Trusting our craft

[packbat]

So a friend of ours was making a funny "games of the year 2022" post, one of those that people make who have no respect for the triple-A gaming industry and want to look at cool weird obscure stuff that fails that industry's metrics and succeeds at being something else. And we love that.

And our friend put our work on that very short list. Twice.

---

We know, from hard experience, how deeply we have learned self-loathing. To be relied upon, to be an anchor, is frightening, because we experience ourselves as persistently flaking. Our phone has an unfinished to-do list reminder from 2020, and our hard drive overflows with unfinished projects.

Set against that, it's easy for us to feel like absolute rock stars with praise.

Briefly.

...what hit us today, though, is that we know what we're doing, sometimes. We can tell that we do. We scrabble for praise to hold off RSD, but we read the stuff we made. When we built our blog post about "This Is Not Normal" by Negativland (cw: COVID) or our one about "Dear Esther" by The Chinese Room (cw: suicide), we pulled threads from selves through tangles of art and back out again, connecting and separating both. When we wrote How to Be a Jerk Ethically, we were steaming mad about something that hopefully no longer matters, but wishing into existence a normal that should exist - planting road signs on a route from mistake to repair. Every 200-word RPG is read out loud to ourselves.

And fuck, we're proud of 1960 #7 in 72 minutes but we could have done some research, right? I get it, we spent our time and focus on other parts of it, but the script could have been better.

Like, we can tell when we're doing a good job. We're around for the work being carried out. The track for "1960 #7 in 72 minutes" was carefully made, as was the font, as were the animations - as the hands of the clock turns, text unrolls at a moderate clip onto the screen, is held there for a while ... and then retracts, deletes itself quickly, and leaves space for the next utterance. The colors were carefully chosen for dark theme and light.

It's easy for us to feel like rock stars with praise, and RSD will always be in the picture, but we're doing work here. We don't have to be blindsided by praise when we can think about that work and understand that yes, this is competent - this meets our standards.

So can we do that, maybe? I think we should do that.

---

Anyway, we've been putting out a free 200-word TTRPG every month on Patreon. And there's a style of phrase-long badass mech names we enjoy, names like Boiling Water Scalding Away Layers Of Bitterness, and a good way to make one is to look at the teapot on your desk, think about how the residue of old brews can be removed with hot water and scrubbing, and then remove context and make the wording go harder until it hits mech name status.