Shadow

This ended up being the last song on Listen, which was one of the albums from my (in hindsight, terrible) plan to make eight Ganglion albums at once.

This song is getting its own page for two reasons:

1. So I can send it to Nikita.
2. There are some videos of me tracking the drums and vocals and other stuff that I kinda wanna put here someday, to help forgive myself for needing to learn how to write songs.

Interlocutor: "Wait, what do you mean, forgive yourself for needing to learn how to write songs?"

Well, I think this song kinda sucks. I mean,

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…Maybe this would be easier with a timeline.

2006

I turn 20. I think knowing how old I am is useful to understand, like, how much opportunity I've had for self discovery: not enough.

2007-ish

Get a jawharp, realize I can play that part of Shadow's theme from FFVI, record it and start working it into a song because that's how my sense of humour works. Also, jawharp sounds good when you boost the bass frequencies.

2008-ish

Song is basically done. Start working it into my live set. It works really well in that form.

2009

Finish and release Listen, feel kinda good-ish but also meh-ish about all the songs.

2010

Feel increasingly meh about everything I've ever done. Move to Edmonton, stop making music entirely.

2012

Move back to Calgary. Record a new album. And another. And another. And another. And another. All in like 6 months.

2013+

Realize that the approach I'd taken to songwriting before 2010 was shit, and that coming back after taking a long break, I'd unlocked some ability to write good songs. Feel good about all my 2012+ music, feel awful about all my 2010- music — like, deeply ashamed that I'd made this music and shared it with people and tried to make it such a big part of my life.

2014

Record what ends up being my last music for roughly eight years. Don't even finish that album. My relationship with Freyja ends up blocking me from having the time, space, or feeling of safety needed to write or record songs. For a while, that's fine — I'm doing other stuff, like getting really good at programming the computer.

2020

Take over the FoC Podcast, doing some sound design inside the episodes. Dig out old music to use for sound cues, especially some 2010- music since that tends to work better, because those songs are less traditionally structured and don't have vocals and are more varied and weird and are more intensely interesting in short bursts. Hmm.

2022-ish

Start recording some music specifically for the FoC podcast, including Wormhole and then Never. That feels really good, and it's… easy.

2023

I have a weekend to myself, so I write & record Don't Do Math. This feels AMAZING. I think this might be the best song I've ever written. It feels like I've grown in the time since 2014. Not as much as a grew in the break between 2010 and 2012, but still.

2023-2025

Lu asks me to make music for various projects of theirs — some of which will someday see the light of day, heheh. I record Jerk, and a few other smaller songs.

2025-2026

I start revisiting some of stuff I made back in 2010- and… it's actually… fine. Like, sure, it still hurts. But, how else was I supposed to get to the point where I could make stuff I was happy with? I taught myself all this shit. I taught myself how to find melodies and how to structure songs and where to put the microphones and how to do a vocal take and when to not play drums and when to cut a song from an album because it didn't fit or wasn't good enough. The music before 2010 is all music where I hadn't yet learned ALL of these lessons. Each song is me figuring out some part of this everything. And then I took a break, and let all of those lessons sink in. Then in 2012-2013, I recorded music where every song/album benefited from every lesson. Then in 2014, I started trying to learn some new lessons, and was interrupted. And now, in 2023+, I've had the meta growth: I can choose, when making a song, whether I want to use the song to learn something new — to take risks and make something that will come out badly, all mashed up by me clambering up the side of it — or whether I just want to make a straight-down-the-middle banger.

2026

I'm working on a new album. Some of the songs are bangers, some of them are are mash. I should always do both: some songs to just feel good about, and some songs to just feel good being bad and learn from.

At an Ink & Switch summit in Barcelona, Todd and I slunk around in the shadows one evening taking a series of double-exposure portraits.

Todd Matthews is one of the people I most dearly cherish in my work life. He is by far the most skillful graphic designer I've ever worked with, and collaborating with him on design projects has helped me build up some muscles that my self-taught ass didn't even know were there. He's also a great photographer, and he always brings a few nice cameras to our gatherings.

For this Barcelona trip, he brought a film camera with the express purpose of shooting double exposures, and he asked if I would be interested in posing for some of these photos, and I leapt at the chance.

The photo at the top is what I'm now using as a profile picture across the web. The fact that it so clearly shows two different-feeling versions of myself is deeply meaningful to me right now, so this was the obvious pick, replacing my previously (and still beloved) pizza face.

Can you see what the second exposure is? It's a bit hard to tell — you can probably flag it as brick, at best. It's a staircase! Now, if you haven't shot a double exposure with a film camera before, what you should know is that you get no preview of how the two images will overlap. The way that Todd so perfectly lined up the bright strips of brick over my eyes and mouth is, in my estimation, a little bit of luck, but also a result of Todd's highly refined sense of composition. Like, he knows how to keep lines horizontal (I'm always dismayed by photos with a crooked horizon). He knows, instinctually, how to perfectly frame a scene or a subject.

These were all shot in the dark with a flash. I don't know how to pull an interesting face. That's okay.

A double with some local foliage. I quite like this one, too. It's funny to me that my posture and hair are almost identical in this shot and the one with the bricks. Todd shot the other exposures earlier during the day, so it was a bit of luck-of-the-draw to see how they all matched up. To me it feels like a miracle.

Here are the vital stats: Nikon FM2n with Nikon 35mm AI-S, Light Orange Filter, Cinestill Double-X at 800 iso, Processed with Cinestill df96 monobath 3min 90°F.

Go spend some time on Todd's website and follow him on bsky.

2025

• 20th — Cut up one of Astrid’s silicone snack containers, salvaged a grip pad from a broken clamp to attach to another clamp, wrapped a towel to wick drips into a pan, and then emptied said pan every 5 minutes for 3 hours while I ran the pump for our cistern. That got us enough drinking water to make it through until next week. Roughed-in a now page.

• 19th — New puppy day! Per Astrid’s insistence, same breed and name as our previous pup who passed suddenly in October. It’s -25°C all week, and puppies need to pee every 20 minutes, so I’m enjoying the constant ~50° temperature shock.

  Spent the afternoon shooting the shit with rabbits and reeds and co. Worked a little bit on sparklines for that secret project I mentioned on the 12th.

• 18th — No coding today. No plumbing either. And no snow. And no puppy. And no computing pioneers. I read a modest proposal to revive/reimagine an old but influential graphical software environment, and it has further stoked my fire. My personal life is structured such that it is hard for me to do enough “computer” without consequences. This causes me no end of strife, self-loathing, doubt, physical pain… all the feelings. Maybe tomorrow it will be different. I wish I could just…

• 17th Today was:

  • call with computing pioneers who shall not be named
  • school cancelled midday due to — surprise — 25cm of snow
  • water leak in the basement, caught just before it did any permanent damage. wonder if we can get a plumber (snow, holidays)
  • rushing to finish some renovations (due to water leak one year ago that destroyed half our basement) and then clean up (been living out of boxes), so that
  • we can get a new puppy Friday?

• 16th — Can’t remember if I did anything more substantial than this.

• 15th — Worked on a mockup for a gestural notebook interface. If you want to see it, go to the FoC slack and check #two-minute-week before it disappears into the void.

• 14th — you want it? well then catch! strike. get ready for the big push! my spider sense is… is gone. i’ve got a picture to prove it. (Podcast editing.)

• 13th — I’ve got the house to myself today. Spent the morning feeling ennui. After a few hours, a thought occurred: “I could be working on Dry Garden.” That instantly made me feel motivated. I’m not actually going to work on Dry Garden — need to finished editing 2 FoC episodes — but it was enough to get me moving. (Dry Garden is a game I’m making with Elliot Evans. Might allocate some Dec Adv time to it, we’ll see.) Later: finished my remix of all the pastagang albums, and then streamed podcast editing.

• 12th — There’s a fun but still secret Ink & Switch project that I’m building tooling for. Completely and utterly unrelated to the previous sentence — cannot stress this enough: there’s no connection. don’t know why you’d think there is. seriously, look elsewhere, you won’t find anything here — I spent my afternoon learning how to write synthesizer patches using a weird sound programming language.

• 11th — Stayed up late editing the upcoming year-in-review episode, again. Pasta Gang released thr- eight albums this year? So I’m making another remix pulling together tracks from all of them. I also attempted a mashup of Radiohead’s Identikit’s broken hearts / make it rain and Wet Leg’s CPR’s I’m in love / you’re to blame, but it sucked so I deleted it.

• 10th — Stayed up late editing the upcoming year-in-review episode. Every one of the song/album picks is getting a little special remix, so that the song matches the pace of the conversation (and vice versa).

• 9th — Added an “orb” to the ganglion page, one of the long-losts turned up in last night’s Archive raid. I guess I didn’t mention it, but I also added a playable build of Refract to its page a few days ago. Later, I streamed myself editing the upcoming year-in-review episode of the Feeling off Computing podcast. The stream was fun! A few people tuned in, which I wasn’t expecting, to watch me be a little stinker and flagrantly disregard copyright. Because fuck copyright.

• 8th — The next few days will be dull — I’ll just be making lots of tiny tweaks to this website. For instance, you probably can’t tell, but I tweaked the params of the starfield on the home page. The colors are slightly more varied, and there are more star-streaks. I lost about an hour tonight down the vortex: I discovered one of my ~dozens of old personal sites in the wayback machine, one that I have no memory of creating. The about page is painful, but I definitely remember being that age. Here’s another one. I should archive what’s left of these, like I did with the first one. They’re all so lovably cringe. I could make a little effigy of deviantart…

• 7th — Rest day.

• 6th — My daughter Astrid is six years old, nearly seven. Over the past few years her inclinations have wavered, as kids’ do, between adventuresome and… faithful. By “wavered”, I mean that she’s been clammed up, fists clenched, unwilling to do damn anything new! Okay, unfair, but that’s how it feels to me. I want adventure! She’s my bean. I want an Adventure Bean™! But… for the past month, she’s been down with a little ritual. A little adventurous ritual. Every week, on our way to art class, she and I pick a new restaurant that she’s never been to before. And we listen to a new album. And I ask her math questions, always some kind of math she’s never done before (we’ve dipped our toes into 3d geometry, symbolic algebra, complex numbers, and her favourite ‘I don’t know I give up’ answer is either “quadrillion”, “negative infinity”, or lately “undefined” in the divide-by-zero sense). Suffice to say: some adventure has crept in. And I’ve been feeling the spirit, myself. I’m trying to cook more different kinds of things, improvising with whatever we have in the house. I try to taste something newly different each day. (This will come up on the FoC bonus episode we record tomorrow morning.) Which brings us to today’s adventure. I did a bunch of le computer. But that’s not the thing. Today’s adventure is that I made a hot toddy. It’s basically honey and lemon in hot water, which I often have with ginger when I’m sick, but you add alcohol and then call it a “hot toddy” for some reason, I’ll be fucked. Why? Who knows. But, also, why? Well, one of my most cherished coworkers, Todd Matthews, designer extraordinaire, made an (unreleased) little website cataloging cocktail recipes. Seems only fitting to try the one that has his name on it. And I’ve heard of a “hot toddy” all my life and never knew what it was. Lemon and honey, hot water, and… bourbon or whatever? Give me a break! Tame. No tomato purée! No Old Bay seasoning. No simulated chicken stock! I don’t need to draw any of my own blood. Why am I getting out of bed for lemon and honey? Well, regretfully for my sense of adventure, which craves only the weirdest shit I can find… it’s actually kinda good. Regretfully, I might make it again.

• 5th — Today’s adventure wasn’t coding-related; rather, I stayed up distressingly late compiling predictions from previous Feeling of Computing end-of-year episodes. You see, every year, we release an episode with reflections on the previous year and predictions about the coming year… or years. Jimmy introduced the pattern of doing 1-year, 3-year and 6-year predictions. Naturally, I reject all patterns on sight… and I’m a lazy sod… so I haven’t done a good job tracking our predictions. Well, thanks to the mounting pressure of some of our longer-term predictions coming true this past year, I’ve done the dang thing and collected up all existing predictions in a useful format. I did this by hand! I put in the legwork! Well, I mean, I used Claude and GPT and Notebook LM and they all shat the bed. So yeah, I did it by hand… but I also learned a little bit about AI along the way 🌈. I learned that AI is unreliable as shit and I have “skill issues”, in that I’m too damned skilled to see AI as helpful for the things I do. On to the next one!

• 4th — I continued chipping away at my Cakefile. The hours melt away and nothing seems to happen. Now it’s after midnight — I could sleep and feel rested in the morning, and resign myself to accompishing nothing, or stay up and then, in an hour, sleep and feel less rested, and resign myself to accomplishing nothing. I feel this sort of neutral, numbing sadness every day. It’s not ennui, it’s something else. I am overflowing with ideas big and small, and I have the skills to do them. But I feel like I get —maybe— one solid productive day a month, at this rate. The rest of the time just evaporates. [some time passes] Okay, so I’ve stayed up a bit. I added a command to my cakefile — cake diff — which will compare the compiled output to a known-good copy, and another command — cake kiss — that will snapshot the current compiled output as the new known-good. I like that “diff” and “kiss” look similar but different, I like the “make them kiss” of it all, I like thinking about tasty cake and coffee when I program, and I really like this pattern of diffing compiler output against known-good output. And that… gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

• 3rd — Tiny update to Please Reload, my plucky little local web server library, to allow extending the set of supported MIME types and do a better job of managing websockets connections. It’s used by Sweetbread, my toolkit for crafting Cakefiles like the one that builds this very website. I came sooo close to rewriting Cake myself, perhaps as part of i, my personal cli, but that’ll have to wait. Yes, yes, welcome to my yak farm. Addendum: seems I broke the websockets.

• 2nd — Various housekeeping, including reviving my GOOD KNOB

• 1st — My 6yo is sick — can’t keep food down — and my partner is away, so today I was a dad and not a computer user. After she fell asleep, I sat beside her in bed and did a bit of pre-cleanup on this site. That’s my first adventure this month: attending to a long list of website desires.

• 0th — It’s weird that the first day of the month is the ordinal 1. Months are 1-indexed. “The 1st of the month”. So if the last day of the previous month is the predecessor, you either need to say “the zeroth of the month” or just skip zero and call it the “negative first”, which I like better except skipping zero feels like standing on top of a mountain in a storm, wearing copper armor, shouting ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS. Don’t toy with powers beyond your comprehension.

Preamble

Last year’s December Adventure started strong then promptly derailed.

I have no reason to imagine this year will be any different.

Except for the “started strong” part. I don’t have any ideas as good as the CSS feed.

The key is going to be setting low expectations and building up steam, I think.

Sometimes people ask what podcasts I listen to. Here’s a list of podcasts I recommend.

Game Development

• Designer Notes
• Draknek & Friends Official Podcast

Gaming News & Criticism

• $ Triple Click
• $ The Besties
• $ Post Games — this one is fantastic

Software Development

• Igalia Chats
• Off the Main Thread — inactive, sadly
• Advent of Computing

Tech News

• $ Accidental Tech Podcast
• $ Dithering
• The Talk Show with John Gruber

Comedy

• $ Stores — quite new, and probably not for most people, but I really love it.
• $ My Brother, My Brother And Me
• $ The Adventure Zone
• You Look Nice Today — inactive, but worth listening from the start
• The 30 Second Podcast — Westin Meme’s patent nonsense, beware

Philo

• Very Bad Wizards — I only listen to the opening segments.

Music

• Strong Songs

Various Johns

• $ Reconcilable Differences — one of my “being a dad” podcasts
• Roderick on the Line — gotta listen to this one from the start
• Robot or Not

…Are Friends

• $ Todepond Pondcast

And no, I haven’t listed any of my own podcasts.

Artwork by Dione McGuire

This is a game I worked on for Global Game Jam 2013, part of a team of seven stationed at the University of Calgary library. After 48 hours, we emerged with this little experiential wordless puzzle, which you can play right here.

A few rough memories, written in a hurry.

Nobody else but me had made a game before. At first, it took a bit of effort and hand-wringing to get everyone thinking at the right scale of ambition given our time limit. We settled on the minimal control scheme and the general theme and gameplay within the first few hours, and then mocked-up a handful of scenes to sort out what kinds of interactions could work with them — lots of back and forth on that. We knew we wanted the game to be wordless, since that felt pretty fresh at the time (remember this is three years before The Witness). I built a little game engine in Flash. We had one designer/PM who helped with some of the gameplay thinking and made sure everyone was unblocked. The rest of the team was five artists, who all worked in parallel and helped each other out with encouragement. Late into the second night, I raced home and came back with a bunch of small soundmakers and some recording gear, and we found a dark empty stairwell to record in. I think that bit — the sound design — was so crucial to the game working at all, and we're lucky it turned out as well as it did considering how last-minute it was. The other crucial bit was Dione's artwork — she was the most seasoned, and it's her work that gives the game its feeling.

Refract on the GGJ Site (Archived) | Presentation Video | Indiestatik Review (Archived)

A heartfelt thank you to Dione McGuire, Elizabeth Wright, Tom Sarsons, Melvin Kwan, Sarah Ahmed, and Louis Ducsharm for the wonderful weekend.

I came up in the early web multimedia era of Youtube poop and eBaum’s World. But I grew up in a culture of strict reverence for artistic integrity, a sort of high-brow looking down one’s nose at anything “unoriginal”. So it took me a good while (and a healthy dose of Kirby Ferguson) to feel okay sharing works of culture like these mashups.

So here you go!

November 2025 — Russell Holzman’s dnb guitar of Flawed Mangoes’ Swimming has the same V I VI progression as Pat’s Soundhouse’s Car Alarm.

December 2023 — Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You and Battles’ Atlas both share a particular triplet feel. I spent about a week with them rattling around together in my head before I finally sat down to bash out this edit. The video is meant to be hypnagogic, and the music is meant to be irresistibly danceable. Play it loud!

August 2018 — Erlang: The Movie is miserably dry, despite the occasional dollop of retro charm. Joe Armstrong, the lovable creator of Erlang, comes across as a bit of a grump. There’s much inadvertent humour in there, but it’s buried — my “distractors cut” tries to pull that humour to the surface.

April 2023 — Finally, here’s something lighter, a little joke about Jimmy’s choice of commit message.

Download

This is just the first half, which I think I’ve “finished”, and it’s somewhat self-contained… so this might be it.

Nerdy details:

I wrote the song partly using the experimental notebook that I (et al) have been building at work. Will share some screenshots eventually.

It started as a piano jam, and I found a little ostinato in 11/8 that I decided to build the rest of the song around. So I tracked the piano and drums first, and then just improvised everything else on top.

I’ve had a rented cello for the past month or so, and that features pretty heavily. I think cello pizz + BC + organ is how I’m gonna do basslines from now on.

I also have a rented flute, and while I recorded a bunch of it for this song, none of it made the cut (…yet, I guess).

Other instruments:

• the 100 year-old hand-me-down wind organ from a local church that now lives next to my piano
• lots of bass and soprano clarinet
• the french horn Schuyler just randomly gave me
• singing bowl
• one little tiny synth bit that you’ll never in a million years hear and go “that’s the synth”; the thing you think is the synth is actually the cello with a really tight high-feedback delay.
• I’ve pared my drum kit down to just the stuff that I really love. Kick, snare, floor tom, hat, ride, broken cymbal that works as a china, two crashes… and a tight stack of broken splash cymbals that sounds just like the $600 Meinl smack stack. Love it.
• my 6 year old loves these two tiny cymbals that, I think, were the hi-hat from a children’s drum set that I somehow wound up with? She put them on individual stands, one tight and one loose. Turns out, the tight one works as a triangle-esq “ting” sound.

I don’t play the flute; never even touched one. But I’ve played a bunch of other instruments, so at this point I know the difficulty curve pretty well.

It comes in three pieces, and I had to figure out how to put them together, and how to hold it. It’s less intuitive than a saxophone, probably closer to cello, so I looked up the answer. You have to wrap your index finger in a weird way, and the weight rests on it a little uncomfortably. Maybe I’ll get used to it (like guitar), or maybe I’m holding it wrong, but whatever (like piano).

Getting it to make a sound was also harder than I expected. It’s a bit like blowing across a bottle, sure, but much more sensitive to angle, and you have to control your breath a lot more.

I’m really bad at playing the flute.

In my life, I’ve always felt a little ashamed to be bad at something. I wouldn’t want to play flute in public, or tell someone “I play the flute”, because that suggests competence. If they then found out I played the flute like a child, that’d be a disappointment. People are often adult by default, and easy to disappoint.

I’m turning 40 next year. By and large, I’ve stopped doing new things that have a years-long long difficulty curve. More and more, I only do the things I’m already good at, or the handful of mediocre things I’d like to be better at.

I don’t like that about myself. I want to continue doing new things. I want to enjoy doing new things, even (and especially) if they’re hard, and I’m bad at them.

That means I need to be comfortable playing the flute, half an hour here, 5 minutes there, every day, some days, several times a day. Sounding awful, struggling, doing it wrong, being uncomfortable. But not feeling ashamed at these things.

Feeling good being bad.

The Frustration of Collaboration is supposed to be monthly. We often record the next one right after releasing the last. Then the unedited audio files sit on my hard drive, the weeks tick by, I keep thinking “I should do that, but it’ll take an entire goddamn day” and I don’t have many days to give.

What I do have is dad shrapnel. A few dozen spans of 5-15 minutes. I haven’t trained myself to context switch into something useful. My score in Threes is pretty good — I’ve almost made a 3,072.

I have a personal philosophy that it’s okay for me to forget stuff. If something is really important, I’ll notice it again in the future, and that’s okay.

I’ll add things to a todo list when it’s convenient, or when I want to take advantage of that set of feelings (the feeling of putting it on the list, the feeling of seeing it on the list, the feeling of checking it off, etc).

When I don’t want those feelings, I don’t write it down. I fall back on the freeing feeling of not worrying about it, and then the annoyance (in a good way) of it continuing to nag at me if it’s a serious issue that I really ought to fix, or the sparkling “oh yeah! I’ve heard of it” when someone else mentions that same movie, or the blissful ignorance of completely forgetting about it if it wasn’t so important after all.

I’m slowly teaching myself Swift by making a few little toy iOS apps. One of them is this “depth camera” that I use as a webcam for live streams and for taking portraits of friends at conferences.

It works by using the depth data from my iPhone’s camera combined with the video feed from the camera. Every frame, it generates a dot per pixel of the video feed, and places the dot in 3d space using the depth data to control the z value.

The depth data is really inconsistent and low-res, with weird sampling / interpolation artifacts. So it produces beautiful results!

Here are some images from the LA Ink & Switch Unconf.

I needed a depth-punny name, so I just went with an MBV reference (warning: flashing).

I think RSS is the bee’s knees!

There are two ways to consume my website via your feed reader of choice:

If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.

In 2010 I quit my job to make indie games.

My childhood friend Sterling had just finished studying comp sci at university, and I’d talked him out of going straight into the industry. Big teams, no autonomy, no vision.

He was a graphics programming savant, deeply specialized, and I could do all the other stuff. Together, we were T-shaped. We had a shared appreciation for weird, innovative games. And we each had some savings.

This was before Steam Greenlight. Before Indie Game: The Movie. The paint was still drying on the App Store. The iPad was new and nobody knew what to do with it. Maybe this big portable screen would be a great canvas for games. Hell, any day now, Flash should come to iOS. But if it doesn’t, Unity seems promising, if a little restrictive.

It feels like indie games are right on the cusp of exploding, the way indie music had a few years ago.

World of Goo and Braid were surprise hits — people had an appetite for quirky, systems-driven games. Online, other indie devs were buzzing about “procedural content generation”. With just one or two clever programmers, you could make a system to generate all the art and levels and music for a game, what would normally take a whole team to produce. You could even make a system that’d underlie your gameplay, letting you tap into new kinds of physics and feelings, breaking away from traditional genres. Could we do that?

The first game we tried to make was, almost exactly, Jusant — a game where you climb up a babel-like tower, stretching from the ground to the sky, through the clouds, so high that by the end there’d be no gravity holding you down. We’d referenced Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid 2, how they each so differently used the feeling of climbing way up high around the outside of a building. The sounds of the bustling city below fade away, overtaken by a stirring wind. Any interior passages would be a relief, a moment of shelter from the elements and the fear of falling, but with risks of their own. And then back out, and up.

There’d be grapple points and hanging ropes, things to swing on, ladders and jutting rocks, narrow walkways. Crumbling abandoned huts built into the rock face, ripped nets, other materials that’d vary as you ascended. There’d be no combat, maybe no other people at all — just climbing. Just the feeling of climbing, that thrill of moving deftly through a complex world (Mario, racing games) or the interplay between the space and your body (Metroid, Mirror’s Edge).

That idea sucked. We couldn’t procedurally generate the tower — it’d need to be hand-authored. Doing procedural character animation for climbing seemed impossible. Hell, Assassin’s Creed was just a really complicated system blending hundreds of hand-authored animations.

The next game we tried was A Shrinking Feeling. I wanted to do what Braid did — a clever twist on a classic, where you realized something was possible, hell it was simple, it was right there and nobody had done it, you could do it, you just have to be careful and do it really well, really think about what has just changed, what you can do with it, what it might mean. Braid took something that’s an implicit assumption in games — time moves forward at a steady rate — and asked, “What if it didn’t?” So I took this idea and generalized it by one step.

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

What other constants exist?

Scale.

In this game, your character is shrinking. Always shrinking. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Always shrinking. Forever.

The world around you feels familiar right now, but just wait a minute. That little enemy you could have squashed, no problem, is now quite the looming threat. But that little squiggle in the ground below you is now a crack, and then a cave, and then a cavern, and you can duck down into it to escape. You are always shrinking. The world around you, and everything in it, is always growing.

These ideas don’t belong to any particular genre. But we needed to pick something to build around. So, we started with the classic: 2d side-scroller. Mario, Sonic… yeah, Braid too. But we could imagine generating these worlds procedurally. We could make a system. I’d draw little bits of the world as paths (not pixels), so that we could snap them together and scale them up and subdivide them into smaller fragments. We could texture them so that as you shrunk, the levels would go from looking normal and Earthly to microscopic to wildly abstract and impossible.

Sterling worked on a prototype of the game. He got something playable, and it was kinda fun! I made some placeholder art, and was working on bits of narrative, and then… and then…

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

Music! I realized that this idea, you could do this with music, too! And, of course, the constant that could grow or shrink, that would perfectly fit with the tone and idea of our game, was tempo. The music would slow down forever. As it slowed, notes would be spaced further and further apart, creating little gaps to be filled by tiny new melodies and rhythms.

I prototyped a system, a little music system, in Unity, and it worked!

That plan sucked. We figured it’d take us months, maybe a year or more, to make this game any good. We didn’t have enough money.

So we put it aside, and tried to make something else. Something simple, that we could make and release within a month, hell, a week, just to prove that we could. We made it. And it was… fine. But we never released it. We grew to resent each other and, due to the very human emotional mess of it all, with its many complications (like, say, the fact that I was dating his brother), Sterling and I parted ways… almost amicably. I went back to my old job. He went off and worked at big tech companies (eventually joining Apple Vision around the time it was just getting started).

But I couldn’t let go of this idea.

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

In 2012, I was making a little home for myself in the sound art scene. There was a program director at a major performing arts center who became quite fond of my systems. She kept feeding me opportunities to exhibit and perform and mingle with other artists. It felt like she was almost just handing me a new career.

All of it was this shrinking music.

I came very, very close to quitting my job (again) to make a career of this sound art stuff. But… all of these gigs involved signing contracts, and these contracts came with exclusivity rules.

For instance. I’d been invited (by a different program director at a competing performing arts center, haha) to join an experimental dance troupe to develop a new show. We’d rehearse for a few months, full days, 6 days a week. We’d do a run of shows locally, and then go on tour. But the local run of shows coincided with a sound art festival at the other place. I’d already been booked to perform there. And this was against the rules.

We’re putting your name on the bill, which means people are coming to see you. That means you can’t be on another bill elsewhere in town at the same time, because that’ll split your audience, and we won’t sell as many tickets.

That deal sucked. I did the math and, at the rate I was booking gigs, and for how much these gigs paid, and for how much time they’d take, and for having to quit my current job to put that time in… I wouldn’t make it. I didn’t have enough money.

I stopped doing sound art. I moved out from the city, to live with my girlfriend in a condo at the edge of town. It was a condo, so I couldn’t make any music. My last album — unfinished, at that — is from 2014.

But I refused to let go of this idea.

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

In 2016 I was learning more and more about coding. Watching Strange Loop talks. Building stuff in the browser. (Flash was not coming to the iPhone, sigh.) Picking up ClojureScript.

I rebuilt the shrinking music in ClojureScript, in the browser. It sounded great. I loaded it up with samples from my last few albums, so that it sounded rich and textured and grounded in reality. I didn’t just make it go slower forever, or faster forever — I gave it a custom function, interacting sine waves generating accelerations that’d pull it back and forth like an infinite series diverging into the horizon.

But that was it. A little side project.

Life slowed down.

I moved away from the city. Slower.

I built a house in the woods. Slower.

I had a kid. Much slower.

I make computer programs,

and that’s about it. To a crawl.

That’s the version of me you probably first met.

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

I am tired of being a computer programmer. I am tired of writing code. It is a grid of letters. It is monospaced. It does not move. You cannot make it shrink and grow, stretch it out, squish it together. Well… maybe you can. You just have to get away from static text. You need to be in an environment where it makes sense for things to shrink and grow, for cracks to open up that you can slip down inside.

And I am bored of not making music.

A friend of my mother’s, a widow whose husband used to play professionally, is getting rid of a beautiful old upright piano. An elderly man, a retired church pastor, is selling the beautiful antique pump organ from his old church.

I have all these instruments.

   I have a few remaining microphones that aren’t broken.

      I have the weekend to myself once in a while.

I’ve started noodling again.

Jerk (Improv)

I’ve started turning these noodles into tunes.

Jerk (Progression)

I’ve started normalizing sharing.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do is record some of this shrinking/growing music with real instruments.

I tried a few times. In Ableton Live, my music software of choice, you can control how different parts of the sound should change throughout the course of a song. You can make the volume go up and down, or bring in some echo right when you need it. You can also control the tempo! You draw a graph showing how the tempo should change. You can make the change sudden, or you can make it gradual.

Live’s tempo control sucks. It updates these values in small little steps, each step the size of a 32nd note. Every time it takes one of those steps, you can hear a little pop or glitch from the changing tempo. (Ableton heads: this seems to happen even if you’re not using warp modes. It’s fucked up.)

So instead of relying on this broken tool, I just made my own. I took my old ClojureScript shrinking music program, and turned it into a metronome.

I recorded that metronome into Ableton Live, so that I could listen to the sound of something smoothly speeding up forever and record along with it.

Speeding up, yes. I’d tried it both ways. I knew how they each felt. Slowing down is sedate. Contemplative. I wanted to shake out the cobwebs. I wanted to go faster. I wanted that thrill of moving deftly through a complex world, the interplay between the space and my body.

In early March, I had the house to myself for a few days. I recorded piano, and drums, guitar, and bass.

For every layer, I’d hit record and start playing along… slowly at first, and the metronome would get faster, and I’d play faster. And it’d keep getting faster, and I’d keep playing faster, until I started to make mistakes. And I’d keep playing faster, and the mistakes would compound, and the sounds would smush together until I was playing total nonsense, and the rhythms would drift out of alignment until I couldn’t keep up at all. Hit stop.

Then I’d pick up a different instrument, and start recording again, a little later on in the song when things were already fast, but I’d start relatively slowly — half time, quarter time.

After I had a bunch of layers, I started mixing them together. EQ. Compressor. Reverb. Gain. I’d turn each layer down until you could barely hear it. Hide all the sounds behind each other. Every sound in the song is hidden behind the song. In psychoacoustics, this is called “masking”, and I love doing it.

I noticed that this song was… fun. You could loop a few bars, and they’d ever so slightly push and pull at your feeling of time. Then loop the next few bars, and they’d do it again. So that’s how I worked — advance the loop, fix the sound, advance the loop, fix the sound, advance the loop, fix the sound…

The song was taking shape.

It had a weird B-section, and I kinda liked it, but it wasn’t quite working. When I record a song, I usually like to try at least one or two new ways of playing an instrument. This song has two.

• First, the kick drum hits all coincide with a staccato blast of bass from the pump organ — a technique I picked up from Louis Cole, an incredible drummer who uses his left hand on a keyboard to play basslines in sync with his kickdrum. Of course, my drum kit and pump organ are in separate rooms, and not easily moved, so I had to record them separately. That was a chore, but I love how it turned out.
• Second, there’s a distorted bass guitar. You don’t hear distorted bass all that often, and the song already has a pretty thick low end from the pump organ, so I figured some crunchy bass guitar would sit nicely in the low-hundred Hz. I have a little fender amp that sounds shockingly good considering how small and cheap it is. I played a P-bass through the gain channel, and it sounded snarly as hell.

The snarly bass begged for crash cymbals, which screamed for icy piano… and the song sort of accidentally wound up with a tacky Nu Metal breakdown in the middle. Oops.

Jerk (Nu Metal)

(If you’d like, here’s the full song in this unfinished nu metal state.)

At the end of the weekend, I sent the song to my friend Lu — maybe they’d want it for their video?

I didn’t release it. I kept working on it for a while. Trying to carve away sections where my playing was trash, or I’d made instrument choices that weren’t working.

Lu used it in a video after all (along with another “song” I made by chopping up a bunch of my older songs and scrambling them together).

Over the following months, whenever I had some time alone, I added more instruments. Bass clarinet. Tuba. A little cheapo Casio. Shakers. Melodica. Recorder.

I wanted the song to have lyrics and a main vocal line. But the shrinking meant something to me, so the lyrics would need to mean something, and I… don’t do that anymore.

So now I’ve given up on it. The song is not finished. It’s abandoned. But I’m okay with that.

The mix is trash. The day I released it, right before the final render, I made the organ too loud at the start, and I’m going to resent that forever. The drums sound fake. The guitar playing is sloppy. The A-section desperately needs a countermelody (which… was supposed to be the vocals). The recorder is too loud. The B-section (that used to be Nu Metal) feels stilted and vacant. The later part is dull, but yet the ending comes too quickly. The melodica is cheesy. The recorder is cheesy. The main melody is cloying and predictable and childish. None of the section transitions flow. The song sucks.

2nd A-section

The 2nd A-section, at 2:23, is… fucking great. It makes me so happy. It was a total accident, too. Everything just worked together, right from the get go, totally unplanned. Sure, it’s just a drone on E, but who cares, it grooves. And that trashy china-esq crash cymbal that keeps coming in and out (at double duration each time — eighth notes, then quarter, half, whole, breve) sits perfectly in the mix. See, look what happens when I pull it out…

Trash

…it sounds like junk by itself! But it just melts into place with everything else around it. I’ve never used this cymbal before because it sounds like junk, so I had no idea it could do this. And you can’t quite perceive it, but there’s a shaker doubling that cymbal, too. This is called “masking”, and I love doing it.

(Someday I'll tell the story of how I got all these cymbals.)

There’s an imperceptible little draaag where all the instruments slow down a tiny bit, and then they all race ahead to catch up to the beat. I did it by accident when recording the very first drum track, and then just repeated the same mistake in every layer that followed. The drag is so small, but it feels so weirdly good to just stretch out how you feel the moment passing. The interplay between the space and your body.

Drag

And the song, it almost does one more thing. A very special thing. A thing that I always, always wanted the shrinking to do. I’ve been trying to make it do. For over a decade. For 14 years now. And a half. Almost fifteen. Years. Now.

There are things you assumed were constant, but what if they aren’t?

My goal for the shrinking is that it should mean something. When something shrinks, or it grows, it should say something. You should feel something. If the shrinking and growing doesn’t express anything, if it’s just a cool trick, that’s wrong. It’s wrong.

A Shrinking Feeling, the game, was going to use its constant shrinking to say something: “if you leave a little thing alone, a little nagging worry, a little problem, it’ll grow and grow until you can’t deal with it any more… but you can slip away from it, and leave it behind… and that’s just fine. you keep changing. you’ll never stop changing. the you that was threatened by that thing is gone. there’s a new you now.”

I haven’t figured out what the shrinking music should say. I had something in mind for this song, that I could say through some lyrics, but… I don’t do that anymore.

But I need to do one thing first, with this music, to eventually be able to say something with it: I need to know I can make you not notice the shrinking. It should feel natural. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Am I a good enough musician to pull that off? Probably not. I didn’t quite get there, this time. But I think I got close. For most of the song, it’s so smooth, but then at moments it’s jarring. But when I tap my fingers together, keeping time, speeding up, the smooth bits and the jarring bits feel the same. I came so close with this one.

I’ll probably come back to this idea again. I don’t want to make music that only speeds up forever, or slows down forever. I want to find a way to make the tempo change, and the change of tempo change, and the change of the change of tempo change. (That’s why the song is called “Jerk” — I’m a jerk because I didn’t do the thing.)

And unlike the tower game, (and the other ideas we had, some of which have appeared elsewhere), I haven’t seen anyone do a shrinking game. So I’ll probably come back to that too.

I spy: Macintosh SE, Can of tomato paste & Metroid II cart, Plateau Astro Sun Spotters glasses, Computer Lib, tablas, guitar pickups mounted in a wooden box, Luna & Strange Loop stickers, Foundations of Game Engine Development, 2 guitar amplifiers and 1 "meeting" amplifier

It's a small temporary space — I'm moving into a larger room next year, so that's why there's no harp or drum kit in these pictures.

I spy: 4 Game Boys, Sitar, various pipes and tubes for didgeridooing, 2 broken ("texture") guitars, floor tom (decorated for live performance), Old Overholt, various other spirits (covered with socks for surprise factor), 2 issues of On Spec, SNES & N64 hits (and a few misses), a few hundred feet of XLR & TRS cables, sheet music, art portfolio, Santana's Abraxas on reel-to-reel, some instrument in a case that I don't remember what it is — yes this is a real problem I have

A lot of folks' rooms look like they want to live in Dwell magazine, or IKEA. You know, with a real floor and bookshelves and shit. No thank you — I want to live inside a dusty curio shop where in the evenings a gypsy-punk band hosts all-ages shows. Again.

I spy: cowbells, vibraslap, autoharp, sleigh bells, tambourine, plastic duck beak that quacks, triangle, alto melodica, pan flute, "death" rattle, thumb piano, benji, drum sticks and mallets, 3.5" floppy, shakers, singing bowl, ball whisks, a dozen-ish recorders and whistles, various pieces from other instruments

I lied about not having bookshelves. There's just no room for books on them.

I spy: train whistle, various bird calls and whistles, nose flute, rosin, siren whistle, capos, trumpet valve grease, EBow, harmonicas, and a little spherical projection of me.