…on hiatus…

Well, I’ve finally hit a month where I just have no time to make something for here and then gone. There’s too much happening right now, and I’m writing this a week in advance because I’ll have no time to write it next week.

here and then gone is such a strange thing. A lot of the time it feels like my here and then gone projects give me energy; I genuinely enjoy working on small, focused projects purely for myself. But then there are months (and quite a few recently) where it feels like a struggle to come up with an idea that I want to work on.

I’m reading Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist (which is an expanded version of this medium post from 2018), and while it’s a bit self help-y, the stuff about the valorisation of productivity definitely struck a nerve. It’s just that here and then gone rarely feels like productive work for me. It often feels relaxing to work on a here and then gone project. I think maybe because I’ve tried to remove a lot of the external motivations that I know would wear me down (money, recognition by peers, social media attention). It feels more like a hobby, like tinkering with a model train set or building a diy modular synthesizer from first principles.

Of course I did give myself one big external motivation, and I think - predictably - the requirement that I produce something regularly every month has started to wear me down. Might need to rethink things.

Further Reading

A beautiful short story about aging and dementia, and having your life shaped by other people’s expectations.

This one’s been doing the rounds, but the story of the St Bride’s School Games Mistresses is absolutely wild.

An incredible twitter thread arguing that paleolithic cave art was expressly designed to move in the flickering of torch light.

Scott Benson made a webcomic about a band I’d never heard of, with strong Night in the Woods feelings.

An excellent, thoughtful critique of the Sable demo by Oma Keeling, looking at the origins of the game’s art style and setting, and the consequences of uncritically reproducing dominant narratives about other cultures.

Okay. Take care of yourself. Remember that laziness is a concept invented to keep us tired, overworked, and burnt out. It is perfectly reasonable to carve out time to be entirely unproductive whenever you can (in fact, it’s probably necessary).