This is an incredibly long and indulgent personal post only tangentially related to IF, so I won’t feel bad and it’s totally fine if you don’t want to dig into this. I’m just basically unpacking my own overstuffed baggage, but the most relevant part: I’m sorry I’ve not played and reviewed and voted in IFComp, and have had problems delving substantially into anyone’s IF for the last three years.
TW: Death of family members.
First of all I’m not leaving or anything; this isn’t the prelude to a grand farewell. I totally love this community and I appreciate that it’s been here to keep me hooked into the IF scene. Being on the Staff of this forum really provides deep satisfaction that I can serve and support IF even though I have in recent years fallen out artistically. I’ve not been actively writing.
I’ve also not been playing or reviewing much IF, and that’s my fault due to personal circumstances. I had a major stint of entering IFComp every year from 2013-2020. I’m still a huge supporter; I donate to Colossal Fund every year and overseeing the yearly IFComp forums here are sort of my project. I feel really guilty that I have not played the yearly games nor actually voted for IFComp for the past few years due to that neglect.
That 7-8 year period of activity sort of overlaps when my Mom moved in with me and I had to take care of her. In many ways, throwing myself into writing IF was needed escapism; it was my way to detach and say “I’m working on something.” As years went on it was a respite as Mom’s health declined. I feel like I kind of hit a peak with my weird trilogy of Cannery Vale/robotsexpartymurder/Cursèd Pickle which kind of covered all of my respective tonal artistic wheelhouses and my meta-explorations of identity/inhabitance/identity-switching - and at that point Mom required a lot more health attention that was draining my spoon-drawer and I made the decision to not expend the energy to enter in 2021 so I could “divert power from the engines” to concentrate on her health care. Luckily I was on the Staff here so I could still participate in the community without major time-sink. It just got hard to sit and concentrate on writing, playing, and reviewing games when there was always something else “more important” to do.
I had a similar separation - I was in the early throes of a decent performing career in a major city all the way up until 2000 when the scene kind of adjusted due to circumstances - unfortunate timing, cutbacks made by many professional theater companies, and some chess-moves I made in my career that were well-meant and probably smart but didn’t work out, coinciding with the deaths of two major director/producers with whom I was networked in good standing and would put me to work at any time when I was available. I didn’t get any major work for about a year and I ended up doing the dreaded “moving home at age 30 and getting a real job” thing.
Part of my weird personality is if I’m serious about something I’m “all-in” and am good at focusing on what I want and doing the work. I was a theater-kid of the utmost geekiness, but when I put performing on hold, I dropped out entirely - stopped keeping up with the scene, stopped going to see shows, even for a long time stopped liking and listening to show tunes (
) despite people saying “Oh, you don’t have to give it up entirely! You can totally be in community theater!” - sure, but after working professionally it’s a frustrating down step/time sink if I’m not getting paid, and more importantly surrounded by people who challenge me. I wanted to do the thing, not be an observer or a hobbyist participant. Plus most of my “day jobs” employed me at night which precludes participation in most performing arts. If wasn’t going full in, it was a waste of time and energy. Plus I live in kind of a performing-arts desert.
That kind of mirrors my down-shift in IF. The way my brain works, if I’m not writing IF it’s hard to concentrate on others’ writing because I always have that “I want to do this myself” urge. It’s kind of “If I’m on the wagon, I’m on the wagon and don’t want to torture myself by looking at what I’m missing being on the wagon” kind of thing.
So this is the formal apology to all the people who’ve written IF in the past half-decade that I’ve neglected. Reading it makes me yearn to write it, and because I’m a joiner, I have trouble making comments about anything but the most positive aspects. If I’m going to critique or review something that isn’t mostly perfect, I can only do so from the perspective of an author and I end up telling someone how I would write their game which is perhaps only pseudo-constructive and doesn’t help anyone! Plus I hate saying bad things. I’m really good at snark, so I don’t want to deploy that skill indiscriminately!
So after Mom passed in 2022 it would seem like the best opportunity to get back in. Timing again: in 2020 my Dad’s health took a turn for the worst. Unchecked advancement of diabetes and several mini strokes put him into a hospital/rehab center during COVID. We tried at-home care (my cousin is an RN) but since he lived way out on the edge of a lake alone in a huge house he built himself (alone by choice - I got my hermit tendencies from him) and due to his mental decline, his frugal collecting and organizational abilities downslid into a hoarding situation and he wasn’t able to take care of himself or the property. Long story short - he ended up moving closer to my cousin into a smaller one-story house, but due to advancing dementia/Alzheimers he couldn’t be left alone. Luckily he had money so I was able to get him into a rather fancy assisted-living and memory-care facility. As he declined, he moved to a 24-hour rehab/nursing facility. I was assured he couldn’t move in with me since due to his mental diagnosis he needed 24-hour supervision. That was fine and saved me being personally hands-on with his healthcare. Even though I work at home, I was instructed leaving him in my apartment for 30 minutes to go to the grocery store did not qualify as “24-hour supervision.” He entered hospice care on October 2nd this year, and passed on October 5th, the day after his last birthday.
So despite all this overall I’m good and am ready to make some positive changes. I’m entering a new phase after a decade of putting my life aside to care for others, which I’m totally grateful for and needed to do. I hope to start writing and reading and playing IF again, but we’ll see. Once you drop a skill, it kind of degrades!
And it’s not an excuse, but part of my real job now is answering customer-service emails, so it’s quite difficult to spend several hours typing furiously to then break off and do more typing in my free time. (But Hanon, that’s a nonsensical paradox because you can’t give a simple answer and go on for paragraphs and paragraphs–) yes, I’m so verbose here, but that for me was kind of the consolation prize. I’m also deep into the Amazon Vine thing right now (Amazon will send me products I choose at no charge if I review them - all the shoes I wear now I acquired for free!)
So TL;DR: my sincere apologies to all the authors whose games I haven’t given a chance, and to several people I agreed to beta-test for and only made a hasty and superficial attempt to accomplish.
