Attachments
It becomes necessary, after a certain point, to ask yourself: “What, exactly, am I getting from this?” It isn’t necessary to have a good answer, but it’s necessary to ask. Sometimes it’s terrifyingly easy to spend an hour, a day,…
Category Essays
Pieces
I haven’t been writing. At first it was just about writing this big piece I’ve been working on, and even then it was an issue. The experience of writing a 5000 word analytic piece is extraordinarily different from the experience…
The Process
Well. The piece I wanted to put up next still isn’t done. It’s up over 3200 words now, but still has a few hundred more to go. If that were all it was I’d just bang them out and put…
Game Over
They’re all playing games. It’s the only explanation I can think of. The way a game is framed, victory is the only thing that matters. Accumulate your resources, destroy your opponents, be the last one standing, survive at any cost.…
Attention
The harder I work, the more I feel the lack of impact that work produces. Pushing a boulder up a hill over and over may be pointless, but at least it’s a solid tactile sensation and at least you know…
Dark Souls
People in dreams are perceived in reverse order. When we are awake, we see a face, a body, a set of mannerisms, a manner of dress, and we recognize the familiar, and we put a name to the person. In…
Grasping
Everything seems so huge when we’re small, and then shrinks to catch up with us. As our awareness gets bigger, everything we are familiar with begins to seem smaller, more self-contained, better understood. It’s not so much, really, that our…
A Painless Death
Sometime within the past 15 years or so, game developers collectively came to the realization that death sucks. They reacted to this by making games easier, by reducing the consequence for failure, by allowing the player to quickly get back…
Pour
Each job carries its own kind of stress. Some jobs are physically taxing, exhausting to bone and muscle, while leaving the mind relatively free. Some jobs are intellectually demanding, forcing a state of deep thought, deep focus, which carries its…
Prisoners
A couple of years ago, I was driving across the Bay Bridge when I realized it wasn’t over. That makes it sound like I was in a way darker place than I really was, but there was a part of…