When I used to hop around on a dozen different websites, I always loved “about me” paged. Someone’s corner of the internet had a place just for them to tell you directly about them.
It never imparted the way we now try to know people through social media. Someone wanted you to really be able to put a person behind what you were looking at. It was always interesting to crawl their website years later: so visually different in goals and personality, and always find those little pages tucked away unchanged.
We’ve been doing DEEP-HELL.COM for about three years at the pace our readers are probably accustomed to. In that time, there’s been space for breaks but not really any time for re-evaluation.
Introspection that’s put into practice is supposedly good for the soul, and we’ve had a lot of time for it as of late. Everyone’s feeling a little more isolated these days, as states focus on forcing us to
be back around each other. Friendships become tinged with an icy fear: could seeing this person I love kill me? We’re all turning to the internet.
Did you know that we’re creating so much data we could theoretically alter the mass size of the Planet Earth? We may hit a point in the near future where data becomes literally heavy. In society’s wake to turn the internet into the perfect outlet for our political misgivings, anxieties, fetishes and honest-to-goodness despair at the state of things, we’re encouraging each other to try and engage with every little thing they can. Everything is a distraction or a new phase to analyze or something. If you’re that type of writer – cool, it’s not fun for me, (for we), personally (deep-hell.com).
DEEP-HELL.COM isn’t going anywhere. As we head back into the world, as the US heads into a fraught election cycle, we’re just taking some advice.
So what if that advice is from Arsenal Gear, the AI that steers the latter half of narrative in Metal Gear Solid 2? It’s good advice!
There’s too much to talk about. We’ve never believed good writing truly comes from ‘having an opinion’ about everything so much as ‘let yourself have feelings’ about anything. We’re not a conversational platform: there are things that in our public lives it does us very little to constantly be yelling about or even having to think about.
Nevertheless, there will be an urge to Be A Part of Things. About a year ago I started a Twitter account. That’s brought great things, and put us in contact with fantastic websites like No Escape, and talented game artists and fiction-makers. In exchange for that has been a constant, low temperature simmering of our grey matter. Not only has it placed us in an awkward place of apparently calling the wrong person a Dumbass Motherfucker apparently, it’s lead to an assumption by some writers we respect that we’re there for the act of making friends. That’s not to say we don’t value the people we meet or work with. We do, because we’re the best. We also don’t want to view some of those relationships as anything other than “people we sometimes read who’s stuff we like”.
We enjoy writing and getting to write things every week – but it’s started becoming too much of a strain and a burden. Not only do I want to resist writing becoming something unenjoyable – I’d like to take time away from the thousand or so words I agonize over every week to writing and creating in different ways.
There might be flashes of hot updates here and there. You may even get some that lead up to something special, and hear nothing from us but banal posts to robbie rackleff about how good Astral Chain felt to play for a month. At the very least, DEEP-HELL will be taking some time to focus on the quality of the writing we create, but also the form and shape of creativity I enjoy getting to share with strangers. We’ve also got a list of people three miles long we’d like to make some things with, and that’s hard to do when you’re constantly engaging with little distractions.