STATE OF THE FIXT - YEAR 3

another one of these? another one of these!

if you happen to be reading this post, i don't think you need me to tell you that the past twelve months haven't been especially great. like, blogging-wise, of course. i guess also the rest of the world is on fire and that's probably fed into the blog a bit? nonetheless, it's April 18th when this goes live, and the least i can do is look back on how things have been going a bit and maybe talk a little bit about the future.

obviously, it wound up being a relatively low-key year for the site - the hobby galleries did finally get up and running and, in a statistical sense, that's probably where i wrote the most this year, but in terms of what i think of as HYPERFIXT's bread and butter, it was pretty much just the biannual GDQ 'best of' lists, my piece on Transformers One, and a late-stage curveball courtesy of WEBFISHING. i won't mince words - going over that lineup, it doesn't feel like much, and it put me in a pretty sour headspace thinking about how little i got done.

if we peel the curtain back a bit, though, and look outside of this web domain, i'd at least like to think some of the other stuff i've been up to has been in service of building a better me, who can in turn build a better blog. i always feel weird getting down into the nitty-gritty of it all, but i actually tried seeing if medication might help this ol' noggin of mine, and it hasn't been perfect, but it's definitely done something, and i'd like to keep working on putting that back into doing the things i love. for all the struggles this brain comes with, i want to give it the love and care it needs to thrive.

that's about as much vulnerability as i feel like showing here, though, and on a more externalized note, i feel like one of the low-key Big Changes of 2024 was that i finally took the plunge on this "social media" thing i'd always been giving the stink eye. i still think the modern internet is a nightmare world that we have to retake step-by-step by building our own webpages, and maybe on that principle Mastodon is closer to what i'd philosophically vouch for, but like, come the fuck on. Mastodon? recognizing that i need to get out of my shell a little bit more, i started a Bluesky account. feels like, at least for the time being, it's still got what i'm looking for in terms of features and culture, although part of that may just be because doing what i do doesn't exactly attract Facebook weirdos like flies. eventually, i'd like to clean the cobwebs off that manually-operated microblog to the right and replace it with a direct feed of my Bluesky posts, although so far, a lot of the code i've found for doing that seems a little arcane and hard to tune just right.

in the spirit of trying to do a little more outreach and exist in just a bit less of a bubble, i also offloaded this year's Q&A to a fresh new Neosprings account! i barely understand how the site works and it seems like it might have its own feed functions that could prove useful one day, but for the time being, it's a quick and easy way to take incoming questions and spit out quick answers. another advantage of doing it this way is i can keep it open year-round, so if you're stumbling onto this page in, i dunno, September, feel free to hit me up! maybe let me know how you got here!

this is also normally where i'd talk about how i have all sorts of big ideas i want to work on in the coming months, and don't get me wrong, the big ideas are still there, but i can also recognize that i've very often thrown out "the next big post" as an abstract concept and failed to live up to those ideas. the run-up to this anniversary has been a bit tricky, and i think to unpack why i might want to do some things differently going into year 3, i gotta paint a picture of how this whole thing started.

i've always been a yapper. it's in my blood. give me a place to yap, and i will. in another life, maybe that place would have been YouTube or something, but in this one, my frustration with the modern landscape of the internet led me to try and make my own little corner, knowing full well that i was choosing to do something very niche for the benefit of... i dunno, picking cool fonts or something. the point i'm trying to make is that HYPERFIXT, the web domain, is just another facet of the type of thing i've always been about, and what's really relevant here is that a lot of its early foundational elements were drawn directly from the types of conversations i was casually having with people.

the ur-example here is "the Halo thesis" - that's still the URL on it, because before it was a real-ass post on my real-ass(?) website, that was the joking way me and my friends referred to my growing web of hot takes on how one of my favorite games had become a weird flashpoint for modern AAA game development and the often hostile ways fan culture reacted. i put a lot of work into that article to make it an article, but in some sense, it's still just as much a museum piece of the things i was talking with my friends about in the months leading up to its posting. like throwing sugar into a big hot wheel to make cotton candy, almost.

i don't mean to disavow that type of process - i have a collection of "notes" sitting around for a potential long-form essay that are literally just screenshots of things i typed while watching a show with my friends. i think where i've gotten off-course is in assuming that every piece of metaphorical cotton candy can be spun into a 15000-word statement piece. i've always advocated for putting quality over quanity and only writing about things that i truly care about, but i think somewhere along the way, i started feeling like if i was going to stand by quality, that meant every new post had to be some kind of gargatuan effort that'd encapsulate every facet of how i feel about a piece of media. i felt like things weren't worth doing if i wasn't leaving it all out on the field, that the only path towards Good Posting Worth Doing ended with me collapsing in the ring after a total slugfest.

writing this anniversary retrospective felt like a bit of a nightmare for a while - i realized about a week or two ago that it was about time for me to be thinking about it, and as i type these words, it's about 5:30pm, the evening before it's supposed to go live. the interesting thing, though, is i did do some writing this week, on a total whim at 1am. i'd posted something entirely off the cuff to my friends (or, rather, for them to see in the morning, because this all happened in the middle of the goddamn night, somehow) and, for whatever reason, found myself compelled to expand on my point. i joked after the fact that it was pre-emptively covering for a pedantic debate nobody was ever actually going to have with me, but to be completely real, it just kind of... happened because i felt like it? there i was, self-indugently doing actual research and making a whole-ass infographic out of it. part of me was worrying about if it was going to be funny or interesting or worth doing at all, but i was possessed by the spirit of doing the damn thing.

i'm not going to share the infographic here just yet, because i think with a few days of actual work put into it, it'd actually make kind of an interesting post for HYPERFIXT. in general, i think that's where i need to be setting my sights more. i don't want to abandon the big long posts when i've got the opportunity and the motivation, but if i sit around waiting for the next "Halo thesis" to come to me, or insist to myself that i need some elaborate gimmick to make my points interesting, i'm going to be right back here in 2026 telling whatever readership i've got the same thing about how i wish i'd done more this year.

none of that is to say you'll never see a big post or an elaborate gimmick under this URL again - trust me, i've got some very elaborate gimmicks that exist solely for my own gratification stored in the back of my head for a rainy day. what i'm trying to get across is that, hand-in-hand with continuing to do maintenance on the meat puppet that helps me type these posts, i gotta get my head in the right place when it comes to what i post. if i had to sum it up with a nice bow on top - the lesson i need to take away from year 2 is that, for as much as i scoff at the idea of not caring enough, it is also entirely possible for me to care too much, and i need to get out of my own way and be more of an absolute freak with my posting. i think the saying might be "practice makes perfect", not "sitting around intimidated by how you'd go about conveying your thoughts on media in a way that is visibly, impractically extravagent and novel makes perfect".

as for what else might be on the horizon... who knows? lately, i've been trying to be a lot more active about persuing things that interest me and giving different hobbies and mediums a fair shot, even if my impression has always been that i can't for some reason. i'd always love to find new, weird ways to get things out in front of people, and i have more places than ever to do so. maybe this is the year i hunker down and edit a video! having my own website is still the driving factor, though, and i've been thinking i might be due for a bit of a visual refresh? i love the way this site looks, but a lot of these assets were thrown together in an afternoon when i barely knew if i was going to use this place for anything, so it might be nice to spruce things up just a bit...

whatever the next twelve months brings, i can't start looking ahead without thanking all my friends who've supported me in this whole endeavor. i'm very lucky to have a lot of people in my life who believe in me, even when i'm being my own worst enemy and harshest critic, and for as much as i put this site out there as some kind of singular vision, nobody's an island and i wouldn't be able to do what i do without my friends. there's still a lot i'm figuring out, about myself and how i want to run this place, and the world around me is arguably scarier than it's ever been before, but i'll always be grateful for the opportunity and privilege to make my silly little posts, and come hell or high water, i'll do my best to keep them coming.