For ages I’ve tried to be a blogger. I started off ok, much like a lot of people do, but then I trailed off quite badly.

I’ve attempted to be an online content maker since my teens. One of the first, and most fondly remembered, hobbies I had after moving out on my own was creating a webcomic, mostly based around injokes about my flatmates and I.

My first attempt, a terrible thing called “The Other Goths” was made of cut and pasted vector art, that I’d basically copied from Real Life. Most of the jokes were based around my then-flatmate Nick being some kind of stand in for Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (could I have been more of a teenage goth cliche?). For some reason this became kind of popular among my friends and a goth forum community I was part of at the time.

After I moved out of that flat I started a new strip, the name of which I still use for this blog: Infinite Stupidity. This I don’t think was as bad, since I started actually drawing the art myself. I only made it through about 33 pages before I stopped drawing it, for reasons I can’t remember now (we are talking about something that happened around a decade ago).

Flash forward to today. I’m trying to do something with my life other than go to work, drink, come home and watch TV or play games, but hell, I continuously sabotage my own creative output. One of the biggest problems I have nowadays is that I might sit down and start a post, but I’ll get about 250-500 words in and either lose any inspiration that I have, or I’ll do some research on what my point is in the post and I’ll work out that I can’t back up my own argument. There’s also the problem where I haven’t figured out what my niche is.

I’m a bit of a jack of all trades. I’ve got knowledge of a lot of things, but not enough to be comfortable calling myself an expert, or having the confidence to write a lot about it. This is why every time I post it’s about something completely different.

Here’s a few ideas I’ve had for what I can focus on, with the reasons I’ve given myself for not actually doing it:

• Beer: One of the things that people most often associate with me is drinking beer, since I do drink a lot of it. I’d love to focus more on writing about it, but if I’ve got to be honest, I wouldn’t know the first thing. I know what I like, I know the technical side of how it’s brewed, I know the academics. When it comes to being able to drink a beer and describe its underlying flavours and its flaws, I fail. I would attribute it to my palate being, well, pretty shit (probably due to my sense of smell being pretty undeveloped). I think a blog about beer would be pretty boring if every post were “I like it”.
• Games: I like games, but just the same, I don’t know if I feel comfortable talking about them. It’s not often that I get a game while people are still talking about it, and when a game turns up cheap on the Steam sale it’s not really worth people’s time to do a review. Granted, I am very tempted to do a writeup about Fallout 4 at some point, but I guess I’m only about 30 hours gametime into it so far, so time spent writing about it is time that I’m not playing it.
• Food: My very first posts on this blog were about cooking, which I absolutely loved. What I don’t love now is the fact that I wrote those posts trying to imitate another blogger who was cooking and writing expletive-laden pieces about the process. I stopped doing that to try and get my own voice, which I feel that I haven’t succeeded in, a few years later.
• Social Justice: The fact that I am privileged in society makes me feel uncomfortable talking about social issues. The last thing I want to do is end up talking over someone who is actually being disadvantaged in society.
• TV: Yeah, maybe I should start reviewing TV shows, since I watch enough of them. But I don’t know if I want to be that guy? You know?

Anyway, that’s probably enough self indulgence for me. One of these days I’ll make myself write, or do one of the other things that will better me. I’ll run out of excuses one day, right?