Well, here I finally am, writing something on this blog of mine.

Who writes blogs any more? More pertinantly, who starts a blog in 2025? Someone with either too much or too little time on their hands.

In this case, it is the desperate act of a man who has spent the past hour staring in to space paralysed by choice as to what I could be doing while finishing this bottle of wine on a Saturday evening. So long as the choices involve staring at a screen.

Therein lies the problem, most likely.

You see, I have a twitch. Or rather, two twitches. Of my eyes, specifically. What started as an inconvience toward the end of last year is now a daily source of frustration. I know that getting annoyed with the twitch will only make the twitch worse. But that’s not a great motivator.

I tried giving up caffeine. That didn’t help. I tried 8pm bed times, those didn’t help. I’ve tried trading games for art and trading screens for books. That didn’t help. Not least because I didn’t keep it up for very long.

I’ve drank the extra water, eaten the bananas, taken the supplements. None of that helped. For the last ten months I’ve cooked and eaten better than I ever have in my life. Has that helped? Doesn’t feel like it.

So now I drink the wine, eat the chocolate, play the games and hope that a doctor will do more next week than tell me to keep an eye on it. Seriously, if they actually tell me to “keep an eye on it” then I might not be responsible for the scene that I shall cause.

In truth, I probably am more stressed than I accept. It has been a horrendous 12 months but the highs have papered over the cracks of the lows and I’ve recently been without the biggest distraction of all. But now that has changed.

Last Friday, Let’s RP launched the RedM BETA server. Although I can’t pretend that I had much involvement in the last run up to launch compared to most of the staff team, it still feels like a milestone – finishing the fight since we produced our first teaser in December 2023.

Our final pre-launch LIVE preview on Twitch was a lot of fun. Such is the nature of the Let’s RP community that even a catastrophic wagon failure could just be laughed off like it never happened. After being too nervous to stream my previous Mexican character in FiveM more than twice, I’ve done nothing but with my RedM counterpart.

I’ve put out over thirteen hours of content with him in this first week so questionable accent aside, I think it’s safe to say I’ve overcome that particular fear. Whether any of it is any good we’ll find out in time, but for now I’m enjoying a new pace of roleplaying and adapting to that style in the editing suite.

Switching from Jay Walker to Francisco Fuentes highlight videos could bring on a case of whiplash. I’m told the RedM community values long-form, slow-burning stories. So hopefully they enjoy long conversations on horseback about the mythical jackalope. While I have one eye on the future and how best to contribute when our BETA period ends, for now I’m enjoying returning to an earlier style and workflow.

Roleplay tends to put everything else on the back burner. No doubt amplified moreso with a new server launch. But I’m going to try and ensure I have a better balance this time. I still want to finish our run of Nightfire Reloaded. I still want to play more Battlefield to satiate me until I get invited to Battlefield Labs (I can squeeze it in, DICE, I promise). Hell, I even downloaded Star Trek: RPG-X for a trip down memory lane. We’ll definitely get to that at some point.

I also spent some time tinkering with the Let’s RP website. First and foremost to transition from a GTA website to a Red Dead website. But also just to see what’s possible now that I have a little more WordPress experience under my belt. It’s a lot of troubleshooting and trial-and-error, but I enjoy the challenge and discovery.

In truth, the most frustrating thing is wanting to do all of these things in the 4-5 hours of time allotted on weekdays to do it. Only a few years ago that felt like an awful lot more time than it does today. Time compression really does kick in the moment you hit 30. Not helped by the inconveinece of muscle spams, back strains, heartburn, stomach cramps and crippling fatigue that haunt your every waking hour. I’m only 31 for goodness sake. I’ve got to put up with decades more of this – and it’s going to get worse?!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to complain about my fragile body in every one of these posts. If there are any more of these posts.

If I could get away with popping on some soft jazz and spending all of my free time following Procreate tutorials to make lovely little landscapes, I probably would. Perhaps then my twitch would go away. But I feel I would still be burdened by the notion of having left too much undone. So instead, I’m going to open up Photoshop and start working on something else I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Or maybe I’ll just watch a movie. Or play a game. Or scroll Bluesky.

Or…