Welcome to my little corner of the Internet. My name’s WobbleRocket.
I’m a YouTuber, streamer, and blogger creating content about retro videogames, indie games, and TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.
I’ve been playing videogames since I was a child. I first remember exploring games on the Atari 2600, and later on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I owned a SNES, and then a Playstation and Playstation 2, although since early 2000s I’ve largely been a PC gamer.
I discovered Dungeons and Dragons a little later than videogames, as a teenager with a group of friends from high school. I quickly started running my own tabletop roleplaying games and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Although I mostly run Dungeons and Dragons 5e these days, I’ve played a number of systems including Basic Fantasy RPG, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, GURPS, and more.
Why WobbleRocket?
When I was coming up with a gamertag, I was watching Apollo 13 and liked the term “wicked shimmy.” That was taken on most platforms, so I just sort of riffed on the idea.
Gaming and Epilepsy
In 2016, I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. In my case, it’s a hereditary condition — my mother also has epilepsy and was also diagnosed in her early 30s, although we both likely presented symptoms earlier in life at various times.
As a lifelong gamer, gaming with epilepsy can be tricky. My epilepsy is triggered somewhat by photic stimulation, meaning that flashing lights and patterns can cause me to experience symptoms. While my current medication usually prevents this from triggering a full-blown seizure, some games can cause headaches, nausea, and other symptoms.
On my streams and videos, I talk a lot about accessibility in videogames, particularly as it relates to photosensitivity. I find that many game developers don’t have a great understanding of how photosensitivity affects people with epilepsy, migraines, motion sickness, and other photosensitive conditions. Visual effects chosen for stylistic reasons can sometimes make games inaccessible for players who experience photosensitive conditions.
One of the reasons I enjoy indie games is that indie devs are often approachable through social media or through Discord — after exploring their games, I try to provide feedback to help them incorporate accessibility features into their games to hopefully make them more playable for other gamers with disabilities.
Freya
My cat Freya has a cat tower behind my computer, and she deigns to make frequent appearances during my streams.
Freya is my nurse cat. She’s always been particularly intuitive about my epilepsy and when she senses that I’m not quite right in the brainmeat, she’ll lay on my chest and protest if I try to move her.
Sometimes she can even notice it before I realize I’m having symptoms, and I’ve learned to pay attention to her insistence that I stay down and chill out.