In which I work out my anxieties about the coronavirus lockdown.
Not sure how to convey this one in words. It’s an interactive… fiction… fragment? I don’t tend to make things with narratives because it seems like a lot of work, and I’m not sure I want to, or know how to, tell a story with a plot, and characters, and a satisfying conclusion. With this one though I came to the (fairly obvious, in retrospect) realisation that I don’t need to tell the whole story. I can tell a tiny fragment and let the reader fill in the rest.
So. The piece is only active for 1 hour each (real-world) day. Executing it within that 1 hour window will allow you to interact with it for ~40 seconds before it exits. It will present you with a short message and let you respond with a 4 character message of your own. The next day it will return a response to your message.
I’ve been told it’s quite stressful given everything else that’s been going on. So, y’know, look after yourself. You don’t need to interact with something that is obviously the product of my own anxieties if you’re not in a good place to do so.
Download a message written in the curve of the horizon
Controls: escape: quit; mouse move: select glyph
The Rules:
The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (06/06/20).
All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL (code) and CC-BYSA (assets).
As long as you abide by those licenses, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
I’ve been reading a lot in lockdown. Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is the most incredible, startling thing I’ve read so far: an encyclopedia for a fictional tv series that’s also a love letter from a queer trans woman to her deceased friend. For the first few entries I didn’t realise that Little Blue was entirely fabricated, and was very confused when I couldn’t find anything about it online. Also disappointed; I desperately want to watch the show described in the book.
Another thing I read, though I would struggle to categorise or explain it: Living In The World As If It Were Home (that title!) by Tim Lilburn:
“The world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything; it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.” (emphasis mine)
I love the conception of the world as a towering strangeness.
A steampunk western by Genevieve Valentine about the colonisation of the West, and the people usually left out of such stories.
A newsletter from Sarah Jaffe responding to this article in Commune. This part in particular caught me up short:
“I also emphatically want to say that none of us are lucky who have to work for a living. Work, of any kind, even in the best conditions, is not a thing we should be grateful for.”
I stumbled across Joe Pera’s quiet, achingly sincere comedy this month, and now I’m sharing it with you. Check out Joe Pera Talks You Back to Sleep and this short stand-up routine where the audience participation goes off on a wonderful tangent.
It’s been a while since a videogame review has properly blown me away, but the games writing The White Pube have been doing lately is something else. I mean, look at this:
“It felt like… idk. Imagine you are swaddled tight in multiple thick blankets and you’re lying on ice, no memory of how you got there. You’re outside on this creaking land with nothing else to do but stare up at a big black sky. Maybe instead of that scenario, imagine you are cradled in a giant empty nest made by a bird that is too big to exist in the world you used to know. You’re in there floating across a calm ocean, rocking evenly and slow. Your eyes blur in and out of focus and when they settle, stars and then more stars reveal themselves to you.”
I’ll finish with a powerful, hopeful article by Rebecca Solnit:
“Familiarity is a life raft or some floating trash we might mistake for a life raft, but the task isn’t to try to bellyflop onto the flotsam; it’s to swim. We are in the ocean and time is fluid and the waves will keep coming and there is a distinct possibility that this is okay.”
The weird thing about this project is that most of the pieces I make get made 1-2 months before they get posted. Which means that often when I write this email I am in an entirely different frame of mind from when I made the piece it links to.
This month that feels like a particularly stark difference. I made this month’s piece at the start of the lockdown, when everything was uncertain and I was spending way too much time reading twitter. But now? I’ve settled in; I’m doing okay.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading. I’ve been unsettlingly productive; painting, making games on my own and haphazard playful web pages with Biome Collective folk… And there are birds in the garden, and leaves unfurling on the trees.
It feels callous to be safe and comfortable during a crisis. I’m all too aware that most people don’t have that luxury, that all around us things are breaking, lives are being uprooted, people are dying, and so much of this could have been prevented.
I always want to end these missives on a positive note. But I don’t think I’ve earned Rebecca Solnit’s “distinct possibility that this is okay”. I’m not convinced it is okay. We are in the ocean and time is fluid and the waves will keep coming and I realise it’s not enough, but I’m here, and I’m thinking of you.