Busman’s Holiday

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September 23, 2020

Call me one take Angry. Because I’m banging out this draft and posting as is. I’m not rewriting, editing, proofing, or posting. And that’s because I’m literally on my way out the door.

I’m disappearing for two weeks. I will not be interacting with any members of my community for two weeks. I’m taking a vacation. It’s a busman’s holiday. I will be using the time to focus on doing the things I used to love about being The Angry GM. Writing analysis and critique and advice and designing game content. I have plenty of work to do. The stresses of dealing with the community have become such a distraction that I cannot get anything useful done right now. And they are making me question what I ever loved about the job.

All live events, chats, streams, and other scheduled things are cancelled as of this moment. I will reschedule things when I return. Articles I have promised and other bits of content will continue to get posted. Because actually writing and designing shit really does relax me. I mean, twelve years ago, this is what I used to do for fun after a 60-hour work week in the accounting mines.

Except when I am contacted via the appropriate channels to resolve problems with book orders, Patreon payment problems, or Patreon reward problems, I will be completely unreachable. Comments will remain shut down on this site and comments and messages on Patreon will go unread. I will not log into the Discord. I am completely off the grid for two weeks. Consider me on Walden Pond or something.

And when you think about how to circumvent this and get in touch with me because you think it’s really important for me to know whether you support this decision or oppose it or how you feel about anything I’ve done or whether you need to withdraw your support, keep in mind that one of the things I am trying to do is trying to remember why the hell I ever wanted to do this in the first place. And if I can’t remember that, there’s a chance I’m not coming back. This is not hyperbolic. I am exhausted. And my physical and mental health issues – which I was recovering from – are being exacerbated by stress.

Meanwhile, if this move offends you, you are invited to withdraw whatever support you provide and to leave me a lengthy exit survey about it. And to do so with my blessing. I do not want money from anyone who doesn’t want to give it freely because they think my work is worth it. If you need to make a political statement, just do it quietly please.

I will return on Monday, October 12. I realize that’s more than two weeks. My logic is is that I have a two week window between this Friday and October 9 during which I said I was going into crunch time and would not be putting out content, so I’m just turning that into very private crunch time somewhere far, far from the Interworld. But no one comes back from vacation on a Friday, so Monday the 12th it is.

The Discord will remain open and Patreon supporters with access to it will be able to hang out and have fun. The Enforcer team has instructions. And the Enforcer team also has a secret red Bat Phone that can reach me even in the Fortress of Angry Solitude. And if they have to pick up that phone, I will likely come back, delete the Discord server, and go back to the accounting mines.

That’s all you need to know. But if you’re caught completely out of left field by this and want to know why it happened, below you will find a brief summary of why I’m done with this shit for two weeks and why I really don’t want to talk to anyone right now.

Over the past three weeks, as a result of a couple of article I wrote about social interactions, I have been inundated with an increasing large amount of feedback. Some of it’s been positive and some of it’s been negative. And because I knew the articles in question would elicit a lot of feedback, I adopted a rather defensive tone in an attempt to spell out some ground rules for what I was and was not willing to debate. Or what debates I was willing to host on my site. When some of my loyal supporters and close friends noted that the tone of those articles seemed very aggressive compared to my normal writing, I gave it a second look. And as I read through it, I agreed with them. The tone was much more aggressive than my normal writing and I was not happy with it. I also removed one joke that – while I still think was funny – was extremely mean spirited and didn’t add anything to the article. It just wasn’t something I wanted people to see coming from me. Especially because my motives for including it made it the sort of dead-baby shock comedy that gets squirted out by Family Guy.

I put out a public statement explaining this, apologizing for my tone, and saying I would stick to my normal angry fare thereafter. And that statement has earned me an endless amount of flak over every channel that people can reach me. Some people are erroneously accusing me of caving to some chimerical social justice mob. Or are at least feel betrayed by my sudden self-censorship that goes against my oft-stated free-speech values. Others are applauding this new direction I’m taking to be a less divisive figure and to shut down toxic and offensive conversations on my site. All of those people are fucking nuts. Because I didn’t do any of that. I reread an article, I didn’t like the tone in which I’d written it, I said as much, and I said I’d be careful about that in the future.

Meanwhile, many others have written in to provide me with unsolicited physical and mental health advice and to provide me unsolicited business advice. They’d like me to know that my anger and stress pose a great threat to my physical and mental health and they’d like me to know that I am going to destroy my readership by making this decision or that decision or whatever. Those people have drastically overstepped their bounds. That shit is just offensive. It’s condescending. And not one person who has tried to provide me any of this sort of advice has enough of a perspective to have anything useful to say. Well-intentioned or not, it’s insulting and patronizing.

And still others just want me to know that while they disagree – or agree – with what I’m doing, they still support my right to do it. Or, even if they don’t, they will accept it magnanimously without withdrawing their support because, hey, they get it. Which is also pretty patronizing and insulting despite the good intentions.

The issue of feedback and negative criticism and unsolicited personal advice and support or opposition for every move I make is not new. It’s something you deal with as a content creator. While I am a thick-skinned guy and can take disagreement and argument in stride I am now starting every one of my workdays wading through that crap. It’s still not a huge amount of feedback, but it’s enough and it’s continuous that it’s the first 30 to 60 minutes of my day. And it saps my motivation to get anything done at all. Most days it just leaves me feeling bitter. Because I write a blog about how to pretend to be an elf really good. Why the hell does that warrant this sort of crap?

And yes, I do have to read it all. Because I also receive useful feedback and I receive a lot of other correspondence as well. And I take pride in reading everything everyone has to say to me and in carefully considering each piece of feedback and then making a reasonable and objective-as-possible choice about what to do. Shutting off the feedback, shutting off the comment section, shutting down my community, ignoring my readers, those things are not options. I cannot do them and still be the businessman and creator I want to be. Neither can I stop being honest, forthright, and transparent. I would rather shut this all down and give it up than lose my integrity.

So I am taking a break to recharge. Hopefully. Or to reassess whether this is what I want to be doing with my life.

Thank you to all of you who have provided me support. Thanks to those of you who have tried to keep me sane through the emotional turmoil this has created. Thanks to the Enforcer squad for stopping me from doing something drastic and encouraging me to just take a break. And thanks to Ben, Arthur, Alyssa, John, and Nanban Jim for your friendship even though I’ve been kind of insufferable and unreliable these past couple of weeks.

See you all soon.


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