Hotspot & Jeff

I think I may have missed something. Did something bad happen to Jeff in the past few months?

During a recent Hotspot podcast he turned dark when the topic of the year 2020 came up. I know about the common sense stuff (COVID-19 and fires). Did something bad happen to him with the fires in California?

I hope he is doing well.......I became genuinely concerned because he seemed very angry about something that happened earlier this year. I hope he is doing well. He seemed in good spirits prior to and after this dark moment. Also, Vinny quickly changed the subject so I didn't get to hear Jeff explain this further.

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"There are scars from this year that will never heal"

"I'm a different **ck*** person in a lot of ways man"

"It's been some shit"

"There will be some things that I will never be able to forget from this year for sure"

"A lot of things that I would like to walk away from"

Vinny: "...and on a lighter note...." lets immediately change the subject to anything other than this!

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Please fill me in if you know what this is about. I listened to the past few bombcasts but only heard them talk about COVID and the fires........nothing really specific to Jeff except for one part. I heard him mention moving out for 1 week due to bad air quality and having a bad experience with the temporary move. Maybe this is what he is talking about? Or something else entirely?

Sorry in advance if I missed something else major that happened this year.

I think it's all about how 2020 is, in a whole bunch of ways, just a fucking garbage fire of a year, and way more than in years passed. From the handling/perception of COVID (both governmentally and anti-maskers etc.), the protests/constant 'mistreatment' (which is way too light of a word for it) of POC, and the fires, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the world has gone down the toilet. He mentioned on a Bombcast of at least 2 attempts at a vacation, one where his kid started throwing up everywhere and the other where he got scammed/ripped off. Add to that just bringing a child into the world in that context, and it's kind of fair to feel like shit about a lot of things. Even on the other side of the world, it's hard not to get massively depressed about the state of things currently...

Not sure how anyone gets through 2020 without being changed in some way.

And I'm saying that without having to live through the fire, smoke, air quality crises for the past few weeks.

@finaldasa:

Agreed. Both at the level of crisis people in the country are facing and the complete inaction by so much of the leadership has been eye opening for a lot of folks.

This year is just a lot, honestly. Speaking from my own, personal position this has been the most upsetting and devastating prolonged period of time in my memory.

In 2001 I was in school in New York that day in September. That was awful and it changed the world forever, but I still went to class the following week and things moved on.

In 2013 I was hit by a driver in the middle of a crosswalk and left for dead and have had to deal with PTSD as well as bone, nerve, and brain trauma since.

This year has just been a "we can't catch a break" between bad news getting worse every day, people close to me dying suddenly and people close to them suffering the same losses. Friends discovering the house they were in just a week prior is now completely gone. Just vanished into the winds... I've been working a job that I love for over a decade now and I've been with that crew, that family of workers for all that time and now I haven't been able to report to work for over half a year and I honestly don't know when I'll be able to return and when I do how many of those people will still be there... For one reason or another.

It's a haunting time, made worse for a lot of us I'm sure because we're all older and more tuned in to the world around us for better or for worse. Shit's just a lot. It's a lot of this all this shit. It can just crush you. It's crushed me a fuck ton of a lot already.

@finaldasa: my life has become incredibly tedious and tiresome and I’m mentally fatigued by the constant worry in the back of my mind that I might get sick if I don’t rub down these groceries or if I don’t wash my hands for the 30th time.

That said I can’t say it has dramatically changed me in any way. I’m just really tired of working from home and the virus and everything that comes with it.

He's been raising a baby during COVID and with the widlfires there. I think that's it man but that's a lot to deal with. I can't imagine how its been in the hot house with the baby where he can't open the windows. You and I can suffer through that but a baby isn't just going to take it like a champ.

There's a reason I don't have kids and never plan to.

It's been a tough year all around, and any personal stuff on top of that could feel even worse than it would in a normal year. Not gonna speculate on Jeff's personal happenings, but 2020's been hard, man. Plus they just got sold, so more uncertainty on top of that.

That Hotspot exchange had me raising an eyebrow, too. All I can really say is that I hope the crew's managing as well as they can.

Same. And same for everyone. I've talked a little about my anxiety before but...I remember sometime nearer the beginning of the year, when my wife started getting really freaked out by the virus spreading as fast as it did, and realizing how many people did not share our urgency. I sat her down, did what I could to ask her to breathe & lower her pulse, and I told her that the way she was feeling was "where I was normally at", in terms of panic and fear - because it was very familiar to me then.

I do not remember how that is anymore. I feel like the Covid thread is a good place for anyone to talk if they feel it, I just wanted to talk about this here.

I don't want to give the impression I know how Jeff or anyone at the site feels. But solidarity with the traumatized and troubled. Even if for you personally it might not have happened yet. At the very least, this period of time has decided the best thing to do is drown your preconceptions in front of you.

Not to mention the sexual abuse allegations among both GB associates (not staff) and industry the staff has interacted with closely over the years. I can see Jeff feeling very hurt and betrayed by all this stuff; not knowing who you can trust or who is of good moral standing. The crunch issues pile on -- I think this is where Jeff may be coming from. You can see in light of black lives, virus, and politics that this is small potatoes but this is core to Jeff's identity, living and history. If he truly feels completely disgusted by the industry, it leaves him without identity and purpose -- until he makes a decision on where he stands or what the next step would be (plenty of games press moving outside games this year, out of choice or necessity). No point playing armchair psychiatrist. As a fan of GB and it being a source of laughter and life, it has been a bummer see how depressed staff has been at times this year. But that's life. On this site, the laughs feel real and I guess the pain feels real too.

This year is rough for people addicted to social media. It's good to tune out. Not completely but also not be part of the 24/7 news cycle addiction. There comes a point when all this news does is not help inform in any meaningful way but instead take a piece away from you day-by-day. I think this is why some staff on site respond differently as some are extremely online while others are more focused on family and friends (Dan may be the extreme of this).

Not to delve too deep into his life...but Jesus

- Covid-19
- New baby
- Making sure two offices in two coast are taken care of during Covid-19
- Fires near his home repeatedly
- Two vacation plans to get away with wife and baby in the last few months ruined (bad AirBnb, bad rentals, etc)
- More fires so bad he had to send wife and baby away for a few days
- Huge sale of his subdivision (Giant Bomb) within CBSi to another company
- Just getting older...I can tell you medical stuff starts around his age
- etc

It's impossible to overstate how dramatic the fires in northern California have been. Weeks, cumulative months of unbreathable air. Not like, 'smog'. Air that will permanently damage you. You can't see down the street. The sky is blood red. And within those weeks, days where it's coming from somewhere so close that you need to prepare for evacuation.

We've obviously had many fires before, increasing in intensity to this point, but this year was the first that I recall having to keep our windows shut for weeks in a row, during 100-degree weather. I can't stress how depressing that is. For me, I've been doing fairly well, mentally, during this nearly year-long pandemic (did we mention the pandemic in which every level of government failed us spectacularly yet?), but there is something uniquely horrible about the compounding that with the sticky, ripe, damp heat of a tightly-sealed housing unit explicitly built to rely on airflow during hot weather.

That's something most people don't seem to realize when they wonder, "well why don't you just have AC?" Housing in California accounts for the (normally beautiful) regional climate with high ceilings and lots of windows, in the same way housing in the midwest does by necessitating basements for hurricanes and tornadoes. Beside the fact that the fires and pandemic are awful crises, most of us aren't living in places designed to be converted into hermetically-sealed cubes.

This is to say nothing of what it must be like to go through one of the worst years in US history, in one of the most intensely-affected regions in the country, on the year of your child's birth. Can't fuckin imagine.

Now that prescribed burns are politicized, you may want to get used to that air.

I mean I would say I am going to be leaving this year shaken and scared. Some of the shit that has gone done this year has hit me in ways I never could have anticipated. So Jeff saying that stuff is understandable, especially considering he has the wild fires and a new born on top of the rest of the shit heap this year has brought us.

Just looking at one aspect of it, raising a baby with significant health issues when you are in your 40s sucks. I've got a 2 year old son with type 1 diabetes, and it just wears me out. And I'm not head of an influential and beloved video game site, I just work part time from home and drive my daughter to hockey. So I'm sure he feels like he just can't catch his breath sometimes with everything else piled up on him.