Rude awakening

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

This was a week of rude awakening. Literally: I fell asleep on Tuesday confident that Hillary Clinton would be elected, not giving it a second thought. Wednesday’s first peek at the smartphone screen was a punch in the face and the start of a gloomy feeling that would stay with me all week.

Figuratively, too: the sense of waking up to a world drifting away from the simple and obvious humanist ideals that I grew up with: cooperation, empathy, nuance, intellect. Do we really need world wars for a few decades of consensus about these things, before entropy kicks in?

It’s tempting to seek comfort in the idea that the USA is far away, and that we’ll never find ourselves in this situation without that terrible two-party system (or, similarly, referenda with two extreme options and irresponsibly large consequences like ‘Brexit’). The Dutch diffuse party system institutionalizes cooperation, right? I’m starting to wonder whether that’s too easy, though, and what I can and should do, as an artist and otherwise. Which I suppose is a healthy thing to think about.

So yeah, life and work continued, but with a heavier heart. I kicked off the last round of designs for Geometry Girl, handing them over to Saskia, and I got acquainted with Mick Niepoth, talking about possibly helping out with the reading app business idea. I gave a guest lecture to third-year ArtEZ creative writing students, looking for a possible intern, and attended a very interesting workshop at the Dutch Foundation of Literature about the ‘biography of the future’ by Liesbeth Dolk, with Lidewijde Paris, Jan Paul Grollé, Lydia Rood, Richard Osinga and Miriam Rasch, among others.

What else? I…

• Received Robin Keijzer’s cover for the Antegods comic, which rounds off the project for now. (The first episode anyway; we’re still deciding on a publishing strategy. Hope to be able to share something soon!)

• Spent a day at Two Tribes, working on the next RIVE update and marketing stuff. We launched new Steam bundles, among other things.

• #hobbydevved with Hessel, finally booting up Unity again, cleaning up my roguelike pathfinding code for a new game idea featuring an astronaut jumping through black holes. Running from alien blobs and space junk, of course.

• Had lunch with Tim.

• Had funky beers with Kars, Simon, Hessel (again) and Tim (again).

• Played Kentucky Route Zero episode 4 with Geert, although we didn’t make it to the end. (This one seemed slower and more wordy than earlier episodes… or maybe we were just tired. It was still super-pretty, like in the above screenshot.)

Average step count per day: 7.870
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 6:41
Average weight: 88,5