2018 in Review: Christ, Am I Tired
And it’s not even because I got anything done. I mean, let’s be real, 2018 largely sucked for most people with half a brain cell and a functioning heart. This is not one of those wrap-up posts where I pretend getting to the finish line was easy; of the things I made this year, almost all of them had me cursing and stressing and sobbing for weeks prior, like some sort of extended birth. And that’s not to mention all the cursing and stressing and sobbing I did unrelated to my personal portfolio.
That said, I’ve seen folks around cast this as more of a “Things I’m proud of” list rather than sponsored advertising for your CV. I can dig the former. It feels more like a gratitude list, and frankly, I am grateful that any ideas managed to worm their way out of my stupid head during this stupid year at all.
Lost Wage Rampage
In mid-2017, I got an email from the Peabody Essex Museum asking if I would be interested in licensing any of my old games for their PlayTime exhibit — or if I would be interested in them commissioning a new one from me, something to release in 2018. The “I made a game!” glow from Handväska! had long worn off, and I was already fretting about when I’d make something new, so I pounced on the offer immediately.
As with all projects, I spent about 2/3rds of the time til the deadline thinking I was going to do one thing, then panicking at the final 1/3 mark and going off on some ridiculous tangent that coalesced into the actual game. I had long had the idea for some sort of women-fronted, heist-y driving game, but I never had a particularly punchy motive; it took experiencing the lovely transparent socialist utopia of The OCR to realize just how angry I was about my past experiences, at other workplaces, with obviously gendered pay disparities. Once I had that motive (make back the money you were wrongfully denied), Lost Wage Rampage came together fast.
It was the most ambitious game I’ve made under my own ~brand~. I had the help of the astonishingly intelligent Andy Wallace, who offhandedly built the procedural level generation engine that the whole game rests on; and the art of the extraordinarily talented Marlowe Dobbe, who not only makes the punchiest, heart-swelling-est, loveliest art, but who delivered work that consistently went above and beyond anything I had even hoped to ask for. To be entirely honest, comparing my work to theirs, I felt major impostor syndrome. I didn’t think a game dev could have impostor syndrome about their own game, but there you go.
My only regret is that I didn’t dump more resources into it, and didn’t commit to the idea earlier. When I play it now, it’s hard not to wish that I had come up with the concept a month prior, and had that full month to search for a low poly 3D artist (surprisingly hard to find on Twitter, even if you offer money), among other things. But it makes me happy, it took me to Salem (for PlayTime) and London (for Now Play This), and women throw their heads back and cackle when they hear about it, so it can’t be that bad.
Playful Possibilities @ Eyeo
A while back, I think when I was still at the New York Times, I got to go to my first Eyeo. It was dizzying. I still remember my desperate attempts to take notes on everything that spoke to me, which was, well, everything. I couldn’t believe that this group existed, that these people were here, having these conversations that I thought very few other people wanted to have. And the people onstage were clearly amazing artists at the top of their game. I remember telling a coworker, “I’ll know that I’ve Made It if I ever become an Eyeo speaker.”
Which is why I legit, straight-up cried when Jer emailed me to ask if I’d be a speaker for Eyeo 2018.That grateful crying immediately pivoted to sheer panic as I wondered what the fuck I’d even talk about. It wasn’t going to be about my dayjob (contracting), so it had to be about games — but I had sort of semi-quit games, and I never really talked about games stuff to non-games audiences, especially not huge non-game audiences full of people I desperately admired. What the fuck would I even say?
Much like with Lost Wage Rampage, I dealt with this as an adult would: procrastinating and not thinking about it until about two weeks before the event. At that point I went straight into total palpitations as I made drafts and threw away drafts, cashing in personal days at work to type and delete with sweaty palms. Writing the talk was so stressful that I completely forgot I was also terrified of flying. I think I just passed out on the flight to Minneapolis.
On the plus side, I think it went well. I don’t get stage fright anymore, yet I was flooded with it that day — but I don’t think you can tell. And it’s about as close to a manifesto as I think I could get. It feels like a nice bow, a solid stake in the ground, on a particular line of thinking I’ve been trying to encapsulate for 5–6 years.
Where C# Meets CSS: Tech Tricks From An AR Lyrics Experiment
Did I mention I have impostor syndrome? I try to keep my contracting life and my arts life separate, but their overlap in my internal Venn diagram is having massive impostor syndrome about both. I’m a programmer without a computer science degree who’s completely incompetent at math, and I am frequently surrounded by the kinds of people who spit out libraries, programming languages, and major utilities for fun. Despite the fact that I release multiple ambitious experiments at my job per year, it’s easy to feel like I don’t know how to do anything.
The thing that I have, however, is creativity, tenacity, and a weirdly specific memory for StackOverflow comments. Over the last year of contracting, I’ve started to realize that there’s very few things I can’t make happen, even if I have to slam two pieces of technology together like they’re Barbie dolls I’m trying to make kiss.
That’s something I only fully realized the value of on this project. The goal: make hand drawn lyrics gracefully emerge, in 3D, in AR. The process: well, you can see more about that here. It was, in short, the most ludicrous, ingenious, stupid-like-a-fox train of tricks that I’ve ever chained together.
It feels funny to call out this one, since it wasn’t the shiniest or most-press-covered thing I did in 2018 — but it was the thing that made me realize just how good I am at what I do.
The Unquantifiable
There’s plenty of other stuff I did that I’m proud of that’s not related to CVs. Here’s a few:
I effectively quit Twitter. Sweet Jesus, was this a good idea. I didn’t fully realize how hooked on Twitter I was, nor how much mental space it was taking up, until I decided to quit it. The decision to do so was from something super boring — I think some rando had misinterpreted some tweet of mine in some obnoxious-but-minor way — and I finally thought, You know what? All this platform does is make me stress about who’s gonna hate me next. So I quit. I capital-Q quit for a few months, and now I pop on and off every so often — maybe 5 minutes every week or so — mostly to catch up with weird Twitter, or talk about new stuff I made.
I will say: when I come back on to promote stuff, despite only having gained followers, my engagement is down like crazy. Like, 1/10th of what it used to be. I suppose not being a power user anymore means the algorithm doesn’t surface my stuff as much anymore, which sounds innocuous but is actually truly fucking bad if you make your living on the internet. But even so, I’m glad I did it. I could afford to pay that price and I’m glad I did.
I helped rehab an insane rescue dog. I didn’t know she was insane at the time, to be fair. Me and Andy thought we were getting the super-chill, super-friendly, well-adjusted rescue dog the rescue org billed her as. What we got was a fearful dog who was petrified of city life, whose list of anxieties and neuroses rivaled my own.
Rehabilitating her has been a long and expensive road, and one that has made me cry a lot. Our trainer and our veterinary behaviorist say she’s the most complex case they’ve ever had (our dog, the overachiever). But we put our all into helping her adjust, and after a good 8 months, she’s now comfortable with many, many more things than she was before. She’s the kind of dog you might actually want to adopt, instead of sort of being tricked into adopting.
She is still petrified of city life, so it may be that we have to find her a home outside of the city in the end, which would make me very sad. But for now, even though her level of anxiety makes me sob sometimes, I am at least proud of what we’ve done to help.
I stopped hustling so hard. This year was the first year in a very long time that I had things like “hobbies.” I turned down a lot of talks and refused to go to conferences. While I probably could have been more productive with my time, I stopped feeling like my entire fucking life had to revolve around work, and actually started to enjoy things that couldn’t be monetized (imagine!). I buckled down on aerials and started learning lyra. Lately I’ve been super into hand-lettering, turning out masterpieces like this:
In conclusion
I wrote all this out and then debated posting it at all. “I only Did three things!” I thought to myself. “I mean, ugh, my list of stupid life things is longer than my list of work things! And this whole list is so much shorter than everyone else’s!”
Which, even if it was true (it isn’t), I am 30 and I just don’t fucking care anymore. Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be — maybe your actual life that you are living day-to-day should have as many things that you are proud of, as a person, as the delta change in your portfolio. What a thought!
And I know from experience that the years of plenty don’t actually, on their own, make you happier — they just make the stakes feel higher, like you have more ground now to lose. Every other year in review I’ve written during my hustling years is about how I don’t feel like I did enough. I’m okay with what I did this year, inside and out. I hope you are too.
