Hello everyone! Apologies if you’ve been trying to reach the site for the last couple of days — I’ve been moving to new hosting as the site had pretty much outgrown the WordPress.com plan it was running on, and the two options were to pay through the nose for the next tier of WordPress.com plan, or move the whole site, which would be hassle but would ultimately future-proof everything a bit more. I went for the latter.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but never quite summoned up the energy to do so, but just recently I’ve been thinking that I fancied writing stuff a bit more regularly again, and so it seemed like a good time to do just that. Please let me know if you encounter any issues with the new site and I’ll do my best to fix them.

Why do I feel like writing again? Well, it’s a bit of a personal tale, but since you’re here, let’s overshare after the jump.

For a while now, I’ve been growing very frustrated with… “online” in general. I don’t like how the default way that people talk to one another is argumentative, negative and accusatory. And I’ve found it especially annoying when I want to share something that I’ve particularly enjoyed recently, only to be immediately shot down by people who are prone to negativity. I talked about this a bit here.

I feel like for the last couple of years in particular, there’s been nowhere “safe” I can go to just be happy about my hobbies. Everyone seems to want to complain about something; everyone is hungry for the latest drama. Even supposed members of “fandoms” seem to just want to complain about the things they’re supposedly a fan of. And I’m just completely exhausted. But it’s often felt like there is no real way to escape.

It’s a real issue. I’ve been feeling well and truly “lost” and isolated for quite some time now, simply because I’ve felt like I haven’t had an outlet to talk about the things that enthuse me. Sure, I have my YouTube channel, but putting a video together is an involved process that I’m not always in the mood for. Social media, meanwhile, is out of the question for all the reasons I’ve described above, so I’ve closed pretty much all of my social accounts except those which are absolutely necessary for my day job.

But then, I thought, I have an outlet. And that outlet is MoeGamer. This site has always been a personal passion project for me more than anything else, and honestly after my experiences of having a couple of moderately successful YouTube videos — which I’ll talk about another day — I really have no desire whatsoever to “make it big” online. And thus, once again, after a bit of a hiatus for various reasons, this site is going to become my personal outlet to just… talk about games.

I’m probably not going to return to a structured, scheduled format like I’ve used in the past unless it really makes sense to do so; instead, I want this place to be a nice little safe haven where I can rabbit on about how I feel about the latest games I’ve been playing. If others happen to stumble across what I write, great. If not, so be it — I’ve still let those thoughts out of my own head onto the page, which helps to alleviate at least some of those feelings of frustration and isolation.

You won’t find ads here. You won’t find search engine optimised articles. You won’t find clickbait. You’ll just find the honest, genuine thoughts of a middle-aged bloke who has been a video game enthusiast his whole life, and who has found particular meaning in certain parts of the medium over the course of the last couple of decades.

If you are reading this, hello and thanks. I hope this place becomes as much of a haven for you as it is for me.

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Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

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