Welcome to the New Place

Greetings. Welcome to the new place. Have a look around. May I offer you something to drink? No? Suit yourself. This tea is delightful.

So, what's this all about anyway? Allow me to explain.

Years ago when I started the SuburbanJoe site, things were a bit different in my life. I was a new homeowner with no kids and a solid gaming habit, but not yet to the level of heated passion I enjoy today. The SuburbanJoe site was meant to reflect that to a degree, with posts about my suburban life and the various things that go along with it. There were many posts about home repairs. Life was good. Along with the site, the name came my online persona.

After the whole infertility thing, I wasn't really into writing and SuburbanJoe went away. Around this time, I also got an Xbox Live account and, oddly enough, SuburbanJoe was taken. With that, Team Binky was born along with the confusion of anyone who met me online and wondered why I had two names. Not that it mattered much, but it always kind of bugged me, having two different tags, for lack of a better word.

When I decided to start writing again, bringing back SuburbanJoe made sense as anyone who might have remembered me from the old days would be able to just do a quick Google search and like magic, make their way to the new place. That's all fine and good except for the fact that the several years between the old site and the new site might as well have been the Triassic period in internet years. Realistically speaking, the number of people who decided to just, on a whim, search for SuburbanJoe based on something they read years ago was probably less than 2.

The problem is that, creatively, I always felt like the new SuburbanJoe site had to be like the old one, including what I wrote about, and as a result, I always felt kind of boxed in. I wasn't really into writing about what I had written about before. My interests were more gaming oriented, and less column like. I had always said that SuburbanJoe wasn't really a blog, because it followed more of a column style, however with the second go around, I wanted more of the flexibility of shorter posts that a blog brings. I know it's stupid, to have creative roadblocks over something to arbitrary, but hey, creative roadblocks never take the form you'd expect them to. Try as I might to change what the site was, I could never get it out of my head that I was supposed to be writing 800 words on mowing the lawn. Again, I know this is stupid.

At the same time that I was feeling like my site wasn't really what I wanted any more, I started writing reviews for GameShark. I've done a shit job of budgeting my writing time since then, and SuburbanJoe suffered as a result. For this I apologize. Once I started writing the Mr. Binky column, I felt even more split up as I had a site, called SuburbanJoe, a GamerTag of Team Binky and a column persona of Mister Binky. Talk about splintered.

And so we get to this site, the aptly named Disparate Elements. I'm going to be writing about a bunch of different, seemingly unconnected things here, hence the name of the site. The name also comes about because of my various online persona and how they made me feel kind of split up. In an effort to fix that, I've done a number of things. One is that I've retired SuburbanJoe, the site and the name, with the exception of my Gmail address, because, damn, that'd be a pain in the ass to change. I've also changed my GamerTag from Team Binky to Mister Binky to coincide with my column and because the Team thing never made a whole lot of sense, even to me and I came up with the damn thing.

The hope with all of this, is to remove some of the creative roadblocks I've had. I feel like I have more freedom here to post about my kids, or games, or what I've had for lunch, or whatever. I realize that I'm still going to have to take the time to write every day, and I'm prepared to do that. Lord knows I spend enough time goofing off each day. I can certainly divert some of that time to this place. I cherish each and every reader I have, and I wish to keep them coming back, and possibly get some new readers along the way. I'm also hoping to use this site to start thinking more critically about games and just generally polish my writing skills in general. At the same time, I understand the need to take baby steps, so don't expect any missives on Half-Life 2 as a allegory for socialism any time soon. Hell, I don't even know what that means.

So, for those that have been with me for the past couple of years, thank so much for coming back and seeing nothing but blank space and week old posts. I hope to change all that. Thank you also to my wife Linda, who continues to inspire me and kick my ass when I'm being lazy. Hopefully I won't need so many ass kickings now.

Enjoy the new place and stay as long as you'd like. We've got a lot to talk about.

-Brandon