cropped-AFTERMATH_Logo_Wordmark_Horizontal_Black.jpg

bigwhitelogo

lede_post_card_default

lede_post_card_stacked

lede_post_card_featured_post

lede_post_card_featured_posts_hero

lede_post_card_featured_posts_sidebar

lede_post_card_highlighted_post

lede_post_card_horizontal_a

lede_post_card_horizontal_c

lede_post_card_related_post

lede_article_featured_16x9

lede_article_featured_3x2

lede_article_featured_flexible

lede_article_content

lede_article_content_wide_width

lede_article_content_full_width

lede_byline_avatar_post_card

lede_byline_avatar_highlight

lede_profile_coral_avatar

lede_logo

lede_logo_banner

lede_logo_footer_banner

lede_logo_simple_header

lede_sponsorship_logo

lede_sponsorship_logo_river_card

lede_sponsorship_homepage_card_logo

lede_sponsorship_homepage_card

MORE

Sidebar 1

Sidebar 2

<p>For a limited time, <strong>new subscribers to our Reader tier get their first month for only $1!</strong> Toggle to our monthly subscriptions to select this discount. Offer ends November 29.</p>


 Aftermath is an independent, worker-owned website about video games and internet culture

Aftermath

It's our birthday!

pexels-photo-7957752

bdaysale

Birthday Sale

Buy Aftermath Merch!

merchsmall

Merch

Riley MacLeod

The words "Play Xbox on these Xboxes" next to an image of an Xbox, a TV, a handheld, a laptop, and a phone

xboxhed

Blog

Xbox’s New Marketing Campaign Is A Bad Captcha

pexels-sora-shimazaki-5926403

Open Thread

Open Thread: Election Day

Someone in a blue shirt playing a mandolin

shutterstock_2368799805 (1)

Music

Luke Said To Tell You About My Mandolin

Three faces on a blue background--a user is pressing the one that is frowning

Please Tell Me Amazon’s AI Sucks On Purpose

Modern,Printer,With,Paper,Near,Computer,On,Wooden,Table,In

Hardware

Owning A Printer Is A Curse

A screenshot from "Stardew Valley:" a player's farm

sradd

Video Games

I Read Too Many Stardew Valley Guides, And I Am Full Of Regret

pexels-huy-phan-316220-3076899

If Only I Could Give You The World, My Houseplants

Screenshot 2024-05-15 at 7.34.08 PM

I Don’t Want To Spend My One Wild And Precious Life Dealing With Google’s AI Search

You might remember that I am a pretty sub-par musician. This is despite playing a whole bunch of instruments, including the guitar, cello, alto and tenor saxes, and now the ukulele, which I picked up back in February and have been obsessed with ever since. A new instrument means a universe of new things to learn, and given that you’re likely an adult, I’m here to inform you that learning new things as an adult rules. OK, it distinctly doesn’t rule. There’s plenty of info out there to suggest that it’s harder to learn new things as we get older, and beyond whatever’s going on in our meat sacks, there are also just less opportunities to be a beginner as you fall into the routines of adult life. Adult demands on your time mean you might not have the space to devote to getting better at something the way you did when you were young. You’re afflicted with an adult’s self-awareness and self-consciousness, coupled with aging’s decline in your strength, dexterity, and reflexes. All this means it’s harder to be good at new things, and more embarrassing to be bad at them. Nevertheless, the bulk of my evenings lately have been spent alternating between editing blogs on this website and tooling around on my ukulele. I’ve fallen down a rabbithole of bluegrass and clawhammer styles, the latter requiring an entirely new strumming hand shape and pattern that is utterly baffling to me. Since I came from guitar, it hasn’t been too hard to get passable-to-good at regular songs, and even some very basic bluegrass picking, but when I open up my clawhammer book, things turn into hours of painfully slow, atonal or whisper-quiet picking and fumbling the style’s “bum-ditty” pattern into a clumsy jangle. I sound like a five-year-old learning their first rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle” on a recital tape you’d pull out to embarrass them before college graduation. It’s awful. But it’s also fucking great. It’s so entirely new to me that every minor, uncertain improvement feels like a life-altering achievement. There’s a fascinating new world of best practices and lexicons to learn, and advanced songs I’m desperate to play that keep me inspired. My horrendous rendition of “Cluck Old Hen” is a miracle if one third of the notes come out audible, but sometimes I can play one-third of the notes! As an adult, and also being an adult who is me and lives in my brain, it’s hard to remember that it’s OK to be bad at things. It’s something I’ve struggled with in most of the new endeavours I picked up since getting sober, a decision that requires both a terrible amount of introspection and an existentially traumatic quantity of time to fill. I feel outraged when I struggle while biking or running, seeing any whisper of challenge as a sign that I’m a failure or a “poser” (one of my weirdest hangups), and all of this despite the fact that I went from being basically glued to a bar stool for over a decade to running the New York Marathon, not through any natural talent but by making stupid early sobriety decisions and having an unhealthy love of suffering. Was it a good marathon performance? God no! But I learned to run a marathon! Sucking at the ukulele feels less upsetting than sucking at running, maybe because I’ve been using my legs since I was little but not playing this instrument, or maybe because the ukulele is such a charming little instrument that it’s hard to get mad while playing it. It is so much fun to be so bad at, and so rewarding to get incrementally better, even if that progress is uncertain and nonlinear. And since I’m an adult in my 40s, there’s none of the youthful pressure of “I should get good at this and join the band to put on my college applications” or “I should turn this into a side hustle to pay off those college loans,” just hours of noisily entertaining myself while pissing off the neighbors. I’m not advocating that you should learn the ukulele (though you should, it rules!), but I am advocating that you should learn something, especially if it’s something you have no desire to turn into a job or a YouTube channel or even show someone else. Come suck at something with me! It’s fun as hell.

pexels-edwardeyer-2962670

Learning New Stuff As An Adult Rules

A man in a white t-shirt and blue pants sits on a bed, holding one hand to his forehead

pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3771115

I Am One Of The People Who Googled ‘Eyes Hurt’ After The Eclipse

oh no