I’ll get around to posting pictures of what we got for Christmas (Sol Invictus) as the kids stay still for them.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to join a few more Discord servers — you can indefinitely mute notification noises from entire servers “until you turn it back on”, which is great — that have to do with gaming. I figured that it couldn’t hurt to be a member of more than just, like… two servers, and as much as I like Supernatural I didn’t want to put all of my eggs into the Supernatural basket. It’ll still be there, but I don’t want it to be the primary (or only) reason that I use Discord. I’ve also found that I don’t have to feel as though I need to hide participation in gaming activities like I do participation in fandom ones from those who know me in real life, and the more problematic aspects of participation in certain fandoms caused me to begin doing this in approximately… 2012. So yeah. Not only do I not know anyone in person who would be interested in fandom — all of my friends are the faithful members of the “general audience” that gets slipped into debates — but it’s also not something that I would feel comfortable bringing up to them, and that’s not something that I feel bad about. I want to continue participating in hobbies and interests, being able to talk about more of those hobbies and interests with all of my friends without first having to scrutinize whether or not I “should” dependent on what type of friend they are… and as stated, I don’t want all of my eggs in the same basket.

For the record, I don’t see this as a “goodbye” or me announcing that I am leaving fandom or anything.

It’s just me announcing that I may not be quite as available to do fandom-related things as I had previously been because I want to engage in other hobbies and interests as well. I may not be “around” as often in that sense, and that’s okay. But for the people who have known me longer than my participation in various fandoms, especially those that have known me as a gamer, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of them.

We are beginning to spike once again because of the Omicron variant, which seems to be able to side-step immunity conferred by vaccines to a point. Google updates this… whenever Google updates this, but it is still deeply concerning. I think the United States is going to be in a pandemic for awhile because none of us, at least as a whole, are willing to quarantine, everyone is rushing to get their kids back into school so that they can rush back into work, the whole nine. (And the rest of the world isn’t much better than we are right now.)