Note: I wrote this on Substack and it's a little weird to read here just because it talks about that a lot but here you go just in case.
Hi gang! As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t been sending many letters lately. (After the second line break I talk about what I’m going to do instead, if you want to skip down there.) I’ve tried to express my reasons for this many times over the course of the last few months, both to myself and in drafts of letters to you all, but have found myself unable to get to the bottom of things. I still find myself unable to get to the bottom of things, but here are my best guesses:
1) I don’t like Substack
I didn’t ever really like this website, but I really don’t like it anymore. This is not merely for political reasons, but also for aesthetic and personal ones. Beyond the general grotesquerie, the feed, which I always accidentally open en route to the newsletter section, makes me very depressed in that particular The Discourse™ way I can’t stand anymore.[1] I’ve tried very hard to stick to concrete criticism of specific cultural objects in this newsletter, but I still feel myself getting swept up in the buzz and whirr of it all, and I hate it.
More than that, maybe, while the “voice” this place has facilitated for me has led to some places I appreciate, I feel very stuck in it at this point. Writing is, I think, always something of a negotiation between the medium and the writer, and I feel a bit backed into a corner here by the medium.
None of this is to impugn the wonderful writers on here whose letters I will continue to read with interest and admiration! But I don’t think writing here works for me.
2) The Discourse™, cont’d.
This is where, in earlier versions of this email, I’d go on one of several really long tangents. Eventually I decided I don’t think any of them are worth anyone’s time. I will say that participating in the chatter-chatter of the internet at this point feels like a) volunteering to partake in a DARPA operation intended to generate novel strains of mental illness and/or b) checking a quest board for windmill bounties. And that’s just the websites I sort of like! It’s so fucking ugly right now in the world, and it’s plugged directly into our nervous systems, and even the good stuff comes in through the same tubes as the horrorslop. I don’t know. I really try to avoid moralizing or normative statements but hard to avoid my conclusion that it’s something really bad for us. This is obviously not a hot take, but doing something about it seems to be, if only insofar as it took me months and months to realize that it wasn’t “writing on the internet” I hated but “writing on this internet.”
3) I got stressed about newsletters in general
There is something very daunting about hitting send on something and shoving it uneditably into everyone’s inboxes. I kept the perfectionism at bay for a while, and I know I should take it lightly because everyone gets one billion emails a day, but it just feels scary lol!!!!
4) It’s just a monologue
I’ve spent my whole life chatting about cultural objects on the internet. By the time I was in middle school I’d already not only participated in a Star Trek-themed roleplaying forum (I want to say I was the engineer but I can’t remember), I was regularly reviewing albums on The Old Amazon That Just Sold Music and Books, which I posted under the “A Kid’s Review” name or whatever they forced you to use if you were under thirteen. Which is to say: I am, for better and for worse, a poster.
Luckily for me, other people seem to like to chat with me and to read what I write. But I’ve been thinking a lot about why it hasn’t felt so good lately, and I realized that most of the times I’ve been most excited to be writing about stuff on the internet were in dialogical settings, mostly web forums. Unfortunately, in order to sanely relate to objectively insane times, I had to step away from most of my favorite haunts, because I have needed a very strictly compartmentalized approach to the internet. (And I’m very bad at email—I owe like five people who might be reading this long emails and I’m so sorry! Also apologies to the others reading whom I owe a phone call!!) In any case, the dialogues I have had with people here have been amazing. I think I just have to go about it all a little differently.
5) My relationship to “criticism” in the year 2025 is ambivalent
This is a goofy way to say it—and the length of this section is not intended as a comment on its relative weight—but I’ll give an example from earlier this year:
- The video game Expedition 33: Clair Obscur has just come out. It gets very good reviews.
- I start it. I think it’s pretty good! Not great, but pretty good.
- Then, I read some articles about how it is insanely good.
- I stop thinking, “Hey, this is a pretty good game.” Instead, I wonder, “Is this an insanely good game?”
- This recalibration facilitates a different, less pleasant form of attention. I am no longer simply paying attention to the game; instead, I am assaying a weird, janky triangulation, attempting to get to the bottom of the difference between a Good and a Great Game. While perhaps “intellectually satisfying” in some way, this ongoing operation makes me feel less happy to be playing it than I was before.
- A couple of days pass.
- While driving my personal automobile around the mid-size USAmerican city in which I live, I hear some people on a podcast say that the game is actually not that good at all! They cite some annoying positive things people said about it. These are not the positive things I read about it—or they are not my interpretation of the positive things I read—but as they express their annoyance, I begin also to get annoyed.
- The layers of mediation between me and the video game are sedimenting. We’ve gone from “this game is pretty good and I’m having fun” to “am I having as much fun as I should be” to “am I as upset with this game as I should be.” I begin to argue in my head with caricatures of all of these internet people I don’t know. At this point, every time I pick up the game, I experience a simmering, low-grade anxiety.
I am obviously aware that this is irrational and ridiculous, an overreaction: possibly a genuinely pathological one; in any case taking personally what isn’t remotely personal. Still, it works to make the experience of sitting around on a weekday evening playing a stupid-ass computer game way more annoying than it’s supposed to feel. It leads me back to thoughts and worries I’ve had a million times before, none of which have to do with what is actually interesting or meaningful about the video game. Like pretty much all “content” in the year 2025, it’s just posts about posts about posts. Eventually, my save got corrupted and I put it down. During my twenty hours of playing Clair Obscur I would say I experienced maybe three hours of actually playing Clair Obscur.
There are a lot of reasons why I am prone to this kind of thing. Perhaps most of it (like most of my “insights”) can be attributed to personal problems: while medication and therapy have brought the more spectacular symptoms of my obsessive-compulsive disorder largely under control, the obsessive mode of thinking is both prolific and frustratingly flexible. It often, for me at least, entails a kind of paranoid scrutiny of subjective experience, one which dovetails unhappily with certain critical modes of thinking.
To be clear, I don’t conceive of critical thinking as intrinsically pathological. Nor do I think of my own pathological obsessive thinking as constitutive of anything in my thinking I do value—it doesn’t make me more creative, or smarter, or a sharper critic, or anything. I regard it as a purely deleterious force, a sort of self-devouring nonsense machine I labor assiduously to keep offline.
But I do think that (a certain version of) the critical impulse, at least in me, can be easily rerouted towards unhelpful rumination. There comes, without my realizing it, a switch in the tracks, and I find I have unwittingly directed my train of thought onto a line whose terminus is just me hitting myself in the head with a big rubber mallet. For a few different reasons, the internet makes the Bad Route more accessible.
In recent months I have been trying broadly to relax the part of me that voraciously and reflexively rips phenomena apart in an attempt to understand them. This might sound like a boast about my intelligence or something, but I’m ultimately talking about a maladjustment, a misalignment, a way of missing what is right in front of me. While I don’t think you can “overthink” something—it’s a qualitative problem, not a quantitative one—I do think there are intellectual approaches to phenomena that are more and less fruitful and useful. This newsletter has mostly been a happy exercise in finding a way to engage with art in a generative and pleasant way; in this, it has been a true gift. But it’s slippery.
Ultimately, I feel like I’m asking the wrong questions about a lot of different stuff in my life—that I’m relying on outmoded generalizations, thoughts I formed in different worlds of experience, not this one. And so I’m going to mix it up. Yeehaw!
6) I’m busy
I started this newsletter when I was super unemployed but I have all this shit to do now and it takes a lot of time!! Fuck!!!!
7) Shifting interests
I love video games very much. I can’t imagine not loving them. I frequently think to myself while playing a video game that it’s unbelievable that I’m allowed to have this much fun just sitting by myself inside of my house. I am going to keep writing about them because writing is a way of getting to stretch out saying “hell yeah” for longer than it takes to say “hell yeah.”[2]
However, now that I am not merely marginally employed but also have friends within an hour’s drive of my house, I am, for better and for worse, no longer regularly putting in hundred-hour weeks in the JRPG mines. As a result, I think, my interests have become a bit more fluid. To take one irritating example, I’ve spent most of the last two months obsessed not with, say, Spelunky, but with setting up a home server in my house. What the hell?
Alas, my writing lives, as do I myself, at the whim of my terrible interests: the muses, or what remain of them, come capriciously to my doorstep, bearing extremely annoying packages full of trash, and it is my holy terrestrial duty to sign for them. I don’t make the rules.
That said, while I’m not going to shove one hundred emails about my experience LARPing as a wildly inept IT professional down your throats, I am probably going to write about some shit that isn’t video games.
Blah blah blah. What’s this mean for you, dear reader?
The plan right now is to migrate the newsletter to the Ghost platform, which I believe allows both blogging and newsletter writing. There, I hope to blog about various things more regularly; if all goes to plan I will also occasionally send out a newsletter featuring collected links to highlights and/or a unique piece of writing. I have all of your email addresses (I say, cackling evilly), so unless you are exclusively using the Substack app to read posts, it should only manifest as a change in sent-from address and email formatting.
If you are an app user—well, for one thing, apps are just websites you can’t block ads trackers etc. on, whereas e-mail is a highly interoperable fifty-year-old communications protocol open and flexible far in excess of substack.apk or whatever the iOS equivalent is, so I recommend checking it out—or if you are an RSS subscriber—in which case I love you and the Kingdom of Heaven is within you—don’t worry! Because I’ll send out at least one more Substack email with the link to the new blog in there.
I also have a few other projects on the burner but I’m not sure how much longer they need to boil. Weeks…months…years? How slow doth heat the stovetop of my soul! Oh well.
For real, though: I did just want to take a moment to say that I really can’t express my gratitude for reading this newsletter. It has been continually and profoundly moving to find that anything rattling around in my head would be of interest to anyone else. The early days of “Corridors of Time” overlapped with a pretty disappointing period of my life; having the capacity to share what I think and care about with you all gave me a comfort I don’t at all take for granted. Thank you all so, so much. See you soon!!
Sincerely,
Theodora
[1] I am footnoting this because it feels unusually catty? Anyway, scrolling through the Substack feed feels like watching people labor (in varying degrees of good faith) to interpret algorithmically-curated output as if it’s a representative expression of the Foucauldian episteme or the economic superstructure or something.
For what it’s worth, based on what I have read from “my subscribers” (insane phrase), this windmill-tiltery probably does not apply to you if you are reading this—honestly, I would not include this footnote if it did. Because more than cool regular bloggy thinkpiecey stuff, the Substack feed, like all such feeds, frequently serves me “ragebait,” which—and this is a brave admission, for which I deserve admiration—genuinely infuriates me every single time. I know my gracious, wise, beneficent, genial, demigoddishly patient presentation surely occults such dark facts from view. But at this point the web gets me fucking tilted. Dear reader, I am mad online.
To be clear, I feel neurochemically allergic to algorithmic feeds in general at this point, and Substack’s is probably better than most. But the last time I accidentally wound up on the Substack feed, I was presented a totally brain-dead “essay” about how ADHD is fake and then another one arguing that the novelist William T. Vollmann killed his daughter, who died, tragically, of chronic alcoholism. (This is a link to Vollmann’s moving piece about this, not the Substack post.) Or today, one day after I wrote that last sentence, I logged on to work on this piece and was greeted with a quote claiming that “AI is the Ozempic of learning,” which I guess makes sense if you think AI is good, but this was a claim that AI was bad? Isn’t the weight you lose on GLP-1 inhibitors real weight? Like a pound is just a pound? Can people just like literally not string thoughts together? Were they ever able to?????? What the fuck is going on!!!
[2] The history of technology is indeed teleological: the process which began with the discovery of fire and the invention of the abacus has found final transcendent expression in the unfathomable reality that I can press like three buttons and then play the campaign of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 at 1440p120 on medium-high settings on a 55” television I got for $300.