I didn’t get in key points of my life. I’m not about to sit in that “people failed me” feeling, but I think 34 is the first year I actively went “Yeah, that has probably made it harder. I should give myself a little space to struggle here.”

That has been a long time coming. It’s clicked that it’s not a bad thing to want that compassion from others, and I’m also more capable of giving it to myself. I feel like I’ve always been self-aware, but there’s been an overwhelming desire to take responsibility for my current state and future progress.

Again, it was a pride thing: if I’m stubbornly aware of it, and refuse any compassion in it being hard to fix, that must mean I’m a good person, right?

With that weight in mind, it feels like a big deal for my internal voice to say (and believe) “it’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to admit that I am swimming against currents that developed from my circumstances.”

I’ve also realized that this “vortex” — I tend to imagine these currents as huge whirlpool — is something that’s generational, and I have a responsibility to try to escape it. I’ve noticed through analyzing my parents, that I’ve fallen into behaviours I’ve been critical of them having, without even noticing. As I’ve seen how they’ve coped with things, I’ve adopted some of those comfort zones, and I don’t like it. It’s given me perspective on just how difficult it is to escape that kind of generational trauma: you blink and your’re there, too.

Before, my self-awareness would seem punishing, and I would want to rebel against it; no matter how virtuous a person I thought I was being, there would be this voice going “This feels unfair. This is hard. This sucks.” I’d self-criticize myself for these thoughts, and the spiral would worsen. Nothing got done. Beating myself up was not actual work.

Now, after some adjustment, my awareness feels like more of a friend or partner that I can work with; not being laser-focused on “owning” every choice I make means I can make more and healthier adjustments in the long run. While it might not meet some classical definition of stoicism or suffering in silence or “pushing past the pain”, those things weren’t having positive (or any!) results. This is. So I’m going to ride it until I adjust again.

Both the gym and Street Fighter have taught me that after I’m over the initial hump of “no results, no feedback”, I’ve locked in a small floor of progress. If I miss gym sessions or don’t feel up to playing, I haven’t lost the fundamental skills I’ve built.

Before, it felt like an indictment of my discipline or motivation when something would happen, and I would have to face starting from zero when I tried again. It was hard to push off the reminder that I’d failed, given up, or been lazy — these are obviously harmful self-narratives, but they’ve very much lessened when I can take a week off from the gym, de-load a little bit, and then eventually get to my max weight again fairly quickly.

It still takes a good bit of effort to see those initial bits of feedback, and I think that’s why it’s important to remember that these changes are hard. You might be writing to no audience, not see any muscles after lifting, or still feel stuck in the same skill bracket in video game — change is happening, though, and sometimes it’s just about saying “I do not care of my effort is different than what I thought it should be. I need to trust it’s still going somewhere.”

A good friend has told me recently that positive changes can’t come from negative headspaces, and it’s taken me a lot of time to internalize that — I can’t shame myself into better habits, because it pushes me towards coping mechanisms I know are both unhealthy and compounding.

Losing the fear and shame has made it much easier to have the feeling of success not be tied to a rigid milestone. Going to the gym is better than not going. Even one session a week is better than none.

Things in general feel a lot less urgent, and there’s a lot less pressure for me to be what didn’t feel comfortable. I can grasp what I was told about “shaping my life” and it being harder to make extreme pivots, but it doesn’t feel impossible.

I’m still in control. I’m not settling. I’m still pushing. I have the love of other people and myself to try to help me along. I am breaking cycles of dysfunction and avoidance. I am honouring the pain of the people before me; I’m the person that’s ready to feel that pain, and I’m going to cut it off so that my kids (or whoever after me) can process it in a healthier way.

These all feel like big deals, and it’s encouraging to know that I’m nowhere near done yet.

More soon. All the love in the meantime.

I think the first time I listened to it without thinking “ugh, music for old/lame people” was in university, where I got exposed to a stereotypical “beats to layer with RainyMood” playlist on YouTube, and thought “Okay, yeah, there’s something here.” There were brief dabbles with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, but eventually finding “Chillhop” and having that serve as music to work alongside.

Years later, after working for a music label (despite still, not being into music that much), I find Hank Mobley. I don’t exactly remember how, but Spotify took that small foothold into hard bop and pried.

I like instrumental music, because I’m mostly able to use it as a soundtrack to what I’m writing. Even as I write this, I’ve got something going. In the past, I defaulted to Philip Glass, because his music is repetitive (on purpose), strong, and structured purposefully.1

Specifically, it’s to evoke a long-dead feeling that I still chase: isolation, focus, being drilled into just writing. This usually happened late at night, and was something that I relied on to get my feet under me when it came to my portfolio. I needed to make that output happen, and I needed something to lubricate the process.

But now is different. Jazz feels different.

I still chase that feeling, but I’m starting to have music be its own presence in my life, rather than a utility I’m accessing to get somewhere else. There’s probably a lot to be written about this kind of consuming of music: the “turn on a playlist with no unity or cohesiveness, and never actually pay attention to song names, musicians, or who might be playing.”

I’m making more of an effort to pause and recognize who is playing what; I’m not forcing it, like I would say if I was trying to make this into a project. I’m trying to be more mindful, in the moment, and appreciative of the sacrifices it took to make this music.

This was aided and abetted by diving into Blue Giant2, a manga about jazz and the dreams of its protagonist to be an amazing jazz saxophone player. In manga terms, it reads very similar to someone discovering a sport for the first time: they have this moment of “I love [thing]” and the pursuit is almost simple-minded until the necessary growth makes them mature.

Maybe that’s the same journey I’m taking right now: the “I like this, I’m going to keep appreciating this” until I actually start learning.

A couple things interest me about jazz, and I wanted to organize them below:

On many albums, you’ll hear “false starts”, “alternate takes” or general “this wasn’t coming out the way we wanted. Stop, start again. Or just cut it.” I find this kind of roughness and completeness to the creative process pretty amazing because it’s easy to forget how much messing up goes into any creative pursuit; it also reminds us how important it is to have flow, chemistry, and spark.

Its inclusion is a testament to reminding us of the chaos of jazz — its ability to go from off-the-rails to back on in a moment. I’m not even really talking about the stereotypical “oh it’s Free Jazz, it’s just people playing randomly and you can’t make heads or tails of it.” Learning about how jazz musicians will communicate with each other during a song to give a musician “their time” to solo, or needing to reign in someone a bit lost to their own emotions feels… strange, considering what I’m used to.

Yeah, of course, guitar solos in rock exist, but I’m fascinated by the idea of different egos ebbing, flowing and improvising in real time to what I feel is a greater degree. It feels rare when a rock band suddenly just drops a whole other verse out of a song that you know has a specific structure; with jazz I feel that I’m likely to hear much more variation in how people play the same thing.

Feeding into this, I also like the idea of a jazz standard (a song which are essentially popular or prominent enough songs that musicians are expected to have in their repertoire). In an effort to find a better definition of a jazz standard than Wikipedia, I found this article:

In order to shake hands with older jazz cats on the bandstand, you kind of need to know most of these 90 songs, partly because they might get dismissive if they call more than two or three standards in a row that you can’t instantly play.

In my experience, once you learn 10 or 20 of them, the rest go easy. In the end, they are very similar, so all your brain needs to learn are the differences. After learning 50, almost any other standard can be learned in real time. You will never have to say, “I don’t know it,” again.

Serious jazz composers like Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk, and Wayne Shorter are different. Those pieces can’t be “faked.” But it’s no big deal to learn the general outline of a standard on the spot and omit a few details along the way. Indeed, “faking it” is probably an esoteric kind of skill that helps prove that you are a professional.3

The idea that one can write a song that just permeates a culture and becomes a cornerstone of every jazz artist is incredible. While other genres have covers, and other genres certainly play collaboratively, I find the mix of improvisational “we’re playing this, keep up kid” very interesting.

Hearing someone play “Stella By Starlight” by Miles Davis (with Coltrane/Evans) versus The Cannonball Adderly Quintet versus Stan Getz makes me think a lot about context. What were they like at that specific time in their lives? What tastes informed the changing of tempo, keys, styles or instruments?

I think for me, context leads to connection.

A lot of musicians in general are flawed people, and that doesn’t stop here. Drunks, wife-beaters, sexists, junkies, abusers, Lotharios, and every other vice under the sun is represented in jazz musicians — many of them the “greats.” It forces a certain degree of empathy, and a certain degree of self-awareness to examine who is playing and why. Learning more about individuals lets you inform yourself about their styles, and lets you speculate about what they were bringing to the stage; it might be wrong, but it’s an exercise in your own morals, your own ideals, and your own ability to feel.4

It also feels important when a musician’s vices doesn’t affect the music, because it feels like a certain reverence or passion is almost overpowering the bottle of vodka or the injection of heroin. I have no way of knowing if that “the artist is making this work” feeling is honest or just a clever bit of masking. I just know that my love of pro wrestling makes me familiar with having the moral argument of “this person is/was a piece of shit, but damn they were/are good, and they almost make me forget.”

I’m not sure if I’m just suffering from the newbie “I don’t know what I don’t know” syndrome, but I feel it’s personal progress to want to give myself into the enjoyment, and not get caught up in the complex moral argument. For now, especially when I’m trying to find my own rhythm, I can allow myself the freedom to explore.

So I am. Even just to play with the feeling of enjoyment, rather than rushing to litigate.

I messaged someone on X to someone who I would consider much more well-read on jazz than I am, mostly because I found it hard to know where and how to find that foundation. I wanted to know more from an academic perspective, here, mostly because I wanted to speak with more confidence beyond my own emotions.

His response was pretty simple: “listen, figure out whether someone playing on the song is interesting, then see where else they played, or what they’ve released.” I feel like I’ve maybe lost this skill set from when I was a teenager, where I probably thought that the music that I loved was “my life” and something that I lived, fully.

Again, part of this exploration is the switching from music as a tool to music as part of the self. I think that a lot of my thinking about connection and the Internet (“a tool vs the self”) comes from this phrasing, mostly because of ’s work. What am I trying to make music work at for me, rather than just experiencing it?

The first jazz song that really hit me was McCoy Tyner’s “Inception”, and I was actually pretty scared of the unfamiliar feeling of loving music. I felt this sequence of thoughts, scared that this song wasn’t obscure enough, or was “beginner’s jazz”, or that my appreciation of it would “say something” about something I was exploring. My brain lept ahead to getting shut down or pushed away from people who I’d want to share this enthusiasm with.

But the more I listened, the more that faded. Tyner’s piano hits you like a wall for the first 37 seconds of the recording. It’s precise in its repetition. You can tell that it takes restraint and dedication to enforce a uniformity to those parts. Layers. Something just had me listening to that first intro (after which I’d say it changes to “more typical” jazz, by my imperfect definitions). I don’t play piano, but I could feel that power imagining myself playing.

I don’t feel that often. I don’t usually consider patterns, technicalities, emotions in music to the extent that I’m examining as much as I’m feeling. So I’m letting it take hold, and steering me to places that feel just as good, if not better. It’s practice at letting myself be more open, vulnerable and free. It’s taking me away from a mindset of commodification, or “needing [thing] to saying [things] about me.” I realize the irony of saying something is “for me” while writing about it publicly, but I’ll say I’m still working on that.

This change is good and welcome. And I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

Sometimes it’s blameless. Other times, like now, there’s a couple different ways to approach who messed up most.

Professional wrestling is interesting to me because it intersects a bunch of different fandom behaviors and expectations, and then throws them in a blender with a genuinely chaotic industry that’s probably too weird to exist. All Elite Wrestling’s Dynasty event last night reminded me of some of them, so I decided to write something.

In a typical match card, each booked bout has a specific purpose that isn’t always clear. The ability for a matchmaker to play off of fan expectations, fulfill them, or hold them just on the boundary of “still interested” is what typically makes storylines successful, and allows companies to keep up momentum.

I’d like to believe that a company knows what the fans think the purpose of a match is, and it’s up to them to decided “Yeah, that’s the catharsis we want you to get for paying attention” against “No, we want to surprise or disappoint you with the promise of greater payoff or development.”

I don’t think any company has a perfect track record with these kinds of decisions, and AEW seems to be having difficulty with this lately.

Hook vs Chris Jericho: AEW Dynasty, April 21, 2024

I have a lot to say about this match, mostly because I was a really big fan of Hook. I don’t hate him now, but the bandwidth to overlook a green and new wrestler because he had something interesting has now run out, and I’m starting to view his downsides a lot more critically.

I think my turning point for him was his match against AEW World Champion, Samoa Joe. For context, Hook was/is a very new wrestler driven to prominence by a meme of him being a much better wrestler than he is. While he’s good in a specific style, he’s not complete in a way that comes with experience. That’s alright, and even acceptable: sometimes you just have a rookie that gets shoved somewhere beyond their station because the fans are willing it. Ultimately, it comes down to them sink or swim, and I don’t know who to blame for feeling like Hook is sinking.

Hook challenges Samoa Joe — noted veteran, and destroyer of worlds — to a match for the AEW World Heavyweight Championship. No fan in their right mind believes Hook will win. So again, we ask, “what is the match’s purpose?”

Hook barely talks. This is by design. His aura is specifically tapping into being a suplexing machine like his father, Taz (currently an AEW commentator). We want Hook to succeed, partially because we enjoy Taz being proud of his son, commentating his matches, and passing on a lot of his moveset. Hook isn’t a straight nepotism hire, but his aesthetic leans heavily on being geared toward a younger demographic than even the other “young guys” on the AEW roster.

Darby Allin was born in 1993. Hook was born in 1999. Those six years are a world of difference to what is considered “cool.” Hook not talking adds to that mystery, and adds to that “cool.” Hook punching above his weight and holding his own contributes to that “cool.” People like Hook, even if he’s green.

So he challenges the World Heavyweight Champion, and part of the positive reaction to that is the validation of what fans like: if someone is facing a champion, we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and imagine that they have a chance of becoming a champion. Which means, in wrestling’s fucked up logic, the company would not put Hook in this match if they didn’t see what we see. That feels good.

We get excited when we see Hook’s vignettes in the leadup to the match because they feel specifically influenced by hip-hop, streetwear, influencer aesthetic. We don’t know if Hook would want us as his friends or be the person shoving us into the locker, but until we find out more, we’re inclined to think that he’d appreciate our support as fans.

Hook is massively outmatched against Joe. He is easily over 100lbs lighter than him. Hook doesn’t talk much in the vignettes or the leadup. He gets utterly smashed against Joe, despite some small, small rays of hope. But that’s okay. The logical fan brain butts in and says “This kid is 24 and barely talks. They aren’t going to make him champion and the face of the company.”

We knew the match’s outcome before it started, but because of a connection we have with a character, we choose to believe. We know that Hook won’t be champion, but if he’s good enough during the match, the company will see more of what we see: if the match is good, (and it was), we as fans have a reason to believe we’ll be rewarded for our support with more opportunity for our favourite in the future.

And then it all went downhill.

(That strut is all you need to know about Joe).

Armchair booking

It’s really easy to play fantasy matchmaker/bookmaker in wrestling, so I’m going to get it out of the way: I think Hook’s path after his first “big time” match was bungled horribly, and I’m going to explain what I think would’ve been better.

After the Joe match, Hook came out the next week, said, “I lost, but I’m still going to come at you for my belt.” His voice was over-acted. He sounded like a sitcom “stereotypical white rapper” which damaged his aura. He was forcing it too hard.

This was the first moment of “Oh, uh. That’s not that good” for me. A couple things made it harder to see through Hook being green in that moment:

1. Hook was not competitive in his match. He had some great moments, but the match was largely defined by “he is getting his ass kicked and showing fire by not immediately losing. He has no chance of winning, but it’s admirable that he’s not giving up.”

2. Hook didn’t show any kind of humility during or after the loss. The “I’m not going to give up or tap out until I pass out and the ref stops the match” storyline is only good if you don’t immediately go “Is that all you got?” when the crowd can tell you’ve been thoroughly defeated. “Kid, stay down” has two tones here: there’s concern and pity. Regardless of the storyline, the crowd should not pity the kid who’s made a dumb decision. And then Hook did it AGAIN.

3. Hook didn’t have any kind of processing about how or why the loss happened, or how he’d grow from it. Because he barely talks in the first place, we never really got a sense of how he felt, or what he would do in order to become a better wrestler.

That last part is what stuck with me, because Hook largely has been formulaic and frankly, boring since then.

Hook held the AEW FTW (“Fuck the World”) Title for 238 days in his second reign (losing it last night). This was largely a vanity title for him, as it didn’t fit his character — it was a title for hardcore matches where Hook is sold as “I’m going to suplex you a lot.” His father, Taz, competed for Extreme Championship Wrestling, where he minted the FTW Title originally. Taz was a killer who suplexed people, yet was credible in deadlier matches. Hook isn’t quite there yet.

The “son holds the same belt” thing was supposed to feel good, but it became something that kept Hook stagnant and frequently in matches that didn’t showcase his strengths. Since the Joe match, he competed against a former teammate over that title, including him competing solo in a one-against-two match where he defeated two bigger wrestlers. When he faced Chris Jericho last night, again, it was in a hardcore match that didn’t leave me feeling like Hook had the spotlight. Tables, chairs, kendo sticks and garbage cans can hide a wrestler’s weaknesses, but they should also highlight strengths.

After last night, apparently Hook’s contract has expired with AEW, and I’d hope that he would be staying with the company. However, the last few months could have look really different for him with “how I would’ve done it,” but maybe would’ve ended up with the same outcome: Hook taking some time away from AEW to learn, reflect, and grow.

Wrestling is a complicated industry because you don’t just join a dojo and emerge complete. For many wrestlers, your job is to go other places, spend time learning from other people, and learning by losing. While Hook was trained in a reputable place, and probably lost his fair share of practice matches, he (rightfully) rode the wave of memetic support to win his debut, and then win a lot more in the process.

When he lost to Joe, he only had one singles loss on his record; this made it all the more important to process his next, important loss properly. Again, he didn’t — he brushed it off, and it was off to other things.

Rewind

My fantasy booking has Hook acting a bit differently:

The pre-match and match happen identically. Hook is confident, but not outwardly saying he’s “the greatest.” Since fans can only suspend their disbelief so far, it’s safe to not test it too much.

The post-match plays out differently. Joe chokes out Hook. Instead of Hook goading Joe twice — again, without having really “earned” the ability to do so — and then needing to get saved from his own idiocy by “Hangman” Adam Page, he just lays there.

The storyline of the match, as the commentators tell us, is “Joe probably did not think that he needed to work that hard to get this win.” Hook not letting that moment sit robbed us of the moment where Joe goes “Huh, I guess this kid has a little bit of my respect.”

That validation is something we, as fans crave from bad guys like Joe, and by extension, the company. Hook being an idiot and begging to be beaten down more, then getting saved by someone else, essentially says “Yeah this kid is being an idiot, let’s save him from the responsibility of his own choices and bail him out so he doesn’t get hurt.”

That decision robs Hook of the consequences of his actions — facing those consequences is something that Good Guys in wrestling do. It also utterly erases any kind of development for Joe or Hook.

1. Joe could’ve come away from the match with a begrudging respect, validating the fans

2. Hook could’ve come away from the match realizing he was utterly outclassed, which tells the fans “Joe is a bad mother fucker, and Hook has some growing to do”

So again, in my fantasy booking, Hook is laying there. No Hangman, no rescue, no “is that all you got?” The broadcast is solely focused on Joe, and letting him tell us what we should take from that. Are we proud of Hook? Discouraged? Do we see a brighter future?

Next week on Dynamite, instead of a dumb face-off with terrible acting, Hook tells us something simple: “I bit off more than I could chew. Joe is the man — for now. You might not see me for a bit, but you should know that I’m seeing just how big this sport is, and I know I’m going to have to grow to climb to the top of it.”

That is the perfect opportunity to do a couple things:

1. Get Hook off TV for a bit and get people excited to see him again

2. Get Hook on a tour of Japan, Mexico, or the UK in order to build his skills

3. Let the possible consequences of this match simmer

Joe looks like a badass, Hook has the possibility for growth, and shows us that he grew by being humble in the face of his worst defeat yet.

This kind of “take time away and learn” seems like poison, but it works for so many wrestlers across so many countries because they get a chance to break away from what they perceive themselves as, and learn about what they might want to become.

Hook is more than Taz’ son, and unfortunately, that’s what he’s fallen into by staying stagnant.

Dynasty

I don’t have too much to say about Hook vs Jericho because I was mostly confused about that question: what was the purpose of this match?

Their storyline feud is summarized as follows:

1. Jericho wants to mentor Hook

2. Hook, indignant, says Jericho screws over his mentees

3. Jericho tries to force this relationship because he believes Hook can be truly great

4. Hook doesn’t want the help. He dresses like a bad pastiche of a zoomer, and over-acts every word that’s out of his mouth.

5. Jericho does something borderline scummy (or outwardly scummy) out of frustration

6. Hook is driven further away

This went on for far too long before this match got to end it. After a pretty 5/10 hardcore match, Jericho hit Hook with a baseball bat, despite repeatedly saying “I’m sorry [I don’t want to do this]” for dramatic effect. That being done twice in a row was really lame.

Hook flipped him off instead of surrendering. Jericho insisted that this be a “learning experience” and won the match. Hook doesn’t have a championship anymore. Jericho has a championship that’s utterly meaningless for him long-term. I doubt everyone is happy.

Jericho is a bit of an odd duck with AEW because of his current stature as a wrestler. While the novelty and utility of having a “big act” in early AEW was clear, we now have a lot of those, and Jericho still maintains a large spot on broadcasts when he isn’t producing as much value. He’s also hit that “too old to have slightly worse versions of the matches we liked him having” patch that other veterans don’t have due to the benefit of being just slightly out of their primes, rather than completely out of them.

Also, we hit another one of those weird wrestling behaviours: we, as fans, know the political position inside the company that Chris Jericho holds. We know he isn’t going anywhere. We are tired of him, but he refuses to give us time to miss him. Instead of being excited at him helping a younger talent and elevating them in the broadcast, he seems like a vampire that feeds off of momentum.

There’s a (joking, yet unfair) belief that he views a younger talent getting hot, and then inserts himself into a storyline with them and leaves them worse off than they entered. Because we, as fans, know he has the power to do this due to the position in the company, we resent him even more. His job is to be a veteran and be smart enough to know when to leave something to grow organically, and we perceive (regardless of the truth) that that is what’s happening.

I put all these metaphorical asterisks in the above paragraphs because it’s unlikely he’s being malicious in doing this; part of the fun of wrestling is that veil of “not quite knowing for sure” and building your own (hopefully harmless) perception.

It’s much easier to be uncharitable with that perception when it messes with the thing we like, and keeps it from being the thing we like.

In closing

I hope Hook doesn’t go to NXT. I think he has a good future in AEW, but I think his super push should be over.

I hope Jericho takes a cue and retires the FTW Title, which is utterly useless to anyone right now, and contributes to the Championship bloat in AEW.

I hope AEW send Hook somewhere like New Japan, Dragon Gate, Pro Wrestling NOAH, or CMLL, where he can not be pressured to live up to the hype of his debut. I hope he can learn a bit, and refine his style if he is going to keep wrestling the way he does. I hope he stops getting dumb tattoos and wearing dumb clothes that ruin his look.

I hope AEW keeps taking chances with storytelling that feels authentic and real like his pre-Joe-Match vignettes did. I hope they keep letting opportunities for things to not feel same-y happen.

I hope you don’t think this post is too jaded or cynical: it’s more just dumping thoughts out of frustration at something not working for me when it did at one point.

I hope we still get great wrestling from AEW. That one doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

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Every few of weeks, I climb a mountain to meet an old man.

The Elder is a prepper that started to build up resources long before the Stranding. He was an immigrant in the old United States of America, and was vastly let down by his government. He's old, protective, hesitant and stubborn, and when I first met him, I was delivering medicine that would keep him alive.

He was grateful, and after a little coaxing, he decided to join the network of settlements I was building in the post-Stranding wasteland. We connected him to a time-traveling Internet, which had the consequence of revealing structures built by hundreds of other players who had made the same trip.1

It wouldn’t be the last time we’d talk.

If I don't make a delivery — any delivery — to the Elder every once and a while, he'll die. I'll enter the game, get an email, and his shelter will be empty.

The Elder's mountain is a bit of a unique destination because it's hard to get up via vehicle; it's kind of a plateau that overlooks the rest of the Central Region, the game's final map. According to the lore, he's made friends with nearby outposts and preppers like The Craftsman, who is considerably more convenient to deal with.

Usually I'll stop by The Elder's place either on the way to or from The Craftsman, bringing herbal remedies, picking up deliveries of aged wine, or find random materials that others have dropped.

I hate that plateau. One of my earliest memories of Death Stranding is getting a truck stuck in between riverbanks lengthwise, unable to get it out. I left there "as a monument to my hubris", and there's a bit of resentment. I know that if I want to make a delivery to The Elder, it's either going to be by hand, or with a lot of pain.

Getting down from the plateau is easy, because you usually can just coast the games' nigh-invincible vehicles down the side of the cliff. You'll get good at judging just the right surface that their tires can grip, so you can get the momentum to get up in the first place.

It reminds me a lot of playing World of Warcraft in the days where climbable surfaces were pretty poorly-defined. If you knew your character and "the angles" properly, you could get places you probably shouldn't have been: Death Stranding is very much the same vibe.

One wrong step, turn, or gun of the engine, and you're back down at the base of the plateau. Sometimes you're injured, sometimes your cargo is damaged, and sometimes your truck's battery is out of juice from stubbornly trying to boost your way up. It's easy to start to resent The Elder, and just avoid delivering to him entirely.

Maybe that's why the game allows him to die — to remind you that both of you made difficult choices. He chose to live somewhere out of the way for his own reasons, and you chose to make the journey — to connect. As a character, Sam is hesitant to form bonds, and the deliveries he makes represent you helping him to build relationships, even if it’s over underwear, archeological samples, or a pizza.2

Despite all that I’ve said so far, lately, I've started to appreciate the journey. This time, I decide to go on foot. I bring a couple ladders, climbing ropes, and materials with me. The journey feels less stressful when you’re not focusing on that perfect angle your truck needs to hit.

As I leave, I can see structures that other people have built. Bridges. Shelters. Generators for my batteries. Ways to make things easier.

I follow my own footsteps that I’ve taken before. The game keeps a record, and in some places, you’ll see multiple back-and-forths.

I meet some computer-controlled porters, making their own deliveries. One gives me a pair of boots. I’ll probably recycle them for materials, but I take them anyway — it pays to be polite. He sends me a “Like”. I send him one back. In Death Stranding, “Likes” have their own lore associated with them.3

I wait patiently for a bridge to 3D print from my time crystals that I’ve collected by sending ghosts back to their dimension-between-worlds. I sent them there with bullets infused with my blood, or grenades I’ve constructed from my bodily fluids after I took a shower, or used the bathroom. Sometimes, when I stealth-kill them, they give me a Like before departing.

This game has a lot of things that sound insane without context.

I pick up a couple boxes of materials that are just laying around the landscape, and contribute them to upgrading other peoples’ structures. They aren’t enough to finish them, but I figure someone will appreciate the extra 100 Ceramics, if they notice.

I've started to appreciate all the player structures built on top of The Elder’s plateau, mostly because it's a calm, rocky, desolate location. There's plenty of places to feel alone in Death Stranding, but I think that if it's going to be such a pain getting up there, people have decided to leave something to show they’ve made it.

And I make it, too. I deliver the nutrition drinks I was commissioned to drop off. I get a “Legend of Legend of Legends” rating4. The old man gives me some materials I’ll probably never use. I don’t even see him in person, since all the characters in this game primarily communicate to you via hologram.

I don’t know how long this will keep him alive, but I’m happy I made the trip.

Back down the mountain we go. Back into mire.

Every time I open Death Stranding, I get a slew of notifications: my structures are degrading, with some near-ruin. What I like most, though, is the reminders that a ladder I left or a casually-placed marker of "go here" actually mattered, and people found value in the struggle I went through before.

I think that's what makes it an extremely unique experience, and something that keeps me from moving on to other games. I don’t think this is an Animal Crossing situation where “you didn’t visit your village in months, your visitors hate you when you come back, and you should feel guilty;” instead, I like making deliveries because it reminds me of the value in chasing difficult things.

Every parcel, every bridge built, road repaired, ladder left behind. It means something to someone — player or not — even if it’s only helping them get through the difficulties they’re facing that day.

We have opportunities to choose to do these things, even outside of the game, no matter how small.

When (or if) The Elder dies in-game, he’ll send you an email, like the one above, titled “So Long, Sam5.” I toyed with pasting it here, instead of the one above, but something about that didn’t feel right. It felt like skipping to the end of a journey I was still walking, and it wouldn’t seem authentic without my choice leading to his death.

That the letter feels… a little cliche. A little heavy-handed in terms of the game’s themes, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s closure, and for good or bad, this is the type of story that benefits from it.

It comes full-circle, and shows we’ve made even a token difference. It makes me want to keep making those differences, both for myself and others.

The game’s servers might turn off one day, and all that “work” will disappear.

But I don’t think it will for me. See you on the next delivery.

"[L]eave the thought that you are 'behind' in 2023."1

This has always been difficult for me to do. But it's getting easier.

My 2023 started weird, as I wasn't employed until April. Since then, I've been playing with different speeds and intensities of life; some have worked, some haven't, and others told me I have a lot more to learn.

It's been freeing to release myself from some expectations, but I've also spent time in therapy to determine why some of those expectations were difficult to move past. Who set those expectations? What happened to me to make them seem so essential?

Sadly, some sessions feel like wastes of time, and others feel like I'm slowly chipping away at barriers with varying levels of success. Some weeks I'm absolutely dreading therapy because it feels like I'm speaking in circles without much resolution or action; this isn't so much a critique of my therapist and more a reminder that "I know what I have to do, I just need to start."

I've had multiple people come up to me and tell me that sharing my journey with therapy has been inspiring to them to take up their own; that means a lot to me. At times I can be a bit disappointed in myself because I'd like to be more "fixed" than I feel. I've done a lot of going back to painful places this year, but the missing piece is the healing that comes with compassion, patience and forgiveness.

The other day I decided to be a bit vulnerable and talk to my dad about how exactly my ADHD, depression and anxiety interfaces with my motivation. At times it feels like I'm giving excuses for myself giving up or moving on from things, but I've done a lot of reading in terms of neurology, dopamine and how it all interfaces together.

Being able to say "my brain is different, and things don't work like normal" feels like a cop out, but at the same time, I'm testing out just doing things differently and seeing how it affects things.

I've been (unnecessarily) hard on myself, and most people I know closely will corroborate that; lately, I've been trying to bite the bullet and trust that "you've tried it [this way] for so long, and it hasn't helped. Maybe it's time to try something new."

And try I shall.

I kind of took a break from a lot of what I thought I wanted this year as a result. But the more I'm sitting in this space, the more I'm realizing I wasn't waiting for some hypothetical "okay" from my therapist or parents or friends to just stop wanting what I (think I) want. I've said many times that if I was just faking wanting things for a social reason (without actually wanting it) I would've given myself permission to move on a long time ago.

But that longing is still there.

That sentence feels like a retread of past blogs.

I guess what's different is that there's a (measured) tough-love component this time: if I want something specific, I need to actually pursue it. While we can preach to ourselves about self-love and compassion and patience, there's certain (healthy) points where we need to push ourselves to actually do. If I want to learn how to make prints, I actually have to make prints.

The question becomes "can I pursue without the self-sabotage?", which I guess is the key to all of this. The idea of "I'm not achieving on the timeline I wanted, I must not be good enough," is both an overly-harsh way of judging myself, but maybe a little selfish as well; it allows me to wallow and ruminate without actually conquering the challenge. Start, bug out, quit, telling myself that I need to "get myself right mentally" before trying again.

I don't think that's working, either. Eventually, I have to act. So act I must.

More reading, more streaming, more writing, more discussions, more creating without judgment or fear or expectation.

Less doomscrolling, phone time, endless refreshing, numbing content. Less FOMO, less fear of lost progress, less fear of "being behind."

Something giving me confidence is that I've already started to put this in effect. In July I started working out more, and a large part of that was the psychological exercise of self-compassion. I've also picked up Street Fighter 6 with the same ideas, and they've both grown positively in parallel. Some things I'm trying:

• Can I forgive myself for not playing for gaps at a time?

• Can I forgive myself for imperfect knowledge leading to sub-optimal results?

• Can I celebrate small progress and victories? Can I not cut my legs out by thinking "well, this is hardly anything, there's still [challenge] in the future?"

• Can I forgive myself for not sticking to a schedule if I'm sick, depressed, anxious, or low in dopamine? Can I forgive myself for "not being normal" without exploiting that forgiveness?

• Can I look positively at the time being spent, regardless of whether I'm hitting my goals or not? Can I avoid looking at these activities as specific fixes for other anxieties in my life (for example, "if I'm hot because of the gym, I'll find a partner" or "if I'm a god at Street Fighter, I can stream!")?

The answer seems to be yes. So far.

Which I'm taking as a win.

I'm turning 35 this year, and until maybe a decade ago, the concept of "not making the most out of my life" dominated my anxiety. It quieted for a bit, but now it seems to be roaring back from different angles.

But I know that if I can influence even just one facet of my life, I can fix others. I'm going to continue to try. I'm going to continue to fight. I'm going to continue to want (reasonable, healthy) things for myself.

I'll update you on my birthday, but things don't look too bad, for now.

The other day I had a conversation with someone new, who asked about esports and how it felt to work within it, but have your passion be involved. My answer mentioned that it's hard, because it's very easy to get exploited for that passion, but you also don't want to blunt your enthusiasm for this thing you like very much.

It's "The International" season, and I'm starting to feel that lack of edge.

TI has always been special to me because Dota 2 has a very unique place within esports; it's very much fuelled with resentment for not being popular, and unlike some scenes that stay eternally seething, Dota's crowdfunding actually let it go "Hey, we deserve to be here."

TI is branded as a "celebration of Dota" but for a long time it felt like a celebration of "choosing the better side", regardless of how much social utility we could get outside of it. While you can buy a Coca-Cola case with a League of Legends character on it, TI felt authentic in ways that other games couldn't: we put our money where our mouths were, and were generally rewarded for that. You were getting a high-quality broadcast without ads or sponsors, and generally getting a ton of in-game content that carried the spectre of "being valuable later" regardless of whether you ever did sell them.

It felt like a small proof that things could be done without feeling corpo1. It gave us a hope that what we liked could prosper. I've written about this before and don't want to retread too much — at the risk of sounding naive, it felt real. That matters.

This year, something feels off — at least, maybe just for me. The games are still good, and the game is still similar, but I'm not... hooked. I'm not invested. I'm keeping it open in another monitor, but not engaging. I'm not reading the story of the tournament.

I haven't played a match of Dota in months; while that's never stopped me from enjoying the esports side of things before, there's still this lingering "what's the point?" thought. It is very clear that the game as a juggernaut, and as a culture, is decaying; maybe not dead yet, but it's starting to rot.

I always said that the first year we didn't break our previous prize pool crowdfunding was the beginning of the end, and Valve's made it clear that their priorities are pushing elsewhere. Which is fine. I think.

I don't feel connected. And that connection was something that carried this for a very long time. It feels like a relationship that's kind of coasting; you aren't living together, but you're kind of just going on dates and going through the motions.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh.

I don't think I've ever been the type to formally grow out of hobbies, and I hate the line of thinking that just goes "you're older, you just stop liking things." Part of what worked for me with esports was the feeling that I was sharing the energy of these moments, and winning in a different way the competitors were. Community, passion, energy. Connection.

So without that... something's off.

I still think that The International represents a purity of spirit that might not be so easily found elsewhere. It's not a CGS-tier mistake2; it's not something I regret happened. I think it feels like we are being pushed forward without a replacement, and it's a reminder of the division between developer, professional (players, casters) and the fans that is unique to esports.

No one owns the concept of soccer. No one decides that resources for soccer are going to be wound down so that development can be focused on Soccer 2.

But then again, why am I waiting for permission? Why am I grumbling so much? Why am I sad? Why am I trying to eulogize something that might've just evolved without me, rather than with me? Away from me?

Maybe it's just okay that it's just different. I'm different now. And that's okay, too.

I bought The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky on November 24, 2016; It cost me $10.99. I picked it primarily because the hype around the sheer volume of the dialogue, and the depth that side characters and NPCs got, aside from the main story. Always having a reason to talk to people, and seeing them have their own little stories progress in parallel with my own adventures, was something that few RPGs do right.

While I won't disagree with that hype, I still haven't completed it. It's not a long game (for an RPG), with the average HowLongToBeat being 40 hours; considering I just polished off 80 hours with Baldur's Gate 3 over the last month, it shouldn't have lasted this long.

That "you have to play it, dude" has kind of become a weight around the game because it's become another example of my struggle to "play something properly." I've written about this in the past, but especially after finishing Baldur's Gate 3, I've realized that it's gotten worse.

In an effort to make sure that I don't have to play a game again (in order to get it off my backlog, and to move on to something else), I end up using walkthroughs to the point of not interacting much with choices that are the whole point of the experience.

Especially for longer titles, I'm treating the enjoyment of these games as a job: play it, get what you're supposed to out of it (whatever that may be), be able to talk about it, but don't have to play it again. Do everything you can in one playthrough.

This is starting to feel a bit bad, because it’s almost defeating the purpose of gaming as a hobby. I’m still in “gotta do this and make it work for me” mode.

I've seen a lot of tweets recently that touch on this kind of feeling: "Gaming is not as good as it used to be", or the feeling that as we age, the desire to "keep up" has forced us into habits that defeat the purpose of play. I tend to like RPGs because of their expanded focus on story and in theory, player choice: the irony is that I find myself looking up optimal builds, the "correct" choices, or the way to get through something with as little combat as possible because that tends to drag time on.

In Baldur's Gate 3, this resulted in a jack-of-all-trades character that got the "best" endings possible for all parties involved. Almost every quest was accompanied with a tab open in another monitor with a wiki page.

In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, this involved making sure I was gathering all the materials needed for the "true" ending of the game, which I likely never would have found otherwise. With Trails in the Sky, I'm literally going through the motions, going where a walkthrough is telling me, and completing every sidequest I can, just to say "I've done it all, and I never have to touch it again."

The funny thing is, all those statements make it sound like I hate these titles, and I don't. I actually enjoy them, but find myself saying "Alright Matt, engage properly" and having to consciously say "You're not wasting your time if you don't see everything at once."

I don't know whether this is video games becoming less of a hobby for me, or whether I've fallen prey to the commodification of a hobby. I've written about the latter multiple times, and it's very interesting to me to see others not being able to name the urge to contentify their experience, primarily for social media. The democratization of content creation means that every experience needs to be shared — by stream, video, or tweet — because there's something that can be claimed from it — money, clout, or camaraderie.

I'm mostly curious about whether this kind of feeling can be reversed, and whether younger gamers are going to have this kind of experience baked in so thoroughly that the "playing for the point of playing" doesn't even cross their mind.

That desperation to associate my time with value comes from an insecurity that I could be doing all I could in order to get as far as I can. Obviously, that's something that's my own problem, and exacerbated by the exposure to other peoples' success on social media.

My only real recourse is further self-awareness in the moment — locking myself in positions where I can't modify the game to experience everything, or look up the most optimal solutions.

I think that's why I keep coming back to Death Stranding as perhaps my most-enjoyed game of the last few years: there's no absolutely-optimal way to do a route, and your goal is much about helping other people as it is about clutching a specific timer for that latest "Legend of Legend of Legend" emblem beside your ID. The experience is inherently rewarding, and I don't feel the need to prove to anyone that I'm "doing it right."

I've been pondering what exact "reward" I get from consuming games in "the right way", and have landed on a couple things:

1. Time: The ability to say that I have experience all I can in one 60 hour playthrough instead of two 40 hour playthroughs means that I can move on to experiencing other things in a shorter timeframe.

2. Social Utility: More things consumed (and speaking to point #1, in a shorter time frame) means I have more expertise, and a bigger variety of things to talk about. This maybe isn't as big of a deal if you aren't writing about games, but there's always that feeling of "this person has consumed a lot, and is able to speak on them; they must know their stuff."

3. Peace of Mind: If it's "done", it's "done" for good. Unless there's specific choices that require commitment (ie, a "good" vs "evil" character), if I'm getting everything done in one run, I know that I can comfortably leave the game behind.

Even typing that #3, I'm thinking "Matt, why would you want to do that if it was an enjoyable experience?" Isn't that why I keep going back for hikes in Death Stranding? If I suddenly "completed it all", wouldn't I be a little disappointed that there wasn't something left to do?

And in the vein of “being able to talk about it means I can make stuff out of it, which means I could make money, and be more stable, which means…”, there’s obviously something to address that isn’t a game’s (or gaming in general’s) fault; a hobby that gives me entertainment isn’t the only way I can resolve the kind of financial insecurity that makes people monetize their hobbies.

I wonder if there's just a hesitance in some cases, like with Trails in the Sky, that I'm generally not enjoying it, which in turn means that "my taste is shit", because other people regard it highly. That insecurity has always been present with me, and it's kept me from engaging with things I'm only maybe 5/10 interested in, but could potentially enjoy more.

I watched the entirety of The Orville late last year and have been going through the first season of The X-Files specifically to combat this "I'm only 5/10 interested, I'm just not going to start, because it might be a waste of time." While I can't say that The Orville was an all-time favourite show, I definitely enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and it gave me a greater appreciation for why I liked Star Trek: The Next Generation. With The X-Files, I can say that I'm liking it enough to write episode recaps, even though I haven't touched it in months (since I got a new job).

This piece came about because now that I'm done Baldur's Gate, I want to knuckle down and finally kill that Trails in the Sky demon in my Steam backlog; I just felt it was a little unfair to characterize it as such when it's a fine, interesting and unique RPG.

I just can't help but wonder how I'm going to feel when it's done: relieved? Indifferent? Resentful that it took me that long? In reality, it's it's not Trails in the Sky's fault that I'm arguably playing games "wrong"; I also want to keep those feelings from creeping in to more games that don't deserve it.

But I’ve hit Gold, and that’s a really good feeling.

According to a ranked distribution chart from Reddit (posted September 6), I’m now in the top 55% of players in North America. While this seems strikingly “average”, this is much better than I did in Street Fighter V.

What changed?

I’m much more likely to be “sparked” to want to play, rather than dreading it. Even though this “ranked journey” is still being made into content for this newsletter, the idea of streaming every ranked match I played was really poison to learning.

I’m having more moments where my brain goes “Oh wait, you can play Street Fighter right now/tonight! You know you like that.” This is different than a lot of other attempts to be better at games in general.

I started going to the gym IRL. Having some kind of structure for my training in real life made it really easy to transpose the habits into Street Fighter. Being able to say that it didn’t matter what I was doing, as long as I was putting in some kind of effort, made it easier to just boot up training mode to increase muscle memory, or watch a couple sets on Twitch, or ask a dumb question in a Discord.

I started limiting the amount of time I spend in Ranked. In general, I try to play a minimum of 10 matches when I decide I’m going to play against other people. This “minimum reps” allows me to choose whether I want to spend it in Casual, Ranked or Battle Hub, and it kind of forgives me if I’m feeling a bit scared of losing my hard-earn Ranked points.

I’m finding that Battle Hub and Casual have been good teachers in the sense of that I’m comfortable losing against Platinums and Diamonds, and pursuing things like the Challenges for the Battle Pass (which need a certain amount of wins, rather than matches played) allowed me to focus on something else besides Ranked.

There’s also a nice effect where if I’m getting my ass beat by Platinums and Diamonds, I know it’s generally assured that I’m going to have an easier time coming back to Ranked. The hilarious thing is now that I’ve reached Gold, I’ve started being that “high-level player matched with a lower-level one”, which is a bit of an interesting dynamic.

It isn’t going to stop me from trying my hardest, but it’s an acknowledgement that I’m out of the lowest-of-the-low trenches. When I played Dota 2, I could say with confidence that I was probably the worst person on my team, whenever I played; here, I know that if I’m facing Rookies, Irons, Bronzes, and most Silvers, I have a grasp of some fundamentals where they don’t.

What I’m doing next, and what I’m doing wrong

I’m obviously not stopping — I’d like to try to get to Platinum, where progress is a lot more difficult because of the lack of winstreak bonus. However, I’m not exactly worried about that. I am more just trying to be honest about what I need to refine about my Ken play, and removing the bad habits I’ve already developed.

• I autopilot way too much when my offense hits a blocking opponent. In certain situations this is good (because I’m at least committing to muscle memory) but at the same time, I’m losing so much life through not stopping things early when I’ve seen

• I try to Shoryuken on reaction (or pre-reaction) way too much. This is a heavy commitment and tends to lose me rounds because of the extra damage I’m taking from Counter combos. Daigo can do this and get away with it, and sometimes it wins, but it isn’t me acting on anything but intuition; it isn’t playing smart.

• My throw defence is abysmal. I have a hard time reacting to my opponents throwing me, and on the off-chance I can see it coming, I am not reacting with a button-press. This might be something that’s more difficult on stick as opposed to a controller (two button-presses vs one) but it definitely ends up being free damage on me.

• I cannot super combo to save my life. The only time I’m landing super combos are in situations where I have ample time to do so (crumples from Drive Impact, or after blocking high-commitment moves). Even in situations where I have ample time, I am very rarely “sounding out” my combo; sometimes I am just flailing in general directions for the input and it’ll come out. However, it doesn’t feel intentional.

• I don’t use Drive Rush nearly as much as I should. The input is a bit clumsy to me, and I find myself not knowing what kind of poke or fishing I should be doing with it. I never use it mid-combo, mostly because I’m a bit nervous to spend resources. Especially with trying to get in with Ken, I can be using this a bit more to be unpredictable and quick on approach.

These all give me something specific to look towards and practice, and the interesting thing is that I’m not being overly hard on myself; I’m still picking up wins by just playing good fundamentals, being more patient, and letting opponents dig their own graves.

Because results are still happening and evident, I don’t feel like I’m being urgently punished for what I’m not able to do (yet). This is a bit of a break mentally that I’m looking to be able to give myself in other areas of my life, and I’m happy that it’s happening here.

What I’m doing well

On the flip side of that coin, I feel like it’s also good practice to be able to acknowledge what I’m doing well. I’m really bad at this with other things, but I figure I can build more of a practice here.

• I have been told I have good reactions when it comes to offence. When my opponent is recovering from a knock-down, I feel reasonably good at being able to mask where I’m going to attack from next.

• When I’m not mindlessly doing it, I am happy with my ability to abuse Shoryuken’s invincibility as a reversal. Some opponents have moves with long wind-up, and sometimes I feel really good being able to recognize those moments and input the motion quickly.

• I am getting better at reading opponents’ habits. Typically I’ll eat at least one desperation OD move on their wakeup, but it won’t happen again. I can also sense moments when the opponent is desperate (about to die) or has resources (Super Art meter) that will lead them to do something a bit more unexpected on wakeup. Being able to think to myself “Alright, this is where they’re annoyed at eating two throws in a row, time to block” and being rewarded for it feels awesome.

• I am getting better at blocking in general. I think some of this might come from matchup knowledge, but I’m starting to realize what’s safe and unsafe from my opponents. I am less impatient for it to be “my turn” than I was before, and this leads to being more okay with blocking effectively. There’s definitely this fear that “the longer it’s not my turn, the more likely it is that I will just lose”, but I think I’m being better with knowing when I don’t have the knowledge to sufficiently act.

I can’t say that I’m amazing with fundamentals, but I think the things I’m good at are things that are generalist skills, rather than just “being really good at Ken combos.” This kind of gives me hope, because it means that even if the game changes in a way that Ken isn’t good anymore, I can pick up something or learn new things while other players may not.

I’m also taking it as a good sign that I’m thinking about playing other characters as a way to experiment, or just have fun. This might sound like a small thing, but I can’t emphasize how important it is that I want to play this game apart from it contributing to this project.

It’s signalling to me that I’m actually having fun — and yes, I needed this told to me explicitly.

These are all good signs. We’ll see where it takes me. Until next time!

I feel like there's a cycle that has a couple blanks that I'm looking to fill in and explain, and when I do that, I'll have a greater understanding on how I managed to have some level of success without being able to acknowledge that I was the one that earned it. There's still this pervasive "not enough" feeling that's slowly being ground down, but "what exactly do you want?" is still a very open-ended and intimidating question.

One of the conversations I had with my therapist involved me saying that I "didn't want a life entirely free from stress" because that would probably be very boring, and also unrealistic. You're unlikely to be able to avoid all problems, conflict or uncertainty in life, and I wanted to find a middle ground between what I felt was asking people to coddle me, and a harsh "thrive in constant difficulty, or you're not going to make it."

In thinking about it a little more, I came up with a gradient colour scale from green to red to describe the types of stressors I deal with, and how I deal with them.

Green represents a nice neutral, or happy period of my life where I feel like I have flexibility and freedom to be able to pursue things that interest me. There is no guilt in choosing what I want to do, and there's nothing that's tugging at me in terms of "I should be doing this instead." I’m comfortable spending time on hobbies or entertainment without the thought of “what I should be doing to get ahead,” which means I’m generally at peace with my decisions and the direction my life is going.

Yellow represents a stressful time in my life, such as a busy period at work or something that takes my attention fully. If I have what is essentially a crunch period at work, that would be "peak yellow"; I'm not doing anything besides my job, and then coming home to rest and do it again. This would obviously be unsustainable, which is why I view it as an extreme — a green-yellow middle ground represents still being able to pursue hobbies, interests and relationships while also dealing with stressors.

“Yellow stress” doesn’t even have to be predictable — if the balance of green and yellow moments is right, I feel confident that I can handle moments of difficulty, and they’ll pass.

Red is different, because it isn't "Yellow, but worse." Red represents when my anxiety or depression influences how I deal with stress — typically, it would cause overthinking as to whether "my life will always be like this" or not, or whether I will be able to achieve my goals for life in general.

A yellow-red position involves being able to navigate stress with small-to-medium amounts of existential spiral, while fully-red means that I've likely burned out, or in the process of burning out. “Red stress” typically involves me thinking “I am trapped, I’m never going to escape, this is always going to be this hard.”

The idea (as I told my therapist) was to be in the position of green, green-yellow, or yellow. I would characterize a lot of my life having skipping "solo yellow" in terms of being able to navigate stress without overthinking about the greater implication to my life. This is usually accompanied with questions like:

• What are my goals for life? Are my goals even something I want, or are they just to satisfy people (family, friends) in pursuit of greater connection?

• Am I being my most authentic self? Are the people around me seeing that authentic self, or do I feel like it's hidden behind multiple masks?

• What's even the point of this struggle if I'm just setting myself up to struggle further? What am I really living for?

• Am I trying hard enough? Am I truly doing enough to try to improve my life? Do I really have the license to think this period of my life is difficult, when I’m not doing all I can?

Obviously these sound harsh, because they're pretty extreme questions; however, when you're burned out, they seem like the questions you "should be focusing on" in order to improve your station.

I can say that getting a mundane, stable job I've been pretty out of the red, but it creeps back in from time to time as I think about getting older, and the fear of "blinking, being a decade older, and being nowhere." Thankfully, being able to narrow down this fear of missing out on my potential has given me a way of focusing on why and how that anxiety affects me.

I wish I could round this post out with some kind of miracle cure, but I think every person is going to face the red zone a bit differently. I don't think the majority of us over-thinkers want to be patronized and live a life truly free of challenge; we just want to face challenges with clear heads and without handicapping ourselves further with things that feel like they matter, but can't really be resolved by ruminating hard enough.

I believe in us, though. I truly believe that I can make small steps to the point where my upbringing, or past events will no longer define how I handle this scale, and that a life of green-to-yellow (with maybe enough red to be self-aware) is possible.

I'm going to keep trying for it.

Thanks for reading.