The Haunted Churchyard

Web Diary Entry 1

I’ve been feeling excruciatingly uncreative for the past year. There has been a small army of ideas that have come and go, for various artistic endeavors, but for a multitude of reasons they’ve all been shelved. I suppose you could say all were due to lack of resources, whether skills, time, or motivation. All that to say, I haven’t made anything in a very long time, and so I’ve decided to start writing this kind of web log. Eventually I want to get back into fiction writing, but for now I will begin to gently exercise my writing muscle with this prose equivalent of an afternoon stroll, or perhaps a 2 pound weight if we’re being generous. This metaphor is starting to make less and less sense, and I don’t have much experience with exercise so I’m not sure why I chose it. Either way, it should help to grease the gears of my writing machine.

I have been somewhat fascinated by travelogues recently, probably in part because I haven’t traveled anywhere to speak of in a long time. I used to love roadtrips when I was younger, but one negative of moving to the city is that travelling becomes more difficult. On the other hand I can’t entirely blame urban sprawl or my reliance on public transportation, because no matter where you are, travel requires money, of which I am always in short supply.

So, I am relegated to relying on the accounts of others to satisfy my itch. It’s always uncomfortable to have an itch in a place you can’t scratch yourself. The standouts of my recent travelogue consumption have been the videos of Noah Caldwell Gervais. He primarily writes youtube essays on videogames, but his lengthy roadtrip videos are by far my favorites. Whether he is following the path of the very first transcontinental roadway, or visiting the closest real world analogues to the locations of the Fallout series, he brings a self conscious wit and open mind to the people and places he finds, and provides insightful, engaging, and at times sobering overviews of their history. America has a complicated and dark past, and a rapidly deteriorating present, and it can be easy to become entirely disillusioned with American people, especially in conservative rural areas, like the place I grew up. This causes a tension with my fondness for small towns, their gas stations, diners, riverside parks, and eccentric populace. But lately, videos like Gervais’ have helped me remember my love for the communities of rural America, and the challenges they face in this era of increased corporatization. Unfortunately that understanding does nothing to remove the bigoted beliefs that run rampant there, distractions sowed among them by the powerful, and swallowed hook, line and sinker.

Speaking of the Fallout series (I did, briefly, if you recall), I have a spent a startling 12.4% of my time in 2026 in the simulated Mojave wasteland of Fallout New Vegas. Needless to say perhaps, I have enjoyed my time there. While the franchise had held some interest for me ever since I first heard of it, I avoided it for a long time, for many years because I didn’t play videogames much at all, and then because of my observations of its fans. From a glance, it appears that its following is largely comprised of cisgender heterosexual men who love guns and shooting and uncritical post-nostalgia for 1950’s America, the types who might refer to that era as a golden age of society. Capital-G Gamers as it were. While this is partly true, there is a comforting and substantial segment of the fans who are far more interested in the world for its anti-capitalism, and cynical sampling of mid-20th century imagery for ironic juxtaposition. If you spend a bit of time in the fan spaces online, you will soon also find that its something of a meme that New Vegas in particular is a favorite among the queer community, and especially transfeminine people, who often credit it as important in some regard to their transition, which seems to boil the blood of that other side of the fandom.

Anyway, I first experienced the series last year, when I was digging into the sub-genre of isometric computer RPGs, and played the original Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role Playing Game. I enjoyed my time there, but I didn’t put over 200 hours into it. I was far more enraptured with Pillars of Eternity at the time, a brilliant fantasy RPG with rich themes and world-building, and extremely well constructed writing. Tangentially, the director and much of the writing team are shared with Fallout New Vegas.

I didn’t get around to playing Fallout 2, because soon after I played the original I was moving, getting a new job, and found myself with less drive and time to play videogames. I had also heard about some of the sequel’s more unsavory aspects (what could generously be called “outdated”), and didn’t particularly feel like dealing with that at the time. Much of the media I enjoy has its problematic elements, and the transgressive, nerdy, or subcultural art I enjoy frequently has issues from a modern perspective. I am very accustomed to parsing the good from the bad in these kinds of media, but it does take a kind of energy investment that I absolutely did not have in the first half of 2025. Though shortly after this I did get heavily into Gundam toward the end of the summer, and that franchise has plenty of its own problems. I suppose there are very few things I enjoy that I don’t have qualms with on some level, that’s just part of seeking out older media, and especially art from the fringes that purposefully aimed to provoke taboos and challenge good graces. Even many largely progressive works that are older are burdened with weird misogyny, and that’s before considering race and queer issues. Fallout New Vegas, though it is only 15 years old, has its own problems, but I think the good far outweighs the bad. Either way, I will probably be discussing it further in a future entry.

I’m watching Ultraman as I am writing this post, the 1966 Japanese special-effects focused TV show about a giant superhero fighting monsters.

If you’re not familiar, it’s sort of like Doctor Who of Japan, in the sense that it's a campy, long running sci-fi television show with many different incarnations over the years. I have some stories to tell about it I think, as I first watched it probably close to 20 years ago when I was a kid, and I have what I feel are interesting things to say about it and its broader genre of Tokusatsu media. I’ll definitely be talking about another tokusatsu series, Kamen Rider too.

With that, I am going to be headed to work soon, the overnight shift at 7/11. Being a Tuesday, it should be quiet, and I’m hoping the rain and thunderstorms will be keeping away most of the fair-weather carousers that flooded the store last night, leaving me in peace with the ability to actually complete all my tasks. Thanks for reading, I think the future entries will be more interesting!