The Death of The Robot Fan Club
Sometimes you have to do something drastic in order to do something right.
Hi!
I’ve decided that I’m going to do something kind of big. I’m going to kill this newsletter. But let me rewind for a second so you understand what I mean.
I started a blog mid-COVID lockdown to track my progress learning to develop a video game. I needed to give the blog a name, so I drew somewhat randomly from my childhood art and named it “Robot Fan Club.” The name didn’t really have much meaning beyond being a cheeky reference to my own art from when I was 8 or 9 years old – a reference only I really understood, and I didn’t really care about that.
Like many projects started in my pre-ADHD-diagnosis life, I started with great enthusiasm and then almost immediately lost momentum. I’m not saying I don’t do that anymore, post-diagnosis, but at the time I didn’t really understand why I would always lose interest in things that I started out having a ton of energy for. Now I know that it isn’t some lack of discipline or a moral failing of mine – I’m just pre-disposed to prefer novelty and exciting new things, while follow-through, focus and planning take a lot more deliberate effort. Long-term projects are especially hard to finish (and incredibly tantalizing to begin).
Eventually, I realized I didn’t have much intention of continuing with the game I was making. Other new ideas started pulling me in different directions for a while while I let the blog become stale and out of date. When I returned to Robot Fan Club, I decided to make things a bit less formal – not declare the beginning of some big project that I would most likely lose interest in, but instead explore how I can share more about my art, how I make things and what I’m working on.
That also didn’t last long.
Robot Fan Club 2.0, this newsletter you’re reading now, almost immediately diverged from being about my work and became about my thinking. I explored big themes of creativity, labour, physical ability and even procrastinating on long incomplete projects with big ambitions (a pattern emerges). The thing that I seemed most driven to share was less just a report on what I was doing and more a deep dive into how I think about making things in general. It turns out I have a lot to say about that.
...and so we return to the name.
Something has started to feel acutely wrong about Robot Fan Club. In my day-job working in marketing and branding, I spend a lot of time thinking about values, big ideas and how we communicate who we are and what matters to us. The truth is that, as I try to come up with the next topic for Robot Fan Club or have ideas for things I want to work on, it just doesn’t fit with who I’m saying I am with this name.
I tried to make it work. I thought “rebranding” Robot Fan Club might help me find some direction for what I was doing here. I got pretty far into it. I wrote a pretty good justification for the name that I don’t think is complete bullshit. I designed the beginnings of a fun new look for the newsletter using some really great typefaces designed by Dan Cederholm at SimpleBits. I made moodboard to inspire the process that I think is oddly good at representing the inside of my head. I did all that and I still couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t care.
I’ve written in the past about how I’ve used casual, goofy, “meaningless” art to hide from the embarrassing work of communicating what I actually think and feel. By pretending I have nothing to say, I was really just preventing myself from saying anything meaningful. I think that’s what Robot Fan Club is. It’s a name that is defensively obtuse, self-consciously meaningless – it says “don’t look at me too closely, I’m just doing a silly little thing.” I don’t want to say that anymore. So I’m going to kill it.
Next time you hear from me, I’ll be doing something different. It isn’t going to change what I do here – but it will align it more with what I want to be saying about who I am and what I believe. I can’t guarantee I won’t lose interest in this next thing, but I’ve learned that a reliable way I can keep myself interested in things is to make them deeper than just novelties. When I move with intention, I have more to hang onto and I’m more likely to stick with it. It needs to matter to me, which means it can’t be meaningless.
I’m saying farewell to Robot Fan Club – the name that I came up with as a little kid that I tried desperately to shoehorn into making sense for me as an adult. I still love it as a little gag, but it doesn’t serve me anymore. At least, not right now. Maybe when I’m an old man it will finally make sense.
I’m really excited about this next step, and I’ll have more to say about it soon. In the meantime, things might look a bit weird at RobotFan.Club as I make some changes behind the hood, so stay tuned.
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Talk soon!
Lots of love,
Simon
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥