Privately Attack Nobuo Uematsu With Questions- Five Years Later
Today is Privately Attack’s 5th Anniversary, and with it I wanted to talk for a bit about how all this came about. I don’t expect to write especially too much today (I plan on writing this the same day as publishing it) so let’s just get right into it.
FIVE YEARS AGO…
I was in a bit of a weird spot in my life. I was 26 years old, fairly fresh out of a terrible job, still living with my parents, and on the edge of a new decade. I spent a solid 6 years at that job, with no real change to my personality or demeanor since the day I got it. Three years prior I made an effort to actually move out, but after my father lost his job my mother and I worked to keep the house afloat. Realizing disability was his only option at his age I offered to stay until he got it. by the middle of 2019 he finally got approved, so I started making plans to move by the beginning of 2020.
So in this limbo between life events I didn’t have much money to spend on hobbies, so I started reading about other people’s experiences with games. “Video Essays” weren’t yet the hotness that they were today, so I found myself reading blogs, essays, and reviews for games that I enjoyed. For the longest time I would think to myself
“Wow these writers are so cool…I loved writing in high school…I wish I could blog about games…”
It didn’t hit me until the beginning of October that I could just simply…do it myself. Once the light bulb finally turned on I whipped out my old laptop and got to work. For efficiency’s sake I had recently kitted the PC out with Linux, but the hard drive was on it’s last leg and the 2GB of ram could only do so much in terms of performance. It would take me about ten minutes to get it to boot, plus another 5 or so to get the web browser to Medium’s text editor. My first essay took nearly a month to complete, with probably about a third of that time spent waiting for my laptop to keep up with my keystrokes.
If you scroll to the bottom of my blog you’ll find that essay. It’s a retrospective on my life with the Dragon Quest series. Do yourself a favor.
Do not read it.
Why? because it was painfully obvious that I was trying to emulate a particular sort of games essayist. Not any one individual person, but a whole sub culture of “New Games Journalists.”
Now there isn’t anything wrong with these writers, it’s just that they’re them and I’m not. I’m not a better or worse writer, I’m just my own person. It took me a while to really figure that out.
I’ve been writing fairly consistently for 5 years now, and I’ve gotta say that the whole thing has been fun. I was the type of kid who loved book reports, and writing about my hobbies is just the adult equivalent of getting up in front of class and waxing poetic about Beowulf. There was once a point where I really wanted to make a whole thing about this. Writing for publications, YouTube, Patreon, etc but it almost instantly took the fun out of it for me. With patreon I felt obligated to get something- anything out every month no matter the quality.
In the beginning I took focus on the quantity of the work over the content’s actual value. Thankfully though my earlier pieces came out fine enough. when you have 25 years of life with one hobby it’s relatively easy to go long in the tooth. Having said that it’s pretty safe to say that I’m done writing about my past. It’s not that I don’t want to, but en your life has been as boring as mine you run out of stories fast.
I loved writing about those memories. I have a penchant for repeating the same stories in conversation, but that’s mostly because I forget who I’m talking to and what I’ve already said. With my writing here it’s like a neat little index of my dumb little anecdotes about games. I’m a deeply nostalgic person- almost to my detriment, so I find myself locked away in my mind for way longer than I need to be. I guess it’s just safe to say that the last 5 years haven’t been especially great for me, let alone anyone. I get by though.
So what’s next?
It’s an election year, a new Dragon Quest is coming out, and next year will be 5 years since the pandemic. It all kind of feels like the clock is just resetting back. The “culture” has stayed stagnant. The industry is failing, and everything is kinda fucked. The price of a used Sega Dreamcast has nearly doubled in the last half decade. What really is next?
One of my non-negotiables when writing is that I don’t go out of my way to bash something for the fun of it. There’s already so much negativity online that’s purely made for profit. If I ain’t getting paid for this shit why bother? I love things. Why would I ever want to say a thing is bad just to say that it’s bad? I won’t ever make anything like “THE STINKIEST GAME YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF” or anything of the sort. That’s a promise. I may have made a light jab about a game or two, but it’s all love. Stellar Blade looks fine, the girl just has a big butt and no personality. That’s all.
I guess what I’m saying is that I still strive to celebrate the medium that is games. Funnily enough I don’t play a lot of games these days despite it being my favorite way to enjoy leisure time. It comes in waves though. I’m usually my least busy during the beginning and middle of the year, which is why I was able to go completely sicko mode and finish Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and FFVII Rebirth back to back this year, and Tears of The Kingdom and Final Fantasy XVI back to back last year. The Privately Attack Fall/Winter Arc is just me working, playing one big ass game for months at a time, and now getting exercise and sleep in. That’s what I’ll leave yall with.
THE TAMAGOTCHIFICATION OF PRIVATELY ATTACK
I don’t have a driver’s license, and I’m fat.
…Like really fat.
I would like to not be as fat, and I would like to learn how to drive.
I took the last couple months and started working on myself. I count calories, stay in a deficit, work out, sleep well, and When I’m not playing Metaphor Re: Fantazio (fantastic game btw) I’m learning how to drive by reading tutorials, watching videos, and if you can believe it… playing Gran Turismo. I don’t condone this, but I actually learned more than I thought about cars at least, let alone driving them simply by playing the game’s single player campaign. I don’t plan on telling the nice lady at the DMV this however.
I’m set to lose 100 pounds within the next 12 months, and I hope to lose another 100 before I’m satisfied. It’s not so much as a goal weight but a goal body.
Let me be completely transparent. I’m 6'3, 500 pounds. I’ve lost weight before, and I can do it again. I want to live to see Dragon Quest XII. That means though that I won’t be playing too many games in the next year or so, or at least finishing them. Games are too long!!! Right now the biggest game in my life is my health, and I plan to win it.
-PA
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