Mission statement after two weeks.

The more you learn the more you realize you don’t know jack. As one learns about subject, you begin to discover that there are vast subtleties and intricacies that not only do you not know about, but you didn’t know that you didn’t know about them. That’s the one thing I have been finding frustrating about writing about comics, I know a lot of things about characters, creators and controversies but there are a lot of things that I don’t have the foggiest idea about, but I feel if I want to speak intelligently on the subject I got to know these things. This is made worse by the fact that there is already so much stuff written about comics by people who know more than I ever will, so why the hell would anybody want to read anything by me? This obviously applies to video games as well. It’s all very anxiety inducing and it robs you of your will to go forward. 

To get around this I have tried to write about my own personal feelings and experiences with comics and video games, there are always going to be people who know way more than I ever will about pretty much anything I would want to write about, but no one knows more about my experiences with comics and video games than me. Additionally I have always been fascinated by how video games are experienced not in isolation but within their relevant social contexts, because whenever I remember my experiences with games I remember their context, I don’t remember playing Donkey Kong Country II in some generic space, I remember playing it sitting on the couch in Mrs. Smiths basement when I was about 10 or 11, I remember Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as that game I downloaded off of Pirate Bay in junior high and played while watching reruns of South Park and so on and so forth. 

Essentially what I want to do is to stop writing articles about more historical perspectives on things and start writing some more personal writings on things.As you can see by the fact that I began the last paragraph by writing about comics and video games and ended the paragraph by writing about video games, what I intend to write about has shifted somewhat. I am not sure I want to continue my series on “True Believer”, I don’t think the two entries are very good and the response to them has been underwhelming, so maybe I will continue that series, but probably not. Instead what I want to write now is a personal experience with my history with video games from the beginning up until say the last year of high school or so. I also want to write some oneoff pieces as well. In particular a review of the first part of Tom King’s Adam Strange Maxi-Series (I have no idea why they call it that, it’s only 12 issues, that is still a mini-series!) and something on a old article I found on Gamespy from about 2003 on what they consider to be the most overrated games of all time https://web.archive.org/web/20090415160611/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/september03/25overrated/index.shtml (I have special fascination with lists of overrated games, mainly because no one can really decide what overrated actually means in most contexts)  

So that’s the gist of it, more personal episodes with a focus on video games over comics. I never know how to end these.