We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important announcement

Hi friends! I survived my 10 days en purgatorio. And, unlike the hazy, half-lucid promise that I made at the outset, I didn’t even so much as pretend to try to keep up with idol goings-on. Just as the team, to whom I would aimlessly misdirect links sans context or (frankly) effort just because I found five minutes to scroll through a feed. It was rough, in its ways, and I’m ultimately most thankful that I don’t think that I missed anything that I’d regret missing, and Team Homicidols did a great job.

Did I say that Team Homicidols did a great job? Team Homicidols did a great job. It’s an amazing feeling to know that there exist smart, good-taste-having, reliable people whose interests just so happen to align with my own at a particularly critical juncture, and that should I be out on a breather, they’ll be like, hey sure let’s go ahead and blog the posts about the things. Crucial. If I even knew where to start, I’d send them all something nice.

Now. Those 10 days.

Neat things can happen when you step outside of your own conventions. I’d known that I was going to have a personal vacancy at roughly this time period for a while, but not the extent of it until more recently, and at that it became a matter of juggling a bunch of knowns with unknowns to make a plausible itinerary. I’d even hoped at the most initial of outsets that maybe I’d need to skip a few days, but nbd, only for that approach to fail hilariously when placed under scrutiny. After a while, I was able to stack up the colliding series of commands, demands and remands into a cohesive run, and it had a nice round number on it.

A funny thing happens when you step away from something core to yourself for a little while. The stereotype is to come back invigorated, driven, head newly cleared and commitment updated. The necessary reverse of that position is the WGAF, wanking-motion complete detachment from the subject, and the grim reduction of passion to job. Frankly, I feared both of those outcomes in different ways: I didn’t want some kind of brutal counter-epiphany by which the things I’d cared about and worked hard for over several years became passe at best; nor did I want to re-approach the work with the same neophyte’s exuberance that I did when I was a budding Maniac, given that many of the components behind my break were tied to deeply personal developments, and I like where I am right now. Where I actually landed was somewhere in the middle.

So what changes? Probably nothing, and that’s the best part! I’m back on the case, the Team remains free to pursue the things that they like, and we charge on. I do think, though, that we’ll see an approximate 10 percent reduction in stupid and probably a relative increase in clarity. There are a few things, ideas half-cocked at the moment, that I’d like to pursue, and I’d like to put some older stuff to bed, and look at more creative ways to do some other regular and past-regular elements. I also think that we, community-wise, need to be better at calling a spade a spade sometimes, and less defensive of This Idol Thing, but that’s more a thematic throughline than an editorial approach at the moment.

And now, as I begin the arduous process of turning things that I wanted to post about into live posts, please accept my fore-apologies for the volume of late stuff and detachment from reality.