Not long after submitting last year's annal I experienced the beginnings of a great shift. In my final month of hospitalisation, through factors still unknown to myself, I began to resist the nihilism and self-loathing that had crippled me for years.
Medication had no role in this transformation; my malaise was rooted in my environment and spirit, not brain chemistry. From the very beginning, I knew this on some subliminal level: my retreat to the island was a somewhat unconscious effort to resolve– or perhaps just escape– my issues. In many ways this move had been far more successful than anything any doctor or psychologist had offered. However as fate would have it, global lockdowns hastily relinquished any normalcy or comfort I could find through human bonds and public spaces.
It felt like there was no escape; only a permanent "exit" could relieve me.
***
Last December, when ECT was done scrambling my mind, I had little to focus on within the ward. Usually in such unstimulating conditions I would bury myself in programming or world-building but that immense urge had been fried from my brain. Instead, I spent my final weeks in deep reflection, my wandering thoughts returning to The Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky time and time again.
I found that there had been a higher form of Love missing from my life, one that I was too cynical and nihilistic to previously acknowledge; a giant, festering cavity in the fabric my soul had gone unnoticed.
I have a hard time detailing the crucial revelations and changes that occurred during this period. For more insight, I would recommend reading Paul Kingsnorth's own epiphany as it is somewhat similar to my own.
Previously, I had been looking for some sanctuary to save me from this world. Now I realise the true path is to become– in body and soul– the sanctuary that I sought out: I myself will become the island that I so desperately tried to flee to. I will look after myself and those that I care about. I will become an oasis in a wasteland.
Everything has been reconfigured from first principles: I have overhauled my diet, exercise and rituals. My approach is holistic: all aspects of living must be understood. Today I am fitter than at any point in my life. Following from this change, my mental wellbeing has steeled. I am stronger in mind, in body, in soul. And I will become even stronger.
After two years of lockdowns, I've finally been able to participate in the community on this island: I have made friends, organised clubs and gone to church. At long last, I have a sense of belonging.
All that's missing is my passion for game-making. ECT stripped me of it, and despite everything, it has not returned. It's like an estranged lover. The amount of "work" I have spent on my game this year is equivalent to what I could do in 3-4 weeks during my prime. Back then I understood the code like the back of my hand; I could see myself in every line. Large swathes I can no longer recognise. The vast stretches of time where I couldn't work on it at all have only exacerbated this feeling. As such, this year's patchwork of labour was spent reacquainting myself with its inner workings: no programming per se, just documentation building. I haven't finished this process just yet but I'm nearly there. When coding resumes I sincerely hope my love of the craft will be rekindled.
When it comes to the arts, I've not been active at all; I've only kept the usual category breakdowns for posterity's sake. My artistic appetite is another casualty of ECT, it seems.
Music
The old hunting grounds are bare; their only worthy offering this year was Duster. Their song, What You're Doing to Me, is fantastic.
Whilst my usual avenues yielded next to nothing, radio of all things picked up the slack.
Every morning at eight I awake to an hour of Classic FM. I lay in bed listening for this whole hour, either half-asleep in some serene dream or trudging through the pits of hell on my laptop. This morning ritual has been a part of my life for many years but this is the first time that I've found truly magical works:
Songs of the Auvergne
The morning I arose to Netania Davrath's Bailero I felt like I had been received by angels. I have never had a more radiant morning before or since, nor do I expect to.
***
Nessun Dorma
To my discredit I had never listened to Pavarotti until I heard this performance. Now a little piece of me is forever miserable knowing I can never witness this grand master live.
***
Pelléas et Mélisande, Dolly Suite
The first orchestral suite that I have enjoyed from beginning to end. There's a whimsical quality to many of the songs that I thoroughly adore. Op. 50 is my favourite by far. Listening to it, I feel like I'm about to embark on some fantastical quest.
***
I have also returned to my long-standing favourites, Kings of Convenience. However my approach this year was very different than previous as I found myself digging through the duo's more obscure solo work:
I was never a big fan of Erlend Øye: his unorthodox and playful attitudes felt awkward and the band's tracks where his influence is pronounced tend to be weaker (especially lyrically). The mixtape above reveals a more nuanced and varied voice than I'm used to. One of his other less-known covers, Bread's Friends and Lovers, was pretty enough for me to learn. It's the first new song that I have learned since university.
***
Growing up, I found myself more drawn to Eirik Bøe. First of all, he was very cool. More importantly, his compositional sensibilities matched my own to such an extreme degree that I almost exclusively taught myself his parts to KoC songs when I first learnt guitar. It took years for me to branch out into other acts and styles. To this day, his influence on my own musical compositions is immediate and uncontestable.
I've been dabbling in piano ever since I discovered Janis Crunch many years ago. Guitar will always be my mainstay but there's a certain allure surrounding piano. Bøe seems to have experienced a similar shift in recent years as he's been recording various work-in-progress piano pieces on his online accounts:
The exact same feelings that draw me to his guitar can be felt here: a melodic melancholy, a sensitivity, a chilling softness. A decade of listening and I am still in awe.
While in Bergen this year, I swear we crossed paths. We made eye contact, but I didn't realise who it was until it was too late:
“He happened to pass him on the pavement by a certain bar...
As he watched him walk on (they had never met), he felt a loneliness he had not known before.”
Literature
I have not read as much as I had intended; some of the heavier volumes I read totally erased my momentum, turning the process into an exercise instead of a joy.
Anna Karenina was terrific. While it didn't quite reach the same heights as Brothers Karamazov it left me with much to ponder. I did not care particularly for Anna; Levin and Kitty's relationship was far more compelling and produced many of the greater chapters: the ice rink; Levin's confession; Kitty's labour. Only Vronsky's attempted suicide reached the same height.
Without the constant philosophising of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy's novel by comparison felt needlessly long. Many, many chapters left me with little to consider. Without keen knowledge of 19th-century Russian society I'm sure the intention and humour of scenes was frequently lost on me. I was incessantly flicking back-and-forth between the prose and chapter notes but it never felt sufficient. At 700-pages, this book turned into a chore, taking over all of my winter and spring reading time. I do not regret reading it; its highs are some of the best highs that I have ever experienced. That said, I do not think I will ever read any more Tolstoy for many, many years.
***
Rarely do I pick up a book by chance. Call it snobbish, but I feel like there's little worth experiencing in all of post-war literature, let alone the 21st-century. Finding jewels amongst the mid-wit pulp in a high street bookshop is a fool's errand. Thankfully one such foolish occassion lead me to Dominic Frisby's non-fiction work, Daylight Robbery.
It is no exaggeration to say that it has completely upended my conception of world history.
Its premise is simple: taxation has a far greater impact on the course of human civilisation than anyone is willing to admit and its consequences have changed the course of empires. It does not matter if we are talking about Babylon, Black Death Britain or Bethlehem, the cause or effects of every world event can be traced to tax. The prose is by no means beautiful but that did not stop me from devouring it within a fortnight. It set my brain alight.
There are a couple of scribbles concerning taxation and governance that I hope to write. With a bit of luck, you'll find them here sometime this coming year.
***
Vargamäe was the second piece of fiction I read this year. It was rather pleasant. I believe the author's intention was to paint a picture of peasant life in an authentic and unidealised way. However, I couldn't help but find the result strangely romantic. Andres, our main character is a farmer on his own plot of land. He has total control over everything that happens on this land: not enough rooms? Build an extension. Land too marshy? Build a drainage system. Want more wood? Chop down some trees. He is king of his plot. There is no oversight. Outside of taxation and lawsuits there is no sign of governance. Yes, life is hard. Yes, life is risky. Yes, life is dominated by men. But there is something so crucial to living that is captured in this book that is sorely missing from contemporary life.
***
I felt the same way about my third and final book, Two Students at St. Andrews. The book is a compilation of archived letters sent by three brothers and their tutor to their father during their four years of study at the University of St Andrews in the early 18th-century.
I have little to say about the book other than the fact that it outs modern mankind as utter imbeciles. These three brothers, barely into their teens during their first year, come to learn ancient Greek, Latin, philosophy and mathematics, all while suffering from chilblains and other ailments in their cold and cramped living quarters. These students were not exceptional: while their tutor does mention that they were top of their class, they still refused to do homework and wasted hours upon hours on the “diversion of golfe”.
Having read their accounts, it is of no surprise that the Scots were on the cusp of a golden age with the level of perseverance, motivation and intellect they display. It is also of no surprise that us modern Scots, mere trolls in the shadows of our ancestry, suffer through an endless state of humiliation and exhaustion.
Manga
I dropped everything this year. I'm not really sure why.
As much as I loved Funeral for Frieren and Chi no Wadachi, ECT removed any sense of continuity when I attempted to read their latest chapters. I will need to start again from the beginning to understand what I have forgotten. I'm sure many fans would consider such an opportunity a blessing. I honestly do not know what is wrong with me: when I open the first page, my eyes just glaze over. It baffles me: reading manga clung me to normalcy and routine last year. This year I seemed to have left it by the wayside without much protest.
There is one exception: Hunter x Hunter.
It has returned! We are blessed. My god, how did I live without this? I strongly believe that the Chimera Ant arc is the apex of Shonen as a genre. And yet, whatever is happening right now is shaping up to be something that will transcend it. It has outgrown the Shonen label and effectively become a genre in-and-of itself.
Games
I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time in my life.
Oh, how I wish I had started earlier! It has revealed to me an entirely novel form of game design. I wish I could discuss at length the simple wonders of DnD but I simply cannot help but relate it to contemporary videogames and their development. At this stage, no videogame should rightfully call themselves an RPG: every single one has failed to capture the core essence of tabletop RPGs. Worse still, they are veering further and further from this original goal. Instead, they incessantly obsess over "refining" and "streamlining" the industry-wide model of "RPG" which has shown itself to be dull, restrictive and unambitious.
We're at the stage where the very best videogame RPGs can only compare to the very worst of tabletop campaigns. Put simply, videogames do very little to reinforce or dissuade certain behaviours that exist outside of the core gameplay loop. This loop has largely been reduced to killing and looting; anything outside of this narrow band is considered superfluous and is treated like garnish by developers.
Now of course, a Dungeon Master is infinitely more capable than static code. However, the quality of their programmed counterparts has only gotten weaker over time: not only have the number of mechanics decreased, they have also become less expressive (typically under the guise of "polish" or "balance"). If you transplant player behaviour from a typical videogame RPG into a DnD campaign it would create the most rote, uninspiring, tactless display possible: characters optimised to beat the game, not to experience it.
The "RPG" label, as it is understood by modern gamers, simply means weapon and character customisation, nothing more. You do not live as your character, you only appear as them. This is why the desire to actually "roleplay" feels so shallow and restrictive. This is why I've never enjoyed playing a role that does not match my own sensibilities; the need to force myself into styles of play that are sub-optimal or to act in ways that are not considered “good” felt painful and pointless as these behaviours are never examined or commented on, despite them being the most interesting.
For the reasons above, I was very skeptical of assuming a role other than myself– one that I wouldn't instinctually feel comfortable with– when starting our DnD campaign. Without fully realising, I quickly found myself assuming my new identity unconditionally like some demented method actor. It was enjoyable to be someone else, not just an idealised version of myself. Playing a flawed character was sincerely rewarding: my flawed motivations and goals fed into the overarching narrative experience. DnD is dynamic enough to allow for this; I believe videogames have the same potential. The problem today is that developers mistake sandboxes for dynamism.
Yes, games are still far from achieving the same open-ended fluidity as an excellent Dungeon Master (we will have to wait for a few developments in AI) but that does not excuse the sorry state we find ourselves in where we must sacrifice roleplaying, either to hyper-linear stories with no freedom or to narrative wastelands where we have unlimited and meaningless freedom.
While campaigning, I had to shake myself out of the gamer's method of approaching problems (hereby titled "gamer-mind") as it has proven itself to be totally unfit for tabletop. For example, in one session I found myself walking down a street in a busy market town when I spotted a fancy item stuck under a drainage grate. First, I tried to remove the grate. No luck– I'm playing a pampered pretty boy so of course not. So what should I try next? Gamer-mind tells you to smash it or blow it up if you can't interact with it normally. In a videogame there would be little consequence to unleashing explosion magic on a busy street: if it works, you are rewarded with an item; if not, there is no permanent consequence. Nearby peasants might gasp, a few might die, but they will forget all about it once they are out of render distance. Ultimately, there is no harm in trying something completely bizarre, destructive and unordinary.
In DnD, things are different. Sure, an explosion will rip open the drain. But it will also create mass disorder, open hostility and potentially the destruction of the item itself. Here, not thinking like an actual human being will cause you a litany of problems.
My gamer-mind was stumped: I couldn't move towards the item because of an obstacle; I could not destroy the obstacle because of consequences; there was no hidden alternate path to reach it. How on earth could I retrieve it? Surely it's impossible! My companion, a veteran of DnD, had been waiting for me to give what should have been a straightforward, almost instinctual answer: use mage hand. Being a bard, I had a few utility spells at my disposal including this one. At first, its effect seems niche to the point of uselessness. But that is gamer-mind talking. Search online and you will find an immense amount of sophisticated strategies underpinned by what seems like an innocuous hand-me-out.
Coding such a spell would be terribly finnicky. So finnicky that I don't believe we have ever seen it in a videogame, at least not in the past twenty years (unless you consider the player's cursor to be mage hand by default). So finnicky, that if a videogame was ever made with it, the entire game would have to be tailored to it (really obvious mage hand puzzles everywhere) to justify its expense.
Yet here in my campaign, after this single use it collected dust on my character sheet except for one other occasion (I'm sure there were others where I overlooked its utility yet again). It never had the chance to feel like a gimmick.
I have been enlightened. There is still so much to evangelise about; perhaps I will write some more in a separate entry. Regardless, my perspective on game design has evolved. So many of my esoteric criticisms regarding videogames are easy to communicate when using tabletop-RPGs as a frame of reference.
While it's too late to incorporate many of these changes into The Valentine Watch, I know precisely how these newfound insights can impact the games that come thereafter.
Art
I have next to nothing to say about art; no artist has truly captivated me since Curran. Browsing art books on Japanese amazon shows some promise, thought not quite enough to warrant a longer comment (yet).
While I've been struggling to consume art, I have managed to produce some myself. This summer I formed my own life drawing group on the island. I find it terribly hard to motivate myself to sketch when I don't have a subject. As such, I founded this club almost as a pretense to get me drawing again (soliciting nude models for 1-on-1 sessions at home didn't seem as appropriate). The class has been a relative success. Unfortunately, being an organiser means I can never lose myself entirely in the poses like I used to but it is still very rewarding. Finding models has been a massive bottleneck so I know these sessions can't last forever. Regardless, I'm glad I tried.
Film
There were two films this year that blew me away: The Elephant Man and Yanagawa.
The Elephant Man is a contender for my favourite film of all time. A very good friend strongly advised me to watch it back in March. Even then I was reluctant as I absolutely despise David Lynch's fever-dream storytelling. Thankfully, The Elephant Man left all that nonsense behind. Having watched it, I can see why some consider him to be among the very best.
My love of the film is almost entirely embodied by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins: their performances here are perhaps the best I've ever seen. The humanity displayed by the two men was beautiful. By revealing their very spirit, I couldn't help but expose my own. Every scene with either of these men inflicted deep wounds upon my heart.
It was a deeply emotional viewing experience; nothing else has come close in years, perhaps not since So Long, My Son. The film left me vulnerable and obsessive: I ended up watching the film two more times that same week as well as reading the memoir that it was based on.
I found there to be a deeply Christian message behind all of the dressing; a very Christian form of Love. It made me want to be good. This final touch elevates the film to the boundaries of perfection.
Of everything listed in this annal, this is the one I would implore you to enjoy.
***
Once again, I made my annual pilgrimage to Edinburgh Film Festival. This year's showings were dismal. Of the five premiers that I attended, only one was worth viewing. Thankfully that single film blew my expectations so far out of the water that it redeemed the entire event. That film was Yanagawa.
It's a story of introspection and reminiscence, of conversations said and unsaid. Three estranged friends ruminate over life while exploring an idyllic Japanese town. The film captures the unique flavours of melancholia and longing so particular to a certain stage of life: the time between quarter- and mid-life crises, where youth is all but over but "aging" is only just beginning.
The main trio perform their roles perfectly. My memories are vague (I have only seen it once) but there were so many moments that captured a magic that I will never forget. The scene where the two friends dance (a complete choreography) late at night by a row of vending machines is forever seared into my mind.
I'm not sure if I would consider it one of my top favourites just yet as I have only seen it once. It is a very obscure film and almost never screened so I have no choice but to wait if I'm ever to see it again. Sadly my first viewing at the premier was spoiled by some Chinese girl who felt it was necessary to check her phone on maximum brightness– illuminating the theatre like a lighthouse– every other scene, including the climax. I thought I was safe from those kinds of people at a film festival, but here we are.
Coda
I'll be honest, this year's entry has been a slog to write. In most years I've looked forward to constructing this post as it felt like a creative reprieve from programming. This time around it has felt like an obstacle preventing me from programming.
Since February I have been working on-and-off (emphasis on 'off') on documentation for TVW's code. It is boring but necessary, given my circumstance. To make matters worse, I stopped coding midway through implementing the largest, most intricate overhaul I have ever attempted: transforming the world from atomic, individual maps into a single, unified, open-world design. This change affected every corner of the code but I never got around to finalising any of the changes: everything is in a half-baked state. So unless I know everything about the system I am doomed to overlook some critical component that could cause mayhem further down the line.
I must finish the documentation. But I really, really cannot be bothered. I want to code! At first, documentation writing was a great way of dipping my toe back into game development. Now it has overstayed its welcome. One of the reasons I believe I feel so uncreative is because I'm not building anything. Surely if I starting making, I'll start thinking and designing. Creativity would surely follow.
Thankfully the documentation is almost complete, perhaps as much as 90%. Unfortunately, the final 10% is composed of the most system-critical packages that I absolutely cannot cut corners on. If I was still in my prime, I could do it in a week of non-stop hard work. In my current situation, I might just be able to finish it before the new year. That would lead to quite an exciting prospect: writing new lines of code in my beloved project in January, almost eighteen months after the last line was added. That is my current goal. I must make it happen.
Aside from pottering around with documentation, I've spent most of my time philosophising and remaining active. I feel refined. My understanding of the world feels more complete than at any time in my past. I've written a few somewhat-unhinged scribbles this past year outlining these thoughts. Expect more next year. Physically, I feel more capable than ever before. I feel limber in a way that I haven't in decades.
Paranoia is ever-present but it no longer conquers me. In all honesty, I believe its a very natural reaction to modern governance and state-sponsored trauma.
My twenty-seventh year will be spent back on the treadmill, figuratively and literally. Let us see where it takes me.
Postscript
I wrote some poetry this year for the first time in my life. This is my best work so far:
