Once again I’m having problems getting posts out on this blog.
This site is driven by three things: model kit builds, photographing those model kit builds, and writing about them. At any given time, two of the three of these activities are fun and easy to do, while I have absolutely zero motivation to do the third.
Earlier this year it was the photography that was the sticking point, but lately it’s been the writing. Well, actually, writing has always been a problem, but I’ve managed to suppress my feelings and push through it. That’s becoming harder and harder to do in this brave new world.
Let’s rewind time. When I was younger I wrote video game reviews and editorials for an amateur website. Sometimes we got comments on our work (usually on the site itself, but also sometimes when we submitted stories to places like Digg).
In parallel, I spent a lot of time reading other people’s writing, and participating in discussions on pre-social media message boards. Long story short, the comments that both I and these other writers received cooked my brain a little
These folks would do everything they could to try and shoot you down. Did you miss stating a certain fact? Did you acknowledge that there are always edge cases to any given maxim? Did you fail to entertain even the most minor, nitpicky little counter argument? Congratulations! You’d be told your entire argument is invalid, and that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
In retrospect, I know I shouldn’t have let these people bother me, but they did. Over time it began to affect my writing. I’d go out of my way to cover every base, uncover every fact, add every disclaimer, and try and figure out every single counter argument that the imaginary Internet Troll in my head could come up with. To this day my writing is still like this, and it’s largely been a curse. It’s the main reason why I stopped writing about gaming, which is something I used to love doing.
As for this hobby focused blog, it hasn’t been a problem largely because I’m not doing much in the way of forming arguments. My build posts are mainly about reporting facts and observations and self critique; there’s really not much an Internet troll can say to shoot me down. I guess they could make fun of the quality of my builds, but weirdly that’s one thing I don’t really care about,
But I’ve noticed that my motivation has been subtly shifting. I guess the best way to describe it is that I find myself increasingly frustrated at the (lack of) quality, reliable information in the English speaking Gundam fandom. There are so many people spouting lies, half truths, and bullshit, and I hate how it muddies the waters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen two people assert two falsehoods, and then argue with each other about which one is true.
This has caused me to seep back into my old ways. I’m trying in vain to try and gather as many facts and educated guesses as I possibly can.
“Facts and educated guesses about what?” you may ask. About everything! I’m finding myself trying to exhaustively report on the ways in which a given mobile suit is portrayed in different media, whether certain things about it are or are not cannon, facts about the contents of each model, speculation on why it was engineered a certain way, etc, all in hopes of providing data that’s as well researched as possible, so as to cut through all the BS.
But it’s all a bit much. Too much for me to handle. The amount of effort it takes to do the research, organize my thoughts, edit and revise them, and gather screenshots is becoming insurmountable. I just don’t have the time and energy to do it all on top of everything else I’ve got going on.
As much as I’d like to inject a little bit more truth (or even just well reasoned speculation) into the world, I can’t allow myself to turn into a walking Gundam encylopedia. It’s not worth my sanity.
But quitting is not that simple. The voice of that imaginary Internet Troll is back in my head, and it says things like:
“NOOOOO you can’t just write a few paragraphs about a mobile suit and then build the model. You have to prove that you watched the show, and paid attention, and did supplemental research after the fact, otherwise you’re nothing more than a tourist!”
I know this sounds silly. I think it’s sill too. But sometimes we can acknowledge that a feeling is ridiculous, and still struggle to shake. But I have to shake it if I want to move forward. So here’s what I’m going to say, both to myself and to trolls (imagined or otherwise).
I’ve been writing about this hobby for over ten years, all in my spare time. In that time I’ve never attempted to use this site to gain fame or fortune. That’s not something a tourist would do.
Going forward, if I omit something in my writing, it may be that I didn’t know about it. But it may also be that I didn’t want to bother going into it. And I’m not going to try and prove it either way to anyone, because it isn’t worth it (more on that later).
Phew! That made me feel a lot better. Now it’s time to move on to the next problem.
All those years of trying to write in a precise, detail oriented manner in order to stave off trolls and critics shaped my writing style in ways that are really hard for me to shake. And that’s become a problem in recent years. At least I think it might be.
Basically, I’m constantly worried that the way I write is too similar to LLM’s write. I don’t care if people don’t read this site (I know this because I don’t look at traffic metrics). I don’t care if people think poorly of my posts (I know this because I don’t have comments, or do any sort of self promotion). But for some reason I hate the idea that someone would dismiss my writing right off the bat because they think it’s AI Slop.
It’s created a lose-lose situation. I’ve tried to mindfully change the way I write, and it never ends well. All I do is overthink it and get anxious. But if I don’t try, then I worry about what others will think of it.
This dilemma has me completely stuck. It’s the main reason why there hasn’t been a new post in over a month. It’s the reason why I’ve built three models since then, and I haven’t shared them here.
I need to do something about it.
First though, I want to make things clear. The only time I ever “use AI” for this website is when I run Japanese text through the machine translator (which is a thing that’s been in existence since long before modern LLM’s took the world be storm). I don’t use it for anything else, and I don’t plan to. That’s simply a personal choice.
But anyway, the problem here is that there is a difference between folks who are genuinely concerned or skeptical about AI, and those who are anti-AI simply for the sake of being contrarian, or because they see it as the new, easy, acceptable purity test that they can use to shun and shame others while feeling better about themselves.
It’s those last two categories which tend to be the loudest and most vocal, and I have to try hard to remind myself that they aren’t worth listening to. The truth is that you could do everything those people ask of you, and they’d simply move the goalposts and find another reason to dunk on you.
Which isn’t to say I can’t or shouldn’t try and improve my writing style, but it has to be something I do because I want to improve my ability to convey ideas to people, not to satisfy people who will condemn you at the sight of a single em dash.
Hopefully I’ll have some real posts for you soon. Thanks for reading.
Addendum
I wonder if they’d even condemn me for using an em dash. I always just use a regular dash/minus sign instead of an actual em dash character.
Actually, no, they’d probably hate me even more for doing that.