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bleakly thinking about 2021 when i was desperately trying to channel my decade of experience with abnormal mapping into hopefully getting a salaried, stable job and now like. literally none of them are left. games media essentially nuked from orbit

lots of weird emotions all tied up in watching it fall apart. a decade ago the dynamic was that there was a ton of justified resentment from marginalized independent writers, whose work would go viral and get quoted as proof of the industry's vibrancy, from websites that would never ever hire them

we got very lucky with abnormal mapping. we owe our current stability basically entirely due to a combination of being known in waypoint adjacent spaces, and also deciding to podcast about anime and not video games. i dont think there's a lesson in there but if there is it's not good or replicable

i have no idea what advice i'd give to someone looking to do games criticism today. i hold on to a distant optimism that in time, in the wake of the collapse of games media and with investors abandoning games entirely, a smaller and less commercial games culture emerges in its wake but. lol. yknow

if there is one lesson it is: never hustle. it is not worth it. everyone works hard. the success stories work hard. the failures you'e never heard of work hard. the people who got laid off worked hard. it is not the determining factor in anything. set yourself free. do only what you love