Reckless Archive isn’t just one thing.
That’s kind of the problem AND the solution.
After my brick & mortar small business failed in an absolutely dogshit economy (after years of surmounting obstacles just to keep the lights on) I had to take a long look at who I actually am before deciding what was next. Because here’s the thing: I’m neurodivergent. I have a LOT of interests that wax and wane with hyperfocus and fixation, and staying in a niche the way every platform now demands is genuinely not something I’m built for. On top of that, if I just enrolled in college classes with no other structure around them, I’d do absolutely nothing. Deadlines alone don’t fix it. I need OTHER stuff happening to make the work happen. I needed a project. For the plot.
So I spent about 30 hours listing my widely varied interests, looked at what my friend group actually talks about, researched what kinds of things I could realistically make, built a release schedule that excited me, and then put together a website. This one. (Website first, because if I’d made something cool to sell and THEN had to do the bones, I would have abandoned the cool thing and never touched it again. That tracks.)
So what are the something cools?
Tabletop RPG stuff: character sheets, premises, homebrew, campaigns, objects, the whole nine yards. Puzzle and indie games: text-based, weird, experimental. Zines: because I ran an independent record store for three years and the current media landscape is bleak and we need them. Documents: because neurodivergent people see the problems with generic design immediately. (Yesterday I registered my kid for school and had to handwrite his birthdate approximately 70,000 times across forms that were literally stapled together.) Research: because wikiholes that turn into independent research projects in your 30s might actually help someone else. Speculative work: what ifs. What if Nixon was assassinated? What if you had 10 minutes notice before being permanently transported to 1977 with only whatever you were touching? Live sessions: because gaming is more fun with friends, whether you know they’re your friends yet or not. Events: community is rad even when we’re all in our own homes. Downloads: because what’s the alternative, mailing you a floppy disk?
What connects all of this? Mostly interest. I’m starting Reckless Archive solo, but I have a genuinely rad group of friends who might want in, and if you’re one of them reading this: please. It would be so much cooler than doing it alone.
If I asked the TikTok algorithm why an account covering this many things wasn’t taking off, it would tell me I don’t have a niche. But I do. The niche is “cool shit made by someone with ADHD.” The idea that everything I make needs to live on twelve different platforms in twelve different boxes is a brand new and deeply weird concept. Yahoo’s front page used to have 50 hyperlinks to wildly different things and nobody had a meltdown about it.
Reckless Archive is named what it is because the shape of this thing is intentional. It’s meant to be reckless and wild and grow free, because people aren’t tied up in tight little boxes, no matter how hard our corporate overlords try.