So many things are changing, moving, ending, rearranging right now. Several of my favorite places, my personal institutions and havens, closed down this month. The bookshop, the donut shop, the karaoke bar. My haunts, exorcised from a city, anointed by rising rent. What do you lose when you lose a place? The infinite layers of memory, or at least a major source of their recurrence. How many friends, books, and worries I had breakfast with at Ike & Jane. The true site of my adult reblooming into someone capable of fun, singing and dancing at Go Bar. The incalculable variety of experiences both shopping and working at Avid Bookshop. Gone with the new year.

These are just the physical things. The ones I’m comfortable talking about. An extraordinary, excruciating number of things have changed in the last 6 months, and continue to cascade into new waves of disruption.

I’m trying to face them with determination, willingness, and resilience. I want to find excitement, where I’ve only been able to find dread. I’ll keep going. But for now, I’m maxed out and reeling. One step at a time. Just not in the same old places.

dream last night where a guy was wearing a t-shirt with TOBACCO written twice vertically down his shirt,

T
O
B
A
C
C
O

like from above each nipple down to the belly button

and he barged into this big mall-looking area like, "who the fuck are you?" and then a young johnny depp-looking character (aka sleazy and self-satisfied with a goatee and his shitty little hat) stepped forward and said, "i'm the guy that put tobacco in your lungs" and stabbed two knives through the middle of the words

i woke up feeling like shit

annnnnd i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have had this dream if not for playing devil may cry 5 last week, which i liked a lot better than this dream!

From Against Worldbuilding by Lincoln Michel

At the same time, fans of worldbuilding works focus not on the arc of the story, the struggles of the characters, or the aesthetic power of the fiction. They focus on the inevitable moments when worldbuilding breaks down. My least favorite example of this is the “crazy fan theory.” These normally begin on a site like Reddit, then spread like Kudzu across the internet. Why didn’t the giant eagles simply fly Frodo to Mount Doom? Well, it would be a really boring story if they did! That doesn’t satisfy fans, who instead create fan theories that “explain” and “fix” and “change the way we see” famous works like The Lord of the Rings. (These crazy fan theories exist for basically every popular book or movie that has ever been produced.)

It isn’t a world that a writer is creating, it is a story. The goal of the writer is not to clutter the path with every object they can think of, but to clear the way for the reader’s journey.

The main reason I think worldbuilding has become a problem is that it leads people to believe that “realism” is the primary point of fiction, even fantasy fiction. But representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction. Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding.

I enjoyed this a lot! Tim's work at Kotaku has been some of my favorite video games-related discussion over the last couple years.

Related: I don’t think it’s a badge of honor to have pristine books. The purpose of a book is to be read, and reading is disruptive. It’s a process that changes you, it’s hard work even if it looks and even feels peaceful, and it’s perfectly normal that both you and the book come out the other side looking different.

I knew a guy who said he took pride in treating his books carefully. No bends, no creases, no marks. He said he wanted someone to look at his shelves and never know he was there. I thought that was a sad dream. I also wondered whether this delicacy felt like love or abandonment, and what his wife thought about those sneaky hands.

I wonder if part of the “decline of books” is the way they’re bound. Most books, floppy or firm, do not lie peacefully flat. You turn the page of a book lying before you, and as you remove a hand to eat a bite of cereal, or to cut into a burrito, the page you just turned to flips itself back over. Then more pages. Unless you firmly crease each page as you open it — which feels violent, exhausting — the book is always trying to shut itself. Shows and movies, you start them and they just go. They beg you to stay. But the book closes off, adds friction, more than simple attention, it requires handling.

You can feel romantic about this, but I think it’s a problem.

Books can be made to lie flat. I have a notebook with a normal-looking spine, but when opened, and maybe with just a bit of pressure, it lies calmly flat. Waiting, welcoming. Take your time, it says. Don’t rush. Think at your own pace. It’s the best notebook I’ve ever had. And it cost less than a moleskine, even though it came from Japan.

and other ridiculous wishes

I've been dragging my past behind me, heavy comet. I'm tired. Constantly triangulating who I am relative to dozens of flat and liftless images is exhausting and useless.

Not the bright-eyed boy tinged with a melodramatic tendency. The performer, teacher's pet, self-centered but open-hearted nerd who fully invested in fictions, including stories he told himself about love and commitment at an age when there's nothing solid to commit with.

Not the disaffected obsessive, up all night in a solitary dorm room or in the strange square house where two years happened in six months, singing mournfully and meaningfully to no one as a body's worth of personhood slipped painfully to the floor. Rapid oscillation between zen-green afternoons and pitch-thick nights where self-destruction tried desperately to be rebirth.

Not the angry screenprinter. Not the musician whose voice was dissolving into ambient noise. Not the game-consumed property manager. Not the blooming bookseller and writer. Not the suicidal rat on the sinking copy shop. Not the surprised web professional, using sudden free time, money, and energy to dance and sing and flirt briefly with happiness. Not the debt-ridden, burned-out crater, feeling futility in every step.

I want a new story. New self-image. New me to lean into. That's a story, too, but it's what I want. Stop trying to be everything I was once, all at once. Ineffectively. Heartbreakingly, insufficient in every direction. I don't have to be these people anymore. I'm already not. Catching up to that is the hard part. Forgive me if I have to shed in the direction of something new. Because things are changing around me and I don't want to just be dragged along in the wake.

I really, really recommend you read the new House of Leaves TV scripts by Mark Z. Danielewski. Especially if you've read the book. These aren't simple adaptation. They're something else, nearly two decades(!) later.

Do me a favor and buy these for $9.

Just a thought!