Welcome to Offrithm

For the past couple of years, I’ve been completely off social media. I found myself getting annoyed and upset by everything I was seeing and the few nuggets of funny or genuine moments were getting harder to find by the day. I decided to delete all the apps from my phone or make the process of getting to those sites much harder for myself. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Little did I know that I hopped off the ship just before it got drenched in slop.

But to say I was completely off the internet would be a lie. I still found myself lazily scrolling on my phone for anything interesting and browsing the couple WhatsApp groups and Discord servers I’m in were my only real source of entertainment. My other distraction was reading article headlines in my Google app. The almighty Algorithm tried to understand me, but the hit rate was abysmal. It figured out I’m into gaming, but all the articles I saw were either ragebait, reactions to some “drama” or deliberately making a headline that sounds like a product description from Wish. The few interesting articles I found with some semblance of humanity were on websites that plastered themselves with ads, popups and e-begging. So I figured, you know what, I can do this so much better.

So who am I? My name is Marko Swanepoel, a shockingly tall man from South Africa who once had a naive dream 20 years ago. I read a local gaming magazine as a little boy and fell in love with the idea of writing about videogames. Gaming gave me great solace during my most troubled years and I wanted to express the adoration I have for the craft through words. I worked my way into a local website and absolutely adored what I was doing, even if I was quite bad at it at first. I was always an underling and I never got paid, but I still worked myself like a Japanese salaryman. I wanted this dream to come true.

My effort wasn’t the problem though, it was the websites I worked for. They all eventually crumbled into nothing and not a single one is accessible today. All 4,000 articles I painstakingly wrote were wiped out of existence. Some failed because it wasn’t financially feasible anymore, many failed because of petty squabbles or the worst leadership you’d ever see. So, that dream I had? It was taken out back and shot in the head while looking at the flowers. It’s been six years since then.

Call it redemption, call it a debt I owe myself, but I want to try again on my own terms and I feel like this particular point in time is perfect for my comeback. As you’ve no doubt noticed, AI has made the internet experience close to unbearable. Slop everywhere, obvious ChatGPT writing and, what bothers me the most, the total erosion of humanity. Real stories by real people have somehow become a rarity. Getting money became the number one motivation for everything and we’ve left it up to the Algorithm to tell us what type of person we are.

Therefore I’ve decided to create Offrithm. It will mainly be about gaming because that is what I know and love, but this will also be a place for anything else I find interesting. And I can guarantee you that this text is coming from nothing else but the big piece of meat in my skull. This is also entirely not for profit, so if there is somehow an ad on this site, something went terribly wrong.

If this all sounds tantalizing to you, stick around. I have many years of pent up writing I need to unleash and many interesting topics I want to explore, so content shouldn’t be scarce.