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about

who am i?

my name is zach! i am an english teacher by day and a sack of bones by night.

this is a separate attempt at keeping a running blog with my thoughts on various aspects of games and media that i engage with. i was using a blogger account for a while, but that started to get filled with some of my creative writing, and it felt like a conflict of interests to keep posting games stuff there. i think i also just wanted a change of scenery. starting this blog (or.. trying to) in 2021 (edit from 2022: haha, nice) is part of a project for myself to decentralize the spaces i spend on the internet from social media. i really liked developer at analgesic games marina kittaka's blog about how social media has choked out the beauty of personal websites in the early-internet days and how our communication has suffered as a result. so! in an effort to set myself apart from that hurlyburly, uh this. welcome!

frequently asked questions

• what is an "unction"?

  an "unction" can be a couple things, but it's typically an oil or medicinal treatment, sometimes used in religious ceremonies to anoint something or someone. a million years ago in my theological studies i saw it used as a descriptor for musings, and this is more or less what my headcanon definition is for it at this point. so, this is a site of my musings. maybe they will serve as a soothing balm.

• what were your other blogs?

  my big one for years, where i posted my end of the year write-ups and some creative writing endeavors, was my blogger site "my umpteenth"—even then i was making jokes about having too many sites. i enjoyed it for a while, dropped in and out, and then felt like it was too disparate in its content and too rarely visited to be of any use to anyone besides myself. in april of 2020, in the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, i started another blog to keep track of games i was playing in an effort to clear out my backlog. it was similarly called unctions, but it was hosted at write.as. the site is nice and minimalistic, and i thought that's what i wanted at first! i had a few issues with it along the way: only one draft at a time, a small development team (i had a few issues and it took a while for the dev team to resolve them—they were very kind, though!), and i didn't end up jiving with the minimalist style. i would have loved to add a little bit more personality to the site. and... that brings us here.

• do you always write in all lower-case?

  i try.

• what will you post here?

  the goal right now is to write consistently about the media i'm fiddling with and what i think about it. predominantly games, i should think! but i'd like to leave it open for other stuff too! who knows? i don't!