Digital Stage Fright

[rynling]

Late last night I had some Zelda fandom feels and went scrolling through Twitter, where I stumbled across this tweet. I'm not used to people saying nice things about me (especially not about my meta posts), and I almost cried.

I'm really nervous about the talk I'm supposed to give at Otakon Online tomorrow afternoon. I don't know whether it will be just myself and the five people producing the event, fifty people, or five hundred people. I don't know whether the streaming software will work properly, or whether someone in the audience will ask some kind of crazy question that I have no way of answering.

Also, as much as I'm honored to be able to give this talk, I'm also hyper aware that I was invited at a relatively late stage for an online event that - while very fucking cool tbh - is probably only seen by most people as a temporary substitute for the real thing. So I feel a little weird.

And, given that this is streaming on Twitch, I hope there's not going to be anyone trolling or hate-watching. I try not to think about this or let it affect me, but it's still a real possibility, and it's still scary - although perhaps not as scary as the possibility that no one shows up at all.

So when I saw this tweet, it was the most amazing thing. Like, maybe I'm not just shouting into the void, and maybe there are people who might be interested in what I'm doing. This person has no way of knowing this, but their random tweet is such a powerful act of kindness that means the world to me.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Holy shit this is so awesome! What a delightful thing to stumble upon! And very well deserved 💕💕💕

I hope the stream goes well tomorrow. I like to think the folks running Otakon Online are more competant than my national operations manager running a Teams call or that guy in Texas who still doesn't understand what a mute button for over three years than usual, but I totally get those anxieties. I'm going to do my best to be there watching tomorrow!