Happy 5 Years of Comparative Geeks!

It’s true! This was the holiday weekend, back in 2013, that we started up Comparative Geeks and got this whole thing going. We’re now coming off of by far our longest hiatus, and it’s good to be back! Hopefully you’ve noticed that the podcast is back – remember you can subscribe to that on iTunes or find the feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ComparativeOpinions

At this point in our lives, now with the Geek Baby and the Nerd Baby, the podcast is by far the easiest thing for us to do. It takes that back-and-forth discussion time that we tended to put into posts and turns it into a process where you can join along! Hopefully you’ve given us a listen and enjoy it – let us know what else you’d like to see us doing with that. Week in Geek should be back soon, a news podcast is a bit daunting after a hiatus, I must say!

We did have a Star Trek post go up Saturday by Hannah – hopefully you caught that! And we’ll try to keep some written content coming, it’s just gotten harder to find the time! That should improve with time.

(That’s the theory).

Meanwhile, David had thoughts of trying to dive back into The Astral Chronicles, but is now not sure. Spending these 5 years as media consumers and critics, he’s realized he’s spent a lot of time saying what he likes to see is new stories – and maybe The Astral Chronicles isn’t quite there. This is leading to thoughts of a more  commentary/non-fiction webcomic, rather than a story-based fiction webcomic. Stay tuned!

In the coming months we’ll also probably make the transition back to WordPress off of our self-hosted site. Life got too busy not only for us but for all of our contributors, making the push to really grow the site too much to sustain. That’s okay – we’re happy still with where we’re at right now! Thanks for sticking with us, dear readers.

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A Pause, A Reflection

Happy Birthday to me!

It’s my birthday, and has become our tradition, I am just writing whatever I want for my birthday. Which, as has been fairly pointed out, isn’t much different from any other day of the year.

Except lately, it is different. A little while back, I finally broke down, gave in, and stopped putting out articles, blog posts, and fillers, on a daily basis. I was keeping the dream alive, but with Holly dealing with pregnancy, and one by one our contributors having other parts of life to contend with, it was down largely to me – and I wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

It being my birthday, I am in particular doing the sort of “what am I doing it for and what are we accomplishing by it?” thinking that comes with the passage of time. It’s a reflective time.

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I wanted to get started with Comparative Geeks – something we did back in January 2013 – to get myself into a regular habit of writing. Here more recently, however, the focus had fallen onto the “regular” part of the equation, rather than the “writing” part. I honestly haven’t written much of anything resembling an essay in some time, and my poor webcomic has languored since March.

Since we’re hitting a big reset moment here soon – with a baby expected in a month’s time, and us planning to take the end of the year off from the site – the questions I’m asking myself are really, what do I plan on doing when we come back in January?

The pop culture and geek culture stuff that we talk about was always about the content. It’s served us well all this time, it’s what we consume, what we’re interested in. At this point, our consumption is way down, and I think our two podcasts are covering that nicely. We’re consuming far more news than content, for instance, and Week in Geek gives us a nice outlet to talk about the stories of the week. Meanwhile, for more topic-driven and review-based content, Comparative Opinions is a lot of fun to do, and it matches roughly our current ability to consume the culture and commentate on it!

What’s funny, though, is that while these podcasts have been accomplishing the goals of Comparative Geeks, they still haven’t been meeting my writing goal.

And when you get down to it, the writing goal is about content creation, about me taking some of my stories and getting them out there. In the long decision making process of choosing whether I’d prefer to pursue non-fiction or fiction, I leaned to fiction, and I need to get back to that. I’ve missed it.

So if we’re back in January as mainly 2 podcasts a week, an ongoing webcomic story, and the occasional essay or review post, with the occasional piece by contributors, I think the biggest thing is just to feel okay with that. Being happy with what you are doing in life has a lot to do with setting expectations, and I’m currently dealing with changing expectations.

And that’s okay. Because pushing this further to pursue what I want out of it – rather than enforcing some sense of what “ought” to be happening – should lead to something better for everyone.

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In closing, I want to say that I don’t tend to think that we – people, humans, individuals, societies – ever have to “peak.” We can be constantly improving, constantly bettering ourselves. Nonetheless, as a personal thought that isn’t quite in line with conventional wisdom, there’s plenty of doubt. But hey, sometimes that doubt is a great song, so it’s worth it, right?

Some Thoughts for our Future at Comparative Geeks!

Hello, dear readers! You may have noticed it’s largely just been me (David) around these parts lately. Rather than bury the lead, I should just say… we’re expecting a second Geek Baby! Due in November, so we’ve been making a lot of plans around this fact, and it’s coloring our decision making otherwise.

And one big decision is, of course, Comparative Geeks. We started the site because we felt like we had so much we love to talk about, and the Internet gave us the place to put ourselves out there and do so. We’ve met a ton of great people along the way, and last year, we swept up a bunch of those great people and brought them along with us to this new self-hosted site to make a go of it on our own.

It’s not really gone to plan.

Life has caught up with each and every one of our contributors, up to and including Holly then with the pregnancy, and me just chipping away posting every day isn’t quite the vision we originally had for all of this.

We’ve also noticed that, surely, it’s not as easy to interact with this site, for our longtime WordPress-based readers. Easily measured elements like the “like” button and comments have been down. I know some of that is that quality has decreased lately – like I said, it’s just been me trying to keep things afloat – but it’s more than that.

So one thing that we’re going to work on figuring out in the coming weeks is moving the site back onto WordPress.com. More details on that to come. We’ll move this whole archive over, and bring along all the contributors as well for when there’s time and interest for them to write. Overall, I wouldn’t expect much of a change in that way – just that we’ll have WordPress taking care of the technical aspects of this whole endeavor.

One of the big pushes for going out on our own was to do more with advertising, which also hasn’t really come together. Given that I think we have more of a smaller, dedicated readership than necessarily some sort of growing brand, I’m thinking something like a Patreon may be more appropriate – and doesn’t need a self-hosted site at all.

We would tie something like that to the Podcast or perhaps the webcomic (or exclusives tied to those sorts of things). Which, speaking of those…

Comparative Opinions and Podcasting

One thing we’ve found – and discussed in this last podcast – was that it’s been a bit easier to podcast than write, of late. And we expect that to only be more true in the future. As such, we’re working on coming up with a second podcast, scooping up some of the bits of Comparative Opinions and overall leading to what will hopefully be more like two 30-minute podcasts, rather than one 45-minute podcast.

The second cast we would focus around geek news, and would include information and opinion around the world of geek. Then Comparative Opinions would focus around the longer topical element each week.

The Webcomic and other articles

One thing that’s happened to the webcomic – other than me taking a break and losing my stride – is that by picking up more and more of the weekly content, I haven’t had time to add the webcomic creation back into my life. It did take some dedicated time to do – usually the effort of a few sessions, not just one like many posts will be.

But I want to keep going with it, and even see if I can get to posting 2 or more times a week. However, to do that – and to more correctly align with our current life reality – I think that the goal we’ve set for ourselves of daily posting needs to be let go.

We got into daily posting in the first place as a reasonable, realistic goal to set for ourselves, and we kept it up for a good long while. Well, okay, it was originally 6 a week with a day off. During the first Geek Baby pregnancy, we dropped it to 5 a week. With the new Comparative Geeks, we went to one (or more) a day and I’ve tried to keep that going, without necessarily re-evaluating it. Well, that time is now.

I would rather we were providing good content – interesting, unique, or at least passionate – rather than just presenting content just because I’m forcing myself to do so. The biggest risk will be that we start to slide and post far less frequently, so please, dear readers, keep on top of us. I’m not looking to take big breaks. But if in two nights I could do one good post, rather than over two nights doing two filler posts, well, one of these scenarios is truly better.

Looking Forward

Holly will be back at it. Other contributors will return, and each will have time and not as their lives ebb and flow. Comparative Geeks is continuing on.

But it’s time to both return to where we probably should be, and to slow ourselves down to be a better voice. Thank you for sticking with us, dear readers, and let us know your thoughts and anything you would like to see from us. Cheers!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day 2017!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I’ll admit, we’ve been leaning on holidays of late a bit as a time to sit back, say hello to our readers, and take a day. We’ve needed some days.

Holly and David are entering a particularly busy point in their lives at the moment. It should be (relatively) short term, but will still be potentially disruptive here on the site. We still want to have a post up a day, but they may not all be as full as others. The other contributors are all going through various phases of their lives, and life comes first, but we should have some great material coming from them soon too.

Hope that your spring, your spring break, your St. Patrick’s day, your Friday, your weekend – whatever moment is happening in your life right now – is excellent.

That Feeling When… All You Want To Do Is Curl Up With Something You Know

I’ve been feeling a lot lately like what I want to do is curl up with something I know, something I’m familiar with. And when you have that feeling, well, it helps drive your decision making, right? Like, we’ve been re-watching Parks & Rec – a show we finished watching not that long ago.

We traveled with a number of games we love and know, as well. We got Diablo 3 in and I remembered that’s a ton of fun on the console, with a shared screen. We played some Borderlands 2 and now I’d really like to try a new playthrough with our powerful characters.

I wanted to play a Final Fantasy game and so I picked back up Final Fantasy VII on the PSP over the choice of something like Crisis Core or Tactics, both of which I haven’t played much. And I picked up XCom for a new playthrough, and oh man, I had forgotten how much fun this game is.

It’s my base!

And there’s a new Final Fantasy game and a new XCom game I could be playing instead. And could be reviewing here on the site.

Which means, there’s maybe the real problem: there’s media-related things I should be doing, we should be doing, to find new things. To review new things. To write about. And I’m sure we will, and we do. I mean, we played 7 Wonders Duel yesterday for the first time, and that was a blast!

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And we’ve delved into new shows and things, and we’re looking ahead at a new movie season, and all that. But you know? Sometimes you just want to curl up with something you know and bask in some nostalgia and things that you know are good.

How about you, readers? What do you do when you feel like this? Do you give in to the nostalgia? Do you push yourself towards new experiences? I’d love to hear your strategies and opinions in the comments below!