Good Morning Friends! Today is the eighth anniversary of the first time we released an episode of AggroChat. While technically we are in our ninth calendar year and as a result “season 9” in my confusing and contorted numbering, Sunday April 13th of 2014 is when the show first saw the light of day. This weekend we released our three hundred and eighty fifth episode of the podcast, and honestly… all these years later I am not entirely certain how we have managed to keep it going. I think part of it comes from the significant shift our lives have undergone in these nine years. As a result AggroChat became this weekly touch point where it guaranteed that we would all be online and talking to each other… the fact that other people listen to it is sort of incidental.
When we started this show we were all in the habit of hanging out on voice chat while gaming, regardless of what that game happened to be. We had these broad reaching discussions every single night, which is ultimately the spark of inspiration that we should record that. As time and our lives shifted, those moments where we were all in the same place at the same time became more fleeting. I think the Saturday evening ritual of recording the podcast became something that we could count on and as a result kept it going. I think another secret to our success, if you can call it that… is the fact that none of us have really taken it too seriously. It is a thing that we do every week but it also doesn’t have a real reason to exist other than for our own entertainment.
Most of us hail from an earlier era of the internet, when things were done for passion or fun… and not necessarily as a vehicle for monetization. As a result we have never planned or even attempted to make any money from the things that we produce. That means we don’t really have a “boss” and are not beholden to the expectations of our listeners other than out of common courtesy. We do this thing every single week and if you are into it cool… and if you are not then maybe don’t listen. The weird thing is we have maintained a fairly consistent listenership over these eight years. We have some episodes that spike the numbers, like any time we do one of our spoiler shows for Final Fantasy XIV. Then we have super esoteric episodes that no one listens to like when we go heavy into something extremely niche like competitive sudoku. Enough people listen on the regular however to keep the numbers spinning, and through a pretty wide variety of platforms.
If we were doing it for the numbers though we would have considered this podcast a failure years ago however. I don’t get that many readers and we collectively get even fewer listeners. However like all passion projects it is effectively keeping itself going because it is a thing that we do together collectively. I will admit there are times when depression hits me and I consider shutting it all down, but then I remember that I am not doing this to make metrics go up. In the art world there is this concept of “outsider art”, where folks make art because they want to, not because they are beholden to some traditions of what makes art good. I’ve always sort of thought my blogging and podcasting are my version of that. Sure I have the knowledge to do something differently and could chase statistics or optimize the fuck out of everything… but why would I be doing it? I feel like I would be generating a lot of stress for little benefit to anyone involved.
So I guess the question is… how long will we keep this going? To that I give you a hearty shoulder shrug, because I have no clue. I am not even sure how we have managed to keep it going this long. Pending we don’t miss many shows we will be releasing our four hundredth episode in July, which seems like a significant milestone. When we started this there were a large number of peer podcasts that we were active with, and we have outlasted most of them. I am not sure what that says about us. We are either really stubborn or really oblivious, because we sorta just keep doing the same thing over and over. If that is your jam then we welcome you along for the ride, and if it is not… that is cool too. In the meantime however we will probably still be over here in the corner doing our own thing.
I never really know what to do for the anniversary of a thing that I created. Coming up soon is the thirteenth anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut in general and again no clue what to do for it. The only regret that I have all these years later is that we would have chosen a better name for the podcast. Tales of the Aggronaut made sense in the original context… which was a Warrior Tanking blog. AggroChat was more or less the fake name that we gave the podcast because it was spun out of the Aggonaut blog…. but then it just sort of stuck for lack of better options. I wish we would have come up with something that sounded a bit more inviting because our discussion is almost never anything close to “Aggro”. However once you have lived with something for as long as we have this name… it becomes hard to change mentally. So here we are… the AggroChat crew and will probably stay that until the end.
Thanks for being along on this ride with us.
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