META-SPIEL 2023: We Are Going META-Bolic!

Look: META-Bolic sounded a lot better than META-Static, ok? ok.

If you’ve been reading META-SPIEL for a while you know that a lot of posts come as part of one quasi-series or another. Phthursday Musings is the most common of course. Running Around Illinois debuted this year, and although I haven’t written one in a while, META-REVIEWS may still be in the offing.

This year I am excited to add two new quasi-series. I say “quasi-series” because I’m not sure “series” is the right word. I really have no idea what the right word is. But I like to sneak “quasi-” and “pseudo-” in to everyday conversation, as I’m sure you do as well. So, quasi-series it is.

META-VONNEGUT is pretty much what you think it is. I’m still working out the format - and am very interested in any thoughts to such effect! - but my tentative plan is to “host” a limited reading group whereby META-SPIEL readers spend some time in 2023 reading Kurt Vonnegut works. At the moment I’m thinking of limiting it to three novels, while also trying to figure out how to include some special guests. I anticipate that it’ll be early February that I announce the first novel and associated timeline.

Pizza Around Illinois is even more so what you think it is. I’m particularly excited about this though because I’m hoping to do something a little more with it. The plan here is that my goofy family will visit 12 new pizza places scattered around Illinois in 2023, and I’ll write about the experience - the food, the decor, the neighborhood, whatever other weird things happened en route, I don’t know. The two rules are, it’s got to be a place we can sit down and eat; and it’s got to be a place we haven’t been, or, maybe, we haven’t been in at least 25 years. What makes this gimmick extra fun is that you all get to not only recommend places, but join us there. They don’t have to be new places for you! What I’m especially hoping for are some old-school Italian / pizza places which have been around for a long time, tucked into weird corners of neighborhoods.

In addition to adding two new quasi-series I am also establishing some other goals for the year which may well impact things which get written about here:

• I’ve noted before in the Running Around Illinois series that I have a ridiculous goal of running a race in each of the state’s 102 counties. My 2023 mini-goal attached to that is to run a race in at least 6 new counties. A couple should be relatively easy (Will, Lake) but the idea here is to kind of push me to getting to at least two places a lot farther out.

• I’ve also set a goal of taking the family to at least 3 new museums this year. I very much anticipate a new museum and a new pizza place occurring on the same trip at some point, and if so, I may write about the museum as part of the writing about the pizza place.

• I’ve also set a goal of taking the family to at least 1 new roller rink this year. As much as anything this is about getting my wife to finally get fitted for new skates, but beyond that, I find the institution of the roller rink to be particularly fascinating, as they’re mostly decades old and have their own special funkiness as a result.

I have some other personal goals for the year, but they’re kind of boring, involving things like cleaning up paperwork and file folders, so I’ll only write about this stuff about nine times this year.

One of the things I’ve had a hard time making my mind up about in recent months is how to deal with publishing META-SPIEL when the main outlets for sharing it outside of the existing subscriber base are notorious social media sites.

Substack offers some stats which are helpful though, and perhaps the most helpful of them is this: Almost nobody clicks through to META-SPIEL from Twitter. Facebook, some; people going directly to the site, some; email, mostly. But Twitter? Nope.

So I’m not going to post them to Twitter anymore, unless there’s someone I want to direct it to there, and that’s the only place I know to reach them.

Substack has a chat function. I have never before used it. But, in anticipation of this post, I went ahead and started a META-SPIEL thread. If you’ve got the Substack app and care about such things give it a whirl. I’m curious to see where that might go.

The big thing I’m going to try, though, is using Mastodon. I’ve actually quietly had a Mastodon account for a few years - I signed up, and never used it. And since Twitter started imploding I’ve kicked around doing “more” with Mastodon but could never really figure out what server to use, how I wanted to try and use it…

Well, I went ahead and set up an account and I hope if you’re on Mastodon you’ll follow me there: @[email protected]

I figured toot.pizza was a good choice for a server since I’m actually going to be writing about pizza, you know?

If this goes nowhere, oh well, it’s the Internet, won’t be the first time something went nowhere.

The strength / weakness of doing this is that when I sit down and write I can churn out a lot of words quickly. Sometimes, I’d like to think, this leads to some interesting observations. Sometimes, I suspect it ends in drivel. And sometimes, I wind up not writing anything at all, because I only have what are frankly tweet-sized ideas to offer up, and, well, I don’t do a lot of that, as you’ve no doubt noticed.

I do however seek ongoing feedback about content and method. I assume that I’m going to keep writing in some medium or another for many years, and I’d kind of like pivoting to something that gets more eyes. I’ve kicked around ideas for articles to submit to some places but a lot of the stuff I have to say is either too silly or too niche or too scattered or all three of those things. And that’s cool. But when I have something more substantial to offer, it’d be nice to have some other kind of outlet, to continue honing whatever this is that I’m doing. So if you do have any suggestions or criticisms or congratulations or whatever it might be you have, please send them my way. They will be much appreciated.

Between the pandemic, the weird directions that social media outlets have gone, some basic realities about how I’ve engaged people in person for a long time, and just as a matter of course of growing older, I simply don’t see a lot of people I’ve known for very long very often. I’m hardly unique in this respect. There’s a reason why social media became so big. It helped bring people together.

I’ve long written with an audience in mind. It’s not coincidence that some of the things I write about, and especially some of the odder ideas I have about things to incorporate, have a secondary design of engaging the audience as more than just readers. I think this is why Pizza Around Illinois excites me so as an idea: it’s a method designed to encourage shared experiences that often aren’t otherwise happening.

I’ve been online in some form or another for about 29 years. I’ve been through a lot of different forums and methods and sites and the like. I don’t need to spend all day on IRC like I once did, or spend all night on some combination of Facebook and whatever else like I once might have. But I do still need something. And so I write about a lot of weird things, but often those things include strange commercials from the ‘80s, or terrible candy, or other things with which many of us do have shared understandings already.

I’m thankful this has all gone as well as it has and I still feel inspired most every week to write at least a little something more.