Angels of Death

Criticizing Criticism

Super Mario World is one of the first games I remember playing. For five or six year-old Solomon, “playing” meant entering and exiting the Top Secret Area for infinite power-ups, 1-Ups, and Yoshis.  The monotony fueled my gaming madness. I knew nothing else about video games, and I loved Super Mario World.

Twenty years later and I found myself nitpicking apart Super Mario Odyssey, a game I appreciate far more than its SNES counterpart. Two decades of gaming had established a rewarding and beloved past time for me, but it aged me into a whiny, critical curmudgeon. Especially since starting my website, I can rarely play a new game without determining a review score or separating the positives and negatives into semi-concise bullet points. Like an established wine connoisseur, I may appreciate the finer aspects of a video game, but I’m also a pretentious ass who doesn’t understand that every game is good if it takes you away from reality and can be made into a drinking contest.

This same conundrum impacts how I have viewed and currently view my creative endeavors. Until about high school, I believed my writing conveyed the equivalent of God’s gospel. I wrote without fear. Nowadays, I obsessively compare my reviews to those on professional websites, questioning how I ever felt confident enough to publish burning garbage on the internet. I view my videos similarly, often berating my commentary while cursing my microphone’s sound quality.

Ignorance, innocence, and experience constitute the Holy Trinity of enjoying life. Ignorance allows you to ignore what you don’t know and focus only on what you do, which can massage or kick your ass based on the unknown information. Innocence encourages you to enjoy something as it is rather than what it could be, which fosters both content and complacency. Experience brings understanding, insight, and improvement but also self-doubt, regret, and some pessimism. Balancing them all seems to be the right option, especially after I described each one as a double-edged sword. Right now, I happen to be balancing the bad parts of ignorance and innocence with the bad parts of experience.

What a cynical man I am. Regardless of my critical nature, this new style of video (commentary over prerecorded footage) has worked better than talking off the cuff. If you have feedback, let me know! Meanwhile, I’ll fester in this echo chamber of my own doing.

An Imperfect God Complex

For this journal, we’ll imagine God as a brilliant but flawed artist.¹⁺² He crafted awe-inspiring mountain ranges, forests, and beaches but also made Wyoming. You can see mastery in the creation of the dazzling peacocks, regal tigers, or majestic elephants. You may also question if God churned out the manatee after wondering what an aquatic scrotum would look like. When you realize we, as humans, have the power to mold the world but still can’t lick our elbows, you begin to see that God didn’t nail every design out there.

We now ask, “Should God have published all of His work, or should He have thrown out all of his subpar products?” It’s a question we all must ponder, the only exception being Neo Nazis who have yet to understand their mouths should not behave like their anuses. To scale this grandiose question to a personal one, I wrestle with the idea of trashing my bad videos/articles or leaving them as is to show the range of my ability. I’ve tackled this conundrum since my very first videos.

This is not a good video. It didn’t feel good recording or watching it. It may not be my worst, but it seems to lurk down there somewhere. As you can see, I posted it, but was this the right choice? At what point do I raise my expectations of myself and only publish content meeting those expectations?

I don’t know yet. Without an opinionated audience, I don’t have the backlash to tell me if I fell short. Rather, I must eyeball my work, myself. I have scrapped many videos, but this one was glitch-free and coherent even if it was boring. If I wanted to redo it, I would have to play through the whole section again while starting a new recording session. Faced with such demand, my laziness won out and here we are.

Today, I may have made the dodo bird, but next time, I hope to make an emu. If you have any ideas or schematics for large flightless birds, let me know.

Wyoming: THERE’S NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL.

¹

For those who don’t believe in monotheism, no worries. Simply substitute God with your all-powerful entity of choice, be it Cthulhu, a council of Greek gods, Barbara Streisand, or the emotionless nothingness of space in which we are but specks of specks of dust crushed into meaningless by the uncaring pressure of time. It all works the same.

²

For those offended by satirical depictions of God, I also have you covered. Replace every instance of “God” with the name, “Archibald,” and now you have a really cool story about this super powerful guy named “Archibald.”

Ignoring What Works

If page views dictated my content, I would have trashed this video journal around when I started complaining about this video journal. These entries—by far—attract the fewest page clicks out of all the articles on my website. Considering my weekly views still putter in the single-digits, many of my posts never see an audience, and the large majority of my video journal entries collect dust on their hyperlinks.

My two short stories have lured the most visitors by a significant margin, followed by my videos edited by Editor One, followed by my reviews as a whole. I have NoSleep to thank for the popularity of my stories and YouTube for the random views on my videos. Most people who visit my website from either source tend to click on a few pages before shoving off. Without the glory of WordPress Reader, this is how I generate traffic.

Logic would advise me to drop most of my other content and focus exclusively on edited videos and horror short stories. Diving deeper into the video realm certainly intrigues me because YouTube stardom is the new American dream (apart from affordable and adequate housing). It was also my dream to focus exclusively on short stories with solomonrambling.com before I determined Nintendo Switch topics and stories would better guarantee a consistent audience. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, so I can clearly see I was an idiot.

Despite my hindsight, I have come to enjoy the varied nature of my website. I like writing all the work you can find here, even my poorly-named and time-consuming blogitorials. Each article requires me to approach my writing differently, which provides both variety and a challenge. Perhaps I would be further along in terms of viewers if I only made videos and short stories, but this is an “if” I don’t regret. My website is me, and if I ever do have a consistent fan base, they’ll have quite a selection to digest.

Do you have any suggestions? Of course you don’t. You don’t exist. Didn’t you read this entry? Of course you didn’t. No one does, you nobody you. However, if you happen to be someone from a future in which I am famous, leave a comment for the Solomon of 9/12/2018.