I make stories you can touch, and stories that touch you. Whether it’s through games, music, writing, interactives, or performance, I create artistic experiences about better futures and the roads we take to get there.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
– Carl Sagan
inspired by jerry goldsmith’s TNG theme, with a bit of bruce broughton’s theme for The Orville, i wrote this main theme for space opera, to be played at the start and/or end of sessions.
it’s written and exported straight from musescore studio, using the honestly impressive orchestral soundfont they released in version 4.
since part of what we’re hoping to do with the experience is have live music, it’s my biggest hope to have musicians take/quote/chop/remix the central motif throughout the session as our players navigate decision-making on a generational scale.
life is short, make every minute count. running late, running behind, running out of time. rise and grind, early bird, not a moment wasted.
memento mori—remember that you will die.
don’t waste my time time is money money is power
levels of extraction, refinement
the industrialization of living
mine an hour and refine it into labour sold
for a number of dollars that buy you the power to… what?
to feel free?
in the time you have left?
in the time you haven’t sold?
no pain, no gain
as if a redwood needed trauma to tower.
what else dies on the alter of time? i’ll sleep when I’m dead
as if the dead wouldn’t give everything to sleep, to dream, to rest.
to lay down in one form and wake up renewed:
sleep is not death, it is metamorphosis, transformation
sleep is the seed in winter soil
the rising bread
the baby in the belly
remember that you will die
did you remember that you will live?
have you never lain with your lover
and felt a minute stretch into forever?
what would it feel like to
make love to
every
moment?
i am going to live forever
i will make love to every moment
i will ask can I do this forever?
i will no longer strip-mine my time
i will no longer colonize my time
i will no longer tear up the
richly watered ferns of my hours
to steal bauxite from my red earth: it is not sustainable.
if time were sand
then you would dread the last grain
but time is water
and you cannot drain the ocean
you are going to live forever
you are going to live forever
you are going to live forever
so live
i watched the squirrel dart out
trying to reach the playground
the only piece of grass and tree
we had left for it in the city
only to be struck
killed by an indifferent machine
i sat stunned, for hardly a second
before the car behind me
beeped impatiently
(places to be)
what is this story
we choose to live in
where a senseless death
is so commonplace
as to be an inconvenience
minority rule
still the tool of oppressors
this shit needs to go
the court and the senators
all of these predators
this shit needs to go
robes hiding legalized prostitution
wipe up the cum with the constitution
fascist imperial institution
this shit needs to go
cant get this labor
for free, and you mad
this shit needs to go
done stuffed the whole 'conomy
into yo bag
this shit needs to go
force women to bear they fruit no choice
survivings a crime they locked in the joint
unlimited labor for you to exploit
this shit needs to go
still begging for power
that youll never use
this shit needs to go
fundraise for decades
and do nothing new
this shit needs to go
pander to who aint white straight and male
begging for votes like we paying your bail
if you aint gon do nothin stay out my mail
this shit needs to go
do something do something
do something now
this shit needs to go
stop acting so pussy
and do something now
this shit needs to go
get up, kill the filly, and take to the streets
ban guns, pack the courts, and arrest djt
dont tell me to vote, nigga, you in the seat
and this shit needs to go
you found a nice spot
at the end of a street
and chose to stay
to build your home
to raise your family
to look down your nose through
half-closed windows
at the rest of your neighbors
as if the premium you paid
makes your position superior
never noticing that
your road goes
nowhere
“i’m just being realistic” is just another way of saying “i can’t imagine what i can’t see.”
its one of the reasons that utopian fiction is so sparse. writing conflict it easy. writing “paradise” is hard.
because we know strife, we know pettiness, we know backstabbing and hypocrisy and the failings of mankind. it’s so easy to look around and see people acting in self-interest, taking the easy way out, taking short-term gain over long-term success, and say “see? i told you so.”
it makes it seem like, in order for things to be better, we have to be better.
daniel quinn wrote that (and i’m paraphrasing) every system of government and commerce would work if people would just be better than theyve always been.
the free market economy works (so long as people dont create monopolies, enslave children, or poison the environment)
communism works (so long as people dont try to gather power for themselves at the expense of others).
and we see all that and cannot possibly imagine a path from here to a supposed utopia free of all the sins of man to which we have become accustomed.
except…
that’s just a story.
it turns out giving every homeless person in america a home is cheaper than leaving them homeless. that’s reality. thats what the data says. we say its “not realistic” to hide our discomfort with giving people things they “didnt earn,” and look for examples of people gaming the system to say “see — told you so.”
we thought the government would never truly consider a universal basic income. then covid hit and suddenly receiving stimuli and PUA is no longer unrealistic.
we worked in offices that would never go remote in a million years (until they had no choice).
there are other ways of living, all around us. tribal, cooperative, socialist, collectivist, hermetic, interconnected, intradependent, car-free, experimental, batshit crazy ways of living that we havent even begun to understand.
but the house at the end of the cul-de-sac that says “that will never work” is too comfortable. never mind the termites.
cynicism says “it will go how it has always gone (and it has always gone badly.)” cynicism is a mask for apathy, and apathy is a mask for depression. cynicism is learned hopelessness spoken aloud.
cynicism is futurelessness.
there are deeper truths out there. but first we have to move out of the cul-de-sac.
the creeping dread that this is all there is — that we reached a peak and are simply falling down the gravel-lined hill into oblivion.
that bad is exponential and good is linear.
it feels like: i recycle 6 cans while exxon dumps a thousand tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
it feels like: i cant save for a house while a hedge fund buys up the block.
it feels like: i vote and vote and vote while politicians do what they damn well please.
it feels like: fourteen people shot in front of a rita’s.
it feels like helplessness. it feels like powerlessness. it feels like futurelessness.
and i’m tired of it.
it’s meant to be overwhelming, isn’t it? we are hit with a constant deluge of information that falls into two categories — upsetting or distracting. we’re meant to be so worried about making rent that we can’t effectively organize. we’re meant to be more concerned with how our activism looks than what our activism does — and lord knows, i fight with that myself. to be an artist, who wants to make a living on that art, whose art is opposed to the systems of power and commerce needed to make that living, is to sit uncomfortably close to the problems. and i don’t feel like i have a solution. not yet.
all i know is that the story of futurelessness isn’t getting us there.
i’ve been managing my own depression my entire life. when i have an episode, one of the mechanisms that keeps me in it is learned helplessness:
Learned helplessness occurs when an animal is repeatedly subjected to an aversive stimulus that it cannot escape. Eventually, the animal will stop trying to avoid the stimulus and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation. Even when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness will prevent any action.
and what is futurelessness if not learned helplessness on a mass level? when we begin to believe that none of our actions will stop the shocks?
as i’ve learned, the only way out is changing our story.
we need to create a new story, something to believe in, something to have faith in. a story that puts us back in the driver’s seat of our own destinies.
i know from experience that in the pit of a depressive episode, any story that says “i have the power to end this” feels worse than impossible — it feels delusional. it feels like a fairy tale, like we’re lying to ourselves. believing in something with no evidence we can see makes you a crazy person.
but i would rather be crazy and work to build a better future, than be “sane” and accept things the way they are.
so i’m building a new story of the future, in hopes that it can be a guide for the crazy. i can’t wait to share it with you.
