Hi all.

I have to be honest about a lot of things lately to explain the complete drought SFG has gone through in July; one I really, really didn’t want to happen, but a lot of factors have made me do so.

Be warned, I gotta discuss some more heavy subject matter here compared to my usual status updates. You might want to back away now if subjects like suicidal ideations, political anxiety would cause you mental distress; I do not want to inflict on anyone what I’ve had to struggle through the past through months, with no thanks to the downsides of the modern internet. As I’ll note later in the piece, I am trying to still make the world/my corner of the internet a better place as much as I’m able to do so, and will try to give advice similar to what’s kinda worked for me so far. Now let’s just get into the bulk of this stuff.

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Yeah, this is a very different site status update and yet again I sincerely apologize for the rough month of July. Looking at my production history, I think this may actually be the worst month for productivity since the start of my reviewing process back in 2014. Yes, worse than the months I lost Chaz and my Grandfather back in 2019. Yes, worse than the periods of 2020 I had extreme death phobias due to COVID. So how on earth could that be? Am I gonna break my promise to not cause a Legacy Legacy Review Queue? Am I just never gonna work on reviews again?

Well no, don’t worry about that last bit; I still wanna write lots of reviews, have tons of cool ideas in mind and lots of drafts in the works. I’ve still been playing games a lot during this downtime, and still taking notes on stuff when able. I even made more progress on a legacy Switch queue game, so rest assured, I still want to write reviews.

But I’ve been struck by some sort of paralysis I can’t quite explain. Many times this month I’ve gone to my usual station to start drafting these things only to lock up with so much anxiety I can’t get a single word documented on the page. For a while this was only when I worked on the LRG Part 3 article, but now it’s spread to everything. I was only able to write what you’re reading right now by playing the Gradius 2 MSX Vinyl on loop over and over to give me the energetic feeling I’ve been lacking for months, and I got Griffin out because it was so darn short it made for an easy warmup review.

This has gone back off and on to February, when I had my biggest fight with clinical depression in years. The last time I had such a major crisis was again, back during 2019 when all that rough stuff happened. You may also remember this was when I withdrew from Bluesky and most other public social media in favor of autoposting my stuff to the site, just like I did with Twitter before outright deleting my account from the website. I noted in previous status updates how I felt like the nature of Bluesky in an era post the current US political situation was getting too much for me mentally, and I still believe in that even today. Despite always having a few trusted political people in my follows going back to 2014 twitter, something about the past year just broke me and I think a lot of other people on the site, even if they don’t wanna admit it, and I think it’s related to the internet as a whole.

See, terrible new US president in charge or no, I felt that Bluesky was increasingly becoming polarized in the same sort of awful way Twitter was pre-takeover, and even with all of Bluesky’s excellent features like blocklists and muted words, it just wasn’t doing enough for me. I kinda wish there was a universal politics blocklist for the site, not because I don’t care (as you’ll hear later, I very much do), but because I wanted to filter all that stuff out, except without blocking people entirely, you know? Muting people is one thing, but if you see a repost you may end up looking at their page, then looking at pages of people they reposted, and before you know it you’ve been in a 1-2 hr doom loop of how bad the world is and feel worse about it before you started your night on the Internet.

And boy, back in February, I was at my wits end. Despite trying a new risk in my day to day life, I was still on the internet way too much, and bsky as a part of that. Even with all my blocked accounts, terms, etc, I still gave myself too much leeway and would poke around at profiles of people who I found interesting on the site, either because they have good work elsewhere, or because a lot of my mutuals still follow those people, so surely my distrust for certain individuals was misguided, right? But from dealing with the struggles of seeing people I follow, even people formerly committed to posting nothing but gaming related stuff having to react to the horrors and frustrations going on in day to day American news, it became hard to avoid it even when I was actively trying to. Short of blocking online friends on the site I’ve known for years and years, I couldn’t seem to find a way to truly escape it besides getting a break.

But I just couldn’t get a break. I tried, and something would magnetize me to keep looking. I cleared my browser history, hid the password in some obscure part of my room, and I’d still have an impulsive urge to check and doomscroll and deadass dive deep into my room for the password just to see if someone had a take reacting to recent news. Or I’d even go so far as be distracted on my phone during work breaks to see the newest hot takes or look at certain political take accounts over and over again, and just get caught up in the catastrophizing doom loop everyone else was despite me knowing deep inside it was a really, really bad idea to be doing that.

But it was hooked into me, the power of social media, and even with Bluesky thankfully being away from the algorithm style focus of other sites, it still had a pretty nasty habit of having you still get in doom loops if the people you followed were reposting from other people. And despite Bluesky being made explicitly to not focus all on clickbait or ragebait for the sake of an algorithm, quite a lot of people on the site sure seem to be trying and make it such in the past few months, and I feel the contrast between the Bluesky of 2024 and 2025 is way too much for me to handle. Lemme explain, and lemme explain how it started to lead to me having incredibly stupid thoughts.

For starters, back in 2024, I felt the site was a bit more unified, even post the election when the results were very distressing. I saw tons of people posting great resources for ballot curing, mutual aid, encouraging people to go out IRL and join local community groups if you were worried. Hell, one of those great people even got me and my scared-of-IRL-interaction self to go out and start doing more frequent IRL meetups, and get to know people in my community to deal with what’s coming ahead, which significantly calmed my nerves down and made me feel a lot better in general. Turns out, going outside, touching grass and meeting likeminded people is a good thing, y’all. Even as the week of my birthday approached and the world got more nervous, it felt like people were still level headed enough to know how to counter the bullshit that we were to see ahead, and the site as a whole was pretty good at shutting down discourse or cringe takes that would lead to petty arguments, and my circles and over bigger circles on the site seemed to control themselves well.

Yet after Jan 20th, it felt like over the next month Bluesky and most social media like it began to collapse and get polluted by the air of toxicity that plagued other sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and so on. Some of the same people who were feeling hopeful in pushing back and protecting their community were now going on and spouting “we’re cooked” all the time and being incredibly catastrophic, and a lot of newer accounts on the site were increasingly argumentative and trying to start fights, with tons of people who should know better or who encouraged people on the site to not do that falling for the bait, again and again and again. Eventually that started to poison me a bit as well, and with February being a month of bad news it got to the point that in just a month, I began to feel incredibly endangered.

And I mean, endangered. From people’s takes getting increasingly worse, people’s catastrophic behavior getting to the point that looking back, some of those reaches were incredibly stupid, I began to connect the dots and felt like even with the few months of the site banding together to motive others to do what’s good for their community and the world, all of that was falling apart. Everything felt over, it seemed, and people were worrying about months ahead and framing those as if they would be the worst months of planet earth, and all of that anxiety became a contagion I swear swept through the entire site, even the non political parts of it.

It got to the point that by mid February my mental state was cratering and I was shutting down, with me getting clinical depression as I noted earlier. What I did not note back then, however, was how despite my long documented phobia of death, despite the fact all of my anxieties stemmed around fear me or my friends would somehow die in the next few months with everything being all over, that I started to have thoughts of suicide seep into my brain.

Absolutely bewildering, even now as I type that. Me, the guy who long boasted that doing such an action was incredibly selfish, stupid and harmful, and who last had any serious thoughts about doing that back in 2011, before I got on anxiety medication and felt way better, actually thinking about trying to exit ramp outta life because of everyone else on the internet feeling like they were giving up and everything pointing to a world beyond repair.

That was when I decided to take a break from Bluesky, and most of social media as a whole. My followers are amazing and were not the people who I followed that were responsible for me ending up in this state. In fact, I would even go as far as to assume the other people worrying who’s posts I saw that let to me ending up in a mental health crises, were doing so out of their own pleas of desperation and anxiety. Kinda can’t argue with that.

But still, the ups and downs that came with that, I posted in February. I posted through June despite it also being rough. I was avoiding Social Media pretty well, and even went as far as to incorporate the life saving AppBlock application on my iPhone to gate me away from social media sites, preventing me from being distracted by them in any way, shape or form. So how on earth have I gone from repairing my mental health over the spring, to it cratering again in the summer? It’s the damn clickbait, man.

I’m a mac user, see. I use macs for everything. Thus I have the choice of a nice browser in the form of Safari and extensions to adblock or website block if I needed. Very handy. But if you’re say, in a work environment, or somewhere you need to use a Windows computer, and you have to open any internet window for work, you end up with MSN blown up in your face before you can click off it. And if your IT/whoever you’re visiting forbids you from installing an extension to turn off that crap, then oops, if there’s very bad news going on in the day or if certain news sites want to go heavy on the clickbait and make it seem like the world is about to end, you will be force fed it with no way to block it from your brain.

This + a lot of recent stuff in the news being framed the way it is, (just ask anyone living in NYC how Zohran Mamdani is being framed constantly in sillier and sillier ways) is part of the huge, nasty rot of the Internet, that even impacts similar sites to my own; the chase for clicks and engagement. Do I like more people finding my stuff? Yeah! Would I want more? Yeah! Would I degrade myself and go all in on clickbait if I could guarantee it? Hell no.

Yet that’s what a lot of sites, whether by choice or force nowadays, have to do. It’s why you see articles with stupidly spicy takes popping up damn near everywhere, why certain outlets get bought out by content farms to make them way worse because dumb CEOs think that more google views = better website, and why certain sites will throw away their integrity to shill terrible products they know have horrid people behind them, but they want those clicks from people searching said product so they’ll gladly ignore their readers and cover the damn thing anyway even if an arms dealer makes it. I still maintain SFG will never be like that considering I am the one and only person in control of SFG, and you’d have to put my body in a casket for the site to stop working, even with my mental state as rough as it is right now, and I’m thankful to my other fellow independent writers fighting the good fight in this regard.

But man, it’s still anxiety inducing and infuriating, having to see stressful news pushed in our faces over positive developments in the world (yes those still exist), yet have the biggest operating system on earth force you to see that stuff every time you open a new tab unless you go outta your way to block or change the browser; if you’re even able to. After a month or so of more stressful world events even with all my personal home blockers on, I can officially confirm I am with most of my EU/UK followers in absolutely hating Daily Mail, The Mirror and Telegraph for sending me into too god damn many panic attacks to count, and I hope the writers behind the clickbaity headlines step on a LEGO.

“But connor, stressful headlines are a thing all the time, why is this month so much worse?”

Because despite me managing to do my best and still enjoy games with all the stress, I still have off days and have been neglecting myself. Getting carried away, trying to cram a review only for no darn words to hit the keyboard, it taking a banger of a Konami OST to get me to write this very article after a month of writer paralysis, and dealing with sleep deprivation, not due to my IRL work/community efforts, but rather due to me being frozen worrying about my self worth.

After all, if someone could get more views from a spicy take, is my stuff worth creating? If I have fun writing it, sure, but if i’m fearful of bad apples or dorks trying to dunk on a review score or opinion even with that almost never happening to begin with, is it worth putting out stuff at all? What if I make a typo or error and I’m not forgiven for it? All these stupid fears and more plague my brain, and it’s been a struggle to get past it. But I still feel the love of retro. I love covering obscure games and even some cooler newer titles. I’ve been trying to get back in the groove of things, and in a sense this article/status bit is my attempt at doing so. Is it badly made? Probably. Will it hopefully help explain my mental health journey, encouraging things others can do to help their mental health? (I seriously recommend Appblock if you have mobile doomscrolling habits, it will save your focus and could even end brainrot for good if it was more widely known across the internet) Hopefully.

Nevertheless… Despite my mind drifting to dark places, and those few days a linked bluesky post might get me spiraling or people in comment sections elsewhere causing me anxiety due to fear of seeing infighting or whatnot, or even dumb multiday arguments over absolutely stupid shit, (I’m so, so, so glad I was not on bluesky during all the Nintendo Switch 2 drama arguments) I wanna keep doing my work here at SFG.

It’s weird not being on a site where I know I have a good community of great people, but trust me, I’m doing this for my mental health and I long for the day the spiciness stops, things simmer down, and I can go on bluesky for more than 5 minutes without wanting to throw myself into a digital sea due to seeing doomers or just bad faith actors in general.

But, I can see from the SFG stats. You all still keep reading my posts, you still enjoy my work, and I thank you so, so, so much. It has also helped me stay sane even in the midst of all the stress i’ve dealt with mentally the past few months, and even with those stupid dark thoughts flooding my head at one point, I know that no matter what, I’ll never ever go down actually doing anything stupid like that because of the support I have from my friends close and abroad. I may not have the reach to do anything I’d like to do such as a twitch charity stream, or some group effort to band together and say, donate to Gaza in the face of their hunger crisis, (though if you want to help via World Central Kitchen, that’s my recommendation for a go-to!) or to Type 1 diabetes causes in honor of my dear friend Chaz, but I still know a lot of you support my work. And remember, I’m still willing to hear feedback, even on rambly writings like this.

So yeah. Sorry for all that rambling. But a lot has been on my mind lately, and this writer paralysis has been a huge pain even for me. I just hope all this writing and venting it out will help lift that rock out of my way, so I can get back to covering some pretty cool games and doing big articles soon; We have the LRG Part 3 article, the Switch 2 Backwards Compatibility article, and a mystery one set for September in the pipeline. I may be a very busy one man team, but I still wanna do all of that stuff.

Thanks for sticking with me,

-Connor from Seafoam Gaming