For some time now I've been struggling to come to terms with what I'm really trying to accomplish with my creative endeavors. I'm a very self-driven person, so much of what I do (especially in the realm of making games) is just a result of developing an idea I like and bringing it to life. That said, I would be lying if I said I didn't care what people think of my work. Most of my expressive outlets, especially in my writing, attempt to tell people things they aren't comfortable hearing and to open a dialogue about things that I consider important or at the very least interesting. This is evident in most of my games and music, where I tend not to repeat myself and have experimented with different genres of game or messages in songs rather than take the time to master one or two styles.

For the most part, I'm motivated to do this because I feel isolated by my ideological differences from other people. I'm polyamorous, but I'm a lot more guarded than most people that fit that description. I'm decidedly less angry than most people that self-identify as nihilists. I'm far more confident than most introverts I know. I see Darwinism as an observation of life rather than an idealization of power structures. I believe that consciousness is a property inherent to all matter, which challenges the idea of humans as individuals as well as existing ideas of what life is. It amazes me that despite the years of personal growth I've experienced, I can still look out the window and see a majority of people far older than I am that accept pre-packaged ideas of religion and politics.

But back on topic. Over the past several months, my personal quality standards have interfered with my music, which is the reason I haven't released a serious song in a while. I've had this idea that if I could somehow improve my rhyme schemes and make my messages a bit more explicit, someone would finally absorb what I'm trying to say and reach out to me and then I would have friends. Of course, under scrutiny I realize that my actual talent and voice has nothing to do with my inability to connect with people. The real reason is that I don't have an active audience.

People I know in real life (let alone over the internet) seldom care about what I do, and if I'm lucky enough that they spend five minutes playing Hungry Joe or listening to Upstream, most of them will just say something like, "That's cool, I liked it." What's vexing about this is that I can see that in myself, too. I could care less about the black and white photography that my chemistry classmate brings with her everywhere. To be completely honest, I don't care what anyone else has to say at all. Whether this is the cause or effect of other peoples' apparent apathy or something else entirely, I'm not sure, but it's putting a major burden on me when I think about what I can do to actually build connections with others, and the hypocrisy that I don't actually want to. Hell, from looking at my audios it's obvious that I'd rather rip someone a new asshole than put myself out there and talk about what's important to me. Maybe I just haven't met the right people, but looking around me it's really hard to maintain the belief that I'm ever going to.

I'm going to end this obnoxiously long post by inviting people to actually comment. Tell me why you clicked on this, why you read it, or why you're following me on Newgrounds. What drew you here? What's keeping you here? What do you want from me? I'm not planning to do commissions for future works but I do want to know who my (admittedly small) audience is.