two years of this nonsense
It turns out that Silly Thoughts is two years old. Two! Two whole years of this blithering crap. I’ve actually been blogging on and off since I was 13 or so, but thankfully, the Wayback Machine does not seem to have any memories of my old blogs, which mostly involved me moaning about girls that were mean to me, and wondering how I could actually become a vampire slayer (those girls wouldn’t laugh at me if I had the power to kick a grown man’s arse, that’s all I’m saying).
I stopped blogging for a bit and then started again when my daughter was a baby. It gave me something to focus on and reignited my passion (which in turn kickstarted my actual job). So I know people like to poke fun of people who write blogs but actually, I owe blogging a lot.
I wonder how much of my writing is floating around out there in the ether. Old files, suspended in time and space, waiting to be found in dead Livejournal accounts and old emails, or stored on floppy discs. When I was a teenager I would write stories for my friends, starring us, and whatever we were into at the time. They liked them, which in turn spurred me on to do more (so really it’s their own fault for encouraging me). I won’t tell you which friends or what I wrote about, but I will say at least one of us was obsessed with Orlando Bloom and if you can’t write yourself and your friends into the making of The Lord of the Rings movies, then what is the point of being able to write in the first place?
Anyway. I believe that many people are capable of concocting a story involving their friend specializing in elf make-up and being so beautiful and down-to-earth that movie stars happen to fall in love with them by accident. It’s just one of those things that you need to practice, and it happens to be the thing that I like doing the most.*
Been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn in a very lackadaisical on-and-off sort of way, and my favourite thing is finding data points. For those of you who haven’t played it (or don’t play games in general), the game is set way into the future, and data points are little snippets of lore you can find scattered about the landscape. They’re old recordings, articles, and so on, and they allow you to build a picture of what society used to be like.
I really like a game that will allow you to find out this rich, in-depth back story without shoving it down your throat. I like piecing it all together as I happen upon things. If this was my job (to make stuff up for videogames), the idea that people could plough through the game and not find everything would drive me absolutely insane. I would want to railroad them into it. If I was going to create an entire world from my brain, I would want people to see it and think, cool. At a bare minimum.
So I have respect for game developers who feel confident enough to just let it be. It’s got me wondering though.
What would happen if there were some kind of massive apocalypse-style event? A horrific global tragedy with only a few survivors left to rebuild? And what if one day all our data — our emails and our social media posts and our files and so on — were almost all completely destroyed, except for a few fragments? And what if one day, a small girl with unnatural levels of curiosity were to stumble upon these fragments? And what if she made it her mission to collect and document these findings over the course of her lifetime? And what if her biggest findings were seventeen fanfiction stories based on me and my friends dating each of the hobbit actors respectively, and a couple of blog posts whinging about camping and low-rise jeans?
Admittedly it would be a very large coincidence that she would happen upon my stuff from the absolutely mammoth amount of data out there. If she wanted to find the fanfiction she’d probably have to land right on top of my parents’ house. And their house would either be massively overgrown or completely gone, so the chances of a box of floppy discs surviving for so long are slim to none. She would also have to have some way of reading these floppy discs. Unlikely given that floppy discs were laughably outdated in 2002 when I was using them, let alone in 3002 or whenever. And her tribe might believe that this sort of thing is tantamount to witchcraft so she’d have to develop backdated technology in secret alongside fighting for survival, lest she be exiled from the group.
Look, I’m not saying I’ve thought it through all the way, okay? It’s just got me wondering whether I should be writing things that are more profound and less about the fact that nowadays, if I were to write fanfiction about anyone in The Lord of the Rings, it would obviously be Aragorn.
But hey. Silly Thoughts makes me happy. Sometimes I just need to write stupid stuff that serves no real purpose. And so thank you, thank you (to my friends and my online friends, and the odd stranger that comes by here sometimes) for reading, and for commenting, and for sometimes telling me ‘hey, I read your blog!’ in person, and putting up with me doing a shocked Pikachu face in response. I’ve been writing for longer than I haven’t been, but every single time I share something I get a bit nervous, so it genuinely means a lot to me (and surprises me) that anyone reads it at all. So. Thanks. ❤
*Reading this back it makes it sound like I’ve written so much fanfiction about my friend charming the pants off Orlando Bloom that it actually eclipses the number of books set in Middle Earth, but I promise I meant writing in general and not just this specific thing. Honest. Although now I’m wondering what would have happened between her and Orlando, and perhaps it would end up with her living her best life, ignoring the fact that her ex now likes to paddleboard naked alongside Katy Perry. Hmmmm.
