I backed this game years ago on Kickstarter. 2012, 2013? It's been on a long, long journey, but apparently it's in the last few months of polish. There's stuff they've shown on kickstarter that isn't in the trailer, and it has continued to look wild as hell the whole time.

I'm trying to imagine working on the same thing for that whole time. I aspire to that energy and dedication.

Wishlist it on Steam, or go ahead and buy it on itch, why doncha?

From this hilarious and insightful interview with Kool Keith / Dr Octagon / etc:

But it’s a catch-22. Some people will pay you a lot to do something easy, and some people will pay less to do something harder, but it’s been the way of my life. There’s people that will let you be free and do what you like to do. You can do a track with a person and they just say, “Yo, do what you do, I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck. I’m rapping about Pizza Hut on my version and you can rap about the fucking garbage truck. I like that.” Then you got some people that want to be more precision. They got to be like, “Okay, this album is about a pit bull—we’re going to talk about his ass, tail, legs, and his head, the wrinkles on his body, or whatever. The dog, we got to talk about him for the whole record.” It’s all cool.

FUCK, THAT'S FUNNY

A lot of rappers, they have dope rhymes and stuff, but they didn’t have the beats to really make it sound good. It should be like a soundtrack, like when James Brown did Black Caesar or when Curtis Mayfield did Super Fly. The soundtrack matched the movie so well. Now you got movies, the soundtrack don’t match. These guys now, they do a scene—a shark is coming, but that shit be playing some elevator music or something. It don’t even match the movie screen. So I wanted my beats to match the lyrics.

I get on all kinds of beats. There’s so much new music out there that it’s just too much for the average antique person. It’s like when the new Dodge Magnum with the magnifying sunroof come out, they can’t look at it. They still riding in the old shit. So they’re mad—it’s the same with music, with beats. The beats are too new and they can’t adjust and get on them. It’s like you sitting in the new Bugatti but you don’t know shit about it. You don’t know how to turn it on; you don’t know how to roll the windows down. You so used to driving that 1991 Buick. You on some ’91 Corolla beats. These motherfuckers don’t wanna adjust to the new shit, so they get mad and say, “That’s not the real shit.” That is the real shit. You pull your ’91 car up to the 2021 shit and it’s parked right next to you. But the old cats is mad because they can’t decipher it.

"The average antique person." God damn. I don't want to be an antique person!

I've been a pretty bad friend, colleague, and overall communicator. For a long time, particularly since the end of last year. I've posted here about doing "better," and I think I am, but in very specific ways. Other things have gotten more difficult; specifically, I have felt an uncharacteristic amount of shame around letting people down, and not being able to apologize or even reach out. I haven't talked to very many people since January; and it's not feeling any easier to reach out and repair my damaged and neglected friendships. I'm not sure why I can recognize it as a problem and yet not do anything directly about it. I'm already at maximum anxiety and discomfort most of the time; adding a phone call where I know I deserve to be chastised causes a peak and then slides away from me as impossible.

To one stupid end, I have fully blocked my access to social media. It's addicting and primarily destructive to me. If you need me, please email me, nick at this domain. Or text me, or better yet, call me; even if you want to yell at me, you can call me. It's easier for me to answer than to dial.

I can feel something unclenching, after just a few days without twitter. There is enormous guilt about not "keeping up" with the cavalcade of horrors, but I'm still reading the news; just less frequently, by way of rss subscriptions, which are significantly less-compelling by virtue of their length. Surely, on my deathbed, I will look back on the amount of time I spent fussing over the precise ways in which I want to be scoured by chaotic information as a shameful waste of finite materiality. Yet here, unfortunately, we are.

lovedrug — castling

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers the progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

— Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

lovedrug — bleed together

this song sounds so cool. I don't identify with its lyrics; I like a lot of Lovedrug's songs because they are strange stories, mythic or fictive, little horror-story vignettes clawing out of the speakers

Thinking about motivation. Yesterday my brother said he wished I could get as excited about our project as I do about Fortnite's new season (extremely good) or finally watching the 2nd and into the 3rd season of Avatar: the Last Airbender (basically perfect). I am excited about it, but every day I wake up like I'm coming out of a deep freeze, reminding myself what I do, gradually overriding the sense that effort is futile and that I need escape in something meaningless.

There were a lot of years, I'm sorry to report, where that sentiment was effectively true.

It's funny to be able to remember when I didn't have this problem. Really, up until I was 21 or 22, I had a deep well of internal motivation; I wrote hundreds of songs as a teenager, drew pictures or wrote stories long into the night, like my life depended on it — no, like it was the only thing I wanted to do. There's a difference. Because now my life does depend on a subset of my creative work, and fuck me if it didn't come long after the wave had crested and broken. But it's here, so I try to pair present circumstances with energy that only arrives intermittently. Like... exhumed.

Trying not to think too hard about the strange fact of someone buying a copy of the album I released in 2007, with a nice little note, and that it’s the 2nd copy anybody ever bought in 13 years 🙃 Or is that true? Maybe somebody bought it from me when I released it and then abruptly stopped trying to perform or promote it. I'm wired wrong from the start; I've gotten so many projects to the point of transcription or initial completion and then fallen off the motivational cliff. Everything scraped in under the professor's locked door.

I assume they bought it after I mentioned it here a few days ago. If so, thank you for the kind note. Received.

Which album from 2004 that I really enjoyed have I completely forgotten about? What lives only on a burned disc spindle that used to get sticky in my accord?

Self-involved meanderings. Pardon our regress.

...

Looked at Spotify's recommended new releases. New songs by The Velvet Teen, The Juliana Theory, Foxy Shazam.... even Poe? Ancient voices stir.

What I'm trying to say is: I'm trying to create the new era, in the death of the old, against massive gravity, and my own density. I want to channel who I once was, or become a new version that works. It's been a real ride, the whole time, but especially the last year. A year ago this time, I was at a record low. In perfect solo ellipsis isolation, I could almost believe things were all right. I'm self-centered, but I'm outward-facing. Nerves connected more to the skin than the spine; too many endings in the eyes. Events carry current; shock collar deterrent.

...

Correction: it's a different Poe.

...

But the only Velvet Teen.

"a mean mind in the way of seeing or receiving the warm summer rays"

These are disconnected snippets from my mean mind. I'll take some deep breaths, and begin again.

really great ways to begin and end an album. first:

and finally:

I probably wrote 3 dozen songs trying to sound like "paper scars" when I was 20. now extinct

Lovedrug — "American Swimming Lesson"

Their first album might be my favorite, but I'm back on this band that I've been listening to since 2004. I saw them play at the Masquerade, but I don't remember when, or with who, or what other bands were there. I guess I went to enough shows there... maybe two dozen, at its old location? Enough that I can't remember them all as distinct events. Anyway, Lovedrug was great, and at least their first two albums are long-time big-times.

If you ever feel like you can't learn anything new, first of all you're wrong. This is a trick your brain plays to avoid doing work, however small. But here's an example I just remembered, and want to write down for myself. Hope this helps!

My whole life, growing up, I was known for stomping and being too loud moving around. In middle school I practically doubled in height, and became a gangly, body-uncomfortable, adult-sized kid. Throughout my teens, I crashed regularly into walls, door frames, and any other obstacles, because my sense of my body was fucked. I would also run everywhere I possibly could, including in the house and at school. But I remember my parents regularly telling me to slow down, and to be quieter; even walking at regular speed, I remember my feet slapping the ground loudly, clumsily. It was part of my identity, to be clunky, loud, and to take up more space than I needed to, in lots of ways.

When I was 20, I took Okinawan karate lessons for a month from a questionable group of middle-aged southern men in a rundown retail building across the street from my house in Milledgeville, Georgia. I was lost, looking for direction and structure anywhere I could find it. I remember vividly walking around in the little dirt lot around this big old house where I lived with 7 other college kids, most of whom I had barely met, and having a painful conversation with my good friend Craig, accosting me for not being able to keep up with the band we had started in Atlanta, even though it was the thing I wanted most in the world. I was already massively depressed, having suffered through my 12th grade ego-cursed sabotage; spent 3 months in a prison school and then 5 months sleeping through class back at my regular school where basically everyone hated me for the wrong reasons; 3 months playing world of warcraft; the first mostly-friendless semester of college with a roommate who had bone cancer and went to bed at like 5pm, wherein I would just lie on the top bunk in the dark listening to music and wishing I was anywhere else; and then the next semester working the library night shift, sleeping 20 minutes every 4 hours and eventually losing my mind for a sleepless week in which I somehow aced my finals and otherwise just played the sims; a summer of hope and bike-riding and meditation and green tea and new love, at the end of which I had sex for the first time and then immediately had a pregnancy scare that turned out to just be low body fat percentage, but which damaged that relationship and traumatized me around sex for the next many years; then half a year in a little house by myself, writing songs in the middle of the night, howling like a mournful cat about everything that had gone wrong that I had no one to really talk to about, no one who could understand and even worse no one who could do anything about it; and even now I've hardly ever really talked to anybody about most of this except to allude to it, this period of several years in which my entire personality was torn down, and everything I valued about myself turned from gold into ash, the anti-Midas years; and even during all of it I had been writing songs on the piano and guitar, practicing with a band in Atlanta and trying to make a new band in Milledgeville and driving all over this cursed, sweating state, and I can remember moving into that big house when I realized that staying by myself might be killing me, and a good friend took a chance on me and let me move in with them, and I fucked that up the next summer by not knowing how to be in love either up close or at a distance;

— I am not in a moment of crisis. It is only out a sense of personal calm that I can reflect on, let alone project, any of this —

all of that behind my inarticulate reply, when Craig asked me about keeping up my end of our collaborative deal to come to Atlanta yet again to practice, which felt impossible and useless despite being one of the only meaningful activities I had, when he asked me, "Why can't you just do it, then?" and I replied, "I don't know... but I can't."

And I was looking at the Okinawan Style Karate School, dark glass front, no one ever visibly coming or going, but a flyer on the front that said accepting students, $90/month.

Maybe karate could help me. So I signed up, took a month's worth of classes, learned the word kata for form, tried to practice the katas but found it so tedious and clumsy that I couldn't lose myself in it usefully. I learned how to punch, with the first two knuckles forward; I was told that, if you do it "right," you could punch someone in the stomach and leave a bruise on their back. That you don't want to have to, but if you needed to, you could break someone's spine by punching correctly. These guys were intense, probably fucked up ex-military, seeking control over their own dark pasts through practice and communion in physical exertion. It was around that time I decided I maybe didn't want to spend more time with them. I've never yet had to punch anyone with my two first knuckles.

What stuck with me most vividly, and what I successfully practiced enough for it to stick, was being taught how to walk. They watched me walk across the room, and explained what I was doing wrong. You don't flap your feet flat on the ground, or go heel toe, heel toe; these are unstable movements, and even the slightest pressure can throw you off-center. It's also too noisy; it attracts attention. What you wanna do, they said, and what I continue to do unconsciously even now, is sweep each step from behind, down the center line of your body, and then out toward the hip, placing the outside of the palm of your foot — whatever that's really called — down first, placing your toes down quickly from the pinky to the thumb, planting your heel along the way. This is the way ninja move, they said. It's stable throughout, and it's silent. Practice, they said. As you walk around town, from class to class, or from your bedroom to the kitchen, practice this motion, over-exaggerating it until it becomes natural. And so I did, everywhere I walked alone around that campus, for months, until it became unconscious. Until I became quiet, until people couldn't hear my footsteps anymore, until I stopped trying to perform publicly, until I stopped seeking attention with every waking moment and accepted that, despite my drive and my talent, the world had no use for me, and that I would struggle to move solidly and stealthily through the rest of my life. To greater and lesser extents, of course. So that for years now, I've regularly and accidentally spooked people by just walking up behind or near them, and having them jump and say, "Jeezus! You scared me. I didn't hear you!!!" And I apologize, and feel strange, because I still feel like the clumsy kid who didn't fit inside this body.

I just remembered all of that in a flash as I walked quietly across this room, from the kitchen to the desk, trying not to wake someone sleeping just feet away, so I could sit back down and resume the challenging work of programming that I only seem to be able to do consistently at night, in the dark, when everything else has vanished, when music and code are the only things left for me to think about, when I used to howl and cry out strumming my guitar so loudly at 3 am that the neighbors would yell at me, a terrible nuisance I'm sure but wanting so badly to be heard, so badly to be heard