The first console I ever owned was the Nintendo GameCube. It was an interactive museum that lived in our basement, and all we had to do was buy the games as they came out. Majora's Mask and Beyond Good & Evil were incredible adventures. Animal Crossing was a fucking revelation. Great games couldn't come out fast enough. I wanted to be a part of this world.
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I never opened a childhood lemonade stand, but when I was in grade 5, I made this game called Ghost Hunter in Game Maker and I had thoughts of finishing it and selling it on floppy disks to my friends. (I recreated Ghost Hunter to the best of my memory in Godot. It's not good, but if you want a hit of 2001-era Game Maker nostalgia, you can dig it up on my itch page.) Even back then, it was about money. I didn't want the money, I wanted what it represented: legitimacy.
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In 2010, Newgrounds sponsored ​Fishbane. They gave me a thousand dollars, and I got the front page treatment and everything. It blew my mind. I kept making games and people kept noticing them. In 2013, Starseed Pilgrim was nominated for a couple IGF awards, I released it on Steam, I made a HUNDRED thousand dollars, and it felt like I got the front page treatment a hundred times over, too. Everybody wanted to talk about me and my game. I got what I had always wanted: LEGITIMACY.

Whisk 1 egg
Add 1/2 cup chicken stock (preferably made with Chinese Knorr powder-- it's different)
Steam for 15 (?) minutes.

* How long to steam for? Is 15 too much, too little? I think it might be too much
* Remember to cook in our small glass cups, not the small glass bowls. It turns out better; I think the smaller mouth means it catches less water and gets less watered-down.

Add seasonings. Usually: a bit of soy sauce, a bit of sesame oil, a sprinkling of roasted sesame seeds

I've been invited to give a keynote for the Vector Festival Game & Hardware Jam! This year's theme is really exciting to me:

Staying committed to something is hard. When encountering the bad parts of something large, it's tempting to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- to trash it and get a clean slate. I do this all the time with individual game designs that fall short, and lately I've been feeling a bit burnt out on trying to make games do what I want. The medium is insufficient.

We were talking about gun violence in videogames and I reflected on my encounters with people stating that the work they are doing, or the event they are hosting, etc., takes place on "unceded land". That is, in Canada, we have entirely displaced and in many cases ruined the traditional territories of the First Nations people who lived here. I wrote,

Quote from: droqenFor a long time I thought it was a little silly that people in Canada acknowledge that they are doing things on unceded land [..]
but it's this weird unavoidable thing. Like, if you live in Canada, what are you gonna do, leave Canada??
If you recognize you're working/existing in a problematic medium/context, you might not be able to change some bad stuff, but you can at least... uh... acknowledge it, if it really matters to you.

I can acknowledge an issue, even if I don't know the solution or whether a solution exists at all, as long as I truly care about it. In the case of unceded land, it's not something I give much thought to or have much familiarity with. Although it isn't something I'm passionate about, I can at least recognize that it's not hollow for someone to acknowledge that they know, they know, that the thing they're doing is problematic to them and yet they carry on anyway. The medium is insufficient. As we grow and learn more about the world I think it is inevitable that we will learn more and more ways in which all mediums are insufficient.

Life is insufficient, but it's all we have. If it's all we have then it is necessarily the most beautiful thing, and if the most beautiful thing is not beautiful then what meaning does beauty have?

regarding this book i found in the bookstore

uurnog uurnlimited
la-mulana

Venues, or platforms, activate creative work

In the style of the Symphony in Acid official video, flicker between manifestos, keeping only the parts you like. Mix and match. Cut and paste. Find the diamond in the rough. Destroy the rest.

Quote from: https://rhmnc.itch.io/northhead-starhead-spearhead-manifesto9 ✦ be contemptuous towards all artists except those whose art you use

14 ✦ use other people's art as your own weapons

I want to write a little thank-you note to everyone who supported me on Patreon. I ended it without much fanfare and I never quite felt like what I did lived up to the promise of Patreon? The idea of it?

In 2018 or 2019 or so, I was trying to figure out what to do with myself... Could I get '''support'''? What could that even mean? What kind of support was I missing?

On January 28, 2018, I tweeted:

Quote from: @droqenwas i driven to make games out of loneliness? then what will i do when i am no longer lonely?

On November 25, 2018, I started a private Discord server that as of this article's writing has 52 semi-inactive members. I remember I made it because of a conversation with [redacted friend], about an internal system used by [redacted company]... Everyone posted what they'd worked on that day, and everyone else had access to this daily feed. So I made an experimental server and there are a handful of people in there hanging out posting -- not usually every day, but often someone does make a post, and it's quiet but nice.

By May 3, 2019, I had started trying to put a Patreon together.

On June 7, 2019, I had created another Discord server for my patrons, for those people generous enough to see across the internet to me, asking for money in exchange for (what, exactly?) and saying "yes, I want to give droqen some cash every month." But I never felt comfortable with it, not really.

On December 8, 2020, I made another Discord server, Droqen's Paradise, which grew and grew of its own messy volition, until it no longer felt like a place that was "mine" as much as it was a place belonging to its inhabitants...

On October 14, 2021, I officially renamed it Paradise and not so long afterward Paradise Collab was born, which was cool.

All this time I was still wondering, what was I looking for??? What should I do with myself??? Did I want to be validated on Twitter, by patrons, on Discord by friends, on Discord by a larger group of peers? What was the Patreon for, if it was making me something like $100-150 / month?

This whole time I was making and printing droqen was here, about eight copies every month, truly a joy to produce. I (re?-)learned the value of making something for myself.

Right... I have to remember to keep the focus. Why did I even start writing this? I wanted to thank you.

I printed 31 issues of droqen was here, a reflective zine that built up my habit of note-taking and note-reflecting and note-distilling. And I would occasionally get a word back from someone, I'd hand a friend a zine in real life and we'd talk about it briefly, but I think because of the weird social dynamic of it I don't think I ever really talked with anyone who supported me on Patreon about the zines, except for those who I already knew in real life ahead of time. I didn't quite know what I wanted, but I know now that I was desperate to feel relevant (again), to revive that extremely visceral feeling of being noticed by the world like I had been when Starseed Pilgrim came out.

I made the dynamic weird, because I don't really like the idea of taking money for making art, least of all from those most willing to give it. I feel unsettled about taking money from the people generous and good enough to offer it to me, and giving... what, in return? I was making art because I wanted attention, and some people were giving me attention. And then, on top of that, some of them were giving me money.

The Patreon Discord, droqen's daydream, was a quiet place because I felt uncomfortable with myself for doing what I was doing. For creating this channel and profiting off of it, but not enough to be fully invested. It couldn't support me, and I wasn't appreciative enough, and I felt uncomfortable. Surely I should appreciate.

Something common between The Timeless Way of Building & The One-Straw Revolution is that they both exude the feeling that 'anyone can do this.' Of course, so do many self-help resources and scams -- they want to rope you in by making you believe that you too are capable of making $5000 a week from home.

But at the heart of TTWOB is this idea that architecture has made itself artificially inaccessible. The result is that people are alienated from their homes because they no longer feel that "I could have made this."

And TO-SR has a similar message: farmers are making what they do too complicated. This hurts the people alienated from the basically human act of farming, including (especially!) the farmers themselves.

I previously left some notes about Deadgames and Alivegames here: http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=2.0

Our conversations at letterclub.games have started to gravitate towards The Timeless Way of Building, which uses the adjective alive, which dug this up out of memory...

How does Christopher Alexander use the word alive, and how does Melos Han-Tani use the word alive?

I can write anything I want.

This is a problem in the field of game design.

It's hard, at a distance, to tell what is fiction and what is reality.

• A team of four friends are going to get funding for and make a low-key MMORPG. This is their second game together, but they'll make it work, and the game will release and be successful - perhaps only modestly so, but enough that they can make a third game together.
• An individual is going to make a game about mental limbo, but it won't tell you that, and it won't actually tell you damn near anything, but there will be a correct way to play and lots of things to uncover in directions you had not even thought to look. It will be wildly successful and beloved in some circles.
• One person can make a 10-hour videogame.
• One person can make a 100-hour videogame.
• One person can make a 1000-hour videogame.

2 whole tomato, chopped into chunks (2-bite size)
2 garlic, mince
2 green onion, chopped
separate green and white
the amount of bouillon stuff for 4 cup water
oil
sesame oil

fry garlic, white onion bite in oil for a bit, till it's sizzling?
add tomato
fry till it's like... red mush
water or foam comes out
then add bouillon + water
boil for a few mins
add white pepper if you want

you can all as much water as you want really, just long as bouillon scales to it

egg and green onion parts are for when you serve