2024
At the end of 2023 I was writing from a position of recovery, looking ahead of a new year where I expected to mostly move to working full-time, and heal from old wounds.
In 2024 I got a lot of things done. This is about half the things I did:
- A writing class
- A GGJ2024 Game
- A Dream Emulator 2023 Jam Game
- 8 months of life drawing classes
- Oil paintings
- Pretentious Jam (Host)
- Pretentious Jam (Game)
- Game dev meetup hosting
- Published n-functor
- 9 months of card game development.
- Published everyones-a-syndicate
Art
I got into oil painting this year. I love the medium, and I've picked up most of a zorn palette which I'm looking forward to messing with in the new year for portraits. I mostly did still life, with some conceptual pieces that mostly didn't see the light of day. Physical paints are so different to digital, but a lot of my digital art methodology transfers well which I was surprised by. I love carving shapes from opaque blocks in any medium. I've been burnt a lot by acrylics being frustrating in the past and not having a working knowledge of the material science of pigments and mediums until a couple of years ago.
I've been going to life drawing sessions for most of this year, and I can't recommend them enough. I have several kilos of paper in an A2 folder that's bursting at the seams.
Other Artists
Maya Beauchamp is a local artist whose work is sick, she's recently started doing a lot of glitch art. She's also a skilled oil painter. Clastic Artistic has been releasing/updating a bunch of texture packs this year. I've been using them to prototype card game designs. I love the work of qqddllbbpp and unibrawn, two artists I first ran into on cohost.
Games
By the beginning of this year I was already working on "Shortly departing from", but before that project was finished I participated in the GGJ 48-hour jam event in Edinburgh for "The Last Laugh" , a 2-player fighting game. This was hectic, but fruitful. It was the first in-person, group game jam I had participated in a long while.
At the end of February while sick with COVID I published Shortly Departing From for the LSD Dream Emulator Game Jam 2023. This is the first of two "poemware" games I made this year, where the focus is more on a way of presenting text in a context than anything else. I really enjoyed working on this.
In the middle of the year I opened up Pretentious Jam, a game jam where I wanted to encourage a confidence in being Artsy, Pretentious Wankers in the games spaces I am in. This got overshadowed by cohost, the main social media platform I had been using, closing its doors on the same day the jam ended. The jam itself was fruitful, and if nothing more I feel more confident to be a prick when it comes to making art games. Participating in my own game jam was a mistake that I regret, mind.
But actually producing Spaces are Moments is not something I regret. I've had this kind of idea kicking around for a while, as a kind of antithesis to the apathetic depressions I've had and observed in my life and a celebration of the specificity of moments in time and artistic-political movements. These times pass but their artefacts influence us, the people who were just in a place in a time inextricably influenced each other because we too are in a moment in time and in a place, and this moment and this place will end as well.
Since march of this year I've been working on a multiplayer anti-trading card game. Its current working name is "Rare Episteme" but I'm not sure how much that will stick. I will release it next year. This is a promise to me, from me. Maybe a demo in February.
Other People's Games
I played "Anthology of the Killer" this year and I felt slapped by it. You should play it, it's good! A couple of days ago I picked up Mosa Lina after it sat on my wishlist for a year. It's good and it makes me mad. A friend of mine through local games events released "I'd Kiss THAT Fish", a fish dress up game. I still need to get around to "The Protagonish". There's a lot of games, people keep making them.
I want everyone reading this to go engage with every entry to pretentious jam, by the way.
Technical Artefacts
I've written a lot of code this year. Some of it is public. I don't hold myself to high standards for public code because what I tend to write is at most just for me, but here's those two projects.
n-functor is something I built for my card game that also was able to be exposed as a more general thing. 500 lines of procedural macros in rust are enough to drive anyone to despair and migraines. I would like to revisit it and add option/result aware mapping sometime, as well as the named "map_param_name" stuff I planned for initially.
everyone's a syndicate is a response to social media just being outright hostile, the death of cohost, dissatisfaction with the "fediverse", the fact RSS readers are finicky, and a desire for more active webrings that feel a bit more like reblogging. It's the third attempt I've made at something like this and by far the cleanest. Being able to copy in the CSS of the host webpage does a lot for having it "fit". The source code is available here and includes a docker file that makes it relatively easy to spin up on something like digitalocean app platform or w/e. In the new year I want to add allowlists, denylists, and give it commandline args to deal with all these things.
fallible.net is now a website and not just a domain I'm squatting. It uses Zola and a lot of patience. I want to get around to changing it up soon, but I fear the monotony of what is expected from professional web design.
Other People's Technical Artefacts
I've used both Godot and Bevy a lot this year. Godot has gotten so much better this last year and it's incredible to see, it's my go-to for artsy projects. As someone who has programmed mostly in Rust in the last 8 years, I'm really happy to see Bevy making a lot of things possible in the Rust software space that has previously been very difficult to imagine doing in terms of real-time user-facing complex software (like, video games).
Social Media
I do not like talking about social media.
A lot of the chatter that goes on about different social media services flies by me because I really am just very mercenary about them. I've used mastodon on and off for almost 8 years and I struggle to treat it as more than just an announcement space. The federation model of mastodon encourages artists to group together with other artists on artist instances, which means the most likely people to run into their work without following them are other artists. This stifles a lot of network effects that come from centralised social media.
I miss cohost so much, it's a very boring ache to feel. It was just a website. "Everyone's a Syndicate" was partly me trying to get past this feeling. It was a network that picked up my work and actually saw it, showed appreciation for it. That's a hard thing to come by. Do you know how hard it is to get people to visit websites that don't auto-complete in the search bar in a clean browser install? I don't like feeling this cynical. I like having faith in people generally, but I can see the analytics post-cohost.
I don't feel like there's somewhere I want to be online. But not being established enough in "career" and "prestige" I can't exactly avoid places.
Other People's Social Media
I've been keeping up with Nicky Flower's blog, it's good!
Events
I participated in 2 gamedev showcases as local indie support for students and their games, first in May at ECGx and again in August for the MDes Graduation Showcase, both times at CodeBase in Edinburgh, first showing off Shortly Departing From and then my now trashed Godot prototype for Rare Episteme (this name isn't sticking for me). This was interesting, and I learnt a lot from turning up to these. Additionally, myself and a friend picked up hosting the local game dev meetup event from the previous organiser.
Other people's Events
Glasgow Independent Games Festival was lovely, the highlight for me was the Unconventional Game Design panel between Kevin Du (developer for Kevin(1997-2077)) and Stephen Gillmurphy (of thecatamites, who was showing off Anthology of the Killer). I love artsy bullshit, this panel made me grin.
I made it down to Sheffield for A MAZE and got to catch up with a couple of friends but the travel and summer heat did get to me, leaving me missing the panels. Another time.
Live music is incredible and you should go see live music, or perform live music. The sharper edges of the folk punk scene in the uk are starting to pop off and I'm excited to see where it goes.
Writing
I don't write much, but this year I have written. I started off this year with a writing class, which I enjoyed but struggled to build on what I had come up with during that. Two games I made this year feature 3 poems. I've gotten back into blogs because of the fall of cohost. Pretentious Jam's prompt was an attempt to drive my fist into the heart of artistically insecure game developers (mostly my own).
Other People's Writing
I've been reading a bit this year, but not as studiously as I'd like. A lot of what I read I like to keep private, but a couple of things I've read this year are the World of Art book on Marcel Duchamp, World of Art's Monet monograph, the book "Cybernetics of the Poor" which is a companion to an exhibition of the same name (I really like the "Exercises and Second Wind" essay), "What does israel fear from Palestine" by Raja Shehadeh, "Pretentiousness" by Dan Fox because I happened to be prepping for pretentious jam and my partner pointed it out to me in a book shop, Aristotle's "Poetics" (I know), Very Little News, and a lot of marxist PDFs. I've been reading people's normal blogs too, but they do not live on my shelf in a way I can easily remember them. Yet.
Work
I have not been employed this year, despite my best efforts.
This is the busiest I've ever been. I am not being paid for it, for the most part. The largest single sum of money I got this year was from being hit by a car while I was on my bike. I'm not stating this out of shame or a request for pity but out of transparency. I'm supported, but not sustainably and in a way where those closest to me do sacrifice their own opportunities to do so. This is just the reality of these kinds of work – it takes up time, and someone has to pay for it.
2025
2024 has been, at least socially and artistically, very good to me. I want to at the very least release a demo for my card game next year. I want to do this sooner rather than later. I want to paint more. I want to write more. 2024 gave me so much momentum. I am holding onto the most boring kind of way of looking towards 2025: some kind of optimism.