Thoughts - Valentines

Thoughts - Valentines

For Valentine's day, I went alone at night to the gym and worked over a heavy bag for an hour, with only the company of concrete and sodium lights. The sound of passing traffic on the highway, and the slow fall of blood from my lip where I bite too hard.

Despair - Drown

Despair - Drown

On this empty point out on the edge of the ocean, beneath a starless sky, I have scrawled the words "I have come here to drown" in the sand, and watched the tide wash the letters away.

Life - Helpless Rage

Life - Helpless Rage

I am alone, standing before a heavy bag. Music I don't remember. There is an acrid smell of chalk and sweat, and the lights are half on, cold, and quiet.

Fists up.

Life - Anything

Life - Anything

Sometimes say something.

Sometimes say nothing.

Sometimes, say anything.

        Don't wait forever.

Writing - Shattered Moon

Writing - Shattered Moon

A shattered moon rose over the night sky. Over the silt-salt oceans boiled away as they watched from the heights of a half-crumbled cloudtower. Beneath, the wilds of concrete seethed and burned, but up here, with the winds and grit for company, a dystopic peace had settled. His hand clutched in hers, the slow crawl of stars plied their soft twinkling dance through the sky.

They were lonely.

In an empty place, devoid in heart of courage there was little to do but watch, wait, and wonder. Until the slow crash of stone and steel sent them plunging cold to the embrace of ash.

Life - Let's Go

Life - Let's Go

The night sky is open above my head. It stretches vast tracts above me, endless and uncertain. The wind calls, it picks up and holds me in her embrace. I am a lonely wanderer of the earth, but I am not alone.

Let's go.

Writing - On The Cascade of Humans

Writing - On The Cascade of Humans

Oh what these glorious monsters, astride in silence looking out into the darkness. I sat in quiet vantage, contemplating their movement and found myself alone. To behold their freewheeling paths, that which made them both envious and enviable.

Words bespoke one another, and gestures too. They tried to share their experiences, but words and language fail, they turn to pictures and then to long pieces of video, carefully constructed for the human mind, frame by frame at a galloping 60 per second.

These too fail.

I kept a silent vigil, long into the night. A cloak of cascade water, and a weary eye alight.

Life - Watering On A Rainy Day

Life - Watering On A Rainy Day

I walked past a man on a rainy day in Vancouver. In and of itself not an unusual occurance. My arms laden with groceries, earbuds in and loud music playing..a kind of slow discordant soundtrack to my life.

It is raining, the slow fall of water from the sky, a cascade of glorious pitter patter on pavement and leaves.

A man stands out the front of his house, on cobbled stone steps. He wears shorts, and a shirt, sandals, and a vacancy in his eyes. In his right hand is a watering hose, and it is still. He waters the cobbles quietly, unmoving, The press of the hose does not move, he waters the same spot as I approach.

He is not aware of my slow approach.

I reach up and remove the headphones from one ear. Looking concerned, I ask.

Are you, alright sir?

A long moment, of stillness save for rain.

He turns to the sound of my voice, but doesn't look quite at me. As though restrained in movement, unable to fixate quite all the way.

I'm fine. I was just...somewhere else.

Like an old clockwork, he turns back to the vacant place he was before.  And again grows still.

I put my earphones back in, and walk down the street.

I guess we're all somewhere else.

Life - Don't Click Send

Life - Don't Click Send

I had a window open to message you.  Technology is funny that way.  I never wrote anything, but there's a window open for it.

I'm working, watching code spiral through and numbers dance the screen.  An almost...a not notification.  You're typing something to me.  And then you decide not to, and it disappears.  Four times it happens.  I watch it the same way I watch my debug windows and wonder.  It appears again, you're typing.  And it disappears as you delete whatever it was you wanted to say.

I wonder what you wrote.  I wonder what you wanted to say and didn't.  What you wanted to say and couldn't.

I don't type anything, just think in the darkness to myself.

I guess we had nothing to send one another anyway.

Art - On Death

Art - On Death

I spend a lot of time as an artist thinking about death.  It’s morbid I know, but bear with me for a moment.  It’s a fixation point in most of the artwork I create.  I’m fascinated by grief, and more keenly than death itself, by the loss of possibility.  I obsess over chance and possibility, what people could or do or choose to amount to.  I find it fascinating to observe the decision-making process.  And there is something keen about the onset of death and how it presses on all the people around who observe it.  Whether they are personally connected to the death itself, or are a more casual observer.

I’ve done a tremendous amount of writing about death, and grief, loss and loneliness.  Truthfully I don’t really know why.  Stories about loss and death are my favourite, I write them, draw them, paint them, and make games around those moments.  I know it’s weird.

But for a long time I have struggled to really capture the myriad whirlwind of how humans deal with death.  I was really touched today when I read an article today by William Hughes.  It’s available here.  http://www.avclub.com/article/fake-deaths-cheap-resurrections-and-dealing-real-g-210402.  The article is beautiful, and sad, and raw.  It's raw because it means something, it's not covered in flowers and pretty words, it's harsh and hard, savage and ripping, and angry.  Really angry.  Angry at the possibilities of what might have been.  Angry at the trivialities that creators are taking with death.

It’s hard for us as creators to think about death and grief.  When we are in mindsets of creation, we want to capture pure emotions and reactions. Unfortunately we live in a society that is not obsessed with death like I am, but rather with killing.  I find myself at a strange crossroads where people push me to put the action of killing into my games.  Combat, warfare, weapons and guns. We are intrigued by the possibility of shooting, of pulling the trigger, of ending life.  Killing has become the causality of this strange fantasy we have of power.  We have actually lost sight of the possibility of death.

We rack up tremendous kill scores, ever increasing strange numbers of heads bashed in, limbs chopped off and bullets to the brain.

I’m walking this strange balance these days between designer and artist.  As a designer I understand the fundamentals of a repetitious cycle that reinforces engagement and entertainment.  I want to provide satisfaction, enjoyment and sloped ever-increasing challenges to my audience of players.  As an artist, my heart writhes in boredom.  I want to make games with stories, where there are no guns and no killing.  I want to think about absorbing people in the ideas of what grief really is, where there is only one death, and never another replay.  I’m in love with the game That Dragon Cancer, while my designer brain analyzes every challenge they will eventually face and wonders about how effectively they will overcome it.

These two sides juxtapose themselves against me, and I have no answers.

Well not no answers.  I’m making a game, quietly.  And I don’t know what it means.

Drabble - On Depression

Drabble - On Depression

There is this insidious, deep seated weird thing in your brain, when every time you hear a compliment you think to yourself "They're just being nice."

Poetry - Dark Sonnet - By Neil Gaiman

Poetry - Dark Sonnet - By Neil Gaiman

Dark Sonnet by Neil Gaiman

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such,
although I liked a few folk pretty well.
Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch, for brave men died and empires rose and fell.
For love, girls follow boys to foreign lands, and men have followed women into hell.
In plays and poems someone understands, there’s something makes us more than blood and bone.
And more than biological demands for me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown.
I see the trees are bending where it’s been.
I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown.
I really don’t know what "I love you" means.
I think it means don’t leave me here alone...

Thoughts - Alone in the Universe

Thoughts - Alone in the Universe

I think...the thought that humanity is the only thing in the universe, that we are completely alone out there is one of the most terrifying things.

What why?  Why do you think it's terrifying to be alone?

Writing - Saturday Night - Quantity

Writing - Saturday Night - Quantity

Quantity

Advice - On Moving On

Advice - On Moving On

One of my hobbies...reading the bestof threads in Reddit once in a while.  People are on occasion truly eloquent or give advice or moments of clarity in a way that you had never truly considered before.  This one is a piece from a person with the nickname 'ChubbyDane' who wrote in response to someone saying "How do I move on?"

Life - Forget

Life - Forget

To be willingly forgotten, is to be cast away and the memory removed.  To be willingly forgotten.  To pretend the memories never existed, and pretend and wish and dream so hard that they never did.  To alter truth, and time, and space.  To willingly forget you knew a person.  To cast them adrift, in a sea of nothings that had never been, and become to one another as strangers again.

Without the light of acknowledgement in your eyes, did we ever know each other once?

I am pleased.

To have made your acquaintance. 

Life - Choose

Life - Choose