Today’s deck is the Fable Hedgehog Tarot.
It’s Luna Factory and we stan Luna Factory.
Today’s reading reflects a feeling of unfairness in the intersection between human interaction and work, and as you’ll see that’s the main theme today.
I had a nightmare where I was in my parents’ house, there was a small party at night, I see some planes flying over it really low and later there’s a helicopter flying extra low before it starts shooting the house and then I wake up.
Woke up going right to therapy, so hey…
The day’s also been rainy as all hell, like, it hasn’t stopped since I went to sleep it seems. At least the laundry I put up managed to dry against all odds.
I sorted assorted things around the house and you know I was doing a good job because I ended up filling like 4 trash bags out of nowhere (with more cardboard and useless things than actual trash, mind you), I also decided I should unclutter my bed and sleep with covers for a change.
I had a minor spook because my dishwasher started making a weird sound but turns out there was like… the smallest bit of onion skin obstructing the drain’s cover.
In the midst of all this I sit down for a bit because at this point lord knows how long I’ve been standing up, and idly do the thing where I see if there’s any new VA-11 Hall-A fanart searching keywords.
Someone had made a the usual boilerplate statement about Nirvana and how they were suffering more than Silksong fans or whatever else. Including comments about we’re doing “anything but work on it” or whatever else and the block button had a party.
Maybe someone in that thread was defending us instead? No idea, I’m not masochistic enough to step on the shit pit after the first step.
Of course I talk big but those comments always get me. I’m not gonna spiral into a bunch of ramblings with sensitive info I’ll redact out afterwards, the only thing to focus on is the fact that one of the feelings that surfaces in those moments is me wondering if there’s any point in making things when people are just going to bitch that it’s not the thing they wanted, which is a heavy thing to consider given the fact that I put up with all the bureaucratic bullshit that I do for the prospect/promise that at some point the workload will lower enough for me to get back into making games.
And then I realized something.
Who cares?
Here’s what I mean…
It all starts in 2021. After YEARS of burnout I finally admitted defeat and decided to work on myself. This, combined with a LOT of other personal elements (and that’s BEFORE accounting the Pandemic Stuff) left me at my lowest point. My whole sense of self crumbled, I wasn’t sure who I was or what I wanted anymore. Do I wanna make things? Do I wanna make videogames?
Then Kentaro Miura died.
Miura’s death came at a point where I was realizing that making things is too ingrained into my own self to discard it, but I was coming to terms with what making things entailed for me.
Seeing people mourn Miura enraged me, not only were a lot of these the same people that made jokes about Berserk’s slow publishing pace, the same people that were like “and this is why there’s no new volume” whenever it came to light Miura was living his life, they weren’t even lamenting Miura’s death but the fact that Berserk was up in the air.
I had thought a lot about death by that point, I remember February of 2021 was a month where I kept feeling that if I died at that moment it would be more of an embarassment, wondering if anyone would care about that.
So seeing that this person died and the main thing everyone talked about was that they wouldn’t get a thing from them anymore, made something… snap inside of me.
Up until that point I kept feeling like I failed people by not being superhuman enough to finish Nirvana while being burned out and going through major life changes, but after that it immediately shifted into “why should I stress myself over people that don’t care about you as a person?”.
It was a bitter thing to think about, after all, it was through the support of those same people that I moved to Japan to expand company operations to begin with, every time I gave myself a treat, sent money to my family, or helped with medical expenses, it was thanks to these people.
And do you see where that thread of thought can get you to? To a position where you feel like you still owe them something for a transaction that’s done. Where THEY feel like you still owe them something for a transaction that’s done.
Hell, I remember when we first announced Nirvana and everyone was looking for any and every reason to bitch about the direction the project seemed to take, and now they were lamenting its absence with the same tone? Come on.
It’s also such a… weird way to think about things when you think about it. “I want this thing!”>”I am gonna loudly bitch about this thing I want louder than the people that hate the thing!”.
There’s also a really weird thing where those kinds of people treat like dettached big corpos the smaller studios with a handful of people, and then treat like people the faceless corpos.
Anyway, I think you can probably see the logical fallacy I ran headfirst into so let me sum up around 500 words into what I mean:
“These people don’t care about me personally why should I care about them” > “Why should I be worried about what said people will think about the thing I release?”.
Even beyond all those old grievances, I’ve just… never cared about playing to the crowd as it were. I will keep in mind things that please said crowd but I don’t take requests, so to speak.
It’s just an inherent thing in me, I don’t like people telling me what to do, and it HAS worked in general because let me tell you, chasing trends and/or public opinion is a losing battle.
Will this make any of the bitterness stop? No, it most definitely will not, but feeling silly about it makes it vanish faster.
I guess I’m still in a bad mood in general… oh well.
I tuned out the rest of the day playing Blue Prince, I was curious how much progress you can make once you know the answer to puzzles and whatnot, and turns out the answer is: A Shocking Amount.
Reminds me of Grimrock 2, one of my favorite games, where you can get a shocking amount of stuff early if you know the solution to puzzles.
Maybe I should just fire up Grimrock 2, maybe I need to tune out with that for a bit.