This was probably the best writing month I've had in years.

Part of this is likely due to my new antidepressants. I started them mid-October, and they kicked in around the beginning of November-- perfectly timed for Iron Noder.

Part of this is because I'm working from home; I'm a teacher, and so while kids are working independently, or when it's my prep period, I am able to write without distraction.

Aside from a few swerves into fiction and review, my theme this year was "weird shit."

Whether it was for the Weird Niche Internet Drama category, like Yandev, Greer, DigiHom, or PFSC, or it was weird history like Deadline, Mary Bateman, or NOC. A lot of the weird internet stuff I've been following for a long time, and this was an opportunity to actually sit down and sort out what I know. The challenge from those came from synthesizing information I was intimately aware of from assorted videos and forum posts into a cohesive narrative that a normie from E2 would understand.

Other stuff, like the PFSC fiasco, is stuff I was aware of back in the day, but never looked too deeply into, and so had to piece it together from the scraps leftover. And then there was Digihom, who nuked a lot of their stuff from orbit a few years back, meaning I had to really scour archives looking for images. Several of the screenshots in the Digihom node were actually lifted from youtube videos, both Jim Sterling's and Frederick Knudsen's, simply because the pages didn't exist anymore.

Then on 11/12, I told Nicolasstag that he should write a choose your own adventure story in order to meet Iron Noder numbers. And because I am a fool, I decided to try it myself, failing to realize that a CYOA is still a work of fiction that takes time to write. The result was Choose Your own Adventure: Mia's Day, which is the first Mia story I've done since 2017.

Also, I found it funny the number of people who messaged me, surprised that the narrator all this time had been Mia's brother. I've had them both in my head since 2012, but I forgot I had left the narrator's gender/name open for interpretation in the actual series, though the narrator was hinted at being a boy in 2013 (it's the first and the fourth vignette down).

At any rate, this is the first successful Iron Noder I've had in a while, and I'm pleased by this.