...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 said last month that the next few here and then gones were probably going to be quite pared-back, and true to my word this is probably the most pared-back thing I've made for this project to date. It's not even a piece of software! Just a wee 4 page pdf.

I was struggling a bit to come up with feasible ideas this month, so I decided to just write down some observations about my dreams. I don't know if this is true for other people, but I'm pretty sure all my dreams take place in the same landscape. That is, I have travelled to locations in one dream that I previously visited in another.

I don't know what other people's dreams are like, but the interconnectedness of my dreams has always seemed weird to me, so I decided to try and document some of the places I've visited when dreaming.

This month is a fairly simple one; each (real world) day you run it will give you a different image, with a procedurally generated title, all accompanied by a generative drone. For the titles I went back through all the names I've given previous here and then gone pieces and created a tracery grammar that tries to replicate some of the patterns in the way that I've been naming these.

Download sound in the margins

Controls: escape: quit; space: reveal picture

In which I narrate a daydream of an alternative highlands, drawing on a BBC adaptation of one of Alan Garner's lesser works from my childhood, the Clearances, rewilding, and strange concrete structures emerging out of the rainforest.

It's very short, just a series of images really, ending with the image that, for whatever reason, has been stuck in my head for the past couple of months, of vast concrete arches towering above a thickly forested glen.

Download the cathedral

Controls: escape: quit; space: advance

Hi folks.

I think with videogames it's sometimes easy to forget that the game is not just what's happening on screen, or in the code. The game is also what's happening in the player's head, in their body, in the physical space they are inhabiting.

So I had this idea to create an inverted text adventure.

Hi folks.

Since this is the first [issue? letter? missive?] I should try and explain what you’ve signed up to.

I’ve been struggling for a while now trying to figure out what to do with the things I make. When I first started making things on the internet I would upload them to my website, post a link on whatever forum I was currently frequenting, and maybe email some games or software sites that I knew would be interested.

And that worked pretty well. Until the forums died out. And most of the small scale games sites died out. And the ones that were left were no longer interested in writing about the kind of things I wanted to make. I was still making and releasing things the way I’d always done, but now it felt like I was tossing them into the void to disappear forever, drowned out by the noise of the internet.