Kooks & Dames

First and foremost, what is Kooks & Dames? Well, beyond a mildly amusing play on words, it’s ostensibly my personal blog where I can rant or rave about my recently played video games and recently read books – and, apparently, talk extensively about my past life experiences and how they might have shaped me into the person I am today.

So, to begin, I’ve been what I like to call a “writer” since I was 12 years old, all the way back in the year of 2008. Actually, it was 2006, but I’m notoriously bad at maths – yes, “maths”, with an S, because I was born, raised and have lived my entire modestly dull life in ye olde UK (England, Wales and Scotland). Not that you would know if you ever heard me speak, since my accent ranges from a muddled mish-mash of British, American, Canadian and something else altogether that does not yet have a name. Almost nobody who hears me speak initially assumes I’m from the UK. It’s only other British people who conclude I must be American or Canadian, while actual American and Canadians look on in confused silence. Yes, I’m evidently dedicating a whole paragraph to what I sound like when I talk, which is rather worthless in a blog since you can’t hear me talk.

Back when I was 12, I used to insist to my parents that the only way I could write is on the computer with a keyboard, although I suspect that was mostly my way of negotiating for more hours on said computer, so I could hang out on deviantART and Bebo, being something of an incidental troll for several hours, while listening to my sister’s musical hand-me-downs of Evanescence, Fallout Boy and My Chemical Romance, before remembering that I wanted to be a “writer” and smashing out some abortively terrible Top Gear fanfictions that I, under no circumstances, ever wish to talk about in detail, thank you and goodnight.* Just kidding, I have several more tangential paragraphs of my history that you almost certainly do not want or necessarily need to know.

Beyond my juvenile trolling of social media sites that most people only recall with a distant sense of wistful nostalgia, I didn’t discover the concept of YouTube gaming (long before I was aware of the existence of Twitch or “justin.tv” as it used to be named for its founder) until mid-2011, when I was 17, out of school for over a year and with very few prospects. I aged out of attempting to barter with my mother for computer time once she decided to take on nurse’s training, was out of the house most hours from the early, early morning and I somehow figured out her laptop password, upon which I spent most of the day, especially after I dropped out of school without any real understanding of what doing that actually meant for me or the people around me. Somewhere between 2006 and 2010, I stopped even pretending to prefer keyboard typing writing to anything else, and developed a habit of scrawling in those tiny, scrappy A5 notepads instead, in which I started writing the first story I would ever finish.

I wrote it between the ages of 17 and 18, and while I know I had the time and motivation to write it because I was ill, I suddenly have no recollection what, specifically, I was ill with. Perhaps it was the depression endemic only to teenagers who dropped out of school under the woefully misguided assumption that it was some kind of “freedom”, not realizing that my guidance teachers trying to sell the concept of college or university for the previous year wasn’t solely due to them wanting to earn clout for the school they worked for. During the first 6 months I left school, I languished in this so-called “freedom”, doing very little but my whimsical online trolling, getting involved with internet drama with people I’d never met (nor ever would) and writing and writing and writing in the hopes of miraculously conjuring the next major best seller that would propel me to the forefront of popularity and world-fame and endless buckets of money, so I could live comfortably doing… very little but online trolling and internet drama, I guess.

It’s my own life and I have a great deal of trouble remembering what it was I wanted out of life, except perhaps to be left alone by the world at large to pursue my dream of being left alone by the world at large, and that cycle could go on and on. The long and the short of it seems to be that, shockingly, at the age of 16, I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I certainly seemed to have a lot of false ideas. It didn’t help that I also had very little notion of what the world at large was like and the ways it would inevitably shunt me around until I figured out an actually sustainable business model.

Six months after I dropped out of school, my parents sat me down and explained that I either needed to go to college or get a job, that I couldn’t lounge around at home any longer because, since I wasn’t in school anymore, they didn’t get Child Benefits for me and couldn’t keep supporting me like this. Why they didn’t explain this to me six months earlier, I cannot tell you. Maybe they thought I already knew, maybe they assumed someone in authority at school had explained this to the students leaving at 16, maybe, maybe, maybe. There’s a lot of “maybe”s in that and not much else. I can tell you that, 16 years later, it doesn’t much matter the “why”s of back then, it’s done, it’s past, it can’t be changed. It can be explored, but not today, I’ve waffled on enough.

Still not the end of this blog entry, though. No sirree, I haven’t even got to talking about my gaming history, although, perhaps, I really ought to leave that until next time. My original point is simply that I haven’t habitually written anything in a few years (due to personal reasons and general busyness, among other reasons) and this blog is an attempt to get back into the habit by talking about two of the things I particularly enjoy, still, even after all these years: video games and books. Books and games. Kooks & Dames.

*If you wish to hear the details of my Top Gear fanfictions, you can let me know via my ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/sarahweisters) where after a suitable donation, I may in fact do so in a dedicated blog entry.