I carried a digital camera everywhere starting in around 2002, and have tens of thousands of photos from the last two decades from WAYYYY before everybody carried a camera everywhere with them all the time.

I didn't realize that the Photos app had loaded all of my old photos onto my laptop until it popped up a "New memory for you from 2012!"

In October of 2011, I went to Los Angeles with my friend Alex, attended a play put on by Mark Z. Danielewski, and wound up getting to have brunch with him. We explored the city by way of House of Leaves, visiting locations from the book and feeling a great many things.

I was in the long drawn out process of breaking up with one of the great loves of my life, who I maintained a level of friendship with until last year when I finally pissed her off enough by being too depressed and literally broke to make it to an event. I was just reconnecting with the next big love of my life; that was messy for a while. The two of them work together now, and neither one likes me very much. I was a pain in the ass!!!!!! I had no idea what I was doing, except trying to do my best and be as sweet and thoughtful as I could be. It fucks me up to see pictures of the past, when the feelings those moments held have never really gone away.

The pictures show me that I'd just met Jace, that Tony was back in town visiting, that I had just moved into the apartment complex where I worked and began that strange stretch of my life. That Mimestein, my sweet first cat, was still alive but didn't live with me anymore. That I had just gotten the glasses I still have now, 8 years later, because I haven't had vision insurance in almost a decade. I just got some this month; if I can figure out that it's safe to go to an optometrist, I'm going to get ten new pairs of glasses to make up for it.

My pictures show me too much. It's almost impossible for me to enjoy my memories after 2004; I stumbled forward from thing to thing, a dazed creature, slowly losing the innocence I had unfortunately retained for so long, that I still retain too much of, but which shifts in and out like a mirage.

The worst thing they show me is that I used to care about my day to day life in a particular way that I don't now, which was to take pictures of things before pictures were ubiquitous, to see and want to capture the people and places I loved, to translate my lived experience into art and song in a way I rarely do anymore. I have become more skilled, more efficient, more valuable, and overall a better person; but it scours a deep canyon of sharp regret to look directly at the things I lost mostly because I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and was reconstructing myself after a pretty commonly fucked up conservative childhood and the dead star gravity collapse of my last year in high school.

Jacob's recital. My blood approves. Impossible breakfasts. Book from Noam. Mugs I don't own. Four Eyes first show. Shitty little desk. Jurassic technology. Dandelion finger. Essays not yet defeated. Marketing reform. Floral exploration. Literally too much for my trauma-stunted depression-addled mind to handle, and yet it kept moving, calamitously, beautifully, and I guess it's normal enough for things to end. But I never wanted what happened to end. I was just so afraid. And I'm so sorry to everyone I wasn't coherent enough to hold on to.

Everything I ever went for, I treasure. The losses sustained through fear of following through or of disrupting what was a pretty pathetic status quo are things I really can't bear to even hold in my mind for long enough to reconcile.

After being under-employed for most of the last two years, I have a steady part-time job and some freelance work that means I can afford to pay somewhere less than $800/month for rent. There are places in Athens that would fit my budget, but none of them are available in my research until the summer or fall because of the fucked-up school-based leasing schedule that rules the entire town. I also still don’t have a car, so until I get one, it would be a major pain to go too far out from a central location.

What do I do if I literally can’t find a place I can afford to live in this town? Moving to another city would almost certainly be more costly, and I don’t want to do that anyway. I’ve been fortunate to have a few different people let me stay with them rent-free (or rent-deferred) at different parts of this year. I don’t have any potential roommates at the moment, which is the only way I’ve ever afforded to live anywhere in my adult life.

I started imagining what it would be like to make enough money to pay more in rent, for a well-lit loft that I could live in by myself, to have enough money to decorate in a way I might like, rather than living in yet another dingy old southern house with a minimum of mismatched furniture that I’ve cobbled together over the last decade from thrift stores and hand-me-downs. It filled me simultaneously with a light of hope, to envision this thing that has never been possible for me, and then the inevitable shadow of disappointment that it will still never be possible. I’ve only briefly been able to fully-embrace anywhere I’ve ever lived as an adult; I’m so tired of having no home, let alone a more-permanent place I can care about and invest in rather than just inhabit briefly and reluctantly.

What do I do if I can’t find somewhere to live?

an astonishing number of apparently-profitable video games for the interactive telephone are simply spreadsheets with interior timers, whose fundamental interactions are so unpleasant that I believe they actually prolong the play experience; they begin with a tutorial, show you how to tap tap tap, and promise that at some point, perhaps once the tutorial is over, they will be fun. before long, there will be so many timers running, completing, yelling that they need to be tapped to collected, tapped three more times to set up the next timer, and then you should figure out whether you have tapped enough of these things to fulfill the “quests” or “orders” coming in or if you need to wait / tap some more first… so many of these running, with playful animations and sound effects, descriptions of items and actions that have no material bearing on the nature of what you do… at no point, not even at the beginning, and certainly not once the workload piles up, is this ever “fun.”

I’m far from the first person to note and describe this. It’s well-known enough to have become a decade-long genre, worth investing a real art budget into, because there are people who want a reason to keep touching their phones when the rest of their reasons have temporarily run out. Or just because a notification has come in, prompting a tap, a wait to load, a reward for returning for yet another day, and a series of taps to collect and wind up the timers again. Laborers on our behalf, these timers, playing the game for us; here, in this game, manifested as servile goblins hatched by you to work endlessly. In others they are dwarves, animals, and humans of varying levels of chibi detail. You set them to their tasks and then go about your day.

What’s the fantasy? What’s the game? Boss simulator, maybe: you do a bare minimum of coordination and ordering-around, and the diligently-employed rake in the cash which you take in full. A goblin can never quit, as a group they can never unionize, they will simply accrue and continue to crank the numbers higher.

None of this feels profound! I just wanted to write it down. I have, for some reason, continues to trawl the iOS App Store’s new releases every week or two for many years now, downloading and maybe trying out hundreds of games at this point. Anything that sounds remotely interesting, mostly “strategic” or “role-playing” games. And I have mostly seen the exact same 4 games released again and again in different guises, with minor variations on theme, polish, mechanical nuance, and budget. As repetitious as console and computer games could be in the 90s and 00s, even now with AAA games converging on the Ubisoft play-slurry format, this is a mind-numbing pattern indicating that, at least as far as the money people are concerned, these are the games worth making for this format. All of this emerging from the coincident market forces of Apple pushing for zero-cost-up-front apps with no “demos” allowed, and the consolidation of wealth away from a majority of people so that even a dollar or two to try a game is treated like extortion, while somehow allowing sunk-cost post-tutorial $4.99 Starter Packs to thrive.

Again, this isn’t profound. You probably know all this. It’s just… frustrating and saddening to me right now, how vast the medium is, that these games are made and promoted at such a regular clip. Oh well. I hope somebody who wouldn’t have made a good living elsewise is able to afford their rent comfortably, something I haven’t been able to do in over a year. I’m thinking about what kinds of game to prototype next, approaching the end of this first big project, and wondering what actions to start with, what will be interesting to me as well as to others, without requiring 5 years of development. That’s part of why I look at new games; I want to know what’s being released, and played, by the vast majority of players who have phones and maybe don’t follow the “big game” news, which seems like a very small portion of the addressable game-playing world.

I can see how these games work. I don’t want to make one like it. But my mercenary instincts have grown while my artistic pretenses have diminished; I need to make something that might make money. I wonder what that’s going to be?

I really love the work Tim is doing with these videos.

Foxy Shazam Is Absolutely Fucking Nuts To The Guts And I Love Them

Apparently I posted this same song with the same excerpt on May 6.

A lot has changed, a lot hasn't. I still like hearing this line.

🚨 NEW MUSIC FROM FOXY SHAZAM 🚨

one of the great bands who should have been way bigger than it seemed like they got to be