It's September now
It's been a while since I've posted about creative things I've been part of or are working on. This is mostly because I haven't had much energy or motivation to, but also because I've been rethinking how I use social media a lot; it's making me more and more uncomfortable, and in these pandemic times I don't know if an output that's just showcasing my productivity without much context is all that useful, for myself or for others. So I thought I'd give this web page/newsletter style approach a go. It might just be burying my achievements in a whole bunch of waffle, I don't know. But I wanted to try it and see if it felt better than Facebook (yes, I am aware that I have shared this on Facebook).
This is the stuff I'm going to cover up top, please feel free to skip through any of it to get to the stuff that interests you
- Robot Dragon with Saint Jorge for Freeplay 2020
- steel/foam published in the first issue of backslash lit journal
- Fireworks etc. in Animal Crossing
- I've started twitch streaming
<b>Robot Dragon for Freeplay 2020 </b>
In June I worked with the incredible poet and person Saint Jorge on the piece for the 2020 Freeplay festival. We called our piece Robot Dragon, because we love robots and we love dragons, and we wanted to see what happened if we smooshed these two loves together. Then we had this idea that we could each perform our own version of the piece, with one person reading, and the other person clicking on links and leading the reader through it. So that's we submitted for the festival, and I really love how it turned out. You can watch the video of our preformance below.
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The Robot Dragon themself is an ongoing project that will build and grow over time :)
And I suppose the good thing about Freeplay being all online this year is that all of the sessions were either pre-recorded or recorded and made available after the sessions, and they're all still up on YouTube. I would reccomend checking out any of the sessions that take your fancy, but I particularly enjoyed the 'Playful' Voiceworks Readings, the Games as Digital Literature and A bushwalk in Red Desert Render.
steel/foam in backslash lit
I'm excited to have another twine piece in the very first issue of backslash lit journal. I wrote steel/foam for a 2019 Freeplay talk, and then expanded on the idea a bit more to submit to another journal. It wasn't accepted there, so I sat on it for a while, tweaking bits here and there, and I really like how it's come out and where it's ended up. I feel like I am getting a good handle on how to use cycling links in a more precise and measured way that really brings out their full potential - although it's hard to resist putting them in every second word, because they're also so fun to use. You can read the piece here if you would like to.
<b> Fireworks in Animal Crossing </b>
I've been making some really good progress on Helena, my Animal Crossing island. I find that making little projects for myself, like building my villagers little yards, or making a market for my town, keeps the game interesting. I also quite like that I'm only playing between half an hour to an hour a day at this point. I moved my house up onto a cliff so I have to walk past Lily's house and the market, two of my favourite areas, to get into the main town. I also changed up my house and flower colour scheme to teal/pink/orange/red, and I'm really into it. My friend Alison came over a couple weeks ago during a meteor shower and we wished on so many stars. And we got fireworks every Sunday for the whole or August. They were so fucking magical.
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<img src="fishing.jpg" align="centre";>
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<img src="tea.jpg" align="centre";>
<img src="fireworks.jpg" align="centre";>
At the moment my favourite time of day is 5:55-6:05 pm - I clock off work and hop onto Helena, just in time to catch the the slightly abrasive 5pm music switching to the very lovely and gentle 6pm music.
<b> Twitch streaming </b>
I'm giving streaming on Twitch a go. I wanted to do it last lockdown, but kind of chickened out, but this lockdown I'm a bit more confident. It was a bit challenging at first - I was worried about keeping the people who were watching interested, and that maybe the games I picked to play were kind of boring, but the more streams I watch the more I realise that that doesn't really matter, and I realise I actually quite like talking out loud to myself when I'm playing games. I don't get a lot of viewers but that's actually fine? Like I have no desire to get thousands of followers or monetise my streams or anything, I think it's just going to be a fun new hobby that also allows me to reflect on the games that I play and share the things I like or think are interesting with other people.
I've really only done a couple of Animal Crossing streams so far, but now that I have my new computer I'm going to start getting into some more experimental and fringe stuff.
Okay, I think that's enough from me now, I hope you're keeping safe and well