I think my focus will be on constructing little worlds to visit. Movement mechanics, scene switching, various audiovisual effects, and... yes, probably how to pace a world, how to think about a player's journey through it or within it, but no focus on other game mechanic like things.

Worlds don't have to be open, they can be linear, but... well, I guess I'll need to define it a bit better.

Planning a Godot workshop for later this summer. It will be online.

I decided yesterday that I was going to make & release a video for the full moon... so... here I am. I'm not sure on what, but I think I've got a lot of thoughts bottled up that I've been letting leak out into bluesky in a way I'm not happy with.

I'm writing the guide to a single card every day. I will be finished sometime in late September, although I'll still need to write supporting text (spreads, intro, etc).

Jul 5 - Sept 23-ish

when thinking, what do i get out of this project/collaboration? i drew the six of coins, which reflects how i felt. i didn't like this feeling -- i want to be a magician working with magicians, parallel creatives. whatever the project is or was, it felt more like a give and take... 'charity'. i don't know what card could capture that dynamic better.

anyway, the project is over. the friendship isn't (necessarily).

x

this has been droqen's close reading of Art & Fear. if i could summarize the book, allow me to corrupt its title and each of its chapter names out of frustration.


title: Art [is something we want to make, but we have] Fear [of not being a Great, like Mozart]

chapter 1: The Nature of the Problem [is: we have the desire to become Great too, but wanting to be Great doesn't result in Great work]

chapter 2: Art [is hard to make] & Fear [is a force that compels quitting, which is a shame, because for some reason we really want to make art, but we're not going to really get into that right now]

chapter 3: Fears About Yourself [for instance, you aren't Mozart]

chapter 4: Fears About Others [for instance, they might not like you as much as they like Mozart]

chapter 5: Finding Your Work [hint: it probably isn't Mozart]

alright that's it, it's out of my system lol. apologies to the authors. thank you for the book, for laying your fears bare, for sharing your wisdom and experience and experiences.

love, droqen

p114

QuoteQ: Will anyone ever match the genius of Mozart?
A: No.
Thank you -- now can we get on with our work?

i'm so mad! like get the fuck outta here with the Mozart shit! maybe this is how people feel when i write about kill gameplay. i'm reacting to something that not everyone is burdened by. these authors are burdened, somehow, by comparisons to 'The Greats'. i am not. i have never been.

i am presently reacting to gameplay, some dread god of culture. perhaps to Bayles and Orland their god, their great enemy, is Mozart. when they wrote in the introduction that their book is about "all art not made by Mozart" they showed their hand and i should have listened: this book, as all works and actions, is a reaction. in their case it is in part a reaction to a fear that they have, that the only art that matters is art made by Mozart and people like him. what, then, is their art? what is art in the shadow of The Greats? i have no use for this, unfortunately, but perhaps someone will. well, the book is quite old, so maybe i should say -- perhaps someone has.

on Chapter V, "Finding Your Work"

i'm done reading for now, i think. i'm too frustrated with the authors for the way their perspective imposes on mine, and differs, conflicts. there is a lot of interesting perspective in the book, many things to draw from and learn, but maybe nothing new, and not in a shape that's useful to me personally. it's not a good shelf, it's been made for a brain other than where mine is now, or maybe i just don't need a new shelf, i've already chosen one.

ugh! i hate this chapter! don't tell me about all of the things that artists are afraid of. i'm so tired of this. i'm not interested in these fears. do i really need to be reading this book about fears about artmaking? i wanted to read about art's relationship to fear, how fear fuels art, but this is a book of anecdotes by artists who fear things. that's kind of interesting, but i want to be reading it as their experience, yet the choice of pronoun is constantly confronting me as advice. "you feel this, you feel that, you you you", no, this is not about me, this is about YOU TWO and perhaps your students(???). i'm not a student though, i haven't been for a long time.

"The only pure communication," they write on p47, "is between you and your work."

yeah. so stop with all this other noise, thank you!!!

p37-38

QuoteAs an artist you're expected to make each successive piece uniquely new an different -- yet reassuringly familiar when set alongside your earlier work.

how can this book do this to me -- in a book called art & fear in a chapter entitled Fears About Others it frequently uses the collective-first-person pronoun, we, and here a second-person pronoun, you... but why would they project these fears onto me? do i care? i do not care about this expectation, or, i should not care about this expectation; the authors are giving me a new fear so that we might be on the same page. authors, i don't want your fear.

who expects this of the artist? nobody i care about, especially not when artmaking.