Tom

One thing I’ve realized while being at BlizzCon is how cynical I’ve become from treating social media like it’s an extension of the real world. It’s not. Social media is an angry caricature of the real world. At BlizzCon, people are hyped. They’re excited. They want to talk about the games they love. There are absolutely criticisms, but underneath them you can feel how much love and passion people have for these worlds. These aren’t people who haven’t played a game in 10 years but still spend every day talking about how terrible it is. And I say that knowing I’ve been in that place too and its easy to slip into. I also want to apologize to the people who used to listen to Tangents of Creation because it was a positive escape, only for me to eventually become extremely negative. Even if some of the things I was criticizing ultimately came true, I understand now why that negativity turned people off and I don't harbor any resentment for that. I would have walked away too. People want to be excited. They want to share the things they love with other people who love them too. And online, we’re constantly being fed ragebait, outrage, negativity, and garbage because that’s what gets engagement. So I’m going to try to be better about that. Not by becoming blindly positive or pretending criticism isn’t warranted. I still want to have nuanced, critical conversations about the things I care about. I just want to remove some of the cynicism from them. Because being negative and angry is incredibly easy. Being positive, fair, respectful, and still willing to criticize something thoughtfully takes a lot more work. And after this weekend, I think that’s something we could use a lot more of.