7:34pm july 1 2025

I sometimes think about ___, whose writing on games influenced me a lot when I was younger, and then years later hearing her friends describe her as a negative person. Are all critics negative people? Doesn't seem necessarily true, but it's sort of related right? If you have any love or aspiration for the thing it has to be bound up with a dissatisfaction towards the present state of it. But I guess you can be less or more graceful in how you express that.

My muscular and well-mannered psychiatrist in San Francisco told me that when people think negative things, it reinforces negative pathways in their brain, and makes them more likely to think negative things in the future. Like running water forming grooves in sand. You have to make changes to your lifestyle and probably take antidepressants in order to reshape those pathways. Then you can think positive things more often.

After that do you just enjoy everything? Do you still have hopes for the medium? Probably you do I guess. At the very least, you might find that your career aspirations sharpen, and you come to understand that taking a legible critical stance, carving out your personal position in the discourse, can be beneficial in achieving those.

6:24pm july 1 2025

Spent the afternoon reading some of Peter Sotos 'Lordotics' and some of Samuel Delany 'Times Square Blue' and 'Times Square Red'. Felt a pleasure in reading that I don't feel often. I think the last time was reading Henry Miller 'Tropic of Cancer' a few months ago. I mainly associate this feeling with reading as a child. I feel like there were maybe ten years of my life where I read more or less only out of a sense of obligation or a feeling of having something to prove to myself or others, and with little pleasure.

Feel a desire to write, and a desire 'to be able to write', 'to be good at writing', and an accompanying sense of - shame? disappointment? - that I'm not really. Would like to try to return to project of reviewing increpare games which I was doing for a couple of weeks and then abandoned for many months but still keep thinking about. Hope that maybe it would be good practice, and maybe help me to overcome recurring difficulties with writing that I have with current long-term game project.

Feeling while reading Lordotics - there aren't any games like this, that I know. Not in terms of the content, but just the way it's expressed. Thought of Robert Yang's sex games, which are fine, but how they sort of have to be over-the-top, flamboyant, etc. These words don't really feel appropriate to what I'm trying to describe. Something like that they're tailored to the same audience who watches twitch streams and youtube videos. Not to disparage those things, but like, it seems removed from the kind of writing, or the kind of presentation, of something like Lordotics. Is it reductive to say that the kind of people who like video games aren't interested in the kind of writing that someone like Peter Sotos does? Am I just looking for a reason to feel better than other people? That seems possible.

Maybe it's about subtlety, I don't know. I think Robert Yang's games are not subtle, mostly. Most games are not subtle. Bad in a way that a vast amount of writing couldn't be accused of, and only very few games. (I'm not trying to say that Robert Yang's games are bad, in general. I thought of those I guess because of the rough adjacency in content, but also because they seem, without thinking about it much, aspirationally like an actually-existing thing close to what I might be looking for.)

My point is not about the extreme / pornographic / amoral stuff, but maybe that's part of it too. Recently I keep thinking about this, how video games for whatever reason seem to be deeply entrenched in a kind of stern moral discourse that for example painting or writing seem to be a little more detached from. (Some recent thecatamites post touched on this and sort of solidified the idea in my head but I won't make the effort to dig it up and link it now.) I don't think I'm really smart enough to speculate on why that might be. It may be that the realm of tasteful / artistic / bourgeois game enthusiasts and professionals exists in opposition to a well-established and morally senseless commercial industry, and therefore has to define itself by a strong moral sensibility. It might also be that games lag a decade behind everything else culturally and therefore are still playing out the moralism of the 2010s (in which case Cruelty Squad and the wave of 'edgy' mostly-FPS games that seem to have found success in its wake are maybe the beginning of a delayed shift away from that). Or it could be just that the games culture for lack of time or other reasons remains kind of stunted and insular, without the kind of plurality that those older media seem to enjoy. It could also be that these observations are only borne from my own personal frustrations and don't really have the objective bearing that I might like to imagine.

It sometimes seems true that, with only a few exceptions, every person involved in making games is bad at writing. (Goes without saying that that includes me.) How could that even be possible? I don't know. Is it a fundamental condition of the format or some incidental thing about the culture? Again I don't know. I don't like to be so negative, anyway.

4:30pm july 1 2025

About a year ago P___ asked me about the game I was working on and I mumbled something like "it's sort of like an RTS I guess, but you don't really get involved, you just walk around and watch other people doing RTS-type things." From his expression and whatever he said in reply I realised the syntax of the sentence I'd spoken pattern-matched to the "X but with Y" pitch-your-game-in-one-sentence format, making me immediately regret having said anything. Rhythm game but with guns, roguelike with puzzle elements, UberEats for scented candles, etc. I don't know why I find stuff like this so grating. Not even the feeling that anything I might be interested in making seems wholly incompatible with what other people actually desire to play or to pay for - since who knows, maybe some people out there really are jonesing for RTS-but-you-can't-actually-do-anything games - but moreso the reminder that the language around these things is so structured by that commercial logic that it's hard to even talk about what you're into without it taking on all these other connotations. I don't know, I guess everyone knows videogames are like this, people have been talking about it for decades probably. And I don't feel much sympathy for the 'trash games' / lets-all-make-bad-games stuff which presumably is mostly a way of dealing with the same kinds of frustration. I don't know what's left really. Probably the best case is some kind of elite patronage type situation where things get get funded on the whims of a wealthy aristocracy. So long as the aristocrats have the same taste as me I don't think I could complain.

12:39am june 4 2025

Watched Meshes of the Afternoon, I was always meaning to watch that. It seemed painfully bad, like a high school project or something. Overwrought and dramatic. Then I watched Unsere Afrikareise again and I liked that still. The truth is I only ever liked art made by men and trans women. That's not really true, but nearly. (Over time lost any sense of moral responsibility for liking whatever stuff I like. Does it matter? I don't think so, not much. Right now have no particular interest in being an ethical participant in the culture or whatever.)

It feels good to casually disregard things other people have made. I used to flinch at people's knee-jerk reactions to anything 'experimental' or avant-garde seeming, but I feel more sympathetic about it now. That reaction seems healthy, even more so for anyone who's actually interested in producing or consuming anything like that. The real question/resentment people have I guess is why did this particular thing become famous? They must have had the right kind of friends, etc. Which seems roughly accurate.

Recently more or less consumed by idleness again, I don't want or like anything much, certainly no motivation to make anything. Last night L__ said I seem 无欲无求 and 麻木 which seems true. I didn't mind because she didn't say it with compassion; if she had I would have interpreted it as pity, which always makes me pretty much want to die.

Trying to continue working on long-term project and constantly weighed down by the sense that I'm trying to implement the vision of a person who I no longer have much to do with and don't particularly respect. Ideas & images become 'themes' which become bare words without any associated feeling. Sense of optimism about recovering original inspiration or drive gradually dissipating. In times like these it seems apparent that the problem runs much deeper. I start to think about getting a job.

4:48pm june 21 2024

My interest in anything at all has never been more than imitative, I think. Other people sometimes seemed beautiful to me; the best I could ever imagine doing was to emulate that surface, to take on their motions and affectations as if that might ultimately flow backwards into some kind of corresponding interiority; desires, reasons for doing things. Sympathetic magic as the beginning and end of living.

10:44pm june 19 2024

I spent the day vacant.

6:26pm may 10 2024

Don't know if it's good to want attention, promote oneself, etc. Used to find it kind of disgusting & empty, now feel more or less neutral. Only as disgusting as anything else I guess.

1:45pm april 11 2024

I grow more and more aware of the fact that I'm accumulating a backlog of unfinished games from the past several years which are finished except for having an empty textbox which needs to be filled in. I don't really know why this keeps happening. Why do I keep imagining games that have text but ending up unable to write anything? I don't know if the implication is that I have some repressed desire to write that's begging to be liberated, or if it's that I should stop trying to make games with text in them since it doesn't suit me.

1:01pm april 11 2024

It's kind of weird but recently I feel that only by accepting and affirming my own capacity for abject cruelty I've been able to begin interacting with other people in something like a normal way.

I mean because I have this awkward tendency to see all social life as naked power struggle, necessitating pursuing one's own interest at the expense of others, therefore continuous with taking slaves, kicking a man's head against concrete, etc. So by acknowledging those as things I would probably do under the right circumstances I feel more comfortable about something like asking someone out for a coffee.

Of course I don't feel great about this and I don't hope or expect to ever do anything truly cruel or violent in my life but at the moment making this acknowledgement really does seem to be the only way to not be miserable, since the only alternative that I can understand is to renounce oneself absolutely in favor of others, which I would really love to do but seem unable to.

It's also possible that cruelty is not the right word and selfishness would be more accurate, if for example celebrating a wedding while watching someone die, maybe even paying them to die, doesn't count as cruelty but only natural and graceful self-interest.

12:16pm april 3 2024

I think the problem is not so much that I'm unable to feel loved so much as that I'm unable to understand love as anything other than a zero-sum game, i.e. that receiving love means taking it away from someone else

7:49pm february 8 2024

快过年。我原来打算跟富大宝去山东枣庄跟他家一起过，然后我们在徐州火车站等高铁时，他没有原因踢了我行李，我打他了一个耳光，然后他突然非常愤怒，打击了我的面。我没反应，只是感觉委屈了。因为他身体很不好，所以我如果打击他会怕很伤害他。同时我在周围人的眼睛没反应，接受他的暴力，感觉惭愧了。然后我不想去他家，我留在徐州一个酒店，他坐高铁走了。我不知道为什么我们关系是这样。可能我们俩都有一些很不小心。虽然好像互相很爱。我一直希望我能强一点，对别人好一点。明天决定应该干什么。

9:17pm january 29 2024

8:59pm january 29 2024

I don't take many photos recently partly because I don't like how the camera on my new phone looks

5:09pm january 2 2024

I used to think that i made all these strange decisions in my life because of some kind of mysterious and beautiful reason that i didn't yet understand myself, but recently it seems more likely that i'm just mentally ill somehow

5:03pm january 2 2024

There was a video on my old phone that i took at night of a toilet block in prospect park, i wanted to use it for a scene in 'jasmine hard to say why' with a guy masturbating behind the toilet block, my little motivation to ever work on the game again was pretty much hanging on this image. But my phone screen stopped working on the plane to China, I thought I would still be able to get videos off it but when I looked again a couple of months later the phone wouldn't even turn on.

4:36pm january 2 2024

There was about a month when i was living at NNU where it felt like i was happy; i had finished my exams, was living for free in a small room with two men who I barely knew but seemed to accept me, i stopped going to classes, mostly stopped speaking to other foreigners except occasionally to go get drunk outside the convenience store across the road with my alcoholic friend Jashdon, almost every day would go to this small cafe where nobody else went and work on videogames for five or six hours. I didn't speak the language, most people treated me like a harmless and beautiful animal, i wasn't looking at the internet much, felt pretty much outside of social life, outside of time. I felt more able to focus on 'work' than any other time in my life.

here it's a bit different, i like the campus less. (NNU was old and wet and decaying, lots of cats and dying trees.) Everyone around me seems filled with intellectual or political or financial ambition, they like to go out and spend money and take photos or else talk about their grades in school. people keep asking me about my plans for the future and my honest answers repulse or confuse them. Here the fact of my race is not enough to justify my existence. I started to feel bad about wasting government money.

3:10pm january 2 2024

it's like, i remember being younger and having this feeling that culture could be an escape from the banality of everything else, but more and more it seemed that culture was really absolutely subordinate to and complicit in banality, truly nothing sacred, etc. Disheartening.

2:48pm january 2 2024

Feel more and more disturbed over the last few years about my loss of interest in videogames

I basically don't play videogames at all anymore, and when i occasionally do i rarely find them particularly meaningful or enjoyable. When i was in videogame school i felt like i had to fake it a bit, not that i really didn't like any of the games i played, just that i didn't really feel any particular drive or compulsion for it all

at some point in the past i felt some kind of deep richness or warmth or saturation in some of the stuff that people were making that was enough to make me interested in sort of orienting my life towards participating in this tradition, etc.

don't really feel that almost ever anymore

2:12pm january 2 2024

one of the only pieces of music that still seems good to me

peace and happiness for every man!

5:41pm december 22 2023

i frequently think that the best thing for me would be to live quietly in upstate new york with the support of a wealthy and gentle older boyfriend but i run up against the frustrating reality that i feel repulsed whenever i encounter a male body in any immediacy. i think francis bacon said that he never had sex with his young lover whose name i forgot so maybe some hope remains.

1:16pm december 22 2023

I don't really like anything anymore; it all just feels like layers on layers of kitsch; kitsch for people who don't like kitsch, kitsch for people who think they're better than people who don't like kitsch, etc.

5:12pm december 20 2023

I have a distinct memory of being in my room at university in 2015 or 2016 and reading a translation of a french poem on the internet which ended with a line that was something like: "Go, knock on the doors of the houses of the bourgeoisie and tell them you will never work!"

in my memory it was Rimbaud or Verlaine or maybe Baudelaire, i barely read anything from any of them other than this poem. Anyway this line stuck in my mind for some reason, at the time i read it i guess i found it invigorating or validating or something, but over time i would sometimes think back to this line and came to feel more and more that it was stupid, or at least that my identification with it was stupid, and it came to be a kind of shorthand in my mind for like a shallow self-righteous bohemianism that i found less and less appealing.

Then a few days ago i was thinking about this line again and searched for it for a while and nothing came up, it seems likely that the poem doesn't exist at all, or is really different from my memory, i don't know how to feel when this sort of thing happens, it makes me feel sort of deeply disconnected from reality, in a benign way.

11:33pm december 19 2023

thank you thought world, good night

11:31pm december 19 2023

Robert Graves, Henry Cowell, Arthur Russell

11:26pm december 19 2023

I sometimes think about this guy called Umair, he showed me his passport once for some reason, in the photo he looked younger and very handsome, he was from Pakistan, he was short and balding and extremely thin and his skin was very pale brown. I was moving into his old room on the 6th floor and he was moving to the 4th floor. He said the 6th floor is full of testosterone-filled angry old men. I said I'll fit right in then. He had a big box with many old books and he would cut words out and rearrange them and glue them on paper. He offered me a line of speed, I had never tried it before. He said this building will teach you about speed. He showed me how to cut it into lines with a credit card and then I tried to do it. I said how thick should the line be. He said yes, well, it's a fine line. Between a thin line and a thick line. He laughed a little bit and I did too, I thought it was funny. Almost everyone in the building was using speed all the time but I think that was the only time I did, except one other time.

I saw him sometimes on the 4th floor and usually he was trying on clothes or putting on makeup with these two girls he seemed to hang out with a lot, they were pretty and liked to dress up and go out I guess. I liked him because he spoke softly and I wanted to be his friend, one time by chance we were on the same bus, I sat behind him and tried to make conversation, but he barely replied to me, I felt he didn't want to talk and it became uncomfortable. Later I said to Andy that I think Umair doesn't really like me, Andy said why do you hate yourself, I said I don't hate myself, I just think Umair doesn't really like me.

11:12pm december 19 2023

I don't really like having a thought world on the gurn group domain because i feel a bit attached to keeping the games as far away from my real life as possible or at least being very careful about how they relate to my real life which seems to run counter to the reasons for my interest in having a thought world. But the reality is that I don't have another domain and I think the effort necessary to set one up would probably be enough to delay me from starting my thought world for at least a number of years. And i don't enjoy twitter at all anymore and i don't really want to make a tumblr or substack or something like that because those things come with their own rules that i don't want to be involved with. Maybe at some point i can move it to a different domain

11:04pm december 19 2023

A week or two ago i found ty's thought world and joey's blog and i enjoyed reading these and found them sort of exciting in a way that made me also want to have a blog or a thought world. I didn't do it for a little while, but after the idea of having a thought world was in my mind, i kept thinking of things i could post if i had a thought world, which i mostly forgot already.

It seems nice to be able to post somewhere where no one will read it unless they really want to. I don't really enjoy the idea of posting sincere or real world adjacent things on twitter for several reasons but one is that i worry about the possibility of writing something that might upset somebody or make their life worse or just make them not like me or otherwise have some kind of negative real world consequence. I think the present geographical and social distance between me and anyone who might look at this page also makes it more appealing / i feel less concerned about what people might think.