Yesterday, I successfully implemented private/direct messages between users of this site. It was a feat, but my next sentence may seem like a non-sequitur, so bear with me a moment. 

I sometimes worry about the trap of nostalgia.

 

It can keep you from advancing, from trying new things, or, while trying new things, keep you from accepting the way newer, more derived things are. The differences become magnified and made larger at the expense of more meaningful things.

I don't think this is idle musing. I've literally made a table-top gaming social media website that answers a question no one has ever asked: what if the Moldvay Basic Set art direction was imposed onto a content management system? 

Thing of it is, I want to experience newer stuff. The new invigorates the old, or it can, and I would be unsatisfied with only being restricted to what has come before. I am already familiar with much of it. There's a lot I don't have direct access to, of course, and given the expense of acquisition, may never, and that's fine. 

The same is true of the newer material, of course, but I have been progressively investing in small materials which show me a way forward. A great thing about the modern D&D game is that the current publisher has released it for free. This is smart. But it also makes me want more, and see what lives inside the covers of the more expensive offerings (I am committed to physical media).

I've been putting more and more time into this site. It was originally going to be something else, something very different, more specifically-dedicated to me writing adventures for downloading for other people to play, just because I wanted to. I bought the domain this year, started laying down the first bones of the CMS in August, but I started research last year. (Almost exactly: December 21, 2018 is the creation date of a little text file filled with domain name candidates I have on my computer. In the end, I selected the shortest and the least costly. The domain name was purchased just this past May, but the origins of this project stretch back further.)

But then several critical events happened:

• My father passed away, at the beginning of this year (2019).
• A friend was knocked off of a social media site for criticizing Nazis.
• Tumblr marked some of my art as pornographic—in one of the stupidest mishandlings of a user base I've yet seen by social media.
• I got older and desired to participate in this hobby more, somehow.

This project then changed into something I could use to help keep me from losing myself in grief (with another, different project dedicated to family history). It became about more than just a few adventures I might make. An erosion of stability and becoming lost is a fear I have. It became about me.

My original intentions did include vague notions of social media, but not the current extent of implementation. But I've been wanting to leave another social media site for my own mental health for a long time now. The typical handling of users who exhibit humanity in the face of oppression has not been at all well handled. I will miss some of the hobby pages, but it is clearly time to move on. I've tried to create a space which might be more welcoming to others, too.

Tumblr was home to Game Restart, another personal project started with an eye to increasing my awareness of a medium I've tried to break into. This place allows me to break from Tumblr in a meaningful way. It's a pity about Tumblr. They got a lot of things right, once, though alienation seems inevitable when a service is sold without regard for its customers or even basic functionality.

Finally, I've been getting older, and, I feel, missing out a lot on a hobby which once infected me with great enthusiasm. If it takes me making something like this to get back into it, so be it. I'll learn a few new things along the way, too. Maybe I don't need an ulterior motive, but I find it helps.

So what if the Moldvay Basic Set art direction was imposed onto a content management system? 

My work here might be called Vintage Nouveau Vague (I search-engined the French word for Wave). 

I can never go home again, but this feels very close.