New Rising Media turns eight

Time moves pretty fast nowadays. Before you know it, 365 days have gone by and we’re celebrating another birthday.

I won’t take up too much of your time with this, but just a quick one to celebrate the fact New Rising Media has been going for eight years - 2,920 days - 70,080 hours. In other words, a ruddy long time.

As many of you will know, this past year on the blog started pretty tumultuously. I felt the full force of my poor mental health, brought to the boil by a mix of internally connecting my working life directly to my wellbeing, and that working life exploding in my face in a whirlwind of betrayal and bad managers. Things improved gradually, though, which I’ll go into in a bit, as many other things happened.

I’m picking up regular work at Stuff Magazine now! It all started shortly after the seventh anniversary of NRM, where I was invited to go review Battlefield V for them. Since then, my work has blossomed and after eight long years of blog-based practice, I’m now a regular freelance tech journalist. Feels weird to be finally living out a dream of mine - for a brand I’ve loved for so long. Hopefully I’m not too bad.

In terms of places I’ve been - went to Stockholm for the aforementioned Battlefield V, Prague to check out some new products from Zagg, headed over to Berlin for the legendary IFA tech show, went to Goodwood Festival of Speed to show my Dad the future of cars, and the McLaren HQ for their eSports tournament finals. Again, just downright surreal.

But definitely the biggest victory for me this year is getting to grips with my own brain. This isn’t me saying “I’m cured,” as to say that would be woefully misguided. 

You never escape your own mind, you can only reason with it - provide yourself with logic when your thoughts are illogical. And with the techniques taught to me through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy by the team at Insight Healthcare, I am able to show myself that logic - prove to myself that I may not actually be a fraud. 

It’s not an exact science, and it doesn’t work all the time. You can never completely outrun your own anxieties, but so long as you have the mechanisms to help you cope, along with a healthy work/life splis, then you’re doing everything you can.

Looking forward, I am working on some interesting sequels… Remember my piece on gamer energy supplements? Yep, there’s going to be a follow-up. I went back to Insomnia and grabbed some interesting comments!

Also getting back in touch with Asgardia (the world’s first space nation, who want to go live on the moon in 25 years), to see how they’ve been getting on since I wrote about them for BBC Science Focus.

Without you - the readers, viewers, listeners and people who have followed this nerd’s occasional ramblings, none of this would have been possible. Thank you all for eight years, and here’s to eight more.

And now, for an embarrassing photo of myself.