newbie blogger initiative

The Podcasting Bug – Part 1

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Love of Spoken Word

I grew up with I guess what you would call a love of both the written and spoken word.   The moment I got access to my first copying machine, was the moment I first tried to create my own comics and magazines devoted to whatever I happened to be into.  When I got my first word processor I went through a renaissance of sorts in trying to publish information about the games I was playing and distribute it freely among anyone who was willing to take it off my hand.  So when I started blogging significantly later in life it was of no real shock.  I had been “trying” to publish my own content for years, just doing so with limited success.  I would be willing to bet that other bloggers “of a certain age” can tell very similar tales of youthful exuberance.  While I grew up in the MTV generation, my sentiments will more than likely always lay with the era when print media was king.

Another constant in my life however was Radio and Public Television.  I spent most of my childhood watching Nova and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and when I rode around in my fathers truck it was almost always tuned to the radio station playing Paul Harvey.  When I started choosing my own radio stations to listen to I found the best use of my time to listen to NPR and use that morning lull as my way of catching up on the world.  From there I discovered so many broadcast programs that were more entertainment than education, and I was absolutely hooked.  In many ways podcasting is the extension of this love for the spoken word.  Some bloggers catch the bug, and feel like they have to move into doing something more than just writing.  This happened to me a little bit over a year ago and now I have two different podcasts to show for my obsession.  Many other attempt to maintain three for four different shows devoted to different segments of their experience.  If this is happening to you, I thought I would take a moment this morning to talk about some of the issues I had to deal with when approaching my first show.

Format

One of the first decisions you are going to have to make is what exactly you want your show to be about.  Just like with your blog you have to make a decision as to what you want your format to be.  Single game or single topic blogs and podcasts will be significantly more popular than generalist ones, however in my experience your audience will also be considerably more fickle.  If you listen to a Wildstar podcast religiously for example, and you stop playing Wildstar…  then your reason for listening to that podcast also goes out the window.  If you listen to a more general podcast you ultimately end up listening for the cast of people, and those sorts of listeners tend to be significantly more loyal.  That said all of the biggest podcasts that I know of tend to be devoted to a very specific niche.

For me personally I knew that there was no way in hell I would be turning this into a career so I was not extremely concerned about trying to get the biggest possible audience.  I am interested in a lot of different things, as are my friends… so for me it was a no brainer that we created AggroChat to reflect the conversations we already had on TeamSpeak on a regular basis.  In my experience podcasts tend to fall into four broad groups as far as the actual format goes.  I have listened to great podcasts that fall into each of these categories, and not so great podcasts as well.  Ultimately you have to pick whatever works best for your cast, which leads us to the next point.

Topic Focused

I chose to refer to this as topic focused, but more often than not this tends to mean a “News” show where the hosts cover a series of predetermined topics.  This requires you to keep good show notes and that they get circulated before the actual recording of the show.  Believe it or not we actually started AggroChat trying to follow this format, but quickly realized we were not the “planning” type people.  These tend to be the most “predictable” shows as far as recording time goes, since you have a clear list of goals that you want to accomplish in each show.

Conversational

This is ultimately the format that AggroChat became, because we are bad at having structure.  The idea here is to record a somewhat natural conversation with a group of people.  Topics flow in and out of the discussion and segway naturally.  The problem here is that this only works if the folks you are recording with are very very familiar with each other.  While the first format relies heavily on planning, this format is all about interpersonal chemistry.  I personally love this format, but I am sure there are just as many people who are annoyed by it.  This is not a format you can carry off if you are assembling a group of people that do not regularly spend time together.

Narrative

This is the podcast that tells a story.  There are many different versions of this but probably my two favorites are This American Life and Radio Lab.  This is the format that requires extreme planning but adds a whole new dimension…  that is significant amounts of post production editing.  When it works you have this wonderful audio journey through the story you are trying to tell.  When it doesn’t work, you end up with jarring gaps.  This is one of those formats that I aspire to try some day, but just don’t have the technical ability yet to really make it work.  If you are an audio editing wizard though this might be your natural format, mixing in clips and music to support the tale you are trying to weave.  The folks that can do this one will have my constant and undying respect.

Interview

This format is probably the most straight forward and at the same time extremely flexible.  The concept is simple, in that one or more hosts asks questions from one or more guests.  The challenge is in scheduling a constant flow of new guests to sit down and record with you.  You can put as much planning into this format as you need to, or you can do it completely off the cuff.  When I record “Bel Folks Stuff” for example I ask a few standard questions but the rest is taken from queues in the conversation and I try and go wherever the conversation wants to lead.  When Braxwolf records Beyond Bossfights he seems to have a master plan laid out in exactly what he wants to ask his guest.  Both work and both are completely viable methods, so ultimately you have to figure out which version works best for you.  Chances are you can even make a hybrid approach work a well.  This format relies mostly on the ability of the hosts to “coax” a performance out of their guests.

Casting

There are lots of different styles of podcasts and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses.  The more people you add into a podcasting cast, the more chaotic the end result.  The fewer people you have, you lose some of the depth of having multiple opinions chime in on topics.  The “Solo” podcast is its own beast that I personally am not a huge fan of.  It always feels like I am being lectured to more than joining in on a conversation.  I am going to talk about a few of the styles that I have experienced and some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Solo Podcast

This is the traditional “one man show” to borrow the showbiz term.  You have an idea that you want to run with and you just start recording.  The problem here is that like I said above these shows tend to be extremely unbalanced sounding.  The solo podcast works well if you are telling a story, and going to be referring back to audio or music clips to help flesh out your narrative.  These shows also work amazingly well for five to ten minute “news update” type formats.  Where the format tends to grind on is when dealing with a thirty minute or longer show of just one voice talking.  The positive is you can literally record whenever you want to, and are not limited by other people to make your ideas work.  The negative is…  you have to carry all of the weight on your own shoulders.

Duo/Trio Podcast

I feel like the majority of podcasts fall into this category, where you have a preset group of two to three voices that present topics every single week.  This is the cornerstone of the podcast for a reason, because it works extremely well.  In three voices especially you can get just a wide enough range of opinion to make most topics work, but not have too many competing voices to let a discussion descend into chaos.  The challenge here then becomes scheduling.  Unless you can find a time every single week or whatever your recording schedule happens to be…  it becomes a juggling act trying to get all of the key players in the room at the same time to record a show.  I know many shows that will record multiple episodes in the same weekend and stagger their release to make up for scheduling conflicts.  I know personally we have done this twice with AggroChat and they made for some very long evenings.  Once you get into a routine then more than likely things will stabilize and get significantly easier.  Duo works well but the problem with Duo is when one person is gone… you have a solo podcast.  With a Trio you can limp through with just two people relatively successfully.

Ensemble Podcast

The ensemble cast is the most forgiving when it comes to scheduling conflicts.  It tends to draw on a large list of potential co-hosts and arranging as many of them as you can on a given night.  This is ultimately what AggroChat has turned into over time having had ten different people who have appeared with semi-regular frequency during the course of our time recording it.  Ultimately however in order to make it work you are going to need a large group of friends who are interested in podcasting.  The strength of this format is that you can incorporate new people easily and in a pinch you can record with significantly fewer people than normal.  The problem being that once you get over five people on a podcast it starts to get extremely chaotic.  We do our best to mitigate that problem with our format, but ultimately AggroChat is what it is… a rambling chaotic mess sometimes.  I feel the casting is extremely sustainable as recently Rae expressed interest in stopping the podcast for the time being, and we were able to work in a couple newer voices in her place.

Interview Podcast

This one is a very different beast in that essentially it is a solo podcast… with one additional guest that varies each time you record.  This is the format I chose for my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, and it has its own set of interesting challenges.  The key problem for me has always been scheduling people.  When dealing with a few people on a regular basis you can pick a single time to record that works for everyone.  When you are constantly changing who your “partner” is on a show by show basis you end up having to work with  the new persons schedule.  This has been pure hell for me at times considering a lot of the people I have wanted to talk to are in vastly different time zones.  This has completely destroyed any semblance of a release schedule for me, and as a result I have purposefully kept from submitting the show to TGEN because I never know when I will get time to record one.  I personally find the format gratifying  as a host because it allows me to have interesting long form conversations with “folks” that I care about.  Due to all of the problems I would highly suggest against this being your “primary” podcasting format.

Release Schedule

As with blogging the key to building a reliable audience is through regular and predictable release schedule.  There are people who start their day by reading my blog, because they know it will always be there waiting on them.  Similarly there are a series of podcasts that I start listening to Monday morning as I begin work because I know they will be reliably waiting on me.  As such I have found that the interval is not nearly as important as simply sticking to something.  I personally jumped in the deep end and started immediately with a “weekly” show.  This means every single week like clockwork you have to crank out a show, edit it, and get it posted and publicized.  AggroChat requires less editing than most shows out there, and still without a doubt this dominates my Saturday night and Sunday morning getting things ready for the world.  There are many nights that I go to sleep about 2 am after editing, and then still have to get up the next morning and deal with the publicizing.  This is the last point I am going to talk about today so I thought I would talk about a few of the release schedules that I have seen work.

Weekly

Like I said this one is at times sheer madness.  You are signing yourself up for a radical shift in your lifestyle to incorporate making a podcast into each and every week.  Depending on the type of podcast this can be easier or harder.  For example we use an ensemble cast, and Kodra is more than willing to “host” but I have never really cross trained anyone else on the whole “creation” process.  The positive here is that people LIKE listening to new content every week.  Your audience will grow faster because you are creating more content for them to consume.  We even have some insanely loyal listeners that have gone back through our entire back catalog of new 56 episodes.  Just realize that the weekly show is a massive challenge, and you have to be fairly stubborn to make it work.

Bi-Weekly

I hate the term bi-weekly because it means two things… twice a week or every other week.  In this case I am referring to the every other week schedule that several podcasts use.  This is still a strenuous schedule but gives people an “on” week and an “off” week to recuperate and plan things around.  I have been exceptionally lucky that I have a wife that supports the madness I am involved in, but for a lot of married couples locking away a night every week is going to be a problem, especially once you factor in children.  The bi-weekly schedule tends to be this happy medium making it equal parts flexible and manageable while still churning out enough content to get folks “hooked” on your format quickly.

Monthly

There are a myriad of issues with the monthly format.  For starters you have to be extremely careful when you schedule exactly when you want to record.  Theoretically you need to record with regular interval meaning you would need to release the first week of every month or some similar schedule.  The problem is life often sabotages you, and while it sounds good right now that we will record in three weeks…  there might be a birthday or an anniversary or some other hurdle that gets in the way.  I am horrible at keeping calendars so there is no way I could do a regular monthly show.  I release “Bel Folks Stuff” on a semi-monthly schedule, but I have actually missed an entire month before.  The big problem I see with a monthly show is that in theory you have to always have a great show.  When you do a weekly show, you can recover from having a shit week pretty easily.  When you are only releasing twelve shows a year… they all pretty much have to be golden to keep folks interested.

Recording Your Podcast

When I set down to talk about all of this I quickly realized that I would have to chunk this up over the course of multiple posts.  In this first part I focused on the “design” of your podcast.  In the next part I am going to focus on the nuts and bolts of recording your first episode.  The final part to follow after that will talk about the nuts and bolts of hosting.  My hope is that this inspires folks to go off and create their own podcast, but also inspires them to realize there is a lot of planning that goes into making it work.  As I am drafting the next pieces I would love to know if there are any specific things that you would like me to take a detour through and cover.

Back But Don’t Play

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Supporting Kickstarter

wasteland2 This morning I am going to tackle the second talkback topic for the Newbie Blogger Initiative because it is actually one that has been on the hearts and minds of the AggroChat folks for the last few weeks.  For the April AggroChat Game Club game I chose Darkest Dungeon, and since then the topic of playing “unfinished” games has been somewhat of a recent discussion among us in private.  The fact that the game was unfinished caused numerous problems, not the least of which was the simple fact that we were never quite sure if this or that functionality was intended… or just unfinished.  So I feel like I was not able to give it a really solid testing, because I don’t know what might change between now and when the studio deems the game “finished”.  The prompt however for this talkback is pretty straight forward but my answer is going to be a bit more nuanced.

Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

So for the first part… yes I wholeheartedly support the backing of unfinished games.  I’ve backed more than I can count at this point through either Kickstarter or company specific initiatives.  I think Kickstarter is a pretty awesome thing, and it has caused a lot of things that I care about to see the light of day.  I’ve backed both software and physical merchandise projects through it, and have been relatively happy with pretty much every project I have ended up chipping in on.  Kickstarter does a lot of things, but the biggest one to me is that it allows me to vote with my dollar on what I think is going to be an idea worth making.  I rarely back very far into a given product tree, and the end result is me usually getting a cut price copy of the game at launch.  While many of these games offer a double platinum early access alpha program…  that is not so much what I am interested at least not any more.

Tired of Alphas

Once upon a time I wanted to be playing every single game I could get my hands on.  I reveled in the fact that I had alpha and beta tested most of the MMOs out there.  For a period of time this was something that was achievable because at any given moment there were a very limited number of Alpha and Beta test programs available.  Somewhere along the line I noticed that playing an Alpha seriously adversely effected my chances of staying with a game for very long after release.  In essence I would burn myself out playing the Alpha, so that when launch happened the game felt very old and tired to me.  The pinnacle of this problem happened for me with Elder Scrolls Online.  I seriously cared about the release of this game, and I took my Alpha testing duties seriously.  I was told at one point that I was in the top 1% of all bug reporters in the game, and every single time we played I spent most of my time reporting and re-reporting issues I saw.

The problem here is that I had been alpha and beta testing builds of this game for a good year before the game actually launched.  So while I only managed to play about three months after the launch of the title, in truth that was around 17 months of me actually playing the game.  Huge chunks of the content I had literally seen hundreds of times, and remembered each of the different incarnations.  The additional problem is I had trouble letting go of the past.  There were some changes made in that game that I considered “for the worse” and myself and many of the other early testers rather vehemently pined for the imagined “good ole days” of early alpha.  Memory is always an incomplete state, and what we remembered was this or that feature that stood out in an ocean of an otherwise broken game.  The final product was so much better than the one we were requesting they return to, but we got hung up on the minutiae of this or that feature that we missed.  Basically I learned that Alpha testing ultimately ruined my enjoyment of the final product… and it only took me twenty some years to wake up to this fact.

Back But Don’t Play

Ultimately I have a very nuanced stance on Kickstarter.  I am more than happy to donate money towards a cause that I believe in like the creation of a brand new Wasteland experience on the PC, or any of the other games I have backed that let me wallow in the nostalgia of my youth.  Generally speaking I now back just far enough into it to give myself a cut rate copy of the game at launch.  Then when I get said copy and any bonus trappings… it seats neatly in my Steam account until I am ready to play it.  I might boot it up periodically to check on its progress, but ultimately I am not going to start the game for real until I see that note from the developer talking about how the game has launched.  The problem is this also means I am phenomenally bad at tracking the progress of games on Kickstarter.  I almost always have a message that needs to be responded to about this or that game but this is what works for me.  It lets me feel like I am backing things that I believe in, but also gives me the piece of mind of not actually starting a game play session until the game is “finished”.

As far as other games that are in a permanent state of development like Minecraft…  once again my feelings are a bit more nuanced.  Paying to play an alpha does not really bother me, if the experience and the enjoyment itself is worth paying to play said alpha.  I got into Minecraft for example during its pre-beta days when you could pick up a copy for well under $10.  I have gotten easily $1000 worth of enjoyment out of that game.  Similarly while I don’t play them nearly as often I have gotten more than enough happiness out of both Trove and Landmark to recuperate any costs I might have put into them.  Ultimately backing an unfinished game, and playing said unfinished game is not an entirely bad idea… so long as you go into it with the thought process that you are playing something that isn’t quite done yet.  Early Access games are in essence paid betas, and if you can live with that… awesome…  if not wait for the release of the game.  I personally have found that the games I played heavily in Alpha and Beta get more enjoyable over time, and going back a year after launch I end up really enjoying myself.  So that is to say that the games I ruined through Alpha testing…  are not in a permanent state of ruined as evidenced by my recent travels into Guild Wars 2, Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic.  Ultimately you have to figure out what works for you, and the amount or risk you are willing to take.  If I feel like I am going to care about a game, I try my best not to burn out before launch.

Finding Your Time

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Writing Blocks

This morning I am trying to knock a post out quickly before “Rainmageddon” gets here.  While I don’t really believe it  the neighbor across the street said we are likely to get “ten inches” of rain during the course of the day.  That would be absolutely insane.  My wife’s theory however is that she just misheard and the news actually said “two inches”.  In any case starting at noon today we are likely not going to want to be out in the world.  This is awesome because it means I can binge on video games.  What is not so awesome is the fact that I need to get a post out quickly rather than my normal lazy Saturday and Sunday posting schedule.  So I have a video game soundtrack on to block out the world, and am in beast mode!  Sadly my beast mode is more like a sleepy kitten, but in any case…  I am making things happen!  For those curious I am listening to the State of Decay soundtrack that is available on Google Play.

Normally Storytime Saturday is the day when I tell you some tale about myself, and I try really hard to make it one I have not already told.  The problem there is that I have shared so many intimate details of my life with you all, and that I have zero recollection of what I say on any given day.  Hell there are days I get to work and I will see entire sections of a post that I don’t remember writing.  In the spirit of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this mornings “Storytime” is more than likely going to be a free form rambling mess as I share indiscriminant tips and tricks I have learned over the years.  The key to thriving as a blog is to be predictable in your posting schedule, and in order to make this happen it means you need to set aside specific blocks of time to write.  How big of a block of time depends entirely on the style of post you make.  When I write a post that requires lots of research those are usually done over the course of several days, with me keeping notes in a Google drive document.  My “normal” style of posting however takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of me sitting down at the keyboard and physically writing it out.

Finding Your Time

When I launched this blog in 2009 I spent a lot of my lunch hours writing posts.  For the most part this worked great because it was a fixed block of time when I was not really doing anything else.  The problem is as work got busier, and I started actually going out for lunch… my noon writing block evaporated.  There were more than a few days when I was working on a problem that I could not set down long enough to write a post, and by the time whatever had been fixed… I was usually too drained mentally to produce something worth reading.  I wont say this was the reason behind some of my larger lapses but it was certainly a contributing factor.  When I started on my “Grand Experiment” I knew I was going to have to figure out something else to do.  I had gotten in the habit of going upstairs with my morning coffee and piddling around in a video game for thirty minutes to an hour before actually going into work.  This “boot up”  time greatly improved my cognitive ability by the time I got to work, so it was actually something that turned out to be pretty beneficial.

When finding your own block of time you have to evaluate your own schedule.  Where is a block that you are doing something every single day, or every few days…  that you could tweak a bit to turn that into a time to write your blog posts?  For me I happily sacrificed my morning game time in an effort to give myself a regular place to write words and things.  This however has been a double edged sword.  I literally cannot start my day without writing a blog post, and the days when I have to do something differently and stage the post the night before…  I feel like something is off the entire day.  I have incorporated this writing phase into my morning boot up routine and when it is missing, I am just not fully functional.  Additionally the problem of writing while you are not entirely awake means sometimes entire blocks of text don’t really make much sense.  Thankfully the frequency of my posting makes up for some of this.  When you are posting every single day, your readers cut you a lot more slack for having an “off day”.

Keep a Contract

The other nice fringe benefit of morning writing is that you feel like you have accomplished some thing.  No matter how south the rest of the day turns, you will have at least had a tiny victory that morning.  For years my wife has done something that I just did not understand until I looked at my own blogging.  When we clean the house we usually divide and conquer, meaning I take certain rooms and she takes certain rooms.  One of the rooms she always wants to do is the Bathroom and I have never understood why she tackles it first thing.  She has always said it made her feel like she had accomplished something, and I guess in a way gets those good vibe endorphins flowing making the rooms that are more painful a little easier to do.  I can definitely see this whole process working because I absolutely see these same kind of benefits with my own blog posts.  No matter how frustrating the rest of the day is… I at least accomplished writing another post and I continued the chain of daily postings by one more day.

Whatever your block or your schedule I think the absolute most important thing is to treat it like a contract.  It becomes extremely easy to give yourself an excuse for not writing one day, that turns into not writing for an entire month.  Before I ventured down the path of daily writing there were so many times when I told myself “I just am not feeling it” and let myself off the hook without writing a post.  Then as months went by of “not feeling it” it became harder to actually start the process again.  In order to keep a schedule you need a certain amount of rigor in your life, and a willingness to sacrifice other things to make sure the ball keeps moving forward.  I know this might sound like an odd statement, especially for something that we all consider a hobby.  The problem is you can’t really treat it like a hobby and achieve the predictable regularity that your readers will want.  In many was blogging is a second job, admittedly one you do out of love… but there still needs to be some constraints on your time.  At this point I have blogged every single day for over two years… so I have this pressure built up in NOT missing a single day.  I have motivation to keep going, and keep writing… and I think it is this motivation that you have to find for yourself.

Talkback Challenge 1

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Avoiding a Topic

First off I have to say I am a huge proponent of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and try my best to do whatever I can to support it.  Unfortunately I do a pretty bad job of actually participating in anything that is going on the forums.  This year I had told myself that I would try really hard to participate more and do more of the various writing prompts.  You know that whole “lead by example” type argument.  The problem is the very first topic is something that I find both repulsive and deeply scary at the same time.  Izlain seems to love to revel in controversial topics, and has recorded podcasts on various incendiary topics in the past, so I really should not be shocked this ended up as a writing prompt.

The aim of the Talkback Challenge is to engage new bloggers on a topic and provide contrasting views on that specific matter. It is also designed to encourage follow-up discussions and blog posts which further widen the level of interaction. The goal is to generate discussion on newbie blogs, raise their respective profile and share traffic. The NBI has run such activities for several years now and they have proven both informative and engaging. The opening topic for debate this time round is “how did GamerGate affect you”?

The prompt itself is pretty straight forward.  How were you effected by GamerGate, but the answer as always is far more nuanced.  I just finished writing my Bonanza post over on MMOGames and during the course of it I ran through all of the responses to this question that were available at the time of posting.  I was somehow bolstered by the fact that the majority of these posts seemed to have no real effect.  The problem is…  for those who were effected this is a really touchy subject.  The fact that someone actually wants to be talking about this makes me realize that in truth they were largely left unscathed.  All of this said, I am going to tackle this topic because I promised myself that I would actually do the writing prompts.

Talkback Challenge 1

GamerGate cycled through the community like nothing I had ever seen before.  It was swift and it was obnoxious…  and quickly moved into the realm of the really damned creepy.  Folks were using the tag without really understanding the consequences.  The claim of the movement is that GamerGate is “About Ethics in Journalism” but this claim has never really matched up to the effects seen in the community.  So much so that this has become a meme and filed away in the internet as yet another meaningless phrase.  What I saw instead was a lot of my friends getting really scared to speak their mind.  This hive mind of hatred seemed to be going after anyone who was “different” from what they saw as the cultural norm.  This meant that women and the lgbt community seemed to garner the brunt of the assault.  I talked to lots of friends who considered just stopping blogging because of the fear and paranoia that was rampant.

The problem is I am by nature not extremely combative.  You can make personal attacks against me and it really usually doesn’t phase me.  However when you take on my friends, and make them feel less than what they are…  then I start to get upset.  In the grand scheme of things I didn’t speak out as harshly as I probably should have on the subject.  I made a pretty general post about how I wish we would “Be Awesome Human Beings”.  Which drew the attention of a Gater that followed me and proceeded to try and argue with me about ethics in journalism in the comments.  I didn’t want to get drawn into his discussion and he kept trying to bring me back to his personal brand of right wing philosophy.  Ultimately I ended up un-following and blocking the person on twitter.  Within a few days of posting this relatively straight forward article, my blog came under fire of a DDoS.  At first I thought nothing about it, since hosting companies get denial of service attacks all of the time.  The thing is… it seemed to be targeted at ONLY the server cluster my blog was on.

Message Delivered

A short time after that my twitter handle appeared on a list of supposed “Social Justice Warriors” that were to be avoided.  Granted half of the people I know ended up on that same list, but while it was a point of pride… it also felt a bit like a veiled threat.  It felt very much like a list of people who “thought wrong” and should be targeted.  When you combine that with the DDoS I won’t like it freaked me out a bit.  I tried my best to exorcise my social networks of any Gamer Gate sympathizers, or at least the ones who were loudly supporting it… and I moved on with my life.  I tried my best to support those who were getting attacked, but I didn’t feel like I supported the other extreme either.  Ultimately I just wanted us all to get along and stop being assholes to each other.  That is the mission I have kept trying to move forward.  I am a tiny blue dot in a very read ocean, but I manage to get along with most of my friends, coworkers and neighbors because we respect each other not enough to try and jam our own personal philosophies down each others throats.

The problem is Gamer Gate has left me scarred.  When someone new follows me on social media the first thing I do is scan down through their posting history to make sure they are not somehow a GG leaner.  I don’t want to make people out to be the bogeyman of the internet, but I also don’t really want that sort of influence screwing up my relatively happy place.  I have tried my best to limit the about of negativity in my world.  It ultimately makes me a happier person, and GG and the vehemently Anti-GG communities both are something I can do without.  That said I am by no means trying to be neutral anymore.  I am not a supporter of the GamerGate community by any means, and the whole situation deeply saddens me.  I don’t want to be made to feel like shit for anything I do, from anyone.  So I am going to keep doing what I am doing, and keep enjoying the things I enjoy and try my damnedest to forget the negative forces still exist.  You cannot get me to believe like you do by yelling at me louder, and you cannot convince me of your point with circular logic.  Ultimately I hope the internet and gamers in particular mature and learn to make decisions on their own merit and not connected to some larger agenda.