I sit down to work and feel a sagging chasm open. I can hardly get there, and once I do, labor feels both impossible and useless. Impossible because it feels useless. What am I aiming for? What's the best possible outcome?

I hear songs that have pleased me and feel either nothing, sadness, or envy. Empty envy. I'm jealous of all accomplishments, all art, all bodies, all beauty that isn't and won't be mine, even as I feel the emptiness of what other people recognize as mine. I want not only to have a different voice or to be a different person, but most of all to be able to believe it would be possible to enjoy having, and being.

More than a dozen people close to me have given serious consideration to death in the last couple of months. This is the creeping darkness of policy. This is the environment we've created, one in which lovely people prefer death to dealing. Inhospitable planet.

I hear someone say the problem is that we live in bad times. That your readiness is less useful. That what we learned to want is wrong now.

I'm watching a catalogue of speed run videos, people bending Super Nintendo games into impossible shapes. The music and art has lost its impact, but there's something in rearranging the shapes into new and deliberately-hostile environments that holds my attention, periodically making me open my eyes wide in disbelief.

"Kaizo" means "rearranged," or maybe it means "asshole," but either way now it also means "a game created to frustrate beyond belief." Games are modified by hacking the impenetrable and delicate fabric of the original ROM, writing inscrutable code to produce monstrous mutations of children's toys. Kaizo is a cruel prank, an easy-looking Mario jump with hidden blocks that dump you into a pit if you try to make the jump as usual. You're only ever a moment from death, with lava at your heels or a vast chasm you have to traverse by spin-jumping repeatedly off the blood-hungry head of a repurposed enemy. It takes incredible patience to explore, decode, and then practice a Kaizo-style game. They're a nightmare of bureaucracy. They turn play into endless paperwork, an arcane form you fill out to the best of your understanding only to have it revoked and returned with corrections and fees attached, thousands of times. And they're fascinating.

People play them to laugh and curse at their own suffering, and at the cleverness of the devil who designed it. Then eventually a small number of people will commit them to memory, practice endlessly to execute the impossible, then take pleasure in being recognized for performing in a way that largely obscures the difficulty of the act in the first place.

I roam the streets of Yarnham and feel purposeful, placated, quietly satisfied. Bloodborne is a game of disgusting, horrifying, frustrating brutality; but Lucy said it feels good to fight because as difficult as it is, you're supposed to beat it. I want blood, I want vengeance, I want there to be an end to the nightmare. Every morning a monster wakes up because no one put the stake in. Every night their eyes close with unearned certainty.

I say Bloodborne has taught me to let go. If I die and lose my accumulated echoes? Oh, well. If I die a hundred times on the way to learning a new area or boss? I hiss curses and try to laugh. But while I'm able to apply this patience and detachment to the game, I can't find that feeling for much of anything else. I take myself entirely too seriously, and failures don't feel like missteps on the way to inevitable victory. I can look back over my life and instead of seeing doors that opened, and paths I've connected, instead I see archways that have collapsed, foreclosing past and future. Places I never got to explore, and simpler territory that's now inaccessible.

I wonder about a Kaizo Bloodborne. Whether I would relish being treated even worse, so long as I had my saw cleaver at the ready. The game was already designed in the kaizo spirit; a distorted terror of height and fur and eyes where nothing is where it's supposed to be and pain bursts forth unannounced. What is the kaizo of kaizo? What is the endless rearrangement that feeds a possibility of pleasure? There's a large part of me that never wants this nightmare to end. It's one of the only activities that brings me anything approaching pleasure at the moment, and its finitude disquiets me. Either it will end, or my enjoyment will run out.

Some people play the same game for decades. They find joy in honing their performance, optimizing the route, skimming along the surface of a memory's lake. I remember learning to beat Super Metroid in about 2 and a half hours when I was maybe 10, because you could see a different ending if you finished in less than 3. I did the same thing with Metal Gear Solid a few years later, to get special items for running the game quickly. I can hardly remember doing those things; I mostly only remember because Ryan has reminded me. I don't know where my own memories go. In 1997 I had no sense of a wider purpose to continuing to run a game. Once I beat the game's internal metrics, I was done. What would I have become if I'd been born ten years later, similarly-disposed, driven to repeat useless tasks to prove I could, if I had been conscious of the world of speedrunning? Like so many other things, it's not worth thinking about. But here I am in the middle of the night turning other people's successes into my own shortcomings.

"Wanna feel the knife, come on, make me bleed. Torn apart for glory while the viewers sleep. On a painted highway towards a fever dream, I could hear the static of television teeth. Yeah, I wanna feel it again!"

"Yes, and finally I am nowhere, on the verge of full collapse it seems. It's a matter of perspective who I am and what you see."

"Head full of strangers under pale moonlight makes me turn from the shadows. I can't find your eyes. It comes from all directions. Suddenly, from all sides. You could be my protector in the arms of the night."

My sleep isn't coming easily. I sleep between 5am and 7am, 9am and 11am, noon and two. Can't get there, can't stay. Does a Hunter who can't reach the dream or the nightmare exist? Hunter's Insomnia, ineffective limbo. Stunning myself into submission.

I'm hoping I'm healing. That waiting is a cocoon and not a tomb. That I can take enough small steps forward and not find myself still in a vast indifference.

I heard someone say all the "successful people I know take their work very seriously, and don't take themselves seriously at all." I am in a prolonged moment of precise inversion.

And I can't help feeling we live in a kaizo world. Where recognizable ingredients have been placed in impossible configurations, where missteps are fatal and there are an increasing number of loose stones and unforeseeable obstacles. One where the monsters aren't being defeated, where their eyes are not placed on altars to reveal the doorways to a livable future. Where every goddamn day is a blind run bracing for the first of many kaizo blocks, and I can't gather the courage to get my ass kicked just to do it again when the only payoff is doing it yet again while a cacophony of clocks tick downward with drooping, inaccurate hands.

"You say, 'the future's open wide, fuck my destiny.' I got nowhere to go; I'm going nowhere."

"On cassettes, I record my memory. Fading colors, tape keeps tangling, little darkness, too much light on the wrong side."

This is a really lovely album that keeps showing new depths.

"Think about it often, the moment I was slain."

"And I'm nothing but a thief, with a knife looking sharp for the heart."

"You can see and not believe."

The promising child had vanished, but the city had not yet burned. Menacing movements in increasing shadows fought for her attention. From high above the common grounds; from higher still than all its walls; from an ancient-sculpted balcony, the princess looked out over Hyrule and made plans under the milk-blue moon.

Zelda remembered what it was like to sit peaceful, enthusiastic, studying or reading or talking happily with friends. For the life of her, she couldn't access it now, any more than she could see the friends her adoptive captor had vanished. How many years can pass without access to that contented mode? Was this adulthood, come too soon from the sky, never to release its grip? Or was it simple imprisonment, with only a key required to sever the lock from his shoulders and set right the world?

Time enough had passed. The sword was gone, the temple emptied, the great tree sagged and silent. Nearly five years. The boy wasn't coming back, nor her father, nor any other promise-making man. There were no promises left in the world, nor hope, nor especially any remnant of romance. A tyrant sat on a reupholstered throne, broadcasting violent triangular waves until her citizens, her charges, saw through violent miscolored eyes and staggered through the streets haunting those who still held onto humanity. Time enough had passed.

So she'd found Impa's dead religion's ceremonial clothes and watchful blade. Snuck together a mismatch of knives and honed them throwable. Channeled secret shreds of hot magic into lynel-eye marbles. Gathered handfuls of combustible tree nuts during her daily walks. Extended the dance lessons of her distant childhood into acrobatic rituals of martial preparation.

Princess Zelda had no more options; she was a goldfish figurehead, kept on display but now largely ignored. If she was ever spotted outside her bowl, she was returned swiftly by beast-twisted hands. Zelda couldn't act, so she would have to be someone else. And she would have to break the hands of any beast or man who brought harm to her beloved people.

She pulled up her boots, cinched tight her wrist wraps and binder, and raised the mask over her mouth. If Zelda must wait hopelessly at home, then another name would do what she could not. The streets would know a new shadow. Old symbols would drive back new horrors. Hyrule was out of time, but Sheik was just getting started.

—

[It's extremely stupid that I write fanfiction in an overwrought voice. This was supposed to set the stage for a game about Zelda/Sheik in the years after young Link is frozen in time; playing on the Batman concept, Sheik would roam the streets of a vast Hyrule, saving people from Ganon's monsters, restoring hope and making room for life. There may or may not be portions where you play as Zelda during the day, gathering resources and holding quiet court beside the tyrant Ganon, listening in his plans and the pleas he ignores to plan her next missions. I would prefer it not conclude with Link's return; this is yet another branching timeline. I think she would ultimately venture out of the city, rescuing Ruto from under the ice and maybe meeting other characters from Ocarina, and then she'd defeat Ganon. When Link emerges from the Temple of Time, he finds Zelda on the throne. Maybe she tenderly apologizes for the loss of his youth, but then she definitely breaks the Master Sword and Ocarina so that there's no chance of time travel being used to undo her work or restore Ganon to power.

Also in my dream game, Hyrule would be warped by Ganon's misuse of the Triforce of Power into a vertically-stretched, Bloodbornesque city of varyingly-mutated Hylians. His power is turning normal people into monsters, including the city itself.

Anyway! An Arkham City-style game with Sheik as Batman would rule! I should probably just write more plainly about these things.]

When will I meet the mysterious benefactor who will let me live in their spare room by the sea for 6 months while I read some books and look at birds

I listened to this new 4-song EP by all-time great band Hussalonia as I forced myself to go for a jog in the hopes that a new set of endorphins would override the crushing sense of uselessness and futility I feel toward my place in the world, and wouldn't you know these songs are about that very same thing. Not my favorite Hussalonia tracks musically, but I really appreciate the clarity of the lyrics in the last few Hussalonia releases. I have felt — and currently feel — a lot of what's in these songs, and it's nice/helpful/consoling to hear someone sing them.

Walking out my door, I notice I’ve accrued sedimentary layers of recent reading on the edge of my desk. I’ve recovered some of my drive to read this year. Each of these books is partially inside me now; I haven’t finished any of them, and they aren’t the only books I’ve let inhabit me in recent months. Everything stews together.

Also pictured: the cat who loves my work chair much more than I do.

This site is built with Kirby 3, which is a really good and relatively-simple flat-file CMS that I use a lot. I ran into an issue where images uploaded from iOS can display with the wrong rotation in non-iPhone browsers. It's not Kirby's fault, but Kirby also doesn't have an easy way to address this with its built-in tags. So I made a custom Kirbytag for displaying images that re-encodes all images before displaying them, which fixes the orientation issue. This uses Kirby's built-in thumbnail processor, so it doesn't require installing anything else. And as a side benefit, I can specify a maximum image width and shrink images down before sending them to the browser, which saves everybody bandwidth! Yeahhhhhhh

If this is of any interest to you, here's the Github repo!