I made the mistake of reflecting on masculinity by way of literature today, because I made the mistake of looking at twitter for longer than 1 minute, because we're caught in a re-litigation loop of the last fifty years because almost everything was wrong with the last fifty years. It has never been a good time to read Infinite Jest, even and especially if you were its author, who had words squeezed out of him compulsively, past-due juice bursting from unhappy citrus. If you start reading one of the ten billion books and don't mesh with its voice, the fault is always the book's. But that's my unasked-for masculinity hissing condescension I only half-mean.

I typed "making and unmaking." What did I mean by that? Oh, yeah. I was watching a video of St. Vincent playing guitar and thinking things about gender that I don't have good words for. The things I admire in her, I would hate in a man. The attitude, the emptiness, the prowess. That confidence in a woman is earned and admirable, while confidence in a man is unearned and loathsome — and that this is almost always true. That women have to make themselves(?) while the task of a man in this moment is to unmake himself; to strip away the monstrous layers of sedimentary masculine nastiness.

Or that's how I find myself thinking about it; that I've spent most of my conscious life trying not to be a ""man"" because almost everything about the concept is repulsive. I've unmade myself for so many reasons, almost all of which have to do with inadvertent manifestation of the toxic. I've been the obnoxious, too-talkative lit dude; but I've grown through it and tried to replace haughtiness with enthusiasm to keep listening. Whenever I try talking about this, though, and raise any complaint about my position as "the dude" in any situation, there's understandable raising of queer hackles that I might be going MRA. No! There is no defense of the obelisk; it must be torn down. It's too much to talk through. All I want to say is that I feel, acutely, that I have been made to carry the insistent clawmarks of manhood, that I've put so much effort into rooting out the enculturation that makes all my favorite people less trustful of me, that it is excruciating to have enjoyed in any measure some of the books on a "red flags list" at some point in my accidental life, and to choose not to defend those experiences, that there is a vast desert of my life that was none of it what I wanted and that I read Infinite Jest not (entirely) because of my gender but because I was jobless and briefly had a roommate with a different set of books than I had access to, and it kept me occupied for a month when I was 22 and needed desperately to believe I wasn't going to be poor forever (spoiler alert: I was), and it was a powerful experience precisely because of the ways it ripped and tore at the fabric of convulsive masculinity, the pressures of performance and speechlessness and disconnection and the illegible torrent of words that want to come out except you're supposed to sit there, politely, and let the old men decide your fate based on whether you fit. And even now I don't want to talk about it, because it's not important to me, and the likeliest thing is that, regardless of my personal experience, invoking certain objects casts me in a light I reject but can't evade.

This renders jagged chasms of my life unspeakable, and I am having a hard time right now with (among everything else) how much of my life feels like a story I either hate or have trouble speaking!

believe me, I am deeply aware of and ashamed of the contrast between posting about racist violence by state actors and then posting about needing a new cell phone plan!!!! we, as I have said, live in hell and the context collapse is just one of its manifestations

Do any of y’all use Visible for your phone? I need to change my phone service and it sounnnnds okay, despite being owned by verizon. Anybody have any good/bad experiences with it, or have a party plan I could join? reply to the tweet this generates or email me!

HEY, COPS, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE, YOU COWARDLY FUCKS

There are no words for how terrifying, exhausting, and enraging it is to live in the USA,
and I’m among the least at risk of just being shot repeatedly because the neighbors called the cops. Jacob Blake was shot by the cops yesterday in front of his kids. I watched the video and feel sick beyond words. I hate this place, our corrupt systems, our constant abuses of power, and our ingrained disregard for human life.

I was shocked and moved to tears to wake up today to several donations to my Ko-fi, some of which were for larger-than-requested amounts!!! Thank you, sincerely, for even being willing to think about supporting me, let alone actually doing it.

If you missed my post yesterday about subscribing to keeping me alive, you can read it there! And whether you read that or not, I just want to say: I have had a hard time making enough money to live over the last couple of years, and am asking for help through donations or subscriptions through Ko-fi. You're not obligated to do anything, but if you have enjoyed any of the jokes, podcasts, art, writing, music, games, or anything else I've put online in the last few years... any amount is appreciated.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on a game that I'm very excited to tell you more about in the next couple of months, planning further game prototypes, and preparing to do some more web work to keep the bills paid. I'm also thinking about what little things might be fun to do for subscriber-only content (idk, we'll see), so if you have ideas about that, go comment on this Ko-fi post!

If you can, and I know it's a fucking ridiculous time, I need to ask for help! I've been having a hard time making ends meet for a couple of years now, but have continued to scrape together enough to keep going. Right now it's not looking so great! I just had to move out of the house where I've lived for the last few years because my housemate was going back to work in person with kids and that's a covid risk! I'm staying with my partner Christina temporarily in her little studio apartment, but I need to get a new place, and can't afford the rent on anything even remotely close to here. I haven't had a working car since last spring, when mine broke down and I couldn't repair it.

Since starting antidepressants last fall, I have majorly rehabilitated my capacity for work. I spend so little on things that aren't rent and food. I've spent most of the year since February working on a small game project that should be announced in the next month or two; but we're in the tail end of a longer-than-expected dev cycle (which, duh), and the money is running out. I have some web work lined up that I'll be able to do hopefully in the next month. But basically every month or two for the last two years I've scrabbled to get enough money together to pay everything I'm responsible for. It's exhausting, as I'm sure you know!

I'm turning 34 in a few weeks. After working low-wage jobs for a decade, then getting paid better but working contract to contract for most of the last... 5 years? I'm looking for something with longer-term stability; I'd love to find a way to keep working on game projects, especially on any of the half dozen designs I have sketched out that would give a fresh and meaningful injection of creativity into the world of games! In the meantime, I'll keep making web sites. I'd like to have time to do more public-facing creative stuff like podcasting and writing. But right now I'm focused on making a living and not dying! I haven't bought new glasses in 9 years! I don't have health insurance! I'm gonna need a new computer soon! Shit is bleak if I take even one tiny step back and peek out from between my trembling fingers, but I'm still going!!!!!!!

If you wanna help me keep the lights on and fund time for me to bring things in the world for you to enjoy, or if you just have a steady income and want to help out your friend who does not, how about you click on that Ko-fi button and subscribe to Keeping Me Alive!!! Or, send me a little one-time chump o'change! I dunno. I appreciate all of you who pay literally any attention to me despite everything, so thanks either way.

I love Achewood.

I still think of myself as a programming beginner. I don't have any formal education on it; but I've learned piecemeal from hundreds of better-educated and more-experienced people than me over the years, mostly indirectly through their writing. I've been (barely) making my living writing code since... 2015?

This hasn't been an easy path. I learned basic HTML around 1999, only using it intermittently on forums and band sites. I branched out into CSS in 2006 because I had a dream about a site called "I Love Sitting On Chairs," told my friend Erik about it — he said I had to make it, but I had to do all the styling in CSS, so I learned and did. I used those techniques to make a web booklet for my album Plate, which I put SO much time into and hardly anyone ever saw that I know of, and doesn't really work in modern browsers. I studied Why's Guide to Ruby in the summer of 2007, sitting on the couch every afternoon at Blackbird with my first mocha forays into coffee. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around more than the basics of code, but that taught me about a lot more than syntax and logic, things like text editors, the command line, and introduced me to some voices online that I would follow for many years, even when I wasn't actively coding. I sat nearby, listening to people talk into microphones about new developments in code, things I mostly didn't understand but which grew slowly more familiar.

Every 6 months or so, someone would ask me to make them a website. Each of these attempts, usually after successfully creating something useful, was punctuated by a collapse into depressive failure-feeling, but slowly I built up my knowledge and experience. I made one for a property management company after moving to Athens in 2009; that led to me, jobless and sweltering, being asked to fill in when the property manager left abruptly. I did that job for 3 years, mostly not doing web stuff, but still learning periodically, and eventually revamping the company's site to be more useful along the way. In my last year there, I read every word published to action button dot net, sent a small fix to Tim for action button entertainment's site, and he asked me to make them another site. So I did, desperate for something interesting and validating, and that led to my tentative forays into real Javascript code. Making the videoball.net site in... 2013??? led to me getting more paid gigs; people reached out to me, asking if I'd make them a site. Wow! What an idea. After a few decent small gigs, I got a job making a dynamic site, that wound up with me making a final version in Vue.js, writing an honest-to-god Web Application.

That whole time, I felt like I was holding on to a bucking bronco mounted to a roller coaster; almost everything I've ever coded has felt like, "I dunno!!! MAYBE I can do this???" And, usually, I've figured something out. But it wasn't until I took a job working on Wordpress sites (fuck wordpress) in an office that I realized just writing HTML, CSS, PHP, and basic Javascript had become deeply boring. I think I'm honestly probably among the top 10% of CSS programmers in the world? I can make CSS do weird stuff. I can answer esoteric questions, and find some way to make just about anything someone's asked me to do work. Especially with a little JS mixed in. I mean, hell; I've been making web sites for literally twenty years now. But, unfortunately, I haven't been able to parlay that extensive knowledge into a lucrative job; and as has been the case with so many skills in my life, I get really good at something, can't find a way to get paid consistently for it, and so I begin to resent the skill and look for something else to do. I've been making between $14k and $22k a year for most of the last decade; the latter two years as a property manager I made closer to $30k, but that required every ounce of available energy and attention and burned me out so badly. Same with the 6 months I spent at the ad agency; I made almost $30k in 6 months, but due to my own fucked up body chemistry, my health tanked, I quit, and then didn't really work for most of the next year. So. All of this has been excruciatingly-difficult, and I did almost all of it with untreated depression that would crater me for weeks at a time! Good for me, I guess!!!!!

The thing I realized while at the ad agency was, I had finally gotten more than just a decent grasp on logical programming. I had become good at it, and more surprisingly, really missed doing it. The few times I got to write a small JS behavior in those months, my whole mind lit up, and I realized I needed to find a way to do that. Now, of course, if I lived in a big city and could stand being cooped up in an office, I could take a job at a startup or something. I've been told by people who have seen my code that I could easily have a mid-level to senior JS programmer position, if I applied to a few. I interviewed for and was offered a couple of jobs in Europe over the last few years; I declined them because I valued my friends and social situation here. OOPS! Guess that might have turned out to be a mistake, because everything is fucked now and I could maybe have had my own apartment in a strange city and actually felt like an adult rather than a fucked-up perpetual-adolescent failure, but that's another conversation.

Rather than follow that more obvious path, I started to study game programming. An infinite frontier of difficult mental labor where I could express my creative ideas. Moreover, my brother Ryan was developing his art skills; we worked on a few things small things together and really liked it. We'd worked together with our friend Tony on Bugspeed Collider for a couple years of free time effort, when I was still too scared of complex code, and too hung up on my own anxiety to do more than a couple hours of challenging creative work. What if we made our own things? I had a handful of strong-feeling game design concepts, and set out to learn how to make some simple things in late 2018. I studied Pico-8 and Lua, and more importantly "the game loop," which was another thing it took many attempts and experiments to really wrap my mind around, which now feels second nature. I made a few small prototypes and experiments, and then we hacked Celeste to make Ingeste. I moved onto Love2D for more power, working with Ryan for several months in 2019 on a little game we called Party Monsters, which was a playful riff on Pokémon. We never really released anything about that, not wanting to promise anything we couldn't deliver, and I studied and struggled and figured out how to make a lot of things work, ultimately hampered by Love2D's deliberate technical limitations and my own inexperience. But I was learning, and showed it to a few people, and that got me the gig I have now, that I'm not allowed to talk about yet. It's cool, it's satisfying, but it's also been massively challenging, and has served as a real game-making boot camp.

All of that in the midst of adapting to antidepressants since November, which has been a real up and down experience, thankfully mostly up. In the midst of covid. In the midst of the end of my longest partnership, and a marked increase in my own social anxiety, and a period of political turmoil in which the bastards may still be getting the upper hand, but we're collectively pushing back against harder than ever, in which I have not been able to participate as directly as I want. I'm broke again because the project is taking longer than anticipated, and debt I accrued over the last couple years of worsening depression has to be paid, and money is harder than its ever been, and we're entering an economic depression because dipshits run everything and haven't been roasted alive yet. I have to move to a new place somehow, despite having no money, because my housemate is going back to work in a preschool in a week, and I'm not gonna get fucking covid if I can help it. I'm grateful to have been seeing an amazing woman since the end of last year, who is going to let me stay with her temporarily. And another friend has offered a guest room, but again, covid worries, just generally, because fuck everything.

But basically, everything is massively fucked, my own stuff is massively fucked and difficult, and yet I'm still trudging forward, doing code work every day, and learning new things in anticipation of future challenges. I fully credit my antidepressants for keeping me going this year; the person I was 12 months ago wouldn't have been able to handle half of this shit. But here I am, and I'm going, and maybe I'll go to debtor's prison, and maybe I'll die in the street, but I'm gonna do my best not to!

... I just wanted to contextualize this video, but wound up typing all of that. I've started studying C++ and Unreal Engine just a little at a time, because assuming I get to work on some more game ideas, I'm going to try in UE. I've also been broadening my base of general computer science knowledge; reading snippets of Knuth, Dijkstra, Game Programming Gems, and others. This far-ranging path crossed with Alexander Stepanov, co-creator of the C++ Standard Template Library, and several recommendations to learn from him. I downloaded the now-free PDF of his Elements of Programming, and the first few pages were a baffling discussion of what programming even is, from a conceptual perspective.

I needed to know what his voice sounded like; who wrote this book, and did I really need it? Hence the above video. The audio sucks; he's talking directly into a blown-out lav mic the hold time. But I loved it; he's talking about the book and its big ideas in a way that definitely convinced me to spend more time with it, however long it takes me, to learn more about the foundation of what's going on at the root of programming. Stepanov is funny, deeply knowledgeable, and I love his contrarian presentation of the book.

A lot of what he's talking about makes my head spin. But a good portion of it is within my grasp. And the thing I've learned over all these miserable years scraping a living from the butt of this prolonged era of American collapse, which I understand how has been happening since before I was born and has just gotten steadily worse... the thing I've learned is that if I point my attention at something for long enough, no matter how obtuse, I will make sense of it. C++ was terrifying a few years ago; now I'm nodding through the opening sections of a video course, waiting for something surprising to happen. I'm deeply knowledgeable about Javascript, Lua, and a bunch of other stuff. And for now, because it's the only thing I can get anybody to pay me to do, as long as there's money available for it, I'm going to keep making websites and hopefully more games, and getting better and better at programming as a discipline, leaning into the torrential wind of our uncertain future, fucking up just about everything along the way but refusing to give in to despair.

If anybody has money or a programming job for me, hmu. Sorry if I haven't been able to do something for you in the last few months. I'm trying to finish this game over the next few weeks and move on to something else, which, at the moment, does not yet exist.

love too not starve in the stupidest country in history

Crash Kings — 1985

Really good percussive piano-driven album. This isn't even my favorite from it, but it might be the one that gets in my head most often. I like to listen to Crash Kings when I need to bang out some code!