seven years ago if you search for it, well, that might be one of the only uses of italic text on the entire deep-hell.com that isn’t the title of a videogame, a movie, or an album. I like to think I win something by sticking to some kind of personal rule that we won’t use italic text to tell you where to think when eyes pass over one phrase or another. If there’s some kind of cheat code, maybe the kind of people who get degrees about writing, maybe there’s a secret all of them know that we don’t, you and I.
Seven years ago as I was saying, maybe eight by the time this is out, we started deep-hell.com.

It was out of a kind of pig-headedness. I did some bad shit to people close to me, and who hasn’t when they’re young and hurting? But the hurt only goes so far before you have to take some kind of responsibility with the rest of the world around you. So maybe you get bitter and angry, maybe the skin around the bones of knuckles turns white and goes through the glass of a bathroom mirror or dry wall. Maybe the person throwing it has never thrown a punch, never thrown a real punch, in their entire life, and that’s just the first time. Only one time out of many that they’ve ever had any kind of outlet where the body feels cool afterwards.

it’s a trap, right? We all know that ex-boyfriend, or we’ve all been that ex-boyfriend. The one who’s put a hole through drywall with nowhere else to go. I was one of the smart ones, i’ll pat myself on the back. it’s been years: I figured out it feels a lot better to put a hole through a body. One that’s going to stand right back up and do the same thing to me. There’s no lesson of humility that comes faster than realizing you can really hurt in a way that carries over to tomorrow, to next week, and having to hold the eyes of the person who did it to you again every week. I want other people to cause my chronic pain, and only hold myself responsible for it.

In San Francisco I stood three feet away from Videogames, herself: a coalition of Very Important Persons. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I remember seeing any of those award winners come down to the show floor afterwards I don’t know if they came down to see the Independent Games Pavilion. I’ve stood next to them and not been notable, and god damn, that’s all I need right? I’ve seen them shake hands and drink free wine from a VIP bar and mingle with strangers. I leave all of the uncomfortable feelings I had beyond a cloth mask in the GDC articles on the cutting room floor somewhere. Hiding my face because I had an inkling I didn’t beyond, maybe somebody would remember it after the fact.

I could mingle myself, no mask, and lock eyes with all of the staff from the GDC pit the days afterwards without them knowing who I was. They’d look to that convention badge and back to my eyes. I’m familiar but maybe the person staring can’t quite place why. I didn’t see any of the VIP’s come to check out the independent games showcase in the time afterwards, and who can fault them? Maybe we were all a little too busy drinking free wine.

I wish I could say before I ever wrote a word about videogames I spent my time writing about music: as much as it’s like dancing with architecture, it seems like a more noble and staid position. Music critics rarely go on to make bestselling albums themselves, but game critics often go on to work in Public Relations.

One of the first shows I ever got to see was in a dingy trailer living-room. The kind of place with all-wooden paneled walls and shag carpets. A tile floor and a band on tour, living the dream. I’d go into the back bedroom with someone no longer with us and make a moment-to-moment choice that I wouldn’t follow all of of the things I did before in life. We were both drunk in ways that we were sane enough to pull away.

Seven years later, I’d see the same band, this time with a glowing backdrop and full stage lights play less of a crowd in a hollowed out college town. Just to keep the tally record going, that’s two times. Happenstance will get in the way of all previous attempts. Work. Vacations. Conventions. I’ll look back and see them pass through the state with a half-dozen bands that aren’t with us today, victims of the tour lifestyle or covid-19 or social fallout or all of the bullets that come for a between the eyes spot when you’re an artist and trying to Make It.

Every thing is different in the goddamned future, and the god damned future is happening every day around us. Most of us wont be here to realize it, I climb into paranoid wells and think. Little beady eyes staring up from endless black pools into technicolor skies that reach down and beg to be made sense of. It’s not my job to make sense of any of it, but if I can just pick one little corner…

I couldn’t have predicted that seven years ago when I started this whole thing, a rich dish of spite on my palate that I’d have the people with nowhere else to go sending me emails, asking to be published. Sometimes I have to turn them away: there’s just not enough money, they don’t fit the website, and every fucking time it feels like a lie. It feels like a bigger lie when I pitch whatever a bigger website is, outside of deep-hell.com. It feels like a lie when I hold aspirations common to the circle close to my heart. Who hasn’t played Devil May Cry 4 and wanted to pen a Rock Paper Shotgun op-ed about it? It’s a short ladder, but it’s the only one some of us can see ourselves climbing.

Well, I pitched them and got told: are you really connected to this whole skeleton thing? aren’t there other things you could call yourself that might be a little more marketable, a little more comfortable?

Who the hell am I trying to sell myself to, now?

My mind went to the people we turned down or couldn’t give a chance. The writing just wasn’t there, so I’d try to steer them in a direction it might work for someone else. A link to the kritiqal or no-escape pitch guides. All I can do to be the hand that steers but still has to say a firm No.

And

And I think of all of the shitty three-chord highschool punk bands. I think of all of the middle-aged men playing hardcore and still pissed off about the eighties and 90’s they grew up with, with only one set of words to describe the feelings with. Rockabilly musicians playing to a nostalgia crowd fifty years out of their depth. Hyperpop artists sampling new grounds cartoons they haven’t heard since they were little kids or teenagers. Writers who’ve poured their heart outs in pitches that I have to steer elsewhere, the feeling I get when someone else does it to me.

I’m here for ever y half-thought article, every failed video essay, every attempt to put feet in the sand, reach for the skies, and hope someone else reaches down and tells us they’re there too. It’s been seven years and in that time we’ve all lost much larger websites, much smaller websites, blogging platforms and youtube channels that slide into the decay of no recent updates. How can I feel comfortable telling anyone else no, if it’s hit me so hard hearing it over and over again? We’re all looking for a good hook now, and complaining that there’s no more small blogs, no more platforms, no more scrappy websites taking on all comers.

My stomach turns. I wish I could turn inside out over it, let people see how I could feel in a braille map of veins and stomach muscle. I can’t. There’s only moving forward.