<![CDATA[ monochromatic ]]> https://mnchrm.co https://mnchrm.co/favicon.png monochromatic https://mnchrm.co Tue, 19 Mar 2024 01:27:19 -0500 60 <![CDATA[ Alien Intelligences ]]> https://mnchrm.co/alien-intelligences/ 654acc6e48ff8423b6beea3a Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:23:00 -0600 I recently started watching the HBO show Scavengers Reign, & was immediately transfixed. It turns out, some things are as good as twitter tells me they are. The show follows some of the surviving crew members of the spaceship Demeter, after they’ve crash-landed on the planet Vesta Minor: an alien world, & oh so far from home.

In the opening minutes, some official from the fleet of space freighters is informed of the Demeter’s disappearance. “For their sake,” he gloomily notes, “let’s hope their are no survivors.” Vesta is nothing like Earth, & not even anything like Pandora from the Avatar series, or very many of the “alien” worlds in most sci-fi tales. It is a harsh, foreboding climate, filled to the gills with strange fauna & flora, each of which seemingly aiming to kill the castaways in new & terrifying ways. In it’s own way, Scavengers Reign manages to pack each 23 minute episode with all the tension & horror of Alien. Vesta is a hostile place, more or less unknowable to us, & of course, also to the people with the misfortune of finding themselves marooned there.

Beyond the mysterious & dark world, I was also captivated by the crew themselves. I’m particularly fond of the dynamic between Azi, one of the former crew members, & Levi, the robot accompanying her. Levi reminds me a bit of Interstellar's TARS, if TARS were interesting. Levi responds to Azi’s orders, & also provides advice or suggestions when prompted. But same as with all the other former crew members, Vesta begins to infect Levi, changing them in strange & new ways. In one episode, Levi shows Azi a sort of cairn sculpture they built in a hideaway. When Azi asks Levi why they did it, they respond: “I don’t know. I just thought it looked nice.” Levi begins to communicate somewhat with some of the fauna; they even start to whistle. At first, this troubles Azi: after all, these are nonessential functions, & survival is at stake. But she soon learns to accept, & even love, these new emergent parts of Levi.

I binged the series to get caught up last week while sick (they’re releasing three, 23 minute-long episodes each Thursday), & did so with my dog asleep on my chest. She’d been sitting next to me, but at one point, sat up, gently pawed at me as if to ask permission, & then relocated once I’d granted it. In the show, Levi speaks; but part of the revelation they find is the realization there’s something beyond just words. What’s communicated by a herd of fleeing creatures? Levi is not the only character in the show to figure this out, but to that point in the series (episode 6), practically the only character to have something besides a negative experience in doing so.

I had a gym buddy once talk to me about the surprising intelligence dogs have. He felt certain that his dog, if not given enough attention relative to other members of the household, would become envious. “Envy is a complex emotion,” he liked to say. He was right, I think. It’s easy to understand what my dog is requesting from me when she goes to stand facing the door to the back porch, or rolls onto her back while I’m petting her. One time, we took her to a farmer’s market, & my girlfriend & I watched her sniff the air before subtly drifting toward the cheese tent like a cartoon character might float towards a fresh pie on a kitchen windowsill. But it’s a bit more nuanced when she puts her head on my lap to ask if she can be held.

There’s another scene in the show where Levi becomes interested in a trail of (what seem like) insects. Through flashing lights, Levi’s able to convey something of a message to it, something beyond the perception or understanding of Azi. Light ripples throughout the swarm. I think of all the smells my dog is able to distinguish on a walk. It’s not as if I can’t smell, same as Azi is technically able to see (& with the right set of tools) produce light; but these signals don’t carry as much meaning for us. I’ve seen my dog smell something on the ground & wag her tail, or conversely have the hair on her back stand up or growl. I guess it’s possible for me to image a smell that might excite me (like freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies), but I have a hard time trying to think of a smell that might make me angry.

In a recent Japanese lesson, one of my teachers told an anecdote about an interaction between a woman who only spoke Japanese & a woman who only spoke German. Despite nearly zero common vocabulary, (rudimentary) communication was possible. I don’t think this is too hard to believe; probably anyone who’s done any sort of language study has experienced some interaction that made them proud, even if they were only able to communicate at the level of a child. But it’s kind of miraculous to me we can have any effective communication between species (of course, not just limited to dogs). Among that, “give me food” is one thing, but “rub my tummy,” “let me sit on your lap,” or “play a game with me” seem like something else entirely. (Isn’t it kind of wild that dogs & a number of animals even have the concept of play?)

Scavengers Reign is great for a lot of reasons, & its truly punishing, nearly unfathomable world is a huge part of the appeal. But like many great sci-fi stories, what it makes me think about is not only the fantastical setting but the deep, & deeply human questions it asks; it makes me think of events & characters not hundreds of light years away, but curled up next to me on the couch.

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<![CDATA[ Is Street Photography Legal In the United States? ]]> https://mnchrm.co/featured/is-street-photography-legal/ 653831fd17075602ec685546 Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:22:11 -0500 Street photography is one of, if not the oldest genres of photography. For over a hundred years, photographers have roamed city streets, looking for authentic moments to capture and share, highlighting something often less distorted than traditionally constructed scenes. Somehow street photography returned to the limelight in the wake of Instagram and YouTube photography communities, and this is probably where I first became acquainted with it. Yet for a practice that’s over a hundred years old, people still bristle at times about the prospect of yes, taking photos of people without their express permission. (I wrote an article about the backlash Tatsuo Suzuki, a Japanese street photographer, faced after appearing in a promotional video for a Fujifilm camera.) After describing the kinds of photos I make, I still have people ask me, “But do you ask people’s permission to take their photo? Is that legal?”

I wanted to write a bit about the practice, what the legality is, and why whether it’s legal or not is perhaps the wrong way to think about it.

Yes, street photography is legal in the United States. If you’re in Chicago (like me!), New York, LA, or anywhere in between, there’s no laws preventing you from grabbing your camera and going out to make some photographs.

The term I’ve often heard is “reasonable expectation of privacy.” That is to say, if you’re in a public space in the US (such as a city street, a park, or sitting outside of a café, as a few examples) these are all spaces you wouldn’t reasonably expect to be private. As such, any time you’re in such an area, you’re able to be photographed without violating any part of the law. And guess what? You probably are! From the security cameras on the sides of buildings or in lobbies, to the video calls and photos of passerby, and the cameras everyone seems to affix to their front door now, it’s becoming more and more likely that when you’re outside, you’re being filmed somewhere. Even so, I’ve never seen someone yell at a Ring camera or someone taking a Facetime call on a park bench, but I have been yelled at by strangers while out making photographs (sometimes by people I didn’t even photograph!)

The simple reality is that a lot of the other means I’ve mentioned are seen as less conspicuous than someone with even a mirrorless camera taking photographs, so you’re going to stand out more. While the negative interactions I’ve had are few and far between, and far outnumbered by the positive interactions, for anyone who’s tried street photography, you’re probably going to draw someone’s ire.

Beyond all that, there are a number of considerations I think are not only pertinent to street photography, but essential to consider for anyone thinking about taking up the practice. Namely, the ethics of photography, and street photography at large.

The Ethics of Street Photography

Something foundational to my own understanding of photography in general, not just street photography, is the idea that all photography is exploitative. This may seem harsh, or untrue. You may wonder how someone could “exploit” a mountain in a landscape photo. But I think of “exploiting” here in the least loaded sense: trying to best utilize or leverage the scene and tools and light and everything that goes into making a photograph into making the best photograph possible. Maybe you’re waiting for the light from daybreak to hit the top of the mountain peak, and using a long lens to isolate the mountain from its surroundings.

Of course, this becomes more complicated (and more loaded, tbh) when talking about photographing people. At the end of the day, as a street photographer, you’re mostly trying to leverage other people as subjects in the process of making art. As such, I think you have at bare minimum a responsibility to treat those around you (and especially the people you’re photographing) with respect, humility, and empathy.

For me, when I started doing this work a bit more seriously, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own personal ethics and intent with my work. What was it I was trying to accomplish? What did I want to capture, and what did I not want to capture? This has evolved over time, of course, and exists more as a series of personal guidelines, rather than hard-and-fast rules. I almost never photograph a child in a way in which they’re recognizable. I don’t photograph unhoused people, or anyone with the intent to other them.

I think that’s really the key point. I want to connect people. I want people to see my photographs, and be able to better see an insightful or funny moment that might’ve gone unnoticed. (My girlfriend often asks me what I’m chuckling at when we’re out, but to me, daily life is filled with coincidental and humorous moments.) I want people to see my subjects, and try and think about what that person might be thinking, seeing, feeling. I want people to see my photographs and simply gain a better recognition and appreciation for beautiful light around us.

This is something I’d recommend doing before you take any photos, and also during. I’m not talking about going crazy about limiting yourself, but every once and a while when I’m out making photos, I like to think to myself, what am I trying to say with this photograph? What do you want to capture? Is there anything you don’t want to capture?

Getting Yelled At

That said, if you’re making street photos for any serious length of time, you’re probably going to encounter someone who’s less than pleased. Even so, this is not something I would obsess over. Despite the ever-presence of image capture, despite the legality, there are people who don’t want to be photographed. There are going to be people who don’t even want to see you taking photographs, even if it’s not of them. There is some level of confidence required in this genre. (If you'd like to start, but the idea of moving quickly around a city makes you nervous, consider trying to "work a scene"; I wrote a guide on the method here!)

Yet what I bristle at are newer photographers asking what the laws are, how to interact with police, or how to take photos in an undetected way. The excellent Street Photographer’s Manual by David Gibson says, “If you get stopped taking photographs, you’re doing something wrong.” (That is a bit too extreme, but you get the point.)

Sure enough, I probably wouldn’t recommend bringing your Canon 1DX and 500mm lens out downtown (...though that’d probably make some unique photographs!) But I think there’s sort of a mirror principle at work. The more you try and hide yourself, the shadier you appear… the shadier people will think you are. Just raise the camera to your eye; as long as you’re working with a good intent, and trying to treat those around you with empathy and respect, you’re not doing anything wrong.

Here’s a photograph I took a couple of years ago.

A man in a suit walks towards camera while he's talking on the phone.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 18mm f/1.4

When I saw this man, he was half-obscured by the repeating columns in a way I thought was interesting. Unfortunately, he broke the illusion, as he stepped out to yell at me once he saw me start to make this image. (This was several years ago, and I haven’t had a negative interaction since.) He was unhappy, and I couldn’t even really figure out why. I simply kept walking, stayed calm, spoke earnestly, and in spite of him following me for several blocks, it never escalated beyond that.

It was unfortunate he felt so aggrieved by what I’d done. But I was simply trying to take a photo. I wasn’t trying to hurt his feelings, or make him feel flustered. I never want to photograph someone having a terrible day, really. I don’t know what his deal was, but simply trying to de-escalate, continuing to move away, and not panicking or becoming aggressive in return has always served me best.

Why Not Just Ask Someone if You Can Take Their Photo?

If the issue often lies in whether or not people are okay with being photographed while they’re in public, why not simply ask if you can take someone’s picture? You can; it’s just when you do, it becomes street portraiture. Whatever expression or candid moment they were a part of is instantly shattered, instead becoming something performed. There’s nothing wrong with these photos, or even in interacting with a subject, like Werner Herzog or Bruce Gilden does. It just becomes something different from what I’m personally trying to capture.

For me, the photos I’m proud of were worth the small risk that someone would become upset.

Street Photography As A Connecting Thread

Finally, I’d like to talk more about my view of street or candid photography, as a way to connect people. I mentioned above that I’d like my street photography to make people more aware of the people, moments, and light around them. But it goes even further than this. I think the photos themselves can connect people, both viewer and subject, and subject and photographer.

While I try not to disturb a scene before I capture it, I’ve had tons of really pleasant interactions with a subject after I make a photo. I think lowering the camera and smiling at someone goes a long way towards making them feel comfortable, and conveying your intent. Here’s an older photograph of mine that I still love:

Woman standing near a cardboard box with some balloons on a city street.
Fujifilm X-H1, 35mm f/1.4

The woman rests her hands on a cardboard box she’s put on top of a stone barricade. The box implies an ending, to me. But the silly, almost childish balloons behind her give a cheerier impression. After I took this photo, I chatted with her a bit, and learned it was her last day at her job; certainly a bittersweet sort of moment.

Are these sorts of interactions impossible without a camera? No, but they’re aided by one. And more so, they allow me to share these moments with others, maybe making even a non-photographer more likely to notice the beautiful moments happening around us all the time. But before you can capture them, you’ve got to be able to notice them yourself.

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<![CDATA[ On Diligence ]]> https://mnchrm.co/newsletters/on-diligence/ 64bae850776aa0469753fa53 Sun, 23 Jul 2023 11:00:20 -0500 INCOMING TRANSMISSION —

This is Monochromatic Aberration, the newsletter of Ian J. Battaglia, a writer and photographer based out of Chicago. Click through to view this post on the blog mnchrm.co, and if you no longer want to receive these emails, feel free to click to unsubscribe link at the bottom.


I used to think of myself as someone who lacked diligence. As I made my way into adult life, I struggled to sustain habits. Many were things I really wanted to do, but for some reason or another, at some point they fizzled out. Not to say I gave up on things forever, I just had a tough time being consistent.

I’d always been a procrastinator as a kid, and it’s something I struggle with even now. I’ve gotten better at it, for sure, but I still find it’s far too easy for me to tell myself that I’ll just get to something later, or to start and get distracted and move to something else, etc., etc. Maybe this is productivity brain at work, but I always wanted to have some sort of clear routine, working towards my goals or doing my hobbies day in and day out; I just struggled to get there.

I mentioned this offhand to one of my Japanese teachers once, and she seemed surprised. “You’ve studied Japanese every day for years now. We’ve had classes together every week for over a year—you even do your homework.” Hearing this was sort of a revelation for me. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me alone, but sometimes you can build up a perception of yourself that only others can change. I suddenly noticed that I had become diligent without even knowing it. I’ve been writing, running, meditating, etc. for years. Maybe not every day, but there was nothing stopping me from doing so. All I had to do was decide to change it.

That’s exactly what I did last year with journaling. I’ve been an off-and-on journaler for years, but for some reason or another I hadn’t managed to be consistent with it. Sometimes I’d step away for a day or two, and sometimes I’d go months without journaling at all. For a while, I thought that was fine too. The creator of the journal I use (Hobonichi Techo), Shigesato Itoi even has a quote about it, noting that the blank pages are part of the story you’re writing, too. Of course, I still think that’s fine, but last August, I decided I wanted to journal every day.

At first, it was hard; so many days I thought for a brief moment I’d skip it, or just get to it tomorrow, before forcing myself to go and do it. I’d think, “Do I really want to end my streak already?” I did not want to. As of today, I’m up to 340 consecutive days of daily journaling. I’m excited to reach one year, and then to finish filling in this whole book after that.

This is a simple example, but I think the point is broadly applicable. My ability to journal didn’t change, only my willpower. I heard something recently, that a habit is not like a chore on the way towards who you want to be, it’s you as that new version of yourself. I often used to think to myself that I’d like to do something for an hour a day, but for me just getting started is the hard / important part. I just need to decide to sit down and write, to go out for a run, to practice something a bit; the rest comes easy.

Of course, this is only the start of a journey, but deciding to do something and sticking with it goes a long way. I saw this tweet last night:

For the unaware, “Bocchi the Rock!” is a currently running manga series that was recently adapted into an anime. In it, a girl named Hitori with social anxiety gets really good at guitar in hopes of joining band.

Hitori with her guitar.

Of course, the series' popularity inspired many to pick up guitar; myself included! So seeing the above tweet made me kind of sad. Of course, that’s the way things go. Most people aren’t gonna stick with a hobby for one reason or another, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with moving on from something that doesn’t suit you. But the top reply to this tweet notes that in the series, Hitori was practicing six hours a day for years (due to her lack of friends). That’s certainly extreme, but you’d be surprised how well you could do with just 20 minutes a day a few times a week.

I slowed down on guitar while I focused on the gym, but I’ve gotten back into it. I guarantee some of the people who returned or resold their guitars were better than me, or had practiced for longer. But I’m still out here, practicing, and getting better. What are you working on?


That's all for me this time. Thanks for reading this far. If you really liked this, I’d appreciate it if you told a friend or shared it with someone! Our member count on the site is slowly climbing, and it’s really been heartening to hear everyone’s nice comments and see the community continue to grow.

Stay Strong,

From Chicago with love,

— I

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<![CDATA[ Embracing Discomfort ]]> https://mnchrm.co/newsletters/embracing-discomfort/ 64aebdd2776aa0469753f92b Wed, 12 Jul 2023 09:51:33 -0500 INCOMING TRANSMISSION —

This is Monochromatic Aberration, the newsletter of Ian J. Battaglia, a writer and photographer based out of Chicago. Click through to view this post on the blog mnchrm.co, and if you no longer want to receive these emails, feel free to click to unsubscribe link at the bottom. You can reply to this via the comment button, or by simply replying to this email.


I recently completed what I thought of as a sort of “intensive training program.” I’ve been thinking more and more about where I’m going as a person, what I want to accomplish, who I want to become, and the steps I need to take to get there. I guess I’ve always been thinking about this, but it feels ever more important. Last year, I tweeted out that I wanted to “hone my body, mind, and spirit;” (among a few other goals). To those ends, I started tracking everything I ate, and started working out in earnest.

I had become a runner in college. I think more than anything, I just wanted to be fit in some way, and felt if it was good enough for Murakami, it was good enough for me. I still haven’t run in any events (but hope to!), but I’ve kept up running over the years. I’ve seen my fitness and endurance improve and wane in different periods, and made conscious efforts to improve my form and ability beyond simply running (there was something almost Zen-like about how I started; I didn’t even have running shoes back then.)

But it wasn’t until last Summer that I did any weight training. It was mostly what I could do at home, with kettlebells and calisthenics, and an occasional session at a gym with a coach. But I decided I wanted to bulk up a bit, so in January this year, I took it even further and began powerlifting at a coached gym: three days a week, every week for months. I started eating a lot more (it's wild how much you have to eat to gain muscle mass), and watched my lifts slowly double, then pass my body weight, and continue to climb. This kept up for about half the year, only ending recently as it no longer fit my budget. I started a contract job at the same time, which coincidentally, is also ending. New endings, new beginnings.

It was a lot of fun, actually. But of course, not always. It was simple, but it was hard. Each session the weight went up. I wanted to train, I wanted to get stronger, and I did. But even for things you want to do, you don’t always want to do them. Of course writing is a perfect example, but there are weeks I don’t want to take a single photograph. I treated it like an ascetic practice. I was doing this job I didn’t especially want to do, and I went to the gym. That was it. Over the course of a few months, I missed two sessions (I think) due to illness; otherwise, I was there, lifting.

Of course, working and going to the gym voluntarily is hardly punishment, but during this time I was thinking to myself that I’d like to be the kind of person who could do anything for a couple of months. From the beginning, I knew this wouldn’t last forever; I tried to savor it while I could. For me, it started to become important to go especially on the days I didn’t want to. I wanted to lean in and embrace the discomfort. In baseball, they say if you want to be a starting pitcher, you might not always have your best stuff every day, but the good ones can go out there and get outs for their team anyways. I wanted to be like that. I set a timer between lifts. Once I went off, I grabbed the bar (and especially as my squat got heavier and heavier, my mental resistance went up!)

Honestly, I think we (as a people, as a society) have an issue with discomfort. We can’t handle it. We look at our phones while we wait at the coffee shop rather than sit and look out the window and think. I read a book recently where the character talks about how no matter what, after 23 seconds of silence between two people, someone will say something to fill the air. And not to go trad on you, but I do think this sort of thing in general is a problem. I think about Zen monks, who depending on the group might give a novice struggling with the meditation posture the advice to be uncomfortable. To sit with it.

I wrote about this a bit in the last newsletter, but I think the reality is that most things worth achieving require some level of effort, and yes, some discomfort. I think the ability to sit with something, push through when you don’t want to, and be diligent is a huge advantage. And it’s something I’m working on all the time. I’m not where I want to be, yet, but I’m hoping to get there.

I've always loved those scenes in shounen anime, where the hero character is at their limit and somehow finds another gear to push themselves into. The secret is, you too can experience this, basically every day. Go for a run, (slow is fine; actually better!) and when you think you can't go any farther, pick a spot a little ways up to run until. Then pick another spot a little farther, and so on. You're capable of so much more than you think, and willpower and mindset account for a huge amount of your abilities.

For now, I'm back to running, back to training on my own. I hope my weightlifting journey isn't at an end, but for now I'm back in another transition stage in my life. But I'm trying to keep what I learned about myself close.


The column I started writing at the Chicago Review of Books has kept up, with the second edition out late last month, and the third on the way shortly. It’s been super fun to talk to these translators, hear about their processes, and just explore the world of literature. Each has offered unique perspectives, and have had surprisingly different things to say!

I’m editing the third piece for the column right now, and it’s very funny, and very insightful. And no spoilers, but the column for August is going to be a banger, I think. Keep your eyes peeled for it! (I’ll share links here, too!)


That’s it for this time. Thanks for reading this far. If you really liked this, I’d appreciate it if you told a friend or shared it with someone! Our member count on the site is slowly climbing, and it’s really been heartening to hear everyone’s nice comments and see the community continue to grow.

Stay Strong,

From Chicago with love,

— I

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<![CDATA[ After a Morning Rain ]]> https://mnchrm.co/newsletters/after-a-morning-rain/ 646a61b3b88ff571f1bcdda6 Sun, 21 May 2023 13:39:31 -0500 INCOMING TRANSMISSION —

This is Monochromatic Aberration, the newsletter of Ian J. Battaglia, a writer and photographer based out of Chicago. Click through to view this post on the blog mnchrm.co, and if you no longer want to receive these emails, feel free to click to unsubscribe link at the bottom.


As I mentioned in my last post, I still feel like I’m not really in a groove, creatively. The desire is there, but these past few weeks have been a bit hectic for me, and I just flat out haven’t really carved out the time to write. My photographic struggles are a bit more existential. I want to elevate my craft, but I’m still working out how exactly to do that, what it’ll look like for me. But I think these sorts of difficult times are probably exactly the times it’s best to keep going. Even if I’m not in love with the photos I’m making, or being productive with any writing, I still want to show up and struggle.

I saw a tweet to this effect recently that’s stuck with me:

It’s a hard line to walk; the right kind of struggle, the right kind of stuck. But I’ve definitely felt the opposite, too: where everything seems to come easy, and upon review later, it wasn’t any good. There really is something about that discomfort, about “sitting with it,” that pushes you in the right direction, I feel. Especially so for a medium like writing, where you can sit and stare at a blank page, working while ostensibly “not writing.” The line between “writing” and “not writing” seems to get smaller all the time, to me.

Photography is the same way I think, though the way it manifests is different. While I’m out shooting—especially with street photography but really in any genre—there are times where I feel like I’m in a groove. Like the pictures are coming easy, or that I’ve just taken a shot I’ll be really proud of. They look so good on the little screens. But it’s really when you get home, when you’ve got all the images laid out in front of you that you find out which ones really work. Maybe none!

Of course, this isn’t a new thought. I’ve got this quote from Ann Patchett taped next to my desk:

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment.
Ann Patchett

It’s good to think clearly and deeply about the sort of work you want to do, about the direction you’re headed. But I don’t want to let that get in the way of just showing up.


One of the things I’m doing now is a very conscious search for inspiration, especially in photography. I must admit, I don’t own many photobooks—they’re usually just so expensive—but I’d like to get some more. In the meantime, I’ve been looking through my gigantic “inspo” folder on my computer, as well as seeking out the work of several photographers I admire. I hope to write a post about this process soon.


I started a new column over at The Chicago Review of Books, where I’ve been on the editorial staff for a few years now. It’s called “The Translator’s Voice,” and the goal is to highlight the work of a translator each month through interviews and more.

I’ve been interested in translation for a long time, as I’ve always sort of gravitated towards those books. It was my desire to read Japanese novels that pushed me to study the language, so it was a huge honor to be able to talk to Philip Gabriel, the translator behind many of the books of Haruki Murakami which spurred on that desire in the first place.

A few years ago I interviewed Sam Bett and David Boyd about translating Mieko Kawakami, which was truly both an honor and a pleasure. I had a lot of fun doing that interview, bringing it together, and felt it occupied a relatively unique space in the literary criticism landscape. But it was extremely difficult to find a publication that was interested in running it, pay aside! So it’s great to have a regular home for these pieces at a publication that’s been such a gracious home to me to this point.

As of right now, these pieces will mostly be interviews, but I’d love to try and integrate them with deeper analysis, maybe leaning more towards features than straight interviews.

Read the first edition here.


I finally got to see a film I’ve been dying to watch. Eno Swinnen’s short animation, E6D7. I’m not sure when I became aware of Eno’s work; I’m certain I stumbled across their profile on Twitter at some point, but beyond that the details are murky. Regardless through the teaser they shared, the impeccable art and design, I’ve been hyped for this for a good while now.

I saw the film had hit the festival circuit, and as such finally got a chance to see it for myself.

Boy, it didn’t disappoint. I don’t want to say too much here, but I thought it was extremely beautiful. The story is about a robot, learning both surgery and chess, and improving in both. It’s a simple story at the core, but deeply affecting; two scenes made me cry—not a small feat for a film under 20 minutes.

I watched the screener on my computer, and I only wish I could’ve seen it in a theater. There’s a lot that frustrates me about the modern theater experience, but I think there really is something special about sitting in the dark, and then stepping out into the world again having been changed by the experience.

That’s how E6D7 felt to me; after I watched it, I felt like I needed to go somewhere, like the things it had left me with were too much to hold on my own, sitting in my apartment. I took my dog out. As we walked around the neighborhood, I got the same feeling I do after a nice meditation; everything seems a bit clearer, I feel a bit more tuned-in. I watched a young mother blowing bubbles to her infant daughter as they sat in their front yard. I saw the patterns of the petals from the flowering trees that had collected on the asphalt after the previous-night’s rain. I saw the first new blades of grass pushing up through the dirt. It was like stepping outside after a morning rain. I hope the work I make is able to convey that same feeling to people.

Follow Eno on Twitter to find out when you can see E6D7 for yourself.


Finally, there’s a handful of new changes on the site, all stuff I think probably only I will notice. I added reading times to the metadata of each post. I added a sign-up form directly on the newsletter page, and a link to an unlisted archive of past issues, if you missed one. I also removed Disqus comments in favor of Ghost’s built-in ones—members (all of you!) can leave comments directly on posts now; give it a go!


That’s all for now. As always, thanks for reading, and if you really liked this, feel free to share with a friend. We've currently got 86 members on the site; trying to hit 100 by mid-June. Your support means a lot.

Stay Strong,

From Chicago with love,

— I

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<![CDATA[ Photowalk with Me ]]> https://mnchrm.co/featured/photowalk-with-me/ 645bcb0d06a13df93f8b2962 Wed, 10 May 2023 13:44:21 -0500 I've been scuffling a bit lately. Feel like I'm in somewhat of a rut. I haven't been super happy with my job for... some time now, so I want to lean on my personal, creative work. But that's slowed too. My writing has stalled a bit, and while I was taking a lot of photos about two months ago, I've started to worry I'm stagnating. I want to advance my style, elevate my photos beyond where they are now. I plan on writing more about this in the near future, but for now, suffice to say I'm searching for it.

But if the old baseball adage is anything to go by, you've got to hit your way out of a slump. You can't do it on the bench. With that in mind, I decided to go out for a photowalk this week, in the middle of a decent thunderstorm. I figured umbrellas always look good. Looking back, I think this is not the best strategy, as part of what I feel like I haven't been focusing on enough in my photos is intent, and stillness. I love working frenetically downtown, running around to get whatever shots might arise, but I think I want to try and slow down more too—but in a different way from working a scene.

Anyways, head out I did, and many photos were made. And as of right now, I'm happy with a good number of them. Some of them feel a bit closer to what I'm searching for, even though I'm not really ready to articulate what that is, yet. I thought it might be fun to write about my photowalk as a whole, and share some unedited SOOC JPGs I made while walking, so you can see the sorts of photos I take, and what I look for, while I'm out. I'll also include some of the final edits of the photos I made, so you can see how far (or close) I end up from where I start.

I started West, heading East on Jackson towards downtown. One of my first photos turned out okay, of a woman looking back at me from behind her umbrella. Here's that and my edit of it:

I cropped in to 4x5, an aspect ratio I feel really comfortable with. I'm not quite sure what draws me to this, and I'd like to work on leaving more photos at 2x3 in the future. I've also cropped to 6x7, another aspect ratio I like after shooting a Mamiya RZ67 for a few years. Otherwise my touch was pretty light, slightly warming the image.

I took a few photos of the expressway and the cloud-covered skyline:

These images are all pretty much the same. I was trying to find a good balance between the figure in the bottom left corner, and a passing car. Had I brought a tripod, maybe a long exposure would've been interesting, but it's rarely something I do. In editing, I brought out the clouds a bit more, adjusted the colors, but this isn't something I'm rushing to put on my portfolio:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I took a handful of photos before crossing the expressway myself, of a woman with an umbrella and a man smoking outside a restaurant. I liked the pop of color from the woman's shawl (and layered umbrella?) but was focused more on going downtown than stopping to compose a shot, so these did not turn out nice. I thought there might be something interesting between the sliver of the man smoking, and the looming buildings in the background, but this too did not materialize.

From there, I did not take another photo for 10 minutes. As I got into the city, I turned to follow the river north, up along where the train stations are downtown. It was fairly quiet, as you might expect in the middle of a weekday rainstorm, but I found a man walking with a red and white umbrella, matching a red and white barricade I thought was an interesting juxtaposition:

You can see I swapped my film simulation from the last set of images. This is my classic negative simulation, sort of a more aggressive filmic look with pronounced greens and reds. In the past, on a grey, rainy day like this, I would've immediately switched to black and white, but I've been trying to photograph more color on overcast days. I was trying to get as far over as possible, but the walkway was very narrow. You can see the edited shot here:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

My next images come 13 mintues later, as I've pushed my way into the heart of downtown. More juxtaposition between the wet pavement, the bright crosswalks, and the obscured faces of umbrella-holding people.

I think it's the fourth image here that's the best, but nothing terribly exciting.

But by then I was into it. I made photos pretty much continuously from then on. Here's a woman crossing the street with her umbrella held sideways. Is she smiling?

I took my time on these next ones, getting a shot of a construction worker and a man with a unique hat smoking:

I like the way the smoke collects around the hand of the construction worker. Of course, for the second guy, I was waiting for him to look up, though neither the pose nore the composition is very dynamic. Here's my edit of the construction worker, though:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I climbed the exit stairs to the el platform to capture a group crossing the street. I liked the arrangement, as well as the yellow umbrella with the yellow-painted pavement:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I guess same as the rest of these, on a whim I decided to head into Millenium Park. I almost never go, as it's an insane tourist trap, but I'd recently described it to my Japanese teacher, and was once again struck by the absurdity of it all. A giant mirrored bean? I took a self portrait in the dirty warped reflection, and then ducked underneath where all the people had congregated:

Of these, I liked the straight reflections the best. I swapped that one to black and white in the edit, which became the featured image on this post.

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I walked into the park, hoping there would be a nice shot along the walkway, but nothing caught my eye. I tried to exit to the North, finding myself blocked in by more construction. I photographed another woman with an umbrella, and found this flag at half-mast.

I've always been a little fascinated with American flags. We just put them all over the place, which naturally leads to some interesting juxtapositions. I've thought about doing a photo series with them; maybe I should.

This woman seemed a little lost; she kept starting and stopping, checking her phone. I asked her if she needed some directions, but she sort of mumbled no and waved me away; wasn't trying to spook her! I like how the shot turned out, though:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

You can se it's very close to the original, leaning into the blue a bit more.

From there I made my way out of the park, and found myself at the base of a building with large columns. I hung out here for a bit looking for a photo. I swapped to black and white briefly.

I only ended up editing the last one in this sequence, here:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I made my way up to Michigan avenue, and crossed the bridge. I snapped a bunch of photos of pedestrians trying to shield themselves from the rain:

I like that the woman with the cheetah print umbrella becomes more perplexed over time, and how happy the folks without umbrellas seem to be. Here's how I edited those, and another confused bystander further along the bridge:

Right on the other side of the bridge, I saw this man with a hat I thought would make a good subject:

Of course, the winner for me is the one with the full reflection in. I swapped this one to black and white as well:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

Or how about this wistful chocolatier?

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I also captured this businessman, sort of a classic image:

I edited this one black and white as well:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I headed back West a bit, towards Trump Tower, and this parking garage with interesting walls. I wanted to get a shot of someone climbing the stairs, something sort of minimal, so I got underneath the stairs and waited:

I cropped this one in a bit and yes, swapped to black and white (this site isn't called "monochromatic" for nothing!) to play up the minimalism and highlight the lines.

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

Next, I ran half a block to catch up with this woman with a yellow and blue umbrella, just for a pop of color. But in the photo I took with her in it, she didn't end up being the subject:

I really like how this one turned out. There's something a little glowy about the light, from the big sign and moisture in the air, the out of focus woman in the foreground, the look he's giving me. Here's the edit:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

I crossed the bridge back South again, and headed West towards Merchandise Mart. I got one more group of people with umbrellas, another image I'm really happy with, and a younger couple. I missed their moment; just after I photographed them, the guy's umbrella flipped inside-out, which made her laugh. It's so funny as a street photographer, collecting not only the images you do make but the memories of the ones you don't get for whatever reason.

And here's the final shot I edited:

Edited image, Fujifilm X-Pro3 & 23mm f/1.4

All told, I shot 166 images on this trip, just under two hours of walking, and nearly 10 miles covered. I like the warmth, the haziness to some of these photos. It feels filmic to me without being completely over the top, or filled with grain. There's a softness to some of these images that I like.

I'm still trying to find what's next for my work, what it is I'm looking for. But I'm trying to break my own processes in a way. Shoot color when it's cloudy. I'm not sure where my photography is going, exactly, but I'm going to get it there.


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<![CDATA[ Computer Generated Images — On Computational Photography and “AI” Assisted Tools ]]> https://mnchrm.co/computer-generated-images/ 64454a0c83fa1e02ed92717f Sun, 23 Apr 2023 10:42:45 -0500 For a few years now, various technology publications and companies have talked about “computational photography”—that is, the supplementation of traditional image processing for software processing, such as on smartphones—as the next leap in photography at large. I was and remain skeptical. Phones are fine cameras; particularly in normal, daytime photography. But to me, even as someone who wouldn’t really consider myself a “pixel peeper,” iPhone photos in general don’t impress on their technical merits. Under less ideal conditions, or even just higher scrutiny than viewed compressed on the device they were taken with, I feel the images don’t hold up. That’s not to say there’s no use for them—like I said, I think they’re great for most normal situations. Even computational photography has its benefits, such as the generally-good-enough portrait mode that’s now ubiquitous. Just consider me unconvinced.

That’s not to say software doesn’t have it’s place in photography. In fact, software processing already plays a large part in the creation of your final image, whether you’re aware or not. I was an Adobe Lightroom user for years, but found I felt that Capture One offered better results for my Fujifilm files. This is largely due to how the RAW converter; just as a film photo differs depending on what developer and process you used, so too will a digital file differ depending on how the software you’re using interprets the data.

As technology improves, so do our photos. As scanners get better, we’re able to pull more and more detail out of film photos, data that’s been there all along. But I feel we’re starting to see the same for digital, as well. As processing advances, we can go back to old files and pull new data that’s been lying dormant.

It’s rare for me to go back to old files, like it’s rare for me to re-read books. But I have from time to time, especially on images I felt I didn’t quite get the results I’d wanted. Here’s a shot I took back in 2020:

A man stands on the Wabash bridge over the Chicago River, silhouetted by the setting sun.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 16mm f/2.8

Even now, there are times I shoot color where I’m not quite sure what to do with it, or which direction I should push things in. Here, I opted for high-contrast, and warm; both of which I way overdid. But the image is still interesting; this man, standing on the bridge, isolated by the last light of the Sun. During a down period, I went back to this image, near the top of my list of “not-quites,” to have another go at making an image while I wasn’t producing new work. Here’s how that turned out:

A man stands on the Wabash bridge over the Chicago River, silhouetted by the setting sun.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 16mm f/2.8, re-edit

Much more natural colors, a softer hand overall. It’s still dark, still silhouetted, but you get the outline of people on the riverwalk, the freshly struck streetlamps. It feels a lot better to me. This wasn’t even really a case of improved processing, though it did benefit a bit from that in the softer highlights. Mostly though, it was just fresh eyes.

Make no mistake though: the processing has certainly improved. I like to espouse what I call “no fear photography”: that is, not worrying about the imperfections or flaws and focusing on the image and the emotion it conveys. At points in my photographic journey, I’ve even leaned into blurriness, certainly into grain and grit. There are always limitations, baked into your processes, your gear, or any part of the imaging chain. For example, as a Fujifilm shooter, I shoot APS-C sensors, which are smaller than a 35mm film frame is. This can lead to worse image quality in low light, as there’s less area to collect light information. With this, you occasionally get noise.

While I love the look of grain, I’ve yet to find much personal joy in color noise. It’s far from the end of the world, but for now, I’d prefer not to have it. So I’ve followed the development and release of various de-noising programs, even early into making photos. A few years ago, I heard that DxO, a company known most for technical tests of various sensors, had released a new program which offered best in class noise reduction. That alone wasn’t enough to make me switch, but it put them on my radar. A few days ago, I heard of a new program from DxO, called DxO Pure Raw, which promises machine-learning aided RAW conversion into DNG files (a proprietary RAW format from Adobe). Even more, they offer specific camera and lens profiles which aim to correct imperfections precisely. With a free trial on offer, I decided to give it a whirl. Take a look at a before-and-after comparison with a high-ISO RAW file I return to for testing:

A woman waits for the bus on upper Wacker drive at night in Chicago, while it snows.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 16mm f/2.8

Kind of wild, right? Not only the noise, but the sharpness and detail resolved really is great. Though this is not the first time I’ve been impressed with results from an app like this. I’ve also used some of the Topaz Labs software, which similarly uses ML processes to denoise, upscale, or sharpen images. I don’t know for certain, but I think these are using software to interpolate where data is lacking. Basically, it’s finding the color noise, the soft edges, and taking an educated guess about how things should look, how they should appear, and then presenting that to you. The software updates; the models and algorithms update.

Here’s another comparison from DxO, of a recent image I took in daylight, zoomed into 100%:

It’s just that much sharper, that much cleaner. I love the way the chromatic aberration clears up. Mind you, I am already happy with the standard processing from Fujifilm files in Capture One. Here’s another image I took, processed entirely normally, zoomed into 100%:

Pretty damn sharp for a nearly five-year-old APS-C sensor! And yet, this will only get better. Honestly, sharpness (independent from resolution) is not something I've ever been worried about on the Fujifilm system. Here's a 100% crop of a portrait taken with the even older Fujifilm X-H1 and the 90mm f/2 lens:

Fujifilm X-H1, 90mm f/2, 100% crop.

I don’t even like shooting in aperture priority mode, so why does this form of the tool taking over not bother me? I’m not sure; it’s still a computer trying to make a guess about my intent or the final image, even moreso than in-camera sharpening or something. I guess it feels like an optional step in the chain, something I can use when I feel it would benefit me, and discard if it doesn’t. And most of all, it feels like it supplements my own abilities, the data that was already there.

Even now, Fujifilm’s smaller APS-C sensors are sometimes met with skepticism: why would anyone choose to shoot smaller than full-frame? But we’re way beyond the looking glass as far as technical concerns are concerned. I can already take my sufficiently-large 4k-by-6k image, and quadruple the size with no loss in quality. I can remove grain effortlessly. The RAW files I’m making now might prove almost endlessly useful. For now, I’ll continue to rarely using these tools, as I rarely feel I need them. They can sit and wait, ready for if or when I want to use them.


If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my newsletter, Monochromatic Aberration, to get these delivered right to your inbox, and a series of photo wallpapers exclusive to subscribers. You can do so at that link above or using the button near the bottom of your screen. I write about photograph, writing, and trying to live an examined life. We've currently got 84 members on the site; trying to hit 100 by mid-June. Your support means a lot.

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<![CDATA[ In Praise of Posting ]]> https://mnchrm.co/in-praise-of-posting/ 6439725cd77f2584d25f0f4f Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:11:46 -0500 I think I'm done with Instagram—again. As a photographer, you're often told you need an Instagram account. Maybe I've just internalized this to a certain degree, but it feels true, too. Instagram has declared itself the photo social network, so if photos are important to you, you've got to be there... right?

But it's never clicked with me. I was a late-comer to Instagram; the early limitations on aspect ratio and emphasis on filters didn't mesh with my photographic sensibilities. But of course, I caved. I've had my ups and downs with the platform, periods of disillusionment and "commitment" (social media demands your time and engagement and sort of promises to reward you for it, in my eyes) Really, most of all I want my photos to be seen. I like the dopamine kick of engagement as much as the rest of us, but I've reached a confidence in my own work, my own aims, and where I'm headed that for photos, the sharing is the point (I have notifications turned off on everything aside from texts and emails, too). I think you can be a totally solitary artist, but I personally want to connect with others, and share in that connection.

But it's all too much. On Instagram, and on Facebook before it, I feel like I'm being jerked around. I've got a very modest number of "followers" (I wrote recently on how vocabulary affects your worldview [among other things], and this is another prime term that sends a shiver up my spine): about 800 or so. I'm loathe to dive into the metrics, but among those 800ish people, a recent post reached less than 250 accounts, and less than 100 of those were people who actually followed me. If the people who have opted-in to seeing my photos aren't, what's the point? I felt similarly off-put a few years ago when Facebook started to manufacture notifications, pinging you for things well beyond your purview. We all know these sites to be manipulative, but even so there has to be a limit.

I'm starting to get the same vibes about Twitter. Twitter has always been my social media platform of choice; you won't see me call it a hellsite. For me, it's always felt like a home. I've met some of my closest friends there, some of whom I've only later met IRL, if I have at all. My profile, maybe more than any other website connected to me, is sort of like a scrapbook collection of my passing thoughts, things I like, things I'm curious about. I think looking through my page gives a good sense of my tastes and sensibilities; it's a snapshot of me, told in 280 character / photo / video vignettes.

Yet it's hard not to feel pessimistic about it's future. I figured intentionally or by accident the site would fizzle out after the acquisition by Elon Musk, which only feels more pressing. Increasing server outages, rampant spam, things actually breaking on the site in a way that feels unprecedented for a company of that size and scale. These are all incidental to the inane changes seemingly ushered in by Musk himself, such as throttling links, and blocking Substack altogether for a short while. Perhaps we were premature in noting the time-of-death (I already made my epitaph post), but doesn't it feel like something's slipping away?

If it all goes dark, here's how I want to go out.

So I'm looking to the horizon. I don't want my work, my thoughts, my connections, to be filtered and mediated by a company whose aims I don't share. My feelings about social media are a big part of the reason I've come back to the blog, to the newsletter, as a way of sharing my thoughts, showing my work, and hoping to find people and build connections who share something in common with me. While the blog and newsletter are great, holistic tools, they lack something that Twitter first and foremost got really right: the post.

To me, a post feels like a perfect encapsulation of something ephemeral. A snippet of text, a few photos or a video, a link to something you liked. It can be thoughtful; it can be stupid; both are totally okay. The brevity is the point. There's something inherently fleeting about it. You can't replicate that with a blog, not alone. Like the short story to the novel, it feels like it's own form, with it's own considerations; and something worth keeping around.

I recently learned the Japanese word for "live broadcast": 生中継 (nama-chuu-kei). The first character means "life" or "fresh" Nothing out of the ordinary, but it's the next two characters that I think are spectacular: they mean something like "relay" or "joint" or "connection." The image it calls to my mind is like a vast network spreading out, the signal for the broadcast connecting each home to one another, a golden thread spreading across the night sky. I remember trading Pokémon online as a kid, connecting via IRC, then sending off my little monster for another; two points discreetly connected by a straight line.

There are, of course, other people concerned about this. A few "alternative" sites have already spun up and wound down. Mastodon already exists as an alternative, but the culture there is already formed. Maybe I'm in a slightly too narrow server (though that's the one my friends are in), but it's just a different beast rather than a replacement. Substack made it's own posting feature, but I don't see the platform for long-form, newsletter writing from largely-established names offering the same sort of free expanse that Twitter offered. I've started to see Bluesky bandied about in my circles; I guess this seems the most promising to me at this moment, but time will tell.

What I want is this: some sort of open standard for making posts. A protocol, instead of a platform. A short bit of text—it'll always be arbitrary—but under 300 characters feels right (I'm generally against "threading," too). Five or fewer photos. Videos under five minutes. Of course, it needs a default platform; something basic that's user-friendly (don't start asking people what instance they're on). You can host them yourself, and feed them into any number of clients. And if someone feels so inclined, they can connect their relay to yours, tuning them in to whatever it is you're broadcasting. Holistic. Direct. Networks as big or small as you'd like. A way to send a little thumbs up, a heart, a sign of approval. A way to add posts from others into your own timeline.

I'd love a feed on the side of Monochromatic. Things that made me think, I wonder, or this is beautiful, or here's something I made. Little statuses, little moments, little thoughts, available for anyone's perusal.

What I want is this: some sort of open standard for making posts. A protocol, instead of a platform.

Is this Mastodon? Am I just reinventing Mastodon? If so, that's very Silicon Valley of me. There's a delicate balance here between giving something enough user-control to be truly resilient in a way that a centralized platform isn't, without losing people in the tech barrier to entry; something I think Mastodon has already lost the war on. I've enjoyed my time there, too; met new people, and reconnected with old friends—but it's forever a different lane for me.

For now, I'll keep posting; I guess I've already decided to go down with the ship. I've started to reach out to the people I want to keep in contact with, either in smaller, more focused communities, or directly. Maybe another platform will emerge at the right time to scoop all the stragglers out of the sea, and we'll hardly know the difference. But the things that float away are worth saving, too. Hopefully, the post lives on.


If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my newsletter, Monochromatic Aberration, at that link or using the button near the bottom of your screen. We're currently at 84 members; trying to reach 100 by mid-June. I write about photograph, writing, and trying to live an examined life. Your support means a lot.

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<![CDATA[ Working a Scene and the Decisive Moment — A Practical Guide ]]> https://mnchrm.co/working-a-scene/ 643052e4d77f2584d25f0d11 Fri, 07 Apr 2023 12:54:45 -0500 I wanted to write a bit more about my process in making street photography, as well some important concepts for not just street photography, but many different styles and genres: “working a scene,” and “the decisive moment.”

I’ve been meaning to get back downtown to shoot more, as it’s been a few weeks since I’ve made any photos in the loop. In sort of a spur of the moment decision, I decided to head down one morning this week, to catch some of the early morning light and the commuters / office workers who’d be heading in.

Because I had a fairly defined goal in mind for the images I wanted to capture, I thought this would be a good opportunity to find and “work” a scene, as I waited for the “right” image to come to me.

What is a “Scene”?

A scene is just any spot you choose to make photographs in for a given amount of time. Basically, I think it’s just any spot that grabs my eye and makes me want to find a good photo rather than something to pass by. This could be due to a confluence of any number of different factors, like nice or interesting light, opportunities for reflections, compositional elements such as foreground elements or opportunities for a frame within a frame, etc. For me, I’m most often looking for hard light, usually in narrow bands as the sunlight slips among the skyscrapers and buildings downtown, or compositional elements like columns, windows, and the like.

A scene is any spot that grabs my eye and makes me want to find a good photo rather than something to pass by.

Early morning light and late evening late are frequently discussed as the cream of the crop, and rightfully so. When the Sun is lower in the sky, you’re more likely to get hard light, resulting in streaks and long shadows. This often makes for dramatic photos, particularly in street photography. I love the warm color of the light during these hours, too. Actually, I feel I struggle to make photos I’m happy with in softer natural light, such as mid-day, or even worse: overcast weather. Something I’d like to push myself on a bit more soon.

What Is “Working a Scene,” and Why Might I Want to Do That?

“Working a scene” is about using your tools and artistic intent to best leverage (or “exploit,” if you will) the scene you’ve found. What sort of photos do you want to make, and what decisions can you make to make the best photos possible at that location? This can be as simple as waiting for the “right” subject to walk through or for things to line up in the way you want, to changing the angle, the lens you’re using, or even influencing the scene depending on your view of the ethics of the situation. (For example, if you walk up quickly causing the pigeons to take flight right as a subject walks past, is that still street photography? What crosses the line? These are all questions you’ll have to think about for yourself.)

A few of the images I made. You should be able to tell they're all from roughly the same vantage point as I let the scene unfold around me.

There are a few benefits to this approach. For one, it’s a slower way of working than just walking around and hoping to get lucky. In the heat of the moment, anyone who’s tried to make street photos has probably missed something they wanted to capture, due to unpreparedness, incorrect camera settings, missed focus, etc. Getting set up allows you to make those decisions ahead of time, so you can focus on getting the picture when it presents itself.

It’s also a great way for amateur street photographers to get started. It’s a bit easier to frame up a shot and wait for someone to walk in, than it is to see someone you want to photograph and raise the camera to your face. If you’re less intimidated, you might have an easier time capturing the photos you want to take.

I should say now this is not always my process; I’m just as likely to keep walking at a fast pace, almost never truly stopping, just making loops around Chicago snapping whatever interesting moments I see. It depends on my mood, and on the photos I want to capture. However, I had in my mind the intent to capture people going into work towards the Sun.

So I got off the train in the loop looking for the light. After a bit of walking, I found what I had been looking for.

Contact Sheets

To help illustrate how I take photos, what I’m looking for, and how I’d go about curating and editing these, I’ve gone ahead and made digital contact sheets for all the photos I took at this spot. I’m adding these as JPGs below, and you can download the original PDF just below that. You can make these in Photoshop and a few other programs, but I did this one in Lightroom as I like the way it formats them a bit better. This is not normally something I’d do, instead I’d just load all the RAW photos into Capture One (my editing software of choice) and just cull using the rating system, but I thought it’d help to see all the photos I took sequentially like this. Final caveat: these are completely unedited, JPGs straight out of camera (affectionately called SOOC JPGs among Fujifilm shooters).

Okay, so from the first three images, the scene should be clear. I’m standing just outside a building downtown with large rectangular columns, which are creating these long shadows and pockets of light. Of course, the light is coming from the Sun, and coming in from East to West (as it does in the morning). You’ll notice I alternate between shooting into the Sun and away from the Sun. My intent had been to capture silhouettes and deeper shadows, which of course means shooting into the Sun, but I switched back and forth based on the presence and direction of the people, i.e., my subjects. Still, the majority of the images are shot towards the Sun.

At this spot that morning, I made 67 photographs, just about two rolls worth. Making a contact sheet invariably makes me think about film. Of course, had I been shooting film, I would not have made nearly as many photos, instead being more decisive about when to press the shutter. But when shooting digital, there’s little reason not to shoot a bit more. Still, I didn’t simply put my camera on high-speed continuous shooting and fire away; I was trying to time out what I wanted in each frame.

First, let’s divide these images into different sequences. I would do this not only by composition but framing; basically, what are the groups of totally unique shots that I should make a select or two from?

So to my eye, there are 12 different sequences here that make up the 67 images. Right off the bat, I think the shots into the Sun are the most interesting, particularly in sequences six and 10-12, which makes sense as I took the most photos in those positions.

From here, I’ll go through each photo individually, and pick the ones that are my selects to edit the most thoroughly. But what do I look for when making these selects? This is where the “decisive moment” comes in.

The “Decisive Moment”

The concept of the decisive moment comes from the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most influential photographers of all time, and often considered the father of street photography. Michael Rubin has a fantastic write-up on this at PetaPixel, so I won’t go into too much depth here (I highly recommend giving that a read!). In that article, Rubin discusses how the concept of the “decisive moment” is often misinterpreted, and should focus on composition, but I sort of like the broader definition: the moment that best captures the essence of the scene. Most of the time, it’s the moment that feels the most balanced, or just feels right. Have you ever taken a photo and wished you or the subject was one step over, or it’d been captured a split second earlier? That’s it.

I know this sounds a bit vague, and that’s because it is. It’s about feel. You just know it when you see it, and like developing style, over time you develop a sense for it. Just keep making photos, getting some hits and a lot of misses, and you’ll start to feel what it is you’re looking for.

The decisive moment is the moment that best captures the essence of the scene.

Okay, how about something a bit more practical? Beyond compositional balance, there are a few things I look for in my own work when making selects. Probably first and foremost is stance or posture. Ideally, I want to capture photos of people in full stride. It looks a bit weird to me if someone’s legs are all bunched up. If you were to mimic the stance of the person in your photo, would you fall over? If so, I usually pass on it. I’d like to find some gap between the legs, some stability.

Another thing I look for is eye contact. The eyes truly are the windows to the soul, and most of the time I want a viewer of my work to make an instant connection with my subject, and the best way to do that is with eye contact. How do people look at you as you’re making a photo of them? I rarely want to take a photo of the back of someone’s head, or worse, someone looking at their phone. Of course, this gets harder to avoid all the time, and these photos are a good example of a scene where my intent was to capture people walking away from me.

The last consideration I’ll mention for now is action. This can be easy when you’re thinking about something like capturing a photo of a skateboarder doing a kickflip. When would you want to take the photo? More often than not, I would think that’s at the apex of their jump. But I try to think about this for more subtle things, too. For example, if I want to capture a photo of a woman in a long coat, I try to find the moment when it’s billowing in the way I want. Think about fabric, hair, movement, moment.

Back to Specifics

Let’s close this out with a real-world example from the photos I took. Let’s look at some images from the 10th and 11th sequences, 1625 through 1636.

Just a few examples from the contact sheet.

From 1625-1628, which is the best image? You can probably tell I was trying to time my photos to their steps, to varying success. Personally, rather than 1627, I actually like 1626 the best. It’s still full-stride, just with the opposite leg.

How about for images 1629-1636? I like the solo figure, but prefer the last photos I took in this scene for those (1645-1648 on the full contact sheet). The addition of the fourth figure in the other light pool just makes this all the better for me. Here, I think you can make a case for 1632 or 1633—shows you how subjective this is!—but my pick is 1633 here. You get the figures and their shadows well framed by the columns, and in full-stride it really shows the motion of the scene. If I’m really being picky, the figure on the left isn’t in the most dynamic pose, but given that they’re nearly dead-on to camera, I’ll take it.

Final Thoughts

Woof, that was a doozy! But hopefully it gave you not only an interesting look into my process, what I’m thinking about and looking for as I’m conceptualizing an image and during the actual photographing, and how this all relates to street and other genres of photography.


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<![CDATA[ Faith in Strangers ]]> https://mnchrm.co/faith-in-strangers/ 64272417d77f2584d25f0a71 Sun, 02 Apr 2023 11:37:53 -0500 Over time, I've naturally acquired a handful of personal beliefs. Of course, these vary tremendously, from stupid things like the "right" way napkins should be folded, to more serious things like my personal street photography ethics (maybe I'll write about this one day). But one of my most central tenets concerns interactions with others. In general, I consider myself a fairly cynical person; maybe that's exactly why I consciously try and remain positive, be aware of my mindset, and most relevantly trust in others. So consider my surprise when this belief of mine came up in Hanasaku Iroha, an anime I've been watching lately.

Hanasaku Iroha (meaning either something like "The ABC's of Blooming" or "The Color of Blooms") follow Ohana Matsumae, a 16-year-old girl sent to live and work in her estranged Grandmother's traditional Japanese-style inn after her Mother elopes with her boyfriend. It's somewhere between a workplace drama and a slice-of-life series, as Ohana has to content with her strict Grandmother, eccentric coworkers, as well as the regular stressors of being a 16-year-old girl.

In Episode 9, the inn finds itself short-staffed as Ohana's Grandmother is forced to go to the hospital and a member of the kitchen staff has taken the day off, both coinciding with an unusual influx of guests. Ohana, taking charge, decides to go into the town to find the absent junior chef Tōru, who had taken a day off to go to a friend's wedding. Of course this is a mad-dash misadventure, with Ohana not knowing even the slightest details about where the wedding is. She receives some encouragement from her childhood friend, who tells her it'll "somehow all work out," and (also of course), it does.

It's only when she gets back to Tōru's motorbike does she realize the situation. She's pulling a co-worker away from a day of celebration and rest, not only back to work, but to an especially hectic environment. She begins to apologize, and Tōru cuts her off, asking her if she did what she did because she thought it would be for the best. She concedes, and he says:

Tōru assures her, saying "If you trusted me enough to think that I'd make everything work," [...]
"I'll have to do just that."
"If you trusted me enough to think that I'd make everything work, I'll have to do just that."
— Tōru Miyagishi

I think it's best to try and accomplish many things by yourself. It's good to have confidence in your own abilities, and to learn, change, and grow through the process—even if it doesn't result in the outcome you're hoping for. But there are times where you need help from others. And generally, I believe that people rise to the expectations you give them.

"Expectations" can be sort of a fraught word; of course, I don't think you should "expect" people to solve all your problems. There are lots of things it would be unfair, unreasonable, or harmful to expect from one another, and like judgment, expectations can place unnecessary pressure on a person. But there's a positive side to this, too. I think most people want to do a good job, want to be helpful. It feels good to be needed by others, and to be able to accomplish together what someone alone couldn't.

Overall, I'm strongly of the belief that your thoughts have a very real effect on the world around you. One way I like to think about this is through your vocabulary. For anyone who has learned or is learning a new language, you'll know that having a limited vocabulary affects the types of sentences you put together, which affects the way you think in general. If you're playing a videogame, and your 10-button controller has seven buttons dedicated to the aiming, firing, and reloading of a gun, that strongly affects the types of interactions available to you.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail."
— Abraham Maslow

In my Japanese study, I recently came across a phrase that encompasses this. 他力本願 (ta-riki-hon-gan), is a phrase made up of four characters, which is called a 四字熟語 (a yo-ji-juku-go, or literally a "four-character idiom"). These are a bunch of different idioms, often derived from classical Chinese, similar to English idioms like "killing two birds with one stone" (which, oddly enough, has a direct Japanese counterpart: 一石二鳥, or "one stone two birds").

From left to right, the characters in 他力本願 mean roughly "other," "power," "source," and "vow." Together, they mean putting your faith in Amida Buddha, the central figure in Pure Land Buddhism, where praying to Amida Buddha before death will allow you to be accepted into the Pure Land, a place where you can more easily achieve enlightenment for yourself; sort of like Buddhist heaven (for this specific branch, anyways).

The other meaning, of course, is to put your faith in others. Like in English, this often has negative connotations; like you're not taking enough responsibility for yourself. But as with Ohana, there are things you simply can't do alone. She can't suddenly gain the complex knowledge her Grandmother has cultivated over years of work experience, nor can she step into the kitchen and fill the gap. But oddly, her faith in Tōru allows him to come in and provide the necessary stability to the inn, which in turn corrects everything else.

I think most people have experienced this on a small scale with themselves. I started lifting weights this year, and my confidence about my abilities on a given day greatly affect my ability to complete my program. Let alone having anyone else (like a coach or another lifter) encourage me. As Ohana is wavering earlier in the episode, her childhood friend Kou assures her that she's always managed to make things work out okay, and this time will be no different.

So it is with everything. It's not easy to give yourself confidence if you're not feeling pre-disposed to do so, but it's not impossible. But your thoughts, your mindset are things that can be changed, and that change can have an effect on the world. Have you ever felt sad, frustrated, or angry, and stopped to think for yourself, why do I feel this way? What's the root of this? Is it useful? Each of us only has a small range of things we can control in this world. And even within that sphere, there's only so much you can do. Will you take the surprise with joy, wonder, and humility, or bitterness?

In another anime (and manga) series, Chihayafuru, the translators re-translated the Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首), an anthology of classical Japanese poems. One of these has always stuck with me, a mantra that comes to mind from time to time:

In order to restore my faith in this world, I have learned to both love and hate my fellow man.
— Emperor Gotoba, Hyakunin Isshu (Chihayafuru)

Not everyone is earnest, or has earned your trust. But I'd rather default to believing in others rather than being skeptical. It's something I think you can't fake; you have to really believe. So have a little faith. Even though it's hard.


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<![CDATA[ Street Photography of Absence ]]> https://mnchrm.co/street-photography-of-absence/ 641e27bc866498bb01231b21 Sun, 26 Mar 2023 09:22:10 -0500 This post originally went out as part of my newsletter, Monochromatic Aberration. Subscribe now to be the first to get posts like this.


I would consider my work generally "people-focused." This isn't some grand theory of art, mind you: "people-focused" vs. "nature-focused" or "idea-focused," or something.

I think this is most obvious in my photos. Even in some of the emptiest, there is almost always a person present. Like this one of downtown Chicago:

A man walks in a city between tall rows of buildings with large columns.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 16mm f/2.8

I love not only the sense of scale it offers, but the connection formed between myself and a subject, a viewer and a subject; however tenuous or fleeting. It's hard for me to look at this and not remember the moment I made the photo, of course, but also imagine myself walking, gazing up at the tall buildings. I think I do that anyways; looking up into the windows, lit or not, imagining the people who are in there, working or living, what they might be thinking.

Sometimes I take photos from those window perspectives, like this one from the same area:

A man is seen doing maintenance work on the corner of a building in a city.
Fujifilm X-Pro3, 23mm f/1.4

There's lots of these little places on buildings downtown, which for some reason seem inaccessible, but of course, they're not. I don't even really want to be out there, personally; I'd probably go if I knew it would be safe, but I don't love heights! But the buildings and their little nooks and balconies only interest me in the idea that a person could be there.

Writing this now, I wonder if this is part of the reason architectural photography has always seemed a lot easier for me than landscape photography—the people are already implicitly present. (Note to self: I should challenge myself to make more landscape photos).

With this, it's hard for me to not think of an incredible interview between author Miyazawa Iori and Mizoguchi Rikimaru from Hayakawa Books, an editor from the imprint that publishes their books. Miyazawa's most famous novel series is called Otherside Picnic, which is a yuri reimagining of the novel Roadside Picnic (which was adapted into the Tarkovsky film Stalker). Yuri is a genre that focuses on female same-sex relationships. This interview was translated into English by @Kati_Lilian, and made the rounds on twitter for a fascinating point Miyazawa makes.

He describes a burgeoning concept he calls "yuri of absence." "That is, emotional scenery is already yuri," says Miyazawa. He continues:

"A cliff is towering over the sea, grass is growing on top of it, there is a fence, the gray ocean and sky are stretching beyond the horizon, there is an empty bench for two... Someone was uploading these images with a "#yuri" tag. You can totally get that."

Mizoguchi: "So it's like the cover of chapter 9 of "Otherside Picnic", where the two girls ride on a farming vehicle, and a boundless meadow is around them... You're saying this is yuri."

Miyazawa: "Yes. Now remove both girls from this scenery."

Mizoguchi: "Right."

Miyazawa: "A rusty, decaying vehicle is resting on top of wheel tracks."

Mizoguchi: "Right."

Miyazawa: "Then you imagine that one day two girls were there... Isn't that already totally yuri?"

Mizoguchi: "Right..."

Miyazawa: "So a grassland somehow becomes yuri."

I shared some photos on twitter recently sort of in this vein.

I never know what to title or caption my work, and actually resist doing so whenever I can for fear of coloring a viewer's impression, but this time I chose a Japanese word. This word is almost always read as "ninki," which means popular, but it can also be read as "hitoke," meaning "signs of life." Just a couple of snapshots with people, that's not necessarily of people.

It's funny thinking about this, the subject or character focus or at least the felt absence of one, and thinking about some of my most vivid memories. I'm not even really sure that "memories" is the right term; they might just be my "imaginings."

Sometimes, when I'm daydreaming or dozing off, I call to mind these little scenes in my head. Places I've been, often little corners from the town I grew up in. I've always had a really visual, active mind; I think in sentences, I can imagine a room I read about in a book, that sort of thing.

They're little places that might have no significance for anyone but me—but for me they're strangely evocative. Mostly I imagine places at night; maybe that makes it easier, if everything falls off into darkness—sort of like limiting the "draw distance" on a video game.

For example, I can vividly call to mind the park area outside my hometown's community center. It's night, of course. It's a big park, and I can imagine the sledding hill, with the soccer fields I played at on the other side—but the part that comes to mind first is a small strip of grass and trees between the community center and the closest residential block. I'm not exactly in the scene, per say, but my perspective is sort of by default facing the same way, towards the houses. One of my friends lived in a house a few blocks towards that direction. I know the large glass window into the pool is behind me. And it's snowing.

How many times would I have been there, at night, in the streetlamp-lit snow? Maybe a couple? Yet this scene is immediately accessible for me.

Another is on the coast of Lake Michigan, in a town my family used to go to on vacations. It's a small park above a beach, with a playground, all of which sits out back of a restaurant we ate breakfast at most days. It doesn't look like that anymore; I went back not too long ago, and I couldn't help but think going to that park was somehow the purpose of my trip. Maybe checking on it. (The community center is different now, too).

These are just examples, but I've got a whole backlog of these sorts of places, that live on as one of those looping cinemagraphs in my mind. (And like I said, they're not all strictly nostalgic places.)

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Source is @frederickdbarnes on Instagram

I guess all this to say: while it's difficult for me to imagine a "street photography of absence,"

  1. Maybe I should be pushing myself to try. After all, if I can see a simple scene as part of a relationship-focused narrative genre like yuri, why couldn't the same be true for a subject-focused genre like street photography? And:
  2. Even if I can't or simply don't come up with any concept of a "street photography of absence" anytime soon, this sort of pull towards evocative scenery has come up in other parts of my work, even across mediums.

For example, thinking about the park outside the public pool precipitated in a short story I'm working on. While the story itself is extremely character-focused, the part that struck me, that got me writing, and became the setting for the story at large and the most climactic scene is the area around the pool. Hope I can share it with you all sometime.


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<![CDATA[ The Difference an Angle Makes ]]> https://mnchrm.co/the-difference-an-angle-makes/ 641b7cc466ab45d6594a14a8 Thu, 23 Mar 2023 08:31:22 -0500

It's easy to think of street or any sort of documentary photography as luck-based. For anyone who's spent an afternoon running around looking for nice frames to capture, you'll the element of chance at play in your work, both in the exposures you make, and the ones you miss. But part of luck in photography, like in many things, is about putting yourself in the best possible situation, to make those "lucky occurrences" more likely. In other words, setting yourself up for success.

This is one of the reasons that "working a scene," that is, finding light or an element you want to capture and waiting for the right subject in the right pose to hit the right part of the frame before you capture it—is so popular. (I'll write about this another time, as well as what "right" might mean in the sentence above.) But even in situations where you're not simply waiting for the decisive moment to occur, being as intentional as possible about your work and what's under your control can lead to drastically different outcomes.

I've often said that photography is an exploitative art form. There are implication to this, almost never more relevant than in a genre like street photography, where you're utilizing public subjects for your work. There's more to this than the surface definition, however. It's also about leveraging a scene to the desired effect.

Art is about a series of choices made by the artist, selecting and highlighting certain elements instead of others. How you compose a shot, what settings you use, even what lens you've got can make a huge difference to a final image.

Take this image for example:

Fujifilm X-Pro3, 18mm f/1.4

I had spent the day, a warm September afternoon, riding my bike up and down the lakefront trail that winds for miles along the Chicago coast. Heading South along this path, I notice a family at the top of a hill flying some kites. I took my bike off the path, and left it slumped sideways in the grass, jogging with my camera (which I'd kept slung around my shoulder the whole time) to catch the moment. This is a common thing for me; running down a block, or through a park, or up a beach, camera in hand, trying to track down or something that caught my eye before the moment passes. Of course, I'm not always successful. Knowing this, I snapped the image.

I like this shot. It feels pleasant to me, a warm late-Summer day, blue skies, green grass. The trodden-dirt path leading up the hill, presumably the one the family followed to get there. It's like stepping into that Windows XP wallpaper. I felt good about the image as I took it.

But now that I'd simply captured the moment, I started to think more about the sort of image I'd like to take. I started to circle the hill, and in doing so reversed the direction of the Sun relative to myself, completely changing the scene. Rather than baby blue skies, I wanted navy. I wanted a Sun star, the beams of light that extend from a light source at smaller apertures. I wanted to freeze this perfect jewel of a moment. I swapped lenses, from an 18mm to a 35mm, and walked a little closer. I changed my settings, and snapped another photo:

Fujifilm X-Pro3, 35mm f/1.4

This is the exact same scene, the same family, the same hill. It's practically the exact same time, taken perhaps five minutes after the first frame. And yet the image is completely different. It feels different. It still feels like Summer to me, but the setting Sun gives it this indelible fleeting feeling to me. The Sun is setting, both the day and Summer are almost over, but we can still fly a kite. Looking at this image, I can almost feel the Sun on my face again.

(As an aside, I kept on making photographs that day, and ended up with other shots I still love, like the one on this "Members" page. Funny how you can get in a groove with photography sometimes.)

This might seem obvious with such an obvious example, either shooting into the Sun or away from it, but consider these photographs from this year:

I'd gone downtown fairly early on a Sunday to capture these, hoping for hard morning light, which I received. I'd found this strip right inside the financial district, where the Sun rising up past the tall buildings created a little strip of light across a sidewalk; perfect.

I think these photos came out nice (especially the one of the two women crossing the street towards the right of frame—can you see what adjustments I made over time?), but looking at them now, I wish I'd done them a little differently. I chose a wider lens, 23mm, which I've been favoring as of late. It's a good street photography lens as far as I'm concerned, and a focal length I'm familiar with, but that lens choice coupled with my low framing maximized the amount of sunlit pavement we see, making the effect even less dramatic than it was in person.

Had I shot these with a tighter lens, pushed in closer towards the smaller end of the light, as well as used a higher angle (I'm tall, so I often try and get low consciously to avoid having the perspective of my photos the same all the time.) I would've made these a bit more dramatic. It's not better or worse per say, just different (I like the smaller people against the tall columns, for example).

I guess all this to say that intentionality in your art is always important, even when you primary concern is simply "making an exposure." Should the Sun be at your back, or at your front? How would the image change if you took a step forward, or got lower? Why'd you pick the lens you did, the settings you did?

I love grabbing one lens, picking some rough settings for the day, and spending a few hours just running around downtown, across streets, seeing what frames will open up to me. But it's good to remind myself to take the time, slow down, and consider how each of the choices I'm making consciously or not will affect the final result.


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<![CDATA[ Almost Daily ]]> https://mnchrm.co/almost-daily/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd708 Wed, 24 Aug 2022 17:09:11 -0500 After a long, long hiatus—I recently started journaling again. At different times, journaling had been an essential part of my routine, part of the way I relate to the world around me. But especially during the pandemic, I felt like my well dried up a bit. I wasn't going out, and didn't really know how to adjust my writing at first. Entries started to look all the same, and at some point, I just caught myself thinking: what’s the point? So I stopped.

Then, about 10 days ago, I picked up the pen again. Honestly, part of the motivator for me has been playing through Xenoblade Chronicles 3 lately. In it, the characters have lifespans of only 10 years, as well as being soldiers in a sort of endless conflict, and as such are constantly facing their own mortality. One character, Mio, is a devout journaler, using it as a way to process her life, and I thought, Oh yeah, I also used to do that. Seems nice. So I started again.

The pandemic for me has been a time of a lot of self-reflection and uncertainty—I’m lucky it’s been almost entirely mental strife rather than the often more immediately-pressing concerns of illness. I lost my primary income stream back in the Spring, and as such I’ve spent even more time thinking about what it is I want to do; the person I want to continue to become (not that this was only an occasional topic before!)

One of the things I’ve been trying to do this year, especially since then, is really formalize my habits. Give myself a routine and structure to build off of, and time to slot in either rest or exploration in between. I feel that if I finally build the habits I’ve long aimed for, or previously done sporadically, it’ll make everything surrounding easier, regardless of what path I want to pursue or job I end up taking.

A few nights ago, I read this piece from Shigesato Itoi—writer, journal designer, generalist—and felt comforted to hear him echo some of my same feelings. Itoi has been posting a blog daily at 1101.com, the Hobonichi website, for many many years, but in the article, he talks about feeling the need to step back from journaling. I’ve long appreciate the generosity he approaches habits, baked into the company’s philosophy: “Hobonichi” means “almost daily” (though as noted, Itoi hasn’t yet upheld the “almost” part of the title on the blog at least). If this paragon of diligence felt the need to step away, surely it was okay for me to do so, too.

The piece outlines the theme for his company for the upcoming year, in which he’s chosen to represent by the word “birth.” He talks about the importance of creation, rather than simply “organization.” His words ring true for me. I haven’t been shooting as many photos. I haven’t been writing for myself (though I’ve been writing a lot professionally). But I want to—I want to make things. I want to be smarter. More thoughtful. Stronger. It might be the most important thing, to just to go out into the world, have experiences, cultivate those, cultivate your ideas, and let them percolate into art. But of course, it’s not quite so simple.

Some other writer friends recently reached out to me, asking if I’d like to participate in a writer’s group. We’d just write some simple short stories, share, and share thoughts. Low pressure. It seemed like the perfect lead back into being creative, so I jumped at the chance. I’ve written one story so far, with another on the way, but I’m a long ways away still from being able to draw the constellations from my ideas and share that in a cohesive, seamless way. (As an aside, maybe it was never that simple. But I digress.)

Still, I’m finding there to be a sort of order of operations at play. I think I’d have to be really dialed in to just sit down at my keyboard and jam out a story in a day or two. I think I have to sort of tell myself, okay, I’m listening; let’s see what you’ve got. Record the loose thoughts as they come. And maybe a big part of that is collecting my thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears from my days in a journal. That sort of personal narrativization. Reflecting on myself before I can apply that to fiction again. I can’t just grow a bounty in a single step. I have to make the rows, plant the seeds, see them to fruition, and then harvest.

I’m only about 10 days into this new journaling run, probably a bit too short to declare as an established habit quite yet. But I’ve been pretty good at establishing a bit more routine for myself lately. I’m not here to say it’s completely changed my output, and I’m halfway through a new novel manuscript or anything crazy like that. I’m just planting the seeds. But it feels good to get back to it a bit. I know I'm not where I want to be, and honestly, I'm not always sure I'm heading in the right direction. But maybe that anxiety, that discomfort is one worth sitting with, for now. Being mindful about it, formulating that into a small bit of writing each day adds some clarity as I try and figure out where exactly it is I’m going, who it is I want to be. And if the process is good, hopefully the result will be, too. Only time will tell.

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<![CDATA[ Why Are Videogames so Bad at Telling Stories? ]]> https://mnchrm.co/storytelling-videogames/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd704 Thu, 29 Nov 2018 12:38:00 -0600 Or: If Videogames Want to Be Movies, Why Don’t They Learn Lessons from Them?

Perhaps this is simply justification for slacking off on my own work and writing, but I value my time spent with videogames and anime as a means of seeing new and interesting narratives told through their respective mediums. Truly, I think some of the most progressive and exciting stories are being told through anime and games now. Some of my biggest narrative influences have come from stories like ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and ‘Cowboy Bebop’, or games like ‘Metal Gear Solid’ and ‘Zelda’. Yet, while games often succeed in the larger narrative and raising interesting questions, I often find them failing in the smaller details like dialogue and tone. Why is this so common, and what can be done about it?

After holding off for years, I finally purchased a Playstation 4 because of a Black Friday deal that I thought was too good to pass up. Even though it was the future promise of playing ‘Death Stranding’ that sold me on the purchase, there are plenty of games exclusive to Playstation’s ecosystem that I’m only dipping my toes into now. Many of these games seem to draw influences from cinema and television, particularly the modern blockbuster, in a way that’s totally foreign to games on the Nintendo Switch, the other current generation console I own.

From the strong use of motion and facial capture as well as performances from notable cinematic and theatrical actors, to an emphasis on camera motion and the cut, it’s clear that many game developers are looking to television and movies for inspiration. Many of these games start with an expository cutscene under title credits, and slide away from gameplay to video at key narrative moments.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with drawing an influence from another medium. I’m fascinated by the ekphrastic writing (that’s writing that describes another artwork, often a visual medium like a painting or sculpture) of Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Sometimes, translating the vocabulary of one medium into the devices of another results in something new. However, videogames seem to draw a largely negative influence from some of the lazier devices of cinematic exposition, like training sequences and expository dialogue. While these devices are lazy in films, they’re damning in games.

In Marvel’s ‘Spider-Man’ which came with the console as part of a bundle, this influence is obvious, given the highly successful Marvel films that have flooded the box office in the past decade. I’m sure this profitability and Hollywood’s penchant for repeatability and familiarity in franchises that is partly responsible for this cinematic shift in videogames. However, the mediums are linked at an even deeper level, since the dawn of 3D gaming with the Nintendo 64 and Playstation, in which developers began to apply the vocabulary of cameras and perspective to their rendered creations.

I’ve been trying to get my girlfriend to explore some new videogame worlds, after her long-running obsession with collecting all the moons in ‘Super Mario Odyssey’. After completing the first mission and opening up the whole of New York, I turned the controller over to her to swing around the city. She quickly nailed the mechanics of traversing the urban jungle, and was having fun gliding around the skyscrapers and finding new tall buildings to climb, but Peter Parker would not let her get too carried away. Every ninety seconds or so, he’d say to himself (but really to us, the players), “Can’t forget to go meet Yuri in Chinatown!”.

What is the point of this? Does Insomniac Games truly think that I (as the player) am going to forget what the next mission is, even with the marker on the minimap, the way-point marker in the world, and the note in the menu? If these more heavy-handed information systems weren’t present, I might be more forgiving of the spoken dialogue reminder. Such a method could be seen as nuanced, like the methods used by ‘Morrowind’ to tell players what quests to undertake. In it, there are no quest markers or minimaps, only clues in text entries and via spoken dialogue between players. Even in that charitable reading, ‘Spider-Man’s’ use of monologue to remind the player of the story objective is still a bit on-the-nose.

These sorts of outbursts where the character talks to herself to remind the player of the objective, while annoying, is a relatively small inconvenience. With the lines repeated so often, they become almost noise to the player, losing meaning until the next mission, when they want you to do something else. All in all, it’s mostly lost in the countless other types of dialogue sent to the player in the form of news and radio broadcasts, police bulletins, and phone calls.

Parker as Spider-Man also has a series of quips for criminals, as any good superhero must. Crimes in progress will pop-up on your map while swinging around, leaving you to intervene or decide you have better things to do. If you jump in to stop them, Parker will say a line related to the crime in progress, like he is want to do. However, as far as I can notice, there’s only a few lines for each type of crime that can be committed, which is also a limited number. I’ve stopped a handful of break-ins, all starting off with Peter yelling, “You don’t look like locksmiths!”

These annoying bits of repeated dialogue and writing are bad, but only in the usual sort of videogame way. As someone who’s played a lot of videogames in my life, I understand why a developer might only write and record a few lines of dialogue for non-playable characters (Have you heard of the high elves?) or want the player to stay on track, and put a few different types of reminders in the game. However, as games start to adopt more of the forms and devices from cinema, we need to take a look at the way they use them, and if they’re effective in accomplishing their goals.

A specific type of cinematic game has become all but synonymous with AAA gaming, particularly on the Playstation ecosystem. Sony didn’t invent the cutscene, but the games exclusive to its platform have championed this specific use case for it. Games like ‘God of War’, ‘The Last of Us’, ‘InFamous’, in which the player undergoes an important journey with cutscenes at the most important story elements. Such story moments often line up with rudimentary screenwriting structuring, such as the Hero’s Journey, or the Three-Act Structure. As someone who studied screenwriting at university, I’m well aware of the place these devices hold, but find their implementation to be lacking. When we go a step further and apply them to games, we remove the critical element that defines games: player input.

In a cutscene, a player gives up the one thing that makes a game a game; their ability to interact with it. It’s as if the director is forcefully taking control in order to hit the plot point they want, which undervalues the player. A cutscene is essentially cinematic in nature, with a camera, set, actors, dialogue, lighting, sound, etc etc. And yet the cinematic elements that make these scenes are often amateurish at best, especially the writing. I’m not expecting every games writer to have gone to film school like I did (Not that I’m the world’s finest writer of course, nor would I say film school is necessarily a valuable experience), however I think it is important for someone working in a medium to have an understanding of that medium. If you want to write a good novel, having read and studied a few helps.

One of the games I was excited to dive into now that I was able to was ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’. In it, you play as a woman named Aloy in a post-post-apocalypse world. Animalistic robots roam the wilds, and you’re able to hunt these beasts and interact with the tribal people scattered throughout the land. This is all well and good, but the establishment of this narrative is painful.

Instead of just dropping you into a mysterious and vast world, something the ‘Zelda’ series is known for, the developers of ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ feel the need to build everything up from square one. It starts with Aloy as a nameless baby, being put into a basket on the back of her guardian, Rost. Rost decides to narrate the following montage of his arduous trek up the mountain to meet with a matriarch. He repeatedly tells this baby things like, “We are outcasts, from the tribe.”

There’s no way this would pass an Introductory Screenwriting Course, and I know because I have taken an Introductory Screenwriting Course.

This montage is a lovely overview of the world we get to explore, but by showing it all to the player within the first few minutes of booting up the game, you lose some of the wonder of discovering these locales for yourself. Meanwhile, the expository monologue is not instructive, nor is it interesting. If I were shown the script for this section and asked to provide notes, I would tell the writer that it’s far more powerful to show the audience these facts about the world than to tell them. Show, don’t tell. I can see they are outcasts by the way they interact with the other humans they come across. I can see the dangerous nature of the robots patrolling the lands by how they’re avoided and watching them hunt.

The problem here is something I see often in all sorts of writing, not just in games: the writer is too focused on their lore. I see writers all the time who are creating a fantasy world who get wrapped up in the minutiae of their own creation. Since J.R.R. Tolkien, every writer feels the need to write their own world’s bible and annals. That’s all well and good, and can help the writer to understand their world better, but by and large it’s not useful or interesting for the audience.

In the case of ‘HZD’, the game chooses to forcefully tell the player information they could see from the world, that isn’t relevant in the first place. Beyond being a heavy-handed narrative method, this information is not useful to the player, and only serves to demystify some of the world. In my view, when creating a fantasy / sci-fi world like this, it’s better to convey as little to the audience as possible. That way, your entire story feels like a puzzle to be solved which motivates the audience to delve deeper, and makes the audience feel smart as they learn more and more about it. When you resort to narrative and expository info dumps like this, the audience knows you think they’re too stupid to pick up this information on their own, which turns them away from your work.

Games as a medium have been met with a lot of disdain and lack of respect. Roger Ebert notoriously said games weren’t art, which seems to haunt many developers and critics to this day, based on how often it still comes up in the discourse (of course, I’m mentioning it right now). Part of the problem to me seems to be this aping of cinematic failings, rather than finding a more natural way to teach the player about the world through the use of the game’s mechanics and interaction with the created world. Of course, there are players who just want to interact with a ten hour movie, and there are times when that can be enjoyable.

If games want to tell a big cinematic story, that’s okay, but certainly not necessary. “Story-less” games like ‘Pac-Man’ and ‘Donkey Kong’ will continue to be beautiful in their own way, through the mastery of their players, and wonder of their mechanics. However, such things are beautiful in a sort of mechanical way, which isn’t moving in the immediate sort of way that a JMW Turner painting might be, but more like how a high level game of chess is beautiful. Whether or not this is art however, is anyone’s guess.

However, for games to truly come into their own, and tell the sorts of stories only they can tell, they need to rely less on the devices used in cinema and lean into interaction and player choice, as well as the overlap of differing game mechanics, which is unique to the medium.


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<![CDATA[ Endless. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/endless/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f5 Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:46:17 -0500

There is an endless amount of data these days. I’d bet that the data gathered by your phone in a single day is more data than a person could analyze and interpret in an entire year. Think about it: obvious data like photos and videos and audio clips, and other data like websites pinged, GPS data, gyroscopic data.

Once, I was the guy with no password on my phone. No case either, but I’m still caseless. I thought, ‘It’s my phone, anything that makes it slower / harder for me to access is a burden, and besides, what data even is there?’. O — my follies are numerous and great.

Data might be the oil of our time. Yet, few of us think about how valuable data actually is, or how much data actually exists. It pervades our society. There’s a wealth of data just generated each time you go to the grocery store, every instance you leave you house. From the text log between my girlfriend and I, you could easily figure out where we are, when we go somewhere, our schedule, our routines, what we’re doing, reading, seeing, or thinking at any given moment. They’re so detailed that at my last job, I used them to complete my timesheet.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

However, this goes both ways; not only is the data that we generate so pervasive, but our culture is now one that is filled with content, posts (like this!), tweets, “takes”, and of course, news.

There’s a video, which I won’t link because of the disturbing content but can be found easily enough, of the four major US networks on the moment of the September 11th attacks. You can see the shock and breathlessness as the news of this terrible event rippled across our society. Almost a side-note in this unimaginable tragedy, you can see the exact moment when the 24-hour news cycle began.

In the moments and hours and weeks following, there was just so much information and confusion coming out, that most news networks began running ‘breaking news’ when something was revealed. I remember as a child, thinking it was almost a comfort, that perhaps someone, the journalists or the police or the government could get to the bottom of this, could figure out what had happened, exactly. The idea that such an event was unknowable didn’t occur to me then.

This constant faucet of news and bulletins and memos, of reporters on the ground and reporters in the studio, of articles and broadcasts, has never stopped. There’s entire networks now built around this concept. Turn on CNN or MSNBC or FOX right now and I bet you’ll get a ‘Breaking News’ bulletin within a few minutes.

When is so much information too much? When does it become not an asset, a resource for someone to take in and help understand the world but a burden to bear?

Part of me thinks we’re reaching critical mass. I just wrote about how often we’re on our phones. For so many, that’s the first thing they look at in the day, and the last thing they look at in the evening. It’s hard not to, when it’s your alarm clock. From there, it’s so easy to be swept up in the dopamine fix of notifications and social networks which is all designed around you using your phone as much as possible.

I’m caught up in it as much as anyone, more than most. I can feel the reflexive urge to pick my phone out of my pocket as I wait for water to boil in the kitchen. Sometimes I feel the pull in-between downtime in my thoughts.

Life is difficult, even for the most privileged people in the wealthiest countries. Even for the luckiest in society, life is still full of anxieties, stress, sorrow, loss. Sometimes, a distraction can make you feel better. And there’s nothing wrong about feeling better, or wanting to. It’s just that sometimes the things we think will make us feel better actually make the problem much worse.

I was reminded recently of a class I took in college, on existentialist philosophy. The class was 10 or fewer students, and we’d sit around a group of tables pushed together with the professor, and spend the next two hours and 45 minutes talking about whatever book we’d been asked to read over the course of previous week. These texts ranged from a few of the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, and ended with contemporary French communist texts like writing from Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee.

I loved that class, largely because it was close to what I had hoped for from my college experience. A place where students could be confronted with ideas and concepts otherwise unfamiliar, and discuss and grapple with them with the guiding hand of a teacher.

One of the most impactful classes was after reading an excerpt from Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, where he outlines his concept of ‘Dasein’, a “being-in-the-world”. He talks about how we’re always confronted with the anxiety of living, pushing for the next experience to help diminish this pain. But we can never truly divorce ourselves from this experience, because we’re inextricably part of the world.

We talked about the concept for a while, until the professor was sure we had a grasp on it, and then he began a sentence and… went silent. He sat there, and we did in response, for what felt like a huge amount of time. In a world filled with so many distractions, actually feeling the weight and anxiety of social situations, and life itself, is a wakeup call.

I don’t believe in blocking anyone’s access to information, or knowledge. I’m naive enough to think that information is mostly beneficial to the populace, and an informed public is a healthier one. However, I do think there’s something hollow about our current state of affairs.

In a world where everyone on the street has earbuds in, where our pockets contain enough buzzes, blips, and flashes to keep us entertained for a lifetime, will we ever decide it’s enough?

I think there’s some small-scale push back against this now, some inklings of a larger movement. While it feels good, or at least can, I think people are starting to realize the lack of substance with this sort of thing. Will we ever dial it back, choose willingly to slow the faucet, to return computers to screens in the basement, and messages to boxes on the street? Perhaps we’ll start to feel like the infinite scroll is not adding to our lives, but causing more harm than it’s worth.

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<![CDATA[ Computers are Fundamentally Depressing. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/computers-are-depressing/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6fd Wed, 13 Jun 2018 11:52:54 -0500

There's something about sitting in front of a computer for a few hours working on a task that leaves me feeling worn out. I haven't gone anywhere, or done anything intensive, but after writing or editing or doing any long-form work on a computer, I have to step away.

This is something we feel, something implicit in our nature and the nature of the machines, and yet we can't divorce ourselves from computers. For most, computers are their gateway to work, to learning, to communication, to fun, and more. In the last fifty years and less, computers have taken an outsize role in our lives. This is even more true among my friends online and off, who are computer programmers, designers, artists, etc...

For those of us who use a computer for work, and even those who don't the computer can be a stressful place. It's unnatural to sit in front of box with flashing lights and sounds, in a high tension environment like while working. Even just navigating the social sphere can be stressful. We know this, inherently, yet rarely choose to talk about it or address it. Computers are depressing. There are ways to deal with this.

Jonathan Blow is a game designer and developer, making games like Braid and The Witness and working on a new programming language called Jai. He's somewhat of a controversial figure in the industry, and known for making opinionated and "harsh" statements. It's not uncommon for me to come across a statement of his I disagree with at a fundamental level. Yet, I think a lot of people would say the same about me. I have a similar reputation for opinionated hard-line stances, and a coarse demeanor. So, in a way I empathize with him. We're all learning to be human.

I found a lecture of his on YouTube the other day on meditation techniques for curing malaise, and I watched it and took notes. There's some very valuable information in here, especially to those who aren't meditators or are at odds with the practice. My goal is to help connect some of his concepts to more traditional Buddhist terminology, and explain the reasoning behind the language.

He starts by talking about his history with computers, learning BASIC programming as a student in elementary school, and now having spent the better part of a few decades in front of the screen. It's in this preamble he says that computers are fundamentally depressing, a claim that resonated with me. When I write, I sit in front of a computer for three or four hours straight. When working in film editing, this is even longer. And of course, many of my "unwind" processes are also linked to a screen.

One of the flaws of his lecture is claiming it will help address depression and malaise. This is an issue of linguistics, and it's not Blow's fault outright. We often use the words "depressed", "depression", and "depressing" to describe feelings of sadness, malaise, melancholy, ennui, etc. The term "depression" is also used to describe a "major depression" in psychology terms, a disease that is an epidemic.

When someone says they are suffering from depression, they usually mean they are inflicted with the biological and psychological disease of depression, which is very different from feeling melancholy. This video from Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on Major Depression can help explain the difference.

The reason I'm making such a big deal about this is to say that psychological techniques like this and even full meditation practice are not going to cure Major Depression, any more than switching your diet is going to cure cancer. It's a disease, and needs to be treated by medical professionals and therapy, though everyone's path is unique. It might help with some feelings of melancholy or malaise, as Jon says it has for him, and it has for me too. This is only a small part of the neurological disorder that is a major depression, so act accordingly.

Now, on to the techniques. Jon later notes that these are not meditation in themselves, but techniques that could be employed in meditation. I think they're ones that will be familiar to any Buddhist or someone who has spent time with a meditation practice. His idea is that it's easier to bear negative stimulus when you break it down into it's component parts and address them individually. He identifies these three parts as thoughts, the physical component of emotions, and the non-physical or feeling component of emotions.

A lot of these techniques center around inquisitive exploration of your mind, in ways the West often takes for-granted as inherent to our experience. If you've done any reading on Buddhism, you're probably familiar with the concept of the "no-self". The point is that there is nothing unchanging in you that could be considered a self. In the West, we often think of our thoughts or our internal monologue as our "selves". Yet, if you stop thinking for a moment, you don't simply vanish, do you?

In concentration meditation, the focus is placed on the breath, a mantra, or even on the sitting position itself, and a viewpoint to help analyze thoughts and feelings as they pass. If you try and focus on one thing, it makes seeing the fleeting nature of thoughts and feelings easier. These are inquiries into those experiences to help deal with them. I've written about more traditional meditation before, though all these techniques can be used in conjunction.

Jon starts with thoughts, as he says we often conflated our thoughts and our being as fundamentally linked. He suggests being in a safe environment, like your home, and taking some time to analyze an emotionally uncharged thought. This could be something simple like, 'What will I have for dinner?'. Then, explore deeper. The point he says is not in intellectual "answers", but in observational experience, which is a cornerstone of meditative inquiry.

He asks further, can you stop a thought? How does the beginning of a thought feel? Can you feel it drift into your awareness? How heavy is it? Can you hold it, grab, it feel it, draw it? Remember, this is about observing your own mind, and not about coming to a thought-out answer. Be aware of having a thought, the process of it, the flow, and not of the thought itself.

He then moves on to the physical component of emotion. This goes a more traditional meditation route, focusing here on the feeling of contact your body has with its surroundings. This starts with the feeling of your butt on a chair, or on the ground or wherever. Jon talks about how with practice, he's become able to "drop into" a feeling to analyze it, and prompts us to do the same.

He notes how he in thinking about his butt in contact with the chair, he thinks about some butt-shaped object making contact with the chair, yet his experience of it is far more amorphous. He finds that analyzing his contact with the chair, he feels something more loosely defined, almost fuzzy, which would be difficult to draw the boundaries of.

This doesn't have to be applied to feeling of sitting though. He talks about playing a sort of game with himself where he puts his hand on a surface and sees how long it takes for him to drop into the sensation. The same techniques can be applied to feelings of discomfort and even pain, and it's through this usage that many will find the most utility.

This goes back to a meditation idea, that sitting in a full or half lotus position is perhaps uncomfortable. When a student raises this idea with the master, they are told to "Stop holding it, and just sit with it." The point is not to block discomfort, but to analyze it and better manage it.

If the last exercise helps illustrate that you are not your thoughts, there are two conclusions Jon draws from this physical exercise. One is that sensations are not good or bad in themselves, but neutral, and our mind applies and interprets them in a way to help us understand. We know this to be true, intellectually, as well: say you scrape your palm, and your nerve endings send a message to your brain that you're in pain. This is meant to educate yourself that the experience is to be avoided, but if it's not life-threatening, and you understand that message, than what value does the continued pain provide?

The other idea here is showing exactly the boundary between what are your mind's interpretations of an experience, and what are not.

The final technique he talks about is a bit more difficult to practice in a neutral environment. Here, he's dealing with the non-physical aspects of emotion, which awe often consider the emotion themselves. This can be something like feeling sad, or angry, or happy. He describes these as the color of the light in his mind; they're an environmental detail that effects the rest of his mind.

He notes that when he goes into an emotion, more often than not he finds it fades into nothing. This is not about thinking about an emotion, but a more base inquiry into the feeling itself. Jon talks about how we often play into these feelings, seeking out an emotional state we associate with being negative. He talks about a time he felt himself becoming more angry thinking about an argument he had, even though rationally he didn't want to be angry. When he noticed the fallacy, he found he was able to make himself feel calm.

For many these exercises and the ideas they might lead to seem obvious; for just as many, they may seem ludicrous. The point is not to take these ideas or their lessons at face value, but to experience them for yourself. It's a skill-set few of us have spent time honing, and can be very effective if your goal is simply to mitigate negative feelings or a more broad meditation practice. Both work towards an understanding of your own mind, and creating a distance between you and your thoughts and feelings to make them more manageable.

For these to work, we have to engage a different way of thinking than we're used to in the West. This is a method of inquiry into your own mind, to better understand how it works. I've tried to distill a few of the points, but these can't be understood with words. Language and words are just thoughts, describing an object or experience or sensation. These might work for you, or they might not; all you can do it try them for yourself, with an open mind.

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<![CDATA[ The Beast ]]> https://mnchrm.co/the-beast/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6fc Tue, 05 Jun 2018 07:00:00 -0500

Few people have been around the competitive Street Fighter scene — or eSports in general — longer than Daigo Umehara. Daigo, also known by his nickname, “The Beast” made his debut in the nineties when he was still a teenager, and has been a fixture of the scene almost continuously since. Even during an absence in the early 2000s which was a period of self-discovery, Daigo dominated the conversation. Not only has he been a member of the community for almost 30 years, but for almost all of that time he has been arguably the top player, as well as being the first Japanese pro, and one of the faces of competitive gaming.

Anyone who has been at the top of their field for decades is going to have some interesting stories and ideas, and Daigo is no exception. He first hit the global stage during EVO 2004, the top fighting game tournament in the world. It was there he pulled off the now-infamous “Moment #37”, cementing his place on the throne. I think the clip of the event does the best job illustrating this.

Even if you’ve never seen a match of Street Fighter, or even heard of the game, I think this clip conveys a sense of wonder. In this version of the game, a character can parry an opponent’s move by moving the joystick in the direction of the other player on the instant their attack would hit. By doing so, your character doesn’t take any damage from the attack, unlike while blocking. In this clip, Daigo is playing as Ken, the blond fighter in white. He’s facing Justin Wong, the top American player in the world and still a tremendously formidable player, who’s playing as Chun-Li, the woman in blue.

Daigo’s health was so low that if any attack hit him, he would lose. He suspected Justin would try and finish the round with his super move, so he figured his only chance was to parry every single move of the combo, and follow up with his own, all with no margin for error, and backed into the corner.

Needless to say, he did.

It’s without question that Daigo is one of the most skilled players, even so far to have been referred to as the god of execution (execution meaning the ability to pull off a move). I’ve been following him for some time, partly for his skill, and partly due to his enigmatic nature.
For one of the top players, he’s known for appearing disaffected, almost monastic, as if tired, while playing. He’s also fairly quiet for the scene, rarely celebrating his own wins. In interviews and videos, he offers small pieces of wisdom, like aphorisms. People post memes with quotes of his, like these:

This past week, I remembered that Daigo had written a book, called “The Will to Keep Winning”, in which I assumed he spoke about his successes and how he accomplished it. I decided to read it, in hopes of more pieces of wisdom like from the memes, direct from the source.

It’s a pretty short book, clocking in at around 110 pages or so on my Kindle. The book is broken up into very small sections on a topic, like motivation, which last around a page or two each. He writes about anecdotes from his life and his childhood, and the lessons he learned from these interactions. Other sections cover a more broad topic, addressed through hypothetical situations or attempts to convey experiential knowledge through writing.

His lessons are applicable not only to fighting games or competition but many facets of life. In one of the foundational sections, he talks about what a naturally smart person his sister is, and how only considerable effort can beat pure talent.

In many ways, effort becomes the cornerstone of the work. His theory is that often the one who comes out on top is the one who puts in the most effort, so that’s what he resolves to do. He wants to always put the most amount of time in, so he can be best prepared to face the challenges that lie ahead.

"He’s not trying to be the best Street Fighter player in the world, he’s trying to be the best Daigo Umehara he can be."

Although, he’s not advocating for overwork. He talks about how self-inflicted pain (say from practicing too much, or not eating or sleeping enough) can feel like progress, but actually is just suffering. He talks about tournaments in his youth in which he burned himself out on trying to practice upwards of 15 hours a day and not sleeping for. In those moments, he didn’t succeed, but they showed him a valuable path forward.

In one of my favorite sections, he talks about working for only three hours a day. He says three hours a day are all that is necessary to improve yourself and make progress towards your dreams. This is tremendously important. Three hours can seem like a lot in a busy life, and it’s by no means the minimum, but in a culture that values working to the brink, understanding a healthy and sustainable level is important.

Sustainability is another of his key tenets, and lead to the title of the book, “The Will to Keep Winning”. The key word in there is keep. He’s not telling you how to push your way to the top for a moment of glory before falling to the wayside. He wants sustained success. Daigo takes this in a few different angles, emphasizing picking a goal that you care about even without the promise of riches, something you’re willing to do day in and day out. He writes about working towards the future, towards continued success instead of aiming for a single award or win.

In fact, wins aren’t Daigo’s goal at all. Of course, as a competitor, he strives to achieve, but he sees wins and tournament success simply as markers for his personal development, which is his true goal. He’s not trying to be the best Street Fighter player in the world, he’s trying to be the best Daigo Umehara he can be. Street Fighter is the conduit, but the principles apply to anything.

That is perhaps the most important message he has in the book. Our society is heavily weighted towards equating people with their jobs, or their output. People ask “what you do” in introductions as frequently as they ask names, and perhaps sooner. Even on the creative / artist side of the line, it can be easy to conflate ourselves with the work we strive to create. But there’s more to life than one passion, and more to ourselves than our goals. We have to cultivate our gardens to become the people we want to be.

IMG_20180602_085509

Grow your flower.

It’s a nice flower pic.twitter.com/I66635DDGj

— Daigo Umehara (@daigothebeast) June 3, 2018

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<![CDATA[ Redstart. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/redstart/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f9 Thu, 24 May 2018 07:00:00 -0500

The heaviest piece of gear she carried were the binoculars, housed in an artificial leather case, lined with red velvet. She didn’t mind the imitation leather. When they were made, it was simply a cost-saving measure, but now there was an environmental side to the choice. It wouldn’t have been right for her birder binoculars to be housed in the skin of another animal.

They were a slightly outdated set, a hand-me-down from her grandfather, though why he’d had it, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t know what hobbies he would have had that warranted binoculars; she didn’t know what hobbies he’d had, period. Besides golf. But a golfing grandfather was practically the default at this point. And really, how much could binocular technology have improved in the last 50 years?

Besides the binoculars, she had a small field guide in the binocular case. It too was out of date, though she didn’t keep it on her for any practical purpose. She could identify almost all of the common birds on the continent offhand. The guide was more of a talisman at this point, something pretty to look at.

It was a book very similar to this one that had sparked her interest in the hobby at all. In that dusty second-hand bookstore, with her chin practically resting on the counter, she remembered how all the drawings of birds looked so lifelike. She had never seen a bird up close, never really looked at one until seeing these drawings laid out in front of her. At that point, her knowledge of birds was limited to her aunt calling out, “redwing blackbird!,” when they went on walks together that rounded near the woods. Most birds were just streaks of brown or black, maybe a flash of red or yellow, a spec on the branches of the ash trees, a daylight shooting star.

This was something different. How had anyone gotten all these birds to sit still for so long to draw them like they had, she wondered? Having been so little when she found that book, she never found it again. The contents had made an impression, but not the title. Instead, the book she carried was nothing more than a tribute. An idea of the seed that grew into the tree. It wasn’t until many years after this that she got into birding herself. She’d gotten used to the mornings, while the kids were still little, with the dogs running laps around her legs. That was her time, to start the day on her terms, the sun be damned.

After the kids went away, she kept the mornings. Without lunches to make, or dogs to walk, she took to reading. There were still many mornings where she would finish a book before breakfast, but something about it was missing. It was then she found the binoculars, and realized what she had wanted to do.

It was August now, though the weather would lead you to believe otherwise. This morning, just after dawn, was perhaps the only part of the day that would be under scorching. Regardless, the Redstart migration had began, and she would be there to help track it. Redstart migration started early in the year, and this had only gotten earlier as the years went on. Because of the changing climate, they rarely dipped this low in the country anymore. It was simply too warm for them; ‘And me,’ she thought.

Redstarts aren’t rare birds, per-say. However, their population had started to get slightly smaller, shrinking marginally each year. In a notebook, in her left back pocket, she kept tabs on all the birds that she saw but couldn’t identify, to determine their species later. This included a brief description, size, shape, color etc, as well as notes on how they’d behaved. Without the context for these being birds, anyone who found this notebook would think she was an advanced people-watcher. “Small in stature, slightly nervous walk, seems to look to the sky intermittently for signs of danger.”

Oddest of all were her descriptions of their calls. Written out in its own sort of queer version of English, she described the tonality, cadence, even the pitch of a call. These were useless to anyone but her, only translatable as music in her mind.

She’d also add tick marks for multiples she saw, which all went into a larger notebook she kept at home. This data wasn’t exactly scientific, but she assumed it had gotten some use in the societies she sent it off to. They always sent her a nice email back, though that was about it.

She had made about half her usual lap of the pond by now, already at the Southern edge of the water. Geese milled about, eating grass just beyond the dirt shore. A turtle left the log it had been perched on, falling ungracefully into the water before swimming away like a stone skipped in slow motion. Redstarts preferred the higher branches, making them difficult to spot by the naked eye, though they could often be found flying near ponds, catching the flies in mid air like microscopic hawks. If she would find them, they’d be here.

A goldfinch called from an unseen roost. The purple of the sky had almost fully receded from the dawn, whose pink and yellow tendrils stretched across the horizon like an endless fire. From her spot on the South pond, she was in a clearing, probably cleared by the parks service to make a spot for barbecues and parties. Behind her was a path, which had runners on all times of the day, though most ran in the earliest morning or just before dinner. Some young men, probably around thirty, came back towards the path carrying little cameras attached to huge lenses, the size of telescopes. The lenses were wrapped in camouflage, like the barrels of rifles slung across the backs of hunters. She looked up, beyond the trees overhead, binoculars still in her case.

She'd never been hunting, though she had shot a gun before. It was practically unavoidable in this end of the country. Just shooting rounds into the distance, no target in particular. In hindsight, it hadn't been exactly a safe activity, but it had seemed benign enough. She'd been invited to go hunt once, by an overzealous boyfriend of hers, who didn't last long. Apparently he'd thought that seeing him kill something would somehow endear him to her, as if he was beyond the force of man.

Birding was its own odd form of exerting control over nature, though not nearly as violent. Did other animals seek to classify and name the species they came across, or was it a purely human drive? Perhaps, to early humans, the idea of naming something made it seem less frightening, and once a classification system had been devised, the world could be made less unknown, and more within our grasp. These Ash trees would last long after they had been known as that, and throughout all that time be none the wiser for having had a name.

At the edge of the purple, the Moon seemed to hang just overhead. Half full, the white side sagged low, like a bowl full of water. ‘Wasn’t it unusual for the moon to still be out, now?,’ she thought. Thinking about it now, she couldn’t remember when she’d last seen the moon and the sun sharing the same sky. Something about the idea seemed perverse, as if it defied understanding. Of course, the sun and moon weren’t the polar opposite forces humans had imagined them to be in the past. As celestial bodies, they held little connection except in their relation to the Earth where they seemed absolute.

The sun was a flat circle. Glancing past it, it sat bright red as if resting on the tree line above her. In the distance, the goldfinch called. She found a bench and sat down. The bench put her faced away from the water, into this vast open space, devoid of people and purposeless for it. There wasn’t much else of a place to be. Like a fisher, she’d cast her line, and now patience would be the game. She would see no birds that day, only feel the dawn unfold for her, and her alone, on bench in a blank and barren field.

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<![CDATA[ Rush. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/rush/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f6 Thu, 10 May 2018 07:00:00 -0500

The route I’d scouted from above the neighboring hill took me through some light brush, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The most dangerous part of the trek would be crossing the road leading up to the main structure, though of course that was unavoidable. I decided simply to take that part of the journey as far as possible from the front gate which the road led to. If I was spotted by whatever lay in wait, it was out of my control.

Before that night when the Sunset had licked the trees, when the smoke cried out for help, we had talked about the structure. From everywhere within our paper walls, you could feel its influence. If you listened close you could still hear its sad rushing roar, though most of us had heard it so long, we could barely make it out anymore. Sometimes, it seemed like a sign of hope, for something more, something to point out to the children as proof that things were still okay, though we knew we were reassuring ourselves.

Yet, there was always something ominous about it. To me, it had brought the thoughts of cicadas in the deep Summer, a time when I would run ceaselessly through the grass, only going home after dark to avoid my Mother’s lectures about my scraped knees.

It also brought to mind the thoughts of the tall man in the tent that became a home, locusts in the desert, relentless in their consumption, leaving the land stripped and bare. And, I suppose, the biblical meaning wasn’t far from the reality.

Nothing is uniform. Nothing absolute. The Sun may rise tomorrow, but if it does so without you, what good does that give you? And a sunset for one prairie’s a dawn for another. There was something beautiful and horrible in that, the thought of the river still flowing after all we did to it, drained dry and run low, all its majesty and awe sold for… for what? But the water’s gotta flow, even if you give it nowhere to go.

I made it past the road without incident, but was forced to merge with it anyways soon thereafter. Only way in, from this side.

We’d wondered, for so many a night, what it meant. Something was still going on inside, that much would be sure. Soon, the cracks would start to show, and drop by drop this whole thing would come apart, the land returning to how it was. That was all well and good with me too. I knew it would happen eventually, as all things do, but for now something kept it going. If it was hope against hope or the last kook bureaucrat cooped up in that tomb, the rush never ended. Neither did our talk.

Never seemed like a good time to go knock on the door and ask. Never until now, of course. How could it? I once read that people will do damn near anything to keep things the way they are, even if the way they are ain’t so good either. Because we can imagine the worst a lot easier than we can imagine the best. The best seems like a dream; the worst seems like a promise.

I had made it into the shadow. The massive concrete structure loomed over me like a storm-wall frozen in time. The roar was almost unbearable here. The water rushed out of massive vents. A row of searchlights blazed at the top of the wall, as they always had. Deep lines of water stains had formed in the concrete, making the wall seem almost natural, like a living erosion map.

Getting inside was far easier than I had expected. I found a maintenance door, picked the lock, and that was that. I was on tilt, and that only made me more nervous. I knew I wasn’t going to find a welcome party, but I expected some resistance. This wasn’t running on good will.

What I was confronted with didn’t calm me at all. The insides were white, or once white. The same staining had occurred inside the plant, though here they ran yellow and brown, diseased gouges in the hospital tile and linoleum, all slick with moisture like a sewer. It looked like an artificial intestine. The lights were a sickly green, but still on, mostly. Just enough of the lit ceiling panels were on to only leave a few feet of shadow before the next pool.

The smell grew stronger as I got deeper into the belly. Years of water leaks, mold growth, the births and deaths of its own self-contained ecosystem, all these smells coalesced into one. This stinking sickly sweet smell, like flowers in decay filled my nose, but I wasn’t paying attention to it.

Even though the hall was mostly lit, I got out my headlamp and clicked it on. Wasn’t about to take any chances. I also got out my women, and carried it readied at my side. The light from my lamp skipped down the hall like a stone on a lake, all sheen lighting and reflections. I started advancing.

From somewhere down the hall, I heard a popping sound, like dead or dying speakers barely clicking along. This started to build as I walked further, though the sound was so quiet to be almost inaudible. A classic trap, leading me on. I followed; where else could I go? I raised my gun higher. Not a good time to be jumpy, but I was.

I walked past a few closed doors, with windows the size of pieces of paper at face level. I peered into each one as I came to it, looking for a sign of trouble, waiting to be ambushed. Each door I passed safely only made me more anxious. The rooms were mostly dark, with deep shadows hiding the walls. Using my headlamp, I saw they were all but bare; stripped by an earlier tresspasser?

As I approached the end of the corridor, I finally realized what I was listening to: it was music. Over some unseen speakers, perhaps these vents in the ceilings, an ancient melody carried out, with words just barely perceptible.

…games, and daisy chains and laughs, you’ve got to keep the loonies on the path.

Cute. Someone was definitely fucking with me, and I wasn’t in the mood. I got to the end of the hall, two double doors, beyond which was the source of the music. Brought the gun up so I could see down the sights. The song reached its climax, all choruses, and drums, singing hollow into the hall. I kicked open the door.

Once I got through, I lowered my gun. It was an impulse, my only option at the time. A single, vintage computer shone into the darkness, sat atop a crowded desk of ruined papers and maps and graphs. The walls were all screens, all cracks and empty mirrors, reflecting the nothing back at itself. I stood still.

The screen rippled in front of me, a stone dropped into an infinitely deep pool. Static wove across its pixels. Then, it went blank. The song had ended. Only the heartbeat looked groove continued, beating on. The popping came back.

Then there was a word: “Hello”.

Scrawled across the tiny display, a miracle, I stared at it, seeing only a drawing before I realized what it had meant.

‘Hello’, I replied out loud, feeling ridiculous, looking for an entry device to log a response instead.

The screen went dark again, then flashed to life once more.

“What can I help you with?”

I walked in closer, unsure what to do next, or what was happening now. My gun was all but forgotten, as was my purpose.

The screen went blank, then reasserted itself with the same query: “What can I help you with?”

‘What is this?’,I asked?

“This,” the screen replied immediately, “is the QB-438c Dam. I am its caretaker.”

‘And how do you do that?’

“I keep the lights on.”

The rushing, roaring sound was still there, somewhere, but I couldn’t hear it. It was a periphery sensation, a tingling that I’d long grown accustomed to. The popping, with its irregularity and the thrum filled my head.

In a dark room, both above and beneath the soil, the water, the air, I saw light in a dark room. I watched the pixels draw themselves, as they had been taught so many years ago. Each time the screen went blank, I saw a woman I had never seen, watching with the wide eyes of a child. And each time, the lights came back.

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<![CDATA[ Refraction. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/refraction/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f4 Thu, 26 Apr 2018 07:00:00 -0500

Sometimes, when I stand in the same place for a long time, I get so accustomed to it that when I move again I get lightheaded. I become aware of my clothes on my skin, in particular any loose threads brushing against the hair of my arms and legs, the feeling of my muscles flexing and relaxing, hard and soft at once.

I have this dream, where I’m standing in a shallow lake. I don’t think it’s a place I’ve ever seen let alone been; there’s no place like that around, and hasn’t for many years I would guess. Perhaps it’s an ocean: behind me, the horizon is all water, the point where the sky touches is just barely distinguishable in a thin line, the shades of blue so close they blur at the edges. The water is up to my calves, gently flowing in and out, up and down across my leg. It’s so shallow, it must be near the shore, but I don’t see one, it’s just the water stretching on and on.

It’s the light that has my attention. I see it passing through and off of the waves, so far away and also close, shimmering like jewels, glittering even against the bright day. In fact, the light is all I notice. I don’t move, I never have, I’m just standing in the water. I can’t feel the waves lap against my legs. I don’t feel the warmth of the sun, hear the flow of the tides. It’s just light, shimmering, and then darkness.

It’s a dream that makes me feel incredibly calm. When I inevitably wake up, I always wish to be right back where I was, sometimes refusing to open my eyes even though I know it’s over, hoping that my will alone will pull me back into it. It never works.

This is what I am thinking about when I come to on the wall. I am only painfully aware of how this world is unlike the one of my dream. I’m crawled up on a giant steel skeleton, fossilized but never buried, the rust so thickly applied to be indistinguishable from the rest of the frame. It could be made of rust. The whole world is. Everything across the sparse rail yard in front of me is several shades of the same color. This brown, like the bark of a tree, so permeates my vision. We breath dust, I cling to rust, and the sky reflects it all back at us. It never gets black at night, not any more.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been hanging on here. Long enough not to feel it any longer. I couldn’t tell you the texture of the bars and beams; my feeling as if through gloves. They insulate me, protect me from the structure — which must be cool, all heat leached into the hard metal and then the hard ground — but I never truly feel what it’s like. It’s all one even tone.

On the other side of the yard, just beyond a few rail lines buried into the ground, a tower waits. Somehow, it stands, unbroken, a skyline of its own, each pane of glass intact in an act of defiance. Against the deep brown, each window stands out, seafoam green, like the whole building is made of bottle glass. It’s there I must go; we must. Who we are, I couldn’t say; their faces are long gone to me, their names never known. Just like me. I remember skulking across the yard, the weight of my body just begging to be reunited with the ground.

You never start at the bottom. I’m snapped in somewhere in the middle of the journey, putting hands over feet on the ladder. I’m face to face with the windows. For there to be a window, there must be an interior, but I can’t see it. All I can do is climb. I didn’t know where it would go, or what would be there, but I knew it must be better than here. Otherwise, why would I keep climbing?

I don’t remember what came next. I don’t know if there was an ending to be reached or if I just kept on climbing that ladder. Maybe I ended on the ladder, or maybe it was where I began. But I remember the light. Looking out on the horizon, I see the darkness blending into one. The ground rising up to meet the near-black sky.

And yet… just past the horizon I see it. Warm light, the color of Summer, spilling into the night. The gentle pulse, the rise and fall of it, breathing, bleeding, coursing. It’s not my dream, but it is, it’s enough, a small promise whispered between lovers in the dark, the idea that there is something, something else, something beyond, a place to climb to, somewhere to lay your head down, to feel the heat from, to stand in the glow of as the light fills your bones.

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<![CDATA[ Breath. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/breath/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f3 Tue, 24 Apr 2018 07:00:00 -0500

I am not a serious runner. Aside from running “The Mile” in gym class growing up (which terrified me!) I didn’t start running until Sophomore year of college, when I was living on my own for the first time. I had friends who were on the track team while we were in high school, and the idea of getting up early to run a few (read: more than one!) miles sounded awful.

However, faced with the prospect of living on my own, and wanting a way to exercise and spend some energy, I gradually started to run, especially on mornings I didn’t have class. I didn’t even have running shoes when I began: I was running in my beat-up everyday sneakers, flat soles and all. Over time, running has become part of my routine and something I look forward to and enjoy, as a chance to push myself, stay in shape, and a time to think.

I haven’t run any events or races, nor am I part of a team or club. Occasionally, I’ll convince one of my friends to go running with me, but for the most part, running is a singular activity. I sort of regret not having the shared running experience of a track team or something similar, now that I’m running on my own. Without that group knowledge, I’m working on my own to try and figure out pace, timing, what sort of qualities I want in shoes, etc.

This past week has been especially nice weather, after the Winter that won’t die, so I’ve been taking advantage of it and putting in miles in the mornings. Most of the time when I finish a run, I find that I have the stamina in my legs and muscles to keep going, but am short on breath. I thought perhaps I was doing something wrong, so I took to a running forum and asked if anyone had any suggestions for spacing my breathing.

Right away I got a response that made me chuckle. A user said: “Don't think about it. Breathing while running is natural, not mechanical, and you're making it a mechanical process. Just breathe in when you need to breathe in and exhale when you need to exhale.”

They’re right.

This is something that comes up in meditation practice, too: breathing is an automatic process. By and large, your body knows how to breath. You don’t have to regulate it, or control it. Imagine how tiring it would be if you had to manually breath in and out each time!

Often, when people first sit down to establish a meditation practice, they do these big, dramatic deep breaths, probably based on some pop-culture idea of what meditation is all about. When in fact, the point is to focus on the breath while letting it become as automatic as possible.

I recently read ‘The Mind Illuminated’, by Culadasa, hoping to expand my knowledge of meditation and enhance my own practice. He suggests intermixing sitting meditation practice with walking meditation, which I have been trying to do.

Walking meditation is largely how it sounds, in which the meditator attempts to focus not only on the breath but also the sensation of movement in your muscles and the impact of your feet making contact with the ground. Then, with your peripheral awareness, being mindful of the sensory experience happening around you as you walk. Culadasa suggests starting to walk at your regular pace, automatically, and then slowing down ever so slightly enough to become aware of the process.

Of course, the difficulty in focusing on something, without truly “thinking” about it is part of the crux of the issue with meditation. The goal is to use the breath as a mantra, and by holding your attention on that as a meditation object, you’re more able to let your passing thoughts and emotions go. If you continue down Buddhism, the goal becomes to free yourself from your desires, which are the root of all suffering according to the Buddha. But of course, isn’t that a desire in itself?

I over-think things, a lot. Generally, most of my worries come from thinking deeply about something that’s largely out of my control, or that will regulate naturally. How does a flower know when to bloom, or when to close its blossoms in the cold or at night?

Of course, it doesn’t. There’s no brain making these decisions. It just knows. Flowers have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years, from time long before man walked through poppy-covered fields. I’ve had a hard time taking care of plants and flowers in my home, as with a sporadic work schedule I would often forget about them, then overcompensate to try and “make it up”. Of course, that doesn’t work.

My girlfriend and I took a trip to a nearby plant nursery recently, where she hoped to pick up some new plants for her apartment (she has a much greener thumb than I). I was amazed by a long aisle they had of different bonsai arrangements, all different sizes and types of trees. There’s something very alluring about bonsai, little self contained worlds of trees that look like they might have been there for hundreds of years.

They had a sign suggesting to ask an employee why bonsai make bad office plants, and I did.

“Because they need a lot of attention!”, he said, “Like pets.” I asked what sort of maintenance a bonsai tree needed, was it hard work? He smiled and said no, they just need water, eventually pruning and cultivation, just like any plant.

I picked up a small bonsai ficus. A ficus is said to be the tree that the Buddha meditated under while he reached enlightenment. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to take care of it, but I won’t neglect it. Each day, after I finish sitting, I make sure the soil is still moist, everything looks good, and that it’s getting the indirect light it needs. It can take care of the rest.

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<![CDATA[ Dreams. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/dreams/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6f2 Mon, 23 Apr 2018 07:00:00 -0500

I have a long standing fascination with dreams. I think many of us do. It’s something that regardless of age instills a sense of wonder. There’s a great mystery to sleeping. Why do we do it, what happens when we’re asleep, what causes dreams, and why do we dream what we dream?

Dreams can help us solve problems, or understand something at a more direct level, a layer below thinking and cognition (or maybe above?) How often do we try to “sleep on it”? Through dreams, I have found the missing pieces that tie my narratives together, and had flashes of inspiration that became stories all to themselves.

Jeff Vandermeer talks about the power dreams had in shaping his Area X trilogy. According to him, he had a dream about descending into a tower and seeing words scrawled on a wall, and when he woke up, he wrote the first 10 pages of the novel. What sort of confluence of passing thoughts and influences combined in the broth of his subconscious to bring the story together? What exactly triggered this sort of response, which a writer like him was able to chart down and turn into a finished piece? It’s likely we’ll never know.

That aspect of writing is as compelling to me as any other: how a writer is able to bring loose bits and bobs together, random threads and images and lines of dialogue, and turn them into a singular quilt. I’ve mentioned before how one of my other favorite writers, Ben Lerner, described the process of writing fiction as the formation of a constellation, and that’s how a lot of my work goes too.

Are dreams fiction? Of course, the events of dreams don’t literally happen, but they are sensory experiences that are “true” for the dreamer. Dreams can be a product of and have an effect on our memories. Sometimes I’ll remember something, especially from what I assume is early in my life, and occasionally I’ll have a tough time figuring out if it truly “happened” or was just a dream. There are times we have dreams and wake up feeling sad, or angry, or lonely. They can even have an effect on the physical world, such as waking up in a sweat after a particularly affecting dream.

I think most interesting of all are recurring dreams. Something that you experience again and again, sometimes separated by months or years. What occurred to make you feel the same thing again? Is your brain still turning over the same thoughts, which combined in a similar enough way to give the same experience? Or maybe you had the same trigger you had before. Or maybe recurring dreams are just dreams that leave you with a better memory of the experience, and a sense of familiarity when you wake up.

I think most people have had a recurring dream before, something that sticks with you. I’ve never really kept a dream log before, but there are dreams that I wake up from with such a sense of importance and urgency that to not write them down, to not document them somehow feels like a loss. Often, I don’t know why I’m left with a memory of my dreamed experience; just the feeling of weight or importance, or that this was somehow resonant or descriptive to my human condition.

For all the importance dreams have, it’s sort of a faux pas to write about them. Or at least, to write them into fiction. The “dream sequence” is a bad trope in both film and fiction. Yet, dreams remain a huge part of our lives, whether we remember them or not. I think anything that has such an outsize role, or that leaves such a mark on our minds is of importance and should be chronicled.

I have a few memories of dreams that were specific to a point in my life, though I rarely know what tied them to that period over any other. I had a long standing dream while growing up of being on a specific swing set, on which I’m being pushed at first before I start swinging of my own accord, and I keep going higher and higher, never going over parallel to the ground, as if the top bar is raising with me. And then there’s no ground at all, it’s all swinging upward, all blue sky and white clouds, no sense of speed or weight, just air.

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<![CDATA[ Time Tracking with Records. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/tracking-with-records/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ed Wed, 21 Mar 2018 12:01:47 -0500

I recently came across this article on John Carmack’s work ethic, and how he tracks his own productivity. John Carmack, if you’re unaware, is one of the patron saints of game development, being a founding member of id software, and responsible for some of the foundational games in the FPS genre like Doom and Quake.

The story goes that Mr. Carmack has a stack of CDs in his office, which he listens to front to back on a stereo. Whenever he isn’t working, say if someone comes to ask a question or he has to go to the bathroom, he pauses the CD.

Then, given that the CDs are only being listened to if he’s working in his office, he can use them to see how much time he’s spent working. Of course, this is only one metric to track yourself by, and assumes you’ve been working at a constant pace while the music is going. And that requires discipline.

You see, to John, it’s most relevant to be honest with yourself about how hard you’ve been working, and whether you’ve been working at all. I’ve fallen into many traps before where I’ve allowed myself to feel complacent or productive, when perhaps I wasn’t writing very effectively at all.

I’ve long admired the work ethic of Haruki Murakami, who wrote his first novels at the kitchen table around midnight after his long shifts at Peter Cat, the jazz bar he owned. If you’ve ever read a Murakami novel, you’ll know how important jazz and records are to him. In fact, on his website, he has a section talking about his massive record collection.

Like Murakami, I need to listen to music if I want to be effective. There’s something about the consistency of having music in the background that keeps me focused on the task ahead.

For a long time, my primary source of music consumption came from Spotify playlists, like this painstaking effort to recreate Murakami’s jazz collection. More recently, I’ve been listing to YouTube live lo-fi hip-hop compilations in the background of doing whatever I was doing, be it writing or cooking or reading.

I still love lo-fi, and even the convenience of music streaming, but lately I’ve been moving away from streaming in favor of something a bit more concrete. I don’t have any CDs, anymore, but I do have a vinyl collection.

Vinyl has seen a slight resurgence in recent years after a steady decline since the dawn of iTunes. There’s a lot to love about wax. Of course, there’s the physicality, of owning your music, as opposed to “borrowing” a digital copy. It’s fun to collect, and to hold, to display, and of course to listen to. There’s something really magic about watching the needle bob up and down in the grooves.

For me, records have served another function, sort of my own version of John Carmack’s method. Lately, as I’ve been writing, my means of tracking my progress and holding myself accountable have been twofold. For one, on my desktop, I use Josh Avanier’s Log to monitor what I’m up to, my peak performance, and see the stats that underly my work.

Instead of launching Spotify when I sit down at my computer, which serves as only another distraction, lately I’ve been putting on a record. A side of a standard 33 RPM 12” record is roughly 22 minutes, give or take. That’s nearly one Pomodoro cycle.

I start the record from the beginning, allowing myself the time to get settled before the music starts. Then, I start the task on Log. For those 22 minutes, I write straight through, not stopping to edit. When the record hits the locked groove, I know my time is up, and I pause the task on Log before getting up, stretching, going to the bathroom, and flipping the record over (or switching albums entirely.)

While I’m writing, I can glance over at the record and get a quick gauge of how far in I am to the session.

Because of the physicality of the record, and the listening experience that it favors, I’m not going to “skip a track”, or leave it playing if I leave the room. I also don’t want to leave it spinning in the lock groove once it finishes. In this way, it forces me to stay on track, until the record comes to an end.

So far, this method of keeping my focus and logging my productive time has been very fruitful.

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<![CDATA[ Fog. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/fog/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6e8 Thu, 01 Mar 2018 07:00:00 -0600

He always walked with his hands in his pockets, holding his thumbs. This had started when he was in grade school, shivering on a cold Winter day during recess, and a girl came over to him and told him that if he held his thumbs, he would feel warmer. So he did, and lo and behold, it worked.

From then on, he always kept his hands in his pockets, and he always held his thumbs. First two fingers wrapped around the knuckle, and his fingertip just peeking up over his ring finger. He did this even when it wasn’t cold, like that day. It was 57 degrees out, hardly warm, yet it felt balmy after the weather he’d experienced the rest of the week.

It was humid, and thick mist hung in the air, like soup. He loved the rain, the sound it made against the window, the way it felt on his skin, how small and quiet it made the city seem, and yet the day after made him wonder if it was all worth it. He thought about moving, to some other city, or town even, where it rained all the time. Never have to deal with the aftermath. And yet, here he was, with a few months on his lease he reluctantly knew he would renew.

The mist had really settled in while he was in the office. After the pleasant morning, in which he'd forewent his run to make pancakes for his fiance, before catching the last bus into the city. After he got off the bus, he saw the moon in the sky, still out, unafraid, just above the office. Like the world didn't exist, or at least not the one he knew.

The fog came in like the tide, slow and unassuming. At first he thought it was just a cloud, passing the office window. Of course, it never passed. It just stood there, foreboding, as if it was the norm. As if it would never leave. He had looked down the long corridor, and saw it wash across the windows at the end, his only source of daylight, gradually blotting out the sun, until they were fully submerged.

The day ended, not by a brilliant sunset, but merely by a gradual dimming of the ambient light, until all was dark. The fog carried the streetlamps and headlights much farther than usual. The world was like one of those old tintype photographs he had seen at the museum, where the artists had brushed the emulsion onto a piece of metal before exposing it to the light. Everything bled and ran; nothing was solid.

He had packed an umbrella for the day, but in weather like this, what good would that do? There wasn't any rain to block. Just mist, water droplets in the air that pulled the heat off of you. He wasn't dressed warm enough for this, for the walk home; but after sitting for so long it was all that he knew to do.

The path home ran like all great paths did: away from civilization. Though his destination wasn't that far removed from it. He lived only far enough to make rent manageable. Normally the path was full of people; other folks like him, office drones, trying to return to their hives after a long day at work. The horde would gently thin out the farther he walked, before there was no one left on the path in front of or behind him.

That day, there was no one on the path, not even from the start of the journey. In fact, he hadn't seen a single soul since the elevator doors had closed on him. He thought that was odd, but not too odd, certainly nothing to linger on. As he walked, he started to notice the fog thinning, as if it were bound to the city itself, and to leave the city would be to free himself from the leeching grasp it held.

The lights sank back into their cages, their reach diminished by the cool late-Winter air. Looking across the lake, he could see the lighthouse, long since disused, once a midway point for the ferry that had carried people to and from his city to the one across the water. After the city folded, there was no one who wanted to go that way, and no need to ferry people across. So the lighthouse sat, waiting for someone to give it purpose. He had always wanted to live there, between the worlds.

When he was almost home, he segued to head through the park, on the edge of the water. A red neon sign advertising a deli glowed, but the store was empty except for special occasions. He crossed through a tunnel, under the road above, finding himself in front of a statue of a woman he had never seen before.

She was bronzed, standing slightly colossal, her long hair flowing down to the top of her back. She had a silhouette in that classic sort of way, the essence of a woman, but done in an art deco style, so to be lacking features. She was all women, and no woman. There was a vague etching on the concrete stand beneath her, which merely gave the initials of the artist, and said she had been created just over a hundred years ago, and rededicated recently. Where had she been until now? He imagined a warehouse full of old statues, in various states of decay, the American terracotta soldiers.

He sat down on a bench across the path from her, even though he was cold. He forgot to wipe the seat clean of water. As he sat, he looked up at her, seeing the back-light and following the path of the light back to a streetlamp, an odd sort of yellow-green. His eyes carried into the night, now clear, all stars hidden by the light of the city. He looked for the moon, but it wasn't there. The sky was empty; nothing to meet his gaze.

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<![CDATA[ Waiting. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/waiting/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6e7 Tue, 27 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0600

I have a habit of waiting. It is as if I am expecting some sort of decisive moment to come, where I am suddenly willing and able to accomplish whatever it is that I am hoping to do. Even though I consciously know this to not be the case, I find myself able to subconsciously put things off until I do something else, or until tomorrow, or worst of all, until next Monday.

There’s something satisfying about events that have a clear start and end. We’re trained to look for it in narrative structure, groomed through hearing and seeing and experiencing thousands of stories. I think it’s an innate part of the human experience, or the logging of that experience, to try and tell something from beginning to end.

As a writer, I’m particularly aware of this circumstance. In writing for the screen, we’re often taught to “get in late and leave early”, meaning to showcase only the most essential core of your narrative. However, this isn’t how life works, at least not in the moment we’re living it.

I keep a daily journal, where I write about how my day went just before I go to bed. This is sort of the reflective part of my meditation practice. It’s amazing to try and put the experiences you had in a day on paper, and naturally slotting them into a narrative framework.

However, I’ve been bad about it lately. Often a few times a week I’ll skip the entry for that day to fill in later. While both approaches lead to me having filled in pages, there’s some serious drawbacks to writing them after the fact.

For one, more is lost the farther you get from the moment. Almost always, the entries written after the fact are a shadow of what they could have been; little more than a simple “first this then this” summary of events. The entries I write the day-of are full of my thoughts and emotions on the day; the capture my sentiment and intention rather than just what I did.

This decreasing value is doubly true for the creative processes I do. Writing, especially, has a time and a place. Ideas drift to me, and I have a limited amount of time to get some form of them down before they slip off into the void. Further, there are times when I have a story come together wholesale, and for one reason or another I won’t get it on paper.

I don’t think I am a person driven by emotions, but there are times where I feel myself so swept away in some emotion or another, just thinking about an idea to write. This is a similar feeling I get when I see something particularly moving in nature, or an incredible piece of art. I know that I can use these emotions to help capture something fleeting I would otherwise miss. The fact that I’m not particularly emotional just means that these occurrences are all the more rare.

So why do I let myself skip some of these opportunities? Perhaps it’s just laziness. Motivation can be fickle, even when you have a passion for doing something.

Truth is, there’s never a best time to get things done. There might not even be a right time. You have to work at these passions, these goals. From writing to running, these skills need to be polished and honed, and continually refined. You can’t just walk away and have the same skill to return to.

For some reason or another, I am able to allow myself to put things off, as if the right moment will hit me like a lightning bolt. Unfortunately, that’s not how it goes. There is no perfect time to work. You can’t even always choose when to work. There is only now. There is only this moment.

Start today.

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<![CDATA[ Woods. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/woods/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6e6 Fri, 23 Feb 2018 11:57:08 -0600

A single bead of rain dripped down off her hood, hitting her eye behind her glasses, before rolling down the front of her shirt. She flinched in reflex, pulled her hood up more, and put her head down. It wasn’t supposed to rain for another fifty minutes, not in earnest anyways. She took her phone out of her pocket to check. Forty minutes now. Just enough time to get home, if she hurried.

She wondered what the rain would sound like hitting the side of her tent. Not that she owned a tent, yet; she still needed to decide on one to buy. But how could you know what you want in a tent without using one first?

It had come to her out of nowhere, a butterfly of a thought that drifts past you and lands on your nose, sprinkling some scales like pollen in its wake. Scales to seeds, taking root, under the current, slipping into your subconscious until it was so ubiquitous to be original.

Whether it would strengthen the soil or speed-up erosion remained to be seen.

She had reached the sudden realization she had never been camping. Her dad had taken her on a few overnight trips in camps with Indian Princesses (a psuedo-girl-scout group that was perhaps slightly less culty but certainly no less problematic) but they had stayed in cabins, only sleeping in sleeping bags on beds for the novelty of it all.

There had been the time she had spent sleeping in the car when road tripping with some of her girlfriends after high school, but that certainly didn’t count, either. After her friends had gone to sleep, she lay awake watching the stars through the sunroof.

With her mind on it now, she pulled her phone out again to look up some tent review, before another raindrop skidded off of her hood, landing on her screen and impossibly zooming into a text message from her mother. She wiped it on her jeans and put it back in her pocket.

She wasn’t sure what had compelled her to want to go camping. Although she was certain she had to get out of the city. At least for a little while. Something about being there had made her feel ill the past few months. She knew if she were able to get away, to rest away from it all, she would be able to think more clearly.

Hadn’t she been thinking more clearly before? Before what? Sometimes she thought she couldn’t quite catch her breath, but maybe that was just the rain. Maybe she was overthinking it. But maybe she was underthinking it, and actually she was really sick of the air and the people and the humidity and the noise. She sometimes worried that she wasn’t giving things enough thought. Or too much. It depended on the subject.

And anyways, wasn’t there something wrong? That was everyone’s problem, she thought: All the psychoses and neuroses of her generation boiled down to the certainty that something was wrong, but a total lack of consensus on what, exactly.

Wasn’t there something wrong with a society that offered $59.95 plastic tubs of powdered protein (which she still purchased, for after yoga classes). What exactly was the diagnosis for a place that profitably supported an “artisanal cupcake factory”?

She looked up to see a flash, an artificial lightning strike, as all the street lamps struck on in a row, remaining dark as they warmed up like the CFL bulbs in her apartment. They would lay dormant for the next few minutes, heating to an acceptable temperature for them to strike on.

She turned the corner, almost home. What was it about the city that felt so familiar and so foreign? So many of her days now were just wandering through the wet steel, bouncing between imagined errands, waiting for the night to come where she could sit in her apartment in peace without feeling shame.

A man stood with his dog, if you could call it that, just a quivering lump of fur, standing in a puddle in a garden box on the sidewalk. The dog looked up at the man, expectantly, its gaze unwavering as she passed, the man fully absorbed in his cellphone.

As she entered her building, she set one of her grocery bags down to fumble for her keys. She tried to dig them out of her purse, before a man, sort of stocky, like a former high school football player came down to exit the door. She thanked him as he opened the door, sparing her the trouble of opening it herself, but he just pushed past, not looking at her. She felt foolish for thanking him in the elevator. Who regrets thanking someone?

All her restlessness disappeared as she cooked. She moved throughout her kitchen effortlessly, each step connected to the last. She ate her beef and bell peppers at her computer desk, awkwardly pushed into a window, sitting down just as the rain started to fall. She closed her laptop, leaving it alone to ponder the Amazon reviews by itself.

She sat for a moment, not eating, not doing anything. Just staring. She flipped off the overhead light, leaving herself in the dark, and opening her curtains all the way. She returned to her food. She heard the sound of the wind through the trees. It started to come back to her, slowly at first, unfolding in front of her like the curtains being drawn on a play; the spill of city light and the sound of the rain washed over her.

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<![CDATA[ Digital Junk Food ]]> https://mnchrm.co/digital-junk-food/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6e5 Tue, 20 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0600

I think my music taste is going stale. Not necessarily that the music I’m listening to is “worse”, but I’m listening to the same things over and over. I tend to get caught in a feedback loop of just listening to the same album or artist for weeks at a time, non-stop, before becoming burned out and moving on to the Next Thing™.

Even when my primary mode of digital music consumption was through iTunes, I would browse through either album covers or the list or artists I had curated, and decide what to listen to that way. Often, it would be something I hadn’t heard in a while.

A big part of this shift is my fault. I’m choosing what to play, and when I click on an album on Spotify it’s my hand on the mouse. However, I find that when I change the medium of consumption, the way I listen to music changes too.

Presented with my smaller vinyl collection (as compared to the entire library of music streaming), I’m much more likely to jump between albums or genres, bouncing off one record into another. Very rarely do I play the same record twice.

Why is it different now?

Once, my friend Brennan described being online as living a “life of junk food without knowing what healthy food is.”

Modern apps, from music players to messaging services, and of course social media is set up around feedback loops. They’re designed for user time, ideally optimizing the amount of time you spend on their services. The more time you browse Facebook, the more opportunities they have to serve you ads.

The same goes for services like Spotify. Even if you pay to subscribe to the service, they want to maximize the time you spend using it. One of the main ways they do this is by trying to show you what you want to see. If you load up the “browse” page on Spotify (which is the default for me, anyways) you’re immediately offered music they think is similar to what you were just listening to. Then they list the playlists they’ve created based on their algorithmic knowledge of your music tastes.

This doesn’t lead for a lot of discovery of new music, at least without jumping through a few hoops. Instead, you’re served music that is or is close to music they already know you like. It’s a conveyor belt of cheeseburgers, without trying a salad.

Is this a little over exaggerated? Sure. For their credit, Spotify uses their algorithms to generate a “Discover Weekly” playlist, which offers music that’s new, based on what you listen to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with indulging in things you like. It just doesn’t lead to you getting out of your comfort zone very often.

Why would a service want to try and give you something you might not like? That risks them somehow alienating you, and having you move to a different service that’s more catered to your likes.

Another part of this comes to how we listen to music. Think about all the 10 hour audio mixes on youtube, or the “lo-fi radio” streams that are oh so popular (with me as well!) For many, music is becoming more of a background activity rather than something you do actively in and of itself.

Beyond music, this really becomes a problem when applied to other fields, like news. Think about the echo chambers that social media is. We’re still unpacking what effect social media and the sharing of news and lies had on the past election in the United States. We may never truly understand how this affects the sociology of people. How is one’s comprehension of their world affected when you only see the side that an algorithm thinks you want to?

Most of my readers are tremendously savvy in the world of technology, and can see how things like this affects them enough to actively work against it. Consider your parents, who’s view of the world might come from only a few sources.

Or consider the generation who doesn’t know a life outside the internet; it’s inherent and ubiquitous to them. The save icon is not a floppy disk; it only means save. The sound made when an iPhone takes a photo is simply a sound effect. Without knowing the deeper meaning, would you know when to walk away?

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<![CDATA[ Celeste is a Marvelous Game ]]> https://mnchrm.co/celeste-review/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6e4 Tue, 06 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0600

Greatness from small beginnings.

I love indie games. The idea that a small team, and sometimes even a single person, can tackle and create something so vast, so beautiful, is inspiring regardless of your field or disposition towards video games. Even more amazing is when the game itself turns out to be as charming and full of wonder as Celeste is. Truly, marvelous is the best word I’ve got for it; I haven’t felt this sense of wonder in a game since perhaps FEZ.

Years after indie video games hit the mainstream in the West with Braid, and even longer after the amazing Cave Story redefined the market, Celeste shows that you can still make a standout experience in indie games in 2018. In a market that is often called oversaturated to the point of being impenetrable, Celeste manages to do the impossible. As a 2D pixel-art platformer, no less!

The stroke of brilliance here comes not only from the excellent controls, tightly designed screens, beautiful soundtrack, or lovely graphics. Instead, their great innovation is marrying the gameplay + story itself (solo climbing a mountain) to both the tale of its development and to the struggle of the player against the challenging game. With this innovation, the team at Matt Makes Games has managed to make something that is far more than the sum of its parts.

Celeste got its start as a prototype in the form of a Pico-8 game. Pico-8 is a sort of all-in-one virtual game console. Basically, it’s a piece of software that allows you to create games by writing the code, creating the art, and making the music and sound effects, all inside the system. Not only that, Pico-8 has its own self-imposed limitations, to mimic the limitations imposed by the hardware on consoles like the GameBoy and NES.

In Pico-8, you’re limited to a resolution of 128x128, 16 colors, and a maximum cartridge size of 32k. There are only 2 buttons to be used, and a D-pad. This means all the games on Pico-8 have a recognizable and similar aesthetic.

I’m a fan of imposing limitations and restrictions on yourself, as I feel it often leads you to more innovative and creative work. With these limitations on the Pico-8, it leads to a heavier emphasize on clarity, on using simple game mechanics that can be understood in a second but take the duration of the game to master.

Celeste is a masterclass in this. Most of the game (both the full and Pico-8 versions) is a series of self-contained screens, which function as their own challenges. Designer Matt Thorson said in the Celeste Reddit AMA that he designed the screens that were simple to understand to be difficult to execute, and the screens that are difficult to understand to be simpler to execute.

This clarity in design is essential to Celeste, and a big part of what makes it both so accessible and so challenging. Redheaded main character Madeline stands out strongly against the blue mountain, as do strawberries, the main collectible you can collect for an added challenge. There are stages in which the strawberry is in plain sight, and the challenge lies in finding out how to collect it safely, and other stages in which the collection is easy after finding the straw better hidden.

Like most platforms, the main mechanics at play are movement and a jump, but that’s not all Madeline has in her arsenal. Her defining tool is the dash, which can be used to launch her in one of eight directions and to re-aim her after a leap. In addition to this, she can also wall-jump like Mario or Meatboy, or grab onto walls to hang and climb.

All of these piece together to form a comprehensive movement set that afford a range of ways to interact with the environment, and to accomplish the challenges presented to you. I’m still finding many new ways to piece these moves together. It was only after watching my girlfriend play the first few levels that I realized you could use the dash before the jump, to give your leaps more momentum otherwise limited to fast-moving platforms.

Beyond even her normal moves, each area of the game (ass accessed by the lovely low-poly world screen) has its own mechanic to remix your moves. The first area after the tutorial has space-colored blocks, which can be dashed through and grabbed onto. All of these pieces come together to make each area feel unique and well thought-out, without taking you too far away from the action.

hese mechanics are contained in a highly polished and beautiful package, on par with any piss-bottling solo developer’s passion project (at a fraction of the dev time!) The love and care put into all the sprites, the map screen, the satisfying chimes and jingles when you complete a stage or collect a strawberry can be felt and experienced.

The score by Lena Raine is one of the finest I’ve heard in a game. Seriously. It goes from chiptune, to electronic, to breakbeat, and everywhere in between. It both pulls you into the task at hand, and draws you beyond the screen to wonder about what lies ahead. It’s joined my roster along with scores like the ones from FEZ and Sword & Sworcery as something I think I’ll be listening to for a long time. I’m listening to it right now.

Celeste is a game that gets stuck in your head. There are mysteries and moments of intrigue and beauty. There’s intense challenges, but only as far as you want to push yourself. If you just want to play the game, but aren’t able to execute what it asks, or don’t want the stress, they’ve graciously included an "assist mode", which is handled so thoughtfully and respectfully I’m not sure anyone else could do it better.

Good that it’s there, too: this game is hard. Not crushingly so, but if you choose to go for 100% completion, the game will make you work for it. Some of the strawberries seem to be within your reach but require patience and time. I quickly had to abandon my “not skipping anything” strategy to opt to come back again and again. In addition to the main game, there are side levels that exist to test your mastery of the mechanics.

I had a pretty good suspicion this game would be good. I had played the Pico-8 version and loved it, and watched the game blossom via the social media of the team at Matt Makes Games bring it to fruition. What I didn’t expect was how good. Or how well they would leverage each piece of the puzzle to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

Take the story for example. By now, most Mario games forgo this convention, unable to find a compelling reason to go through the gauntlet of Bowser’s design other than to rescue the princess. I would generally consider myself a game-purist; game design and mechanics above all else. Stories are just window dressing.

How good it feels to be wrong.

Somehow, the team infused a platformer with a story that not only compliments the game play, but resonates beyond the game. It has stakes, twist, real-world complications, and helps you empathize with Madeline. I’ll leave out most narrative details, but suffice to say I think it is supremely well done.

At the end of the day, I don’t often remember the specifics of games. I don’t know how many screens I’ll remember from Celeste a few years from now. I remember the feeling, how it feels to play a game, to hear the music, to complete the challenges presented. Most of all, I remember the feeling it brings up inside me, be it a sense of cleverness, or of power, or sadness, or fun. Celeste has all these things.

By stripping down to the essentials, Celeste manages to fill the gaps in with mystery and wonder. There are no loading screens listing the buttons. There is only you and the challenge, the boundaries between you and the game as thin as possible. Somehow I found myself more immersed in a pixel art platformer than even the fanciest first person game AAA can muster.

A few years from now, I won’t remember collecting strawberry #24, but I will remember birds on a balcony, shooting apart in a starburst, in front of a satellite dish.

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<![CDATA[ Forgetting & Place ]]> https://mnchrm.co/forgetting-and-place/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6de Thu, 04 Jan 2018 07:00:00 -0600

In an interview with the Paris Review in 2007, Haruki Murakami said memory was “The most important asset of human beings.” Continuing, he said his own memory was “like a chest of drawers when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.”

I think we all have memories we store, some dear to us, which we can recall with vivid clarity at the slightest hint, and others more subdued, where even a conscious effort to remember might not bring forth the details you’re looking for.

On the first day of this year, I went with my girlfriend to watch one of my favorite movies in the theater, “Spirited Away”. In it, a girl named Chihiro is forced to work at a bathhouse for spirits in order to try and save her parents. The bathhouse is run by a witch named Yubaba, who controls people by capturing their names. Once you’ve forgotten your real name, you chances of escape are slim.

In a run-in with Yubaba’s sister, Zeniba, she tells Chihiro that “Once you do something, you never forget it. Even if you can’t remember”. What about remembering things that didn’t happen, at least not as you remember them?

There are a lot of triggers for memory. Proust famously talks about the use of senses in recollection, like taste and smell. For him, having a Madeleine with tea immediately opened the floodgates to the memories of his Aunt.

Sometimes, I think I have a similar memory to Murakami. I can recall things that others might view as banal and mundane, and try to render them with enough clarity to fill in the gaps, making it something memorable for the readers. This, I think, is what it means to be a writer.

In a way, I’m also performing the same trick on myself. I frequently recall moments that leave me wondering if they were a dream or something unremembered from reality. Other times, I remember something and wonder what, if anything, was significant about it, or what caused that to surface.

Through my mindfulness and meditation practices, my chest of drawers is only growing even faster. As I better learn my own process and mind, I find this sense of awareness wash over me with increasing frequency.

I find a lot of these details are centered around places, however small, however created or discovered. For the story Moth, I drew on only the idea of a small door, bordering an enclosed body of water, connecting to the lake I live near. The door can only be seen from the highway, or at specific angles, and is hidden generally from view. Instead of learning what it was for, as my curious mind wanted, I allowed it to fill in the gaps and draw a narrative in and around the lines.

There are times when I specifically “save” a location in my mind, based on the potential I think is there for narrative. Other times, an image or view is brought forth, and I try and see how that can be incorporated. I think I save places, lines, and even words, as much as I save memories.

I am a believer in the idea that making your own tools leads to greater strides in your personal development. After all, the more control you have over a project, the better a reflection it will be of yourself and your abilities. (Of course, there are plenty of great reasons for collaboration, and many projects that can only be accomplished as such, regardless of discipline.) And writing is in a way the purest form of that idea.

Not only are you responsible for the tools and memories at your disposal to draw from, it’s up to you to shape these ideas and dreams into something tangible. The best stories become memories for both the writer and the reader. Even if you haven’t dreamed it yet.

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<![CDATA[ Zoo. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/zoo/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d9 Thu, 14 Dec 2017 07:00:00 -0600

One cold Winter morning, I stood waiting for the bus. The Sun was low in the sky, having only just risen a half hour ago, and would set only a few hours from now. Stripes of clouds drifted in the air, stretching but never losing their shape. I was bundled up, but still felt the cold slip under the cuffs of my pants around my ankles and the chill on my back.

The bus was coming, but I had missed the previous one, and now would have to wait for 10 minutes. For almost an hour, there’s a near endless supply of buses at this stop, to take the morning commute into work. After that window passes, the stream slows to a trickle, and in the slowest moments, a bus would only come a few times an hour. I had missed the window, but I was still headed into work.

The corner where I caught the bus stood adjacent to the zoo, which has been in operation for over a hundred years. Within the fences you could see everything from bears and lions, otters and penguins, even giraffes. On an average weekday morning, you might only find a loose smattering of people wandering the grounds. The animals must have outnumbered the humans more than 2:1.

Just on my side of the fence (the other side, obscured through layers and layers of bushes, was the wolf exhibit) sat a large sycamore tree, of which a branch extended over the fence bars. At the base of the tree was a dirt circle, and resting on the dirt was about half a loaf of bread. It looked like it had been there for a while, gently picked away by various park animals that still roamed the city.

Another woman walked up to the stop, and leaned against the opposite wall of the shelter from me. I saw a flash of movement, and instinctively my head tracked it and I found myself looking at the fence once more. From the brush a flock of birds had flown and swarmed around the bread, pulling it apart in pieces, some birds not even stopping to land. This went on for a few heartbeats, like watching piranhas tear apart a body in a James Bond film, before all the birds at once flew back through the bars, to disappear into the green.

I stared at the bread, waiting for it to happen again. And sure enough, it did, the birds pouring synchronously through the branches and steel and attacking the bread mercilessly. They seemed to act as one unit, a murmuration, flitting around the bread and back into the zoo.

Did they see the other animals with pity, with disgust? Did they have to think about flying around the bars, or did they simply act? Of course, this is all nature for the birds. They just fly. They don’t have to ponder their circumstance, even if they have the capacity to.

The bus pulled up minutes later, and I boarded after the woman, finding a seat near the window. The birds weren’t around the bread anymore, perhaps back into the bush they came from. The bus took me towards the city, around past the lake, and further from the sycamore and the bread. As I looked out over the lake, I saw a flock of birds, flying up past the bus, out over the water, to pastures unknown.

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<![CDATA[ Moments: An Experiment ]]> https://mnchrm.co/moments/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d8 Tue, 12 Dec 2017 07:00:00 -0600

There are so many activities we do every day that are so integrated into our daily lives to the point of automation. We don’t often think about how often we sit down, we drink a glass of water, open a door, or tie our shoes. We perform these actions as if unconsciously.

Of course, there is a good reason for this, mostly. If you had to be aware of every time you blinked, or took a breath, you’d go crazy. The brain isn’t prepared to handle those sorts of interactions all the time, so it’s relegated to our unthinking process.

As a side affect of this, we start to relegate more and more tasks to this category. As this happens, more of the day slips into unconsciousness, making it easy for you to lose your frame of reference on the day. If half the tasks you perform are on autopilot, how does this affect the other half?

In meditation, there’s often a call to awareness for other parts of life, through walking meditation, or in observing small moments. I have found that this helps to reframe my perspective on the value of a moment, and can be a good way of adding awareness between meditation sessions.

So my proposal is this: pick one activity to work through consciously each day, and try it for a week. One common one is the act of opening a door and passing through. In this case, you just focus your attention on the task at hand when you move to grab a door handle, the feeling of opening it, the change in temperature and pressure when you pass through. As well as the sensory change, if the sounds and smells and sights change when you walk through.

Think of it like a mini-mantra to add into your daily life, through something mundane.

Another you could do is tying your shoes. Many people seem to never tie or untie their shoes, simply electing to leave them loosely tied enough to slip on and off when needed. Others minimize the times they take their shoes off at all. In Japan, you remove your shoes before stepping up onto the floor of a home, and many times you’re inside.

Perhaps try and take your shoes off any time you’re home, and put them on any time you need to leave. When you do this, go through the process of tying and untying your shoes. By calling attention to this action, you’ll become more aware of it, and maybe come to value the transition.

Any transition could be used for this purpose. The point is to add awareness to an activity that otherwise would be performed with a different part of your brain. This addition of awareness is largely the goal of any meditative practice, and can have pleasant affects on all aspects of your life.

If you miss one, don’t be hard on yourself. This isn’t a cumulative practice, which is one of its greatest benefits. Simply remind yourself to check the next one. After all, the whole point is to become more aware, and you shouldn’t expect that to happen overnight. Soon, you’ll get better and better at it, maybe keeping track of all of them in a single day.

So pick something to think about, and for the next week, give it a shot. See how it makes you feel at the end of the first day, and the third day, and the end of the week. I’ll be doing the same, for any doors I open. Of course, I recommend doing some sort of reflection on this, preferably in writing. If you write a single note each day, on how it went and how you feel, you’ll be better for it.

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<![CDATA[ Cranes. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/cranes/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d7 Thu, 07 Dec 2017 07:00:00 -0600

When you live in the city for so long, you see a lot of cranes. That’s natural. Buildings come, buildings go. Just like people. One day they’re here, & the next they’ve moved on. No big deal. Because cranes are used for both construction or destruction, you can’t tell at a glance whether they signal growth or decay. Sometimes they’re both. It’s a symbol without a meaning. They stick up like monoliths or tombstones, as still as the flag on the moon, silently marking where something will start or end.

From the top of any crane in the city, you can see another. Practically from every base, too, but certainly from every top. They have to be; the tech works best with line-of-sight.

You ever notice how so many cranes are identical? There’s a reason for that too: they’re just shuffled around the city. Not that the Alderman expects people to go around counting cranes — I mean, who does? — but just as an added precaution. It doesn’t take much these days for people to assume conspiracy, & get out the red yarn & tinfoil hats.

Though, I guess that’s probably an accurate description, if you didn’t know the details. You’re not supposed to.

It started as a side-project, a test. Each city has a certain number of cranes always around. A slightly smaller number of these are always working. That’s just how business goes. Uptown one day, West side on the next, it doesn’t matter.

Story goes, some start-up guy pitched his idea in one of those closed-door meetings. He offered to build a network, a direct line, for the powerful of the city. Long had they wanted such a connection, but they couldn’t go around putting antennas & satellite dishes all over the place without raising suspicion. Why would he need to? A simple modification to the existing network of cranes would allow this sort of connection, all for little added cost.

Of course, that’s not what it was for. Sure, it did that too, but in actuality it was simply a side-project of a side-project.

No, he wasn’t building a network. He was building a computer. One that would tie into every system & resource the city had to offer. Each node in the chain added to it’s potential. Once it was fully operational, he could leverage it against the politicians, or against the city itself. To be in control of the entire city network is power like you can’t imagine.

Or maybe he’d do nothing at all, just let his strings pull from behind the scenes, never revealing the trick, a sleeping giant ready to lay waste.

Only time would tell. But for now, I simply ascended up the stairs, a man on a wire, & placed the building blocks.

Someday, the new construction would be complete.

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<![CDATA[ Wanderer ]]> https://mnchrm.co/wanderer/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d6 Tue, 05 Dec 2017 07:00:00 -0600

I love walking. I savor walks. I look forward to them like a normal person looks forward to dessert. I’d be far from the first person to tell you that taking walks is an excellent way to clear mental blocks. That it's a great way to refresh yourself, and good for you. But it’s not about being first. Especially when walking somewhere.

My family has long looked to walks as a bonding activity, as something to do after a meal. Since before I was born, my family has always had a dog, and my folks would walk them three times a day. They were like mail carriers: they’d stop for nothing. I would go with them in my stroller, then of my own volition. Even without a dog of my own, I take walks to ground myself.

I often find myself drawn to the street, usually after a long period of sitting, or heavy screen use. It calls out to me. I grab a few essentials and jog down the back stairs of my apartment building, walking across the small roof; before spilling out onto the alley.

It’s quiet here. Occasionally cars drive by, usually unknown neighbors of mine, heading home. In rare situations a ride-sharing driver will head through here as if it’s an unmarked road.

Immediately the alley presents a problem: there’s no way forward. Only left or right. I either head towards the nearby college, where there’s people, a grocery store, cafes. Or the other way, between train stops, with a quiet park where people bring their dogs to run. I choose the park.

That’s the only choice I’ll make on this walk; from here on out, I’m going where my feet take me. I'm restless, almost unsteady. It seems like if my feet stopped moving I'd fall over. So I don’t let them. I walk with a constant pace.

It is about four in the afternoon. Being Winter, it’s nearly dark. The streetlights have come on. Still, to the West, deep maroon clouds contrast against the pale blue sky. Scratches in the veil from an unseen hand.

I walk as if pulled along a wire. I’m free to look at my surroundings, take it all in. Once I get away from the larger streets, it’s quiet. The few people I pass make no noise. It’s as if everyone is in unspoken agreement not to violate the stillness. To speak would shatter the illusion.

I continue on, but before I get to the park, my feet pull me across the street, South, away from where I set out to go. It’s as good a direction as any. Right now is not about where I’m going, or how I get there; it’s only about the act of walking.

In 19th Century Paris, there was a type of person referred to for their wandering: the Flâneur. To Walter Benjamin, who brought her under our inspection as a philosophical fixture, she was more than a saunterer. She was an inquisitor, a conscientious objector to the city and it’s trappings. The Flâneur was an individual in observation of Paris at the start of the capitalist society we now inhabit. With the economic shift, the Flâneur driven all but to extinction.

I walk on. The train rattles above. For me, walking is like using a slow-cooker. It takes all my vague memories, breaks them all down into their basest parts, and combines them to a cohesive stew. It was on this walk I started pulling together this piece.

Of course, I lose some things on the way; especially if like me you don’t stop to take notes, or record your thoughts. But what remains is of far more value than anything lost to the atmosphere. Ideas percolate, getting sifted through my surroundings.

As I looped back, I stopped at a grocery store, and bought a piece of salmon to make for dinner. By this point, I had been walking for over an hour. I put the fish in my bag, and went back outside. By now, night had fallen. I walked up the row of stopped cars, waiting for the light to change. High above me, the Moon is light gold as if reflecting the streetlights, diffused through the thin layer of clouds.

I stopped to look at it. The crowd appears around me. I sit like the salmon must have in the middle of the stream, letting the waters flow about my waist. Cars inch on towards the lake. I should head home to cook this. No longer am I a wanderer; now I am only a member of the crowd. Perhaps sometime soon, I can wander these streets again.

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<![CDATA[ Interview with Devine Lu Linvega ]]> https://mnchrm.co/interview-with-devine/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d2 Sun, 12 Nov 2017 07:00:00 -0600

What is your name? What do you do?

My name is Devine Lu Linvega, and I do all the things.

How’s New Zealand been so far? Glad to be settling in?

New Zealand has been amazing so far. I was told, and can now confirm, that NZ is a hub of DIY culture, where people will have a natural tendency to make their own houses, boats, things and tools - where the instinct will be to build, instead of to buy.

I’ve referred to you before as a multi-disciplinary artist. Do you think this title is fitting?

I think so. Yet, I have a sense that I could only ever present myself in such a way in some damp church basement, in deep shame. "Hello, I'm a multi-disciplinary artist", I would say, my homologues clapping at my confessing and welcome me as one of their own; as multi-disciplinary comes invariably with "..and master of none".

When did you start to focus on creative output? What made you want to?

It was fall, all my friends were going back to school, and I was at home. It appeared at the time that I was stuck, that on that day when I decided to not return to school I forfeited my dreams of making video games, of traveling, or becoming a musician. I wrote in a spreadsheet the date and that it had been spent a waste. The next day, again. The third day, again, and after a few days or weeks, of alternating between playing video games and recording my inactivity, I finally logged a handful of hours spent writing music. Then a few more designing a Flash website a couple of days later, then came streaks of 3, or 4, subsequent days. After a while, I had enough at stake, or to loose, from breaking a streak that I woke up and immediately got to work -- to work on doing all the things, and to finance my dreams of travel.

What disciplines did you start with, creatively? How did you add on to that, or how did you shift to other mediums?

At first, I stumbled unto photo manipulation. From DeviantArt, to Raster and to Depthcore, I was moving from working with photos, to drawing; toward modeling. While I enjoyed visual art, its application didn't excite me nearly as did music writing. Days, and weeks, vanished. I could go on just synthesizing sounds and tracks, and seldom move at all for long periods. But sounds eventually paled, to the intensity of the power that came with programming. It was like discovering a new dimension, intractability. I was building websites, it mattered not that had a topic, I would go on an making websites about it. Like little shrines dedicated to the praise of their own envelopes. They were promptly built, then they were forgotten. Because, nothing could rival with my newly found passion into procedural art. Interactive graphics, and games! Which, in turn, vanished in the longest shadow of all shadows, generative music. But then-

You have a set of very disparate knowledge and interests. How does that knowledge complement itself? How does it work together?

It might look disparate from the outside, but I could trace each like you would a genealogy tree. I've always chosen my battles carefully, and have tried to stay at an arm's length of anything I love, if only to admire it whole. There are things I do not touch, subjective topics like politics and religion. I tend to learn only the thing I need to the accomplishment of a task, nothing more. I don't have anything one would call "general interests".

Does having such a wide pool to draw from make you more productive?

Being independent streamlines the output process as there are no dialog involved with others than myself. But again, there are no dialog involved with others than myself. So, no. It's only different.

How do you approach learning and research? Are you a note-taker, or prefer to merely ingest information?

I learn only what I need to solve any one task.

You’ve written about your workflow and how you find it best to do one thing at a time. How are you able to focus yourself on one task?

I go to bed choosing one thing to accomplish for the next day, I wake up to tackle this single task. I tend to work only in the morning, get everything done before lunch. The afternoons, I spend mostly reading and learning things to help me solve the next days.

How did Hundred Rabbits studio form? What drew you and Rekka together?

Before HR, we had Drownspire - a small studio through which we released projects issued from our joint forces. With HR, it was going to be more than that, it's a lifestyle experiment. It's a vessel through which we can release collaborative works, but most of all, it's the actual application of the values that we promoted on land.

When did you and Rekka make the decision to live aboard a sailboat? How did you come to that conclusion?

We lived in Japan, and at the time, it presented itself as the only option that we had. We wanted to keep traveling, we wanted to eat better, spend more time outdoors - Or, if only to be, once more, in a position to feel the exhilaration of the early strides of learning something new.

What have you learned about that life that you wished you knew going into it? Did you have any misconceptions about what it would entail?

Nothing. Learning from doing has a much stronger hold onto me, than reading about it. I knew nothing about the world when I started, the further I go, the more I feel like I knew nothing, so I must keep going.

You’ve said you spend a lot of time when not working aboard the boat reading, listening to podcasts and lectures, etc. What are five books you think everyone should read?

  • Le Città Invisibili, Italo Calvino. 1972 : Because imagination is the most important thing.
  • Blumroch l'admirable, Louis Pauwels. 1976 : Because creativity is the second most important thing.
  • Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges. 1941 : Because there is always another angle to a problem.
  • Field Manual 21: Survival : Because you don't have to live in society if you don't want to.
  • No.44, Mark Twain. 1916 : Because we all die alone, without souls, and nothing matters.

Living with such a limited connection to the internet at times is an unusual choice for someone who is among other things a software and web developer. Has this had the impact you expected it to in terms of your output?

Haha, okay. I admit it, I fucked up. I thought internet was an "everywhere thing". It's not. But it has changed the way I program, it has forced me to only used open-sourced software that I can repair on my own, it has forced me to use tools that don't try to call home, that do not have external libraries or minified dependencies. It has taught me not to depend on Apple products, because there is nothing quite like your navigation tool locking itself up, in the middle of the ocean, until it has successfully updated itself.

What is Merveilles? How did this group form?

Merveilles is a genre I suppose, more than a group. Maybe it's a movement, I'm not sure. It might be that we all grew up with similar influences, yet it might not. Sometimes I think it's a style of going about art, but again, it also applies to musicians and programmers. But when we see each other, we know.

A lot of your work has been with the creation of ecosystems, with Nataniev, Oscean, Horaire, and the accompanying tools like Marabu, Ronin, and Left. What draws you to this sort of work?

It's all kinds of inevitable. I'm so difficult. My friction threshold is very low. I apply Mari Kondo's Method to software, if a tool does not make my insides fuzzy, my head feel light and/or completely throw me into revery, I trash it, and I make a new one.

I know you’ve been looking at expanding the platform for Nataniev, and making it more public. Where do you see this leading?

I want to make a phone OS. Because I hate my iPhone, and there is no way in hell that I will use an Android phone again.

In a way, Verreciel is another sort of ecosystem. However, this project connects to your other work by another one of your major themes, linguistics. What about linguistics and the study of communication interests you?

There is two things I find flagrant in a person, you can automatically tell wether something has traveled or not, as you can tell if someone speaks a single language or not. It's shown in compassion, outlook and conversation. It would be pointless to paint the world around me with apps and games, if it was to be used by monolingual nationalists. I'm hoping that I can inspire someone to be less complacent about the cards they were dealt, and grow curious enough to look elsewhere and try other things - what better way than an imaginary world with a made-up language.

How did this interest lead to the development of Lietal?

Natural languages are so flawed, it reveals things of cognition that I foolishly wanted to suppress. Lietal is one of these experiments where you build a tool to circumvent an issue, only to realize that your tool is imbued with the same problems - But in the process, you understand the problems better. Lietal lives in my work now, it's one of the projects I am most proud of, and one I can always turn to, to remind me of this.

Language shows something interesting about the culture it stems from, revealing something of the philosophy it was devised from. What sort of focus is conveyed through Lietal?

I think it's the amongst the truer forms of who I am. It's equally, or more, revealing of myself than the body of work I have built in music and illustration.

Verreciel is very different from a lot of other space-faring games. It’s very meditative and atmospheric. How does this relate to your current living situation? Do you draw parallels between your life on the boat and the player in their spaceship?

Absolutely. I think Verreciel is what I thought sailing was going to be like, and I was not too far off.

Lately, you’ve been working a lot on Rotonde, a peer-to-peer social media platform. Where does the idea for Rotonde come from?

It comes from my want to encourage people to log their creative output. In a format that can be parsed and used in the optimization toward one's goals. It also aligns with my dreams of a decentralized internet, without gatekeepers. Whenever I use Twitter, I am reminded that the cost of using platforms that encourage toxic behaviors has grown too high.

What is your goal with Rotonde? How has seeing the response from the community changed the initial direction?

I think it's more the community's goals at this points. We don't have focus/hours output logs, but I'm hoping someone will step up and implement it. I'm hopeful, and will wait and see.

Like a language, a social media platform creates its own sense of culture based on how it’s developed. Much has been made of Rotonde’s more honest nature, without metrics for validation or distraction. What lead the design in this direction?

If you could re-design twitter, I'm sure you would get rid of popularity metrics too. Anything that gets in the way of getting that one task a day, should be removed. The platform will work for us, and not us for it.

How did your interest in cultivating a community like Merveilles grow into making a project like Rotonde? Is this an expansion of that network?

It is. Would it be megalomaniac to say that Merveilles has infinite potential and through tools like Horaire, it can reach it? That looking at Josh making Horaire available to everyone has done a lot of good, or Vi's or Deuveir's instances of Oscean has inspired others to build frameworks around themselves to cull for the optimal outputs. Maybe Merveilles are better described as Augmented Artists, or Tool-Assisted Developers.

A lot of the people I've talked to lately talk about learning things to solve specific problems or accomplish a single task. Does your work follow this structure too?

It's either you shape your goals around a tool, or shape your tools around your goal. It's two valid approaches, the difference is either initial friction, or friction during the remaining 10% of the project. I personally prefer to struggle at first, and lighten the friction load as my focus trickle down the last remaining tasks of a project. Nothing is worst to me than fighting the tool at the end of a project.

Where do you see Rotonde progressing to?

To mobiles.

What’s next for you and Hundred Rabbits?

Tokyo, Japan

What are your hobbies outside of creative work?

Wha-

What are your biggest inspirations?

Alan Watts & Imperial Boy.

What is your dream?

Sailing to Japan, building a phone and its OS.

Where can people find your work?

XXIIVV (When it allows itself to be not down)

Rotonde: dat://2f21e3c122ef0f2555d3a99497710cd875c7b0383f998a2d37c02c042d598485/

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<![CDATA[ Greenhouse. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/greenhouse-part-one/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6d1 Thu, 09 Nov 2017 07:00:00 -0600

The evergreens here were taller than those back home, she thought. They stretched up towards the sky, becoming long & spindly by the tree tops, swaying only gently in the breeze. She wondered how they managed to stay so strong, being as slight as they were. The fog spilled around them like molasses poured onto a plate. It swirled around her, & she drew her hand through it as if testing the water. She brought her hand up to her face the the fog dripped off of it, spiraling down as it tumbled back into the stream.

The trees went on for gods knows how long, longer than anyone had the patience & ability to survey. The deeper you went, the darker & more dangerous the wood was. Still, that didn’t stop a few brave & stupid souls from setting up shop. Often times these were criminals, vagabonds, those that didn’t fit into society. It was those sorts of men she would often track into these woods, into the lion’s den, before returning to the walled city with them or their corpse in tow.

There was no contract today, only whispers. She wondered if she was wasting her time. Still, she waded deeper into the dark. She placed her hand on the bark of one as she passed, & found sap on her hand. Her nose crinkled, her lip curled. She wanted a drink, to feel the warmth of a fire.

The only break in the woods were the ridges that rose up from & out of the Earth. These jagged gashes were like stone tents, rough & unhewn. One side almost always carried the grass up from the forest floor, while the barer side was damp & held sparse moss.

She didn’t know what she was looking for, only that she would know when she saw it. It was the kind of structure you would almost miss if you weren’t looking for it. Especially because the surrounding scenery was all the more beautiful. This was its danger. Once you started in on the woods, there was some sort of pull drawing you to find its core.

Buried amidst the ridges & fog, a small building stood.

It was shaped like a small house, rectangular in base, with a roof just barely rising to a point. It was mostly made of glass, but lacking any of the irregularities she was used to seeing. It was like a mirage, both invisible & iridescent in the dark woods. Even given the glass walls, it’s interior was hidden behind a layer of steam.

The door didn’t seem to have a lock on it, but it wouldn’t budge. She slipped the blade of her knife in the seam between the door & the frame, & worked it between the ribs. A deep sigh came from the building, & steam met her hands before dissipating into the sky. It was warm enough to make her recoil, but not scalding. She removed her knife & tried the door once more.

It opened slowly, its hinges rusted out from the humidity, & scraping against the dirt floor. As she stepped inside, she felt the change in air like wading into a pool, warm & embracing. She was greeted by a sweet aroma, almost too sweet, like fermenting crops on a freshly manured field. It was a greenhouse, like they kept in the city. But why build one out here, where the ground is so fertile?

A long row stretched back the entire length of the building, flanked on both sides by rows of big bushes. They all seemed to be the same plant, one she had never seen before, like grand peonies, as white as snow. She leaned in to smell one. An ant crawled across the flower, pausing as if to look at her, before returning to its work. Had it found its way in as she had, or had she invaded its home?

Other than the two rows of bushes, the greenhouse was empty. The row went to another glass wall, & abruptly ended. She paced the path carved in the center, worn in by an unknown hand. She tried to imagine the greenhouse like a river stream, eroded away, shaped naturally but leaving a trace. She checked the base of the plants, looking for a way forward, not finding even a seam between the fauna.

She turned her attention to the dirt. With her boot, she started to poke through the ground for anything that might lead her. Any sense of guidance. She made it down the row, & nearly tripping into the bushes, caught her toe on something metallic in the ground. She crouched down to see what it was.

A ring, just smaller than her palm, like the missing link in a giant’s chainmail. Once more, she pulled her knife from the sheath at her waist, slid it into the dirt, & wedged the ring free. Luckily, this gave way much easier. It was stuck into the ground at one point, & lifting revealed a square door, about two feet across. Notches cut into the wall created a sort of ladder down. Dirt spilled into the black hole, & a different aroma greeted her. This time, she smelled something like a clean mountain stream. She could swear she smelled the hint of oranges.

The blackness gazed up at her, so dark it seemed like not a space at all, merely a nothing, a void in the Earth. She might have torch somewhere in her pack, she thought. She knew she should go back to the town, but had come so far… & now she had begun to be curious.

She realized that she did have a torch, but without any place to hold it while descending the ladder, left it to her bag. Lucky for her, the descent grew darker & darker, until it could get no darker, & beyond that started to get more light again. This gave her hope. It meant at least that this path lead somewhere.

With the light, came sound.

As she got lower & lower in the pit, (though, who could really be sure?) she was met with a rushing sound, gently growing. It sounded like a stampede, heard through the ground, a few miles away.

She went to take the next step down, before her foot caught only air. A few pebbles fell, & splashed. She looked down. The tunnel that had been her passage gave way to a larger cavern area, of which she could only see a small still pool directly beneath her. Another fork in the road. She could drop, or come back up. If she pressed on, there would be no getting back, at least not through here.

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<![CDATA[ On Passions & Practice ]]> https://mnchrm.co/on-passions-practice/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ce Thu, 02 Nov 2017 07:00:00 -0500

I have a wide range of interests. A quick perusal through this website should tell you as much. I’ve got writing, photography, video, some small design elements, code, and that’s just limited to the confines of this digital nook in the wall. My interests go even further beyond that, into music, video games, biking, reading, sports, language, meditation, cooking, studying (is that a hobby?) Sometimes it’s hard to know where to focus your time and energy.

I’ve written before about the problems in specialization If you focus all your attentive hours into only a small subset of your interests, you’ll see your abilities in other areas diminish. I’m certainly no proponent of the “10,000 hours” plan, but I think a concentrated regular practice is important for most progress in a given discipline. After all, they’re not referred to as disciplines because to be lazy about them.

In general, my philosophy for focus is similar to Brennan Letkeman’s, as outlined in his interview: do what you want to do, when you want to do it. That’s worked for me so far, but sometime you need to force yourself to work on an area in a more concentrated manor. I’m reminded of a quote by Neil Gaiman, where he says “If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.” I tend to agree. (and even then my poetry isn’t any good)

However, I append one small rule onto this: Only do one thing at a time. I don’t listen to music while I bike. I don’t write while I’m playing video games. I do one thing, and then I stop it and move on. If you’ve having trouble with this, I have found Josh’s Log system to be a motivator to stay on task, at least while on my computer.

I’ve read a lot of books on the process of learning and practice, and I’m curious to try and execute on these philosophies more. However, it’s difficult to try and find what to apply these to. I’m going to think about this more, and expand on my thoughts in another post soon.

For now though, I think it’s important to find what you’re passionate about, across disciplines, and focus time and energy into improving your abilities at them. You never know what could become useful, and even skills that will never directly affect your life will teach you valuable skills, even just about how best to teach yourself. That’s the most important skill of all.

It’s okay to do something that isn’t your prime goal, and to work towards things that are frivolous. Do everything. Practice anything that interests you. The most interesting stuff is when people combine things in ways no one else can. What’s the point otherwise?

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<![CDATA[ Drone. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/drone/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6cd Thu, 26 Oct 2017 07:00:00 -0500

It started innocuously enough, as most of my projects did. A friend of mine crashed their drone into the lake, presumed dead. Just a small consumer model, all stock. Once we fished it out, water had run to the motherboard, shorted everything. He said it was done, and that I could have it.

It sat on my workshop table for a few days, while I looked up components for it in-between classes. The wonder of the internet is being able to buy the same parts direct from the factory. It was an easy fix. Swapped the brain for a faster one, the rotors for lighter ones, and the motors for stronger ones. All for a fraction of the cost he’d sunk into it before sinking it to the depths. I upgraded it, all said and done.

But what to do with it?

After a few trial runs, especially against the increasingly difficult weather, I felt secure enough to let it go to work on its own. It just needed a job. I gave it a nest, atop my apartment building, which I’d been slowly crafting into my hideaway for the past few years. I hid its roost behind a cluster of cables on the other side of some sort of exhaust vent. It had a wireless charger, while being protected enough from the wind to not blow over.

Once back in my apartment, I calibrated the GPS and launch height from a small app on my computer, always running, and let it get to work.

The program was simple. Each night, right at sundown, it would take flight. It patrolled a few blocks around my neighborhood, checking in on other projects I had running quietly in the city streets, taking some photos and videos, wind measurements, weather assessment etc., all while live-streaming back to a private feed online.

I didn’t have a plan for the data, not at first. I just liked looking. It made its rounds, took its notes, and came home. A good little worker bee. I’d check the feed occasionally, watching the city sleep. A flicker of lights, a gentle drift on the wind, and my ghost was away. A slow hum that sang out in the city night.

Nothing but the sound of its rotors. An apparition. It’s good to be invisible, but it’s best to be imperceptible.

Soon however, the data became less regular. A ghost in the recordings. I had to convince myself I was actually seeing something, not just imagining it. Something unusual, not ominous, just at the edge of my perception.

It started with a sound. A drone, not unlike the sound generated by the rotors. I must’ve taken the damn thing apart three times before convincing myself that wasn’t the source. No, the sound I heard went deeper. Never quite blending in with the ambient noise, not fully, always something a bit higher and a bit lower than what I heard. Like two voices calling out in perfect harmony.

Here’s a clip:

Can you hear it? No seriously, can you? Or am I just losing it?

Calling out for what?

Convinced there was nothing wrong with the drone, I put the bot back together and let it get back to work. It returned to its rounds, checking the same places it always did. I had it stop monitoring the wind, the weather, no more photos or videos; put all its processing power to use picking up sounds.

I’d taken the habit of obsessively listening to all the audio, often live as it came in. Just a girl on the train listening to the sounds of the city streaming from my earbuds. Or at my computer, simultaneously pouring over the waveform.

It took a few days of logging all the data from the audio gathered to find a pattern. There was a faint but distinct crescendo, detectable as the drone reached a certain spot in the city. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the shift in frequency was different each day, but always located around the same spot.

I’ve since omitted the rough coordinates from this post, after receiving multiple reports of incidents at this location. Suffice to say whatever was there isn’t anymore. I pulled the microphone from the bot and biked over to about where the interference had been introduced. I wired the mic directly to my earbuds and started to walk.

Like a scientist trudging into an irradiated zone, I listened to my meter click away, the sounds of the city amplified into my ears, recording and playing, desperately concentrating on the rising hum in my head. I knew I was walking to the lion's den but I had to, if only to know. I had to.

I followed it best I could, losing it for a moment before doubling back only to find it once more, I scanned and searched, not sure what for. The only thing that was constant was the hum.

I found myself outside a church, a board across the door. The train rattled above me. I wasn't listening. The hum rang out in my ears. I started to walk the perimeter of the building, listening for any slight increase in intensity or frequency.

To the Southeast side of the building, the hum was at it's peak.

I looked around for an entrance, but I was at a brick wall. A fog had started to creep in at the edges of my view, and the Sun was about to set. Just past a dumpster, on the fire escape, I found it. Hidden under a discarded wooden crate.

I took it. It’s on my workshop table right now, in a small glossy black enclosure.

It feels cool to the touch, like a small piece of onyx, polished endlessly. Gives off no noise to my ears, but generates some kind of frequency that messes with electronics. I sort of hesitated to bring it here, given how many projects I’ve got laying around.

I haven’t been able to get at the internals of it yet, but that’ll come in time. I’ve returned the drone to its previous function, and it’s back out gathering new data as I write this log. I keep trying new test, applying new strategies on it, but the only thing it has offered me so far is an eerie feeling. Someone put it there. It was meant to be found.

It was meant to be found by me.

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<![CDATA[ Interview with Brennan Letkeman ]]> https://mnchrm.co/interview-with-brennan/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6cb Sun, 22 Oct 2017 07:00:00 -0500

Who are you? Where are you based? What do you do?

My name is Brennan Letkeman out of Calgary, Canada. I'm sort of an everything-doer but when pressed I usually just say 'industrial design' or make up something like 'diamond heist planner' every time.

You initially studied graphic design, correct?

Yeah, informally. My first non-retail job was in web design in the summers between high school years so it wasn't any sort of formal studying but I taught myself enough Photoshop by then to be dangerous and managed to talk my way into a job which gave me plenty of hours to learn while doing.

What lead you to transition into industrial design?

There's a certain physicality I think I've always liked - I grew up on LEGO and building dumpy things out of wood, or drawing 'plans' for hover bikes in school notebook margins, so perhaps it was inevitable. That's my formal schooling, mechanical design, and I went a little more consumer-centric with it into industrial and product design in the years since.

I think there's also a problem solving I like; nothing against graphic art but there's simply more to contend with in physical design, when you're dealing with 3D physics and engineering and material choices (balancing aesthetics with mechanical properties) and manufacturability and cost (always cost). There's just a lot of really good intersecting problems there trying to suss out a design and make sure it actually works / fulfills increasingly outrageous and specific specs. I like that; at heart I'm a problem solving puzzle lover, and this just allows me to also invent the pieces.

How has your foundation in graphic design help with industrial design? What have you carried over? What's been abandoned?

The basics are always there: design is about communication and industrial design was just bits of all of that at once: buttons and levers that both work as physical things but also, you know, are colored and arranged and labeled to make comprehensive sense to users. There's always differences in the specific implementation of these mediums but the overarching psychology is all very similar. Humans are humans, and we're building stuff for humans to use.

And then like, color theory and materials and typography and working with vague clients is all pretty much the same. A lot of the other odd jobs I do are still straight up graphic art roles: making a product's box, or doing a little branding package to get a Kickstarter something to brand themselves with. I'll make logos and choose type and build cohesive moods to tie the product to the graphic elements. It's nice being a sole (or small team) voice in these projects and wear many hats because I can build that cohesion and not be throwing stuff blindly over a wall for other teams to try and figure out later.

Abandoned is an interesting word. I think at a job or a career level, I purposefully try to keep myself away from the graphic artist trap of having arbitrary decisions and subjectivity. A lot of industrial design is having data and reasons for each of a million decisions, whereas I found in web there was a fair bit of "could you make that purple more purple?" or "my cousin's friend is an artist and she says that the fonts without the little thingies are better" whereas in mechanical design we're building your thing out of copper because that's literally the only metal with X thermal conductivity we need to make it work. That's not a subjective decision, it's math. I like that data driven approach myself, and I like it at a client level. Work, in the end, has to be livable psychologically.

What is your day to day like?

These days it's pretty varied. A few years ago I was working as the designer for a manufacturing company and worked on developing new products, making blueprints and CAD drawings for parts, implementing inventory systems for moving parts through the stages of the factory: that sort of thing.

Two-ish years ago I struck out freelance and it's been great overall. A lot more rendering actually, a lot of people already have working ideas for products (or buildings, as of late) but just need sexy concept shots to use for promotional materials or whatever. This used to be bigger in Kickstarter type projects, but they've flip-flopped their terms and services over the years to allow/disallow concept renders as valid marketing because of scammers / over-promising projects. I've been doing architecture renders for about a year too, so that's growing in my portfolio.

The truth is, at a more existential level, I'm not really sure what to do with my days: now that I don't commute my natural workday is effectively from 6:00 to noon and then I'll cook a nice lunch and maybe poke through a few hours of less brain-powered work in the afternoon and then nap or read or whatever. So, I'm looking for hobbies (that aren't just more work) and searching for that bigger 'why' to follow right now. For the most part the stuff I do for fun is just the same stuff I do for money which is a blessing and a sort of monotony.

What sort of projects do you do?

I have a rotating list of clients, it's again pretty varied: renders for products or buildings, mechanical design for products, we started a tiny company last year making laser-cut walnut and acrylic MTG deck boxes, my friend and I run a youtube channel for DIY builds and general shenanigans so we try to get to the shop once a week and get out hands dirty. I bought a 3D printer recently so it's nice to have one in the house I can play very directly with, we want to make props for cosplay and then local indie films.

I'm learning to cook better both as a skill and as a health thing. Building furniture, just playing around and learning 3D. We do an hour long podcast every week talking about the future of work. Made some SVG avatars recently for a community project called Rotonde. I write daily and publish almost none of it. Sometimes I make videos.

Calling personal things projects almost feels weird, I guess I just sort of do whatever is interesting at the time and my work / life "balance" is more of a weave. I don't really distinguish it as time "here" vs "there" as much as it's all... life.

What are you favorite things to design?

Ooh. Hmm. I like mechanical things that are just complex enough to be a good puzzle but not so complex that they're tedious. It's a fine line, but if we're talking dream jobs here, I really just don't care about the more boring engineering bits. Doing math long-form reminds me of school, but sometimes it's really satisfying to whip out just a tiny bit of it to solve for something. I'm a bit irrational I guess with this. Likewise I like the soft stuff but not so soft it gets subjective and sloppy, as mentioned before.

I think in the end I always want to be doing new work. There's a shocking lot of projects now in my history that are like "I created this to solve your problem and I think we're the first people in the world to have done it like this." that's satisfying. Not new for newness sake, but genuine solving of new problems as they come up. Any time I can create a process and have the workflow down, then it gets boring. I don't want to repeat projects.

What designers inspire you?

Am I a bad person to admit I just... don't really have any heroes? Like, there's definitely a lot of cool work out there but nothing in me feels super compelled to switch lives with your Draplin’s or Jony Ive’s or whoever. Too limiting. A lot of my inspiration is cross-seeded maybe, like as designers I think we just collect these catalogues of shapes and forms.

You look at a tropical plant leaf drip water and years later you use that for a faucet spout. Or maybe this building reminds you of the curve of your ex-girlfriend's fingernail for some reason. There's this dot-connecting engine perpetually running back there that is looking for contexts. I'm not really a designer with a set style - I'm not a "MUJI is always best" or "I want to make twee Wes Anderson universe objects" as much as, you know, there's a place for all these different things.

This gets a bit into the weeds of design philosophy woo-woo but you might describe the process and trying to do right by the object and what it wants to be. Something honest, something contextual, something right for the users and its environment. A lot of cheap design is like "we made a water cooler that looks like an iPod" and it has a scroll wheel on the front. Like, great, whatever. That's just not a considered approach to that object's existence. The same with any hero-worship in design. It's fine to have that collection of references, but they should service the goals first and wholly.

What sort of spaces do you expect design to venture into in the next few years?

Manufacturing has changed a ton in the past decades with both CNC and 3D printing. There's shapes we can make now that we simply couldn't before (or not well / quickly), and so that library of what's possible (and practical, and good) expands ever bigger as new methods do. I'm a very pragmatic futurist as far as we probably won't all have our own replicators that can make anything: the raw materials you'd have to stock in every house is just bonkers, and centralized manufacturing is fast and cheap for a reason.

But! You know, incorporating metal sintering into a car factory for making panels hollow with a strength lattice so that they're lighter and get better fuel economy with added rigidity (and with perfect stress gradients) is really cool and exciting.Organic shapes come out with this sort of design because, shockingly, bones and trees have been solving these same physics problems for millions of years. Whether that's an aesthetic people will like or not, who knows, but the engineering side is getting cooler.

Likewise, newer manufacturing allows smaller runs of things, so combined with internet sales we can make a product for 1000 people as a niche market and have that be financially feasible. Design, traditionally, has been generic because you've got to make millions of something to commit to the upfront cost of tooling a factory to make that identical thing. So we're seeing this slow shift in phones, say, where there's that RED phone for camera nerds and a rugged CAT phone with a FLIR camera for construction workers and the whole market solves problems for individual needs better than just one iPhone for everyone as this lowest common denominator object. We'll still have those common objects, of course, but having options existing unbinds our hands a lot as small companies making cool little experimental things and as consumers to buy things we genuinely like and work for our lives best.

Are there other fields you see in a similar light?

I think we'll generate more and more design at an algorithmic level: we're seeing this in architecture with relatively rigid building codes demanding certain amount of HVAC airflow in each room, say, you can push a button and it'll build out all the air pipe paths and how they reduce (HVAC vents, if you've ever noticed, get progressively smaller to maintain airflow pressure along the whole length and traditionally (still today) this has been calculated by hand). Same with window size and placement. Same with rooms and hallways themselves. Electrical wiring, light switches, lights. You know? They're all known quantities and bound to be automated. Enter a few parameters and it'll generate fully realized options including all the part list BOMs, construction plans etc etc. Even if it's not perfect first try, we're getting these results so much faster and, frankly, better than humans can design them.

The maker space has little tools to generate gear tooth profiles where you enter a handful of dimensions you need a gear to solve and it'll build that instantly. That's awesome! It's an augmentation to designers. We have to solve the macro problems of an object still, but saving time and energy doing fiddly maths for gear teeth is just, done for us. There's a cool generator for box joints and laser cutting too, so you can put together stronger boxes that fit perfectly. These kinds of tools are awesome and free and just part of the design paradigm now. And I do see them as tools: some get panicked that the robots are coming for our jobs (they are) but at the same time, air nailers didn't come for construction workers' jobs. They just build houses faster now with better tools and less hammer swinging. We still, for now, need humans to be consideration engines.

You’ve mentioned a desire to be as “wholesome” as possible. What does this mean to you? How does it influence your interactions, and your work?

Part of me comes by it naturally, but it's also sometimes something to work hard on being and living. There's a few facets to it all: at a life level it's about contentment and appreciation for the things around us being generally awesome (and certainly better than almost all of previous human history). At a creative level there's a childlike wonder and curiosity to things, you might bring it back to that 'beginners mind' concept of learning and approaching problems.

At a work level I think I'm trying my best to make things that people pause and consider, but this is an increasingly difficult and sometimes auxiliary goal. Sometimes the best you can do is just make something good enough that people will never notice it. Just something that isn't frustrating, that is invisibly useful. That's a worthy goal by itself.

But I think it's hard in a world where somehow cynicism has come to imply intelligence? Like, positivity is seen as naïveté is seen as dumb and uncultured compared to the world-weary tiredness of these "experienced" pessimists who are really mostly just lazily internalizing all the garbage news cycle fear mongering nonsense. So, there's a certain braveness and counterculture to being wholesome, as funny as that is. It's almost punk to be happy and excited about things? I don't know. I don't really care to categorize or judge people, I just know I don't really jive well with the people resigned to their dismal impotence. We are, anyone who is reading this, comparatively some of the richest, most autonomous people in the world and can learn basically anything on demand. What do you do with that power? Because sitting around and moaning on Reddit seems like a waste.

You’ve said you see yourself more as a technician than a creative, how so? Does this affect the way you view design?

This is an arguable semantic distinction, but it’s sort of the one I default to: design is unemotional problem solving, art is emotional question asking. Certainly, I don’t hold either in higher regard, I just think my brain is wired to do the former rather than the latter. I see problems and I’m good at fixing them and my opinions or feelings or internal screaming doesn’t really factor in or work its way into the work. Whereas, I might write or make little films and those things are emotional expressions of something inside me yearning to get out and be recognized. That’s art.

I just happen to be paid more for design, and art is more for myself. I don’t even publish most of it, it’s enough to merely get it from my brain onto a page and sort of… release it from being on my mind.

And, of course, most works involve bits of both. There are flourishes in design that are certainly artistic; you’re trying to express something internal via the being of an object (or why you feel like that object should exist in the first place) and there are bits in art that are problem solving for communication or making a medium work (someone engineered the boxes to hold Damian Hirst’s ton of blue fluid, that was a problem). So, they’re hand in hand.

Deep down though, I look at my artist friends and I have no idea how they just come up with the stuff they do. It seems so spontaneous and unattached to references. I need my brain library to cheat and constraints to get me started. Problem solving is creative work, but it’s not… creative work?

You have a very disparate set of interests, as far as design and your personal interests go. How do you see these different fields overlap, if at all? Do they inform one another?

I guess I see everything as genres. There’s this sort of synaesthesia where you could listen to a certain song and it reminds you of a scene, right? And maybe it’s a tropical sounding song, so you imagine the palm trees and the sand and there’s a bamboo hut smoothie shack.

Now, you can imagine what sort of blenders they’re using, and you can imagine the typography on the signage, or the chalkboard deal of the day writing. You can see the clothes people are wearing both as beach-goers and employees. You can see the kind of cars and motorcycles and the wooden pergola. So if you dive in you can really build a whole world of architecture and graphic arts and industrial design and fashion and this overarching style emerges.

And everything is like that? There’s a mahogany paneled hunting lodge in the mountains with tweed jackets and intricately carved shotgun stocks and those library looking lamps with the green glass and books on fishing and hunting. You know the typography on the spines. You know the sort of slightly archaic British words you’d find in them. You can imagine the music they’d like. You know the food they eat, you have an image of their haircut and internet habits and all of these things fall into cohesive place as you’re considering them.

So the different disciplines might work in different mediums, but they’re all building a world together. A car designer might not be designing a dress, but you can bet on their mood board for the 2018 Lamborrari Martinsegg there’s a photo of a man in a fine suit with a woman in a slinky black dress, the dress they might design if they were responsible for that part of the scene. Likewise, the dress maker has photos of nice cars, right? And the handbag people, and the Ibiza DJs spinning luxury deep house, and the yacht makers. Everyone.

What disciplines are you interested in that you’d like to work more at?

I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything because I simply wanted to do it. Like, I learned Arduino stuff because I wanted to build a little controller to do something and Arduino happened to be a good solution. I learned to sew because I needed to sew something. Last week we learned about SVGs because that happened to be the format Rotonde went with. So the real question is more like “what problems might come up that you need to solve in a new way?” and then I’m not sure I could ever predict that.

That said, I’ve been teaching myself to cook more, I think I mentioned that, with flavor as an interesting element to the scene. There’s hearty meaty things and delicate light sour things and they’re all part of that cohesive style library too. Finding the flavor = color intersections to be really interesting, especially where the taste’s color and the physical color are different.

You have said you favor your own independence and mobility heavily, even applying it to picking leases and contracts. How else does that manifest? How do you apply it?

This is a huge can of worms unto itself, but as someone financially minded I spend a lot of time thinking about optimization of money and time and the various other resources. Designing your life against those constraints is essentially identical to designing objects against those same resources.

Housing, naturally, is a big topic because regardless if you rent or mortgage, it’s likely the biggest monthly expense most people have. As such, it’d have the biggest impact to solve. There’s a lot of chatter about Universal Basic Income schemes and whatever, and that’s a good conversation of course but for someone in manufacturing my interest would be like “instead of paying people more money, what if we could reduce expenses to effectively zero?” and the tax implications with that, if you spend less you could earn less which means you work less which frees up more time which could be used for better things anyway and so on.
But, that’s a huge topic.

At a more local level, at a Brennan level, I just try to structure myself for resilience. It’s way easier to spend less than it is to earn more (plus time) so there’s a healthy inclination to minimalism and frugality I come by naturally.

If I suddenly made way less income, I could simply move out of this place within a month; so I’m never afraid of ‘what if I can’t make rent?’ because the answer is always ‘find somewhere cheaper for a while.’ and as a stress thing, if you do that for every aspect of your life, you start to feel pretty invincible and that allows you to make good work without fear.

So that’s sort of my jam: earn as much as possible, spend as little as possible, save up a huge hoard and take on whatever weirdness the world throws at you. Quit bad jobs when you feel like it, buy whatever you want (and come to learn that you don’t want much), save as much as you can when you’re young and it’s the most potent for long term gains. Spend less time working, spend that extra time becoming better at everything. I’m not a paranoid apocalypse prepper type, but, you know, learn to camp and fish and fix your own stuff and at some point you’ll be slightly more confident with whatever happens.

How should people find your work?

You can find me on twitter @letkma, or online at BrennanLetkeman.com, and Brennan.Pizza.

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<![CDATA[ Knausgård's 'Autumn' ]]> https://mnchrm.co/knausgaard-autumn/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ca Tue, 17 Oct 2017 07:00:00 -0500

Karl One Knausgård is a polarizing writer. While successful and known in Scandinavia after his first few releases, he received international acclaim upon the release and translations of his six-volume semi-autobiographical masterpiece, ‘My Struggle’. I can confirm that you will get weird stares reading this on the subway.

The series is a look at his life, especially the oft-ignored parts of the human psyche: the embarrassing, the dark, the macabre. Knausgård wanted to “write plainly” about his life, and ended up doing so, discussing his relationships with his friends and family members, and making more than a few enemies along the way.

I love the series. I haven’t quite finished it yet, and the sixth book has yet to be translated into English yet. I wrote about it briefly in my 2016 Year in Review.

It’s raw. It’s aggressive. It’s so very genuine. He’s not writing about himself to show how awesome he is. He’s writing about himself to show what a jerk he is, because we’re all jerks, in ways we don’t like to admit.

While I make my way through ‘My Struggle’, I saw Knausgård had a new book out, called ‘Autumn’. So, I biked down to the nearest bookstore and bought a copy.

In a departure for Knausgård, ‘Autumn’ is a series of essays, all titled with the subject, most around 2 pages. These are broken up into a few months, each section starting with a letter to his soon-to-be-born (at the time) daughter, his fourth child.

There is also a collection of artwork interspersed between the acts.

While the writing here is still about his life, with a focus on his family (especially the daughter and her siblings). He references the house and land the family lives on. Unlike the writing done in ‘My Struggle’, Karl Ove himself takes a backseat. This is just his pure, unfiltered thoughts; the world as he sees it, presented to his daughter, as he mentions in the opening letter.

It’s a strange collection. Each essay lasts so short to never bore with something that isn’t working, but when a piece really resonates, it isn’t given enough space to breath. As with any collection of essays, there are ones where such resonance affected me, making me pause before leaping into the next one as is so easy in this collection, breath and take in the world around me.

Some fall totally flat. There’s one about a toilet, which he ends with, “this swan of the bath chamber”. There’s an essay on vomit that is about what you expect.

Yet, there is some incredibly beautiful writing on display here. I am haunted by his essay on oil tankers. His essay on beekeeping is delightful. An essay on buttons is nearly worth the price of admission alone. When he hits, it’s a homer.

I’m sure what essays resonate with you varies person by person. Someone will be bored to tears by the essay I quite enjoyed on daguerrotypes. Someone out there is going to love his essay on piss.

It’s a hard collection to nail, and there’s sort of an out built-in. “Well, they can’t all be winners”, I imagine someone saying. Very true. And his misses are more whiffs than full strikes. There’s nothing worth avoiding in this collection, and a few pieces are so excellent that make it worth anyone’s while.

Who is this collection for? Is it for the reader who has yet to dive into any writing by Knausgård? Or the Knausgård-acolyte who’s already plowed through ‘My Struggle’ and wants more?

In a way, both, or neither. It really depends on what sort of a reader you are. This collection of essays (itself the first in a four part series; it is Knausgård, after all) probably sounds interesting or boring to you based on that description.

Reading ‘My Struggle’ is like sitting down with an old friend to hear them tell a story. It just starts and keeps going and before you know it you’re off on some wonderful tangent that you didn’t even feel the transition for and now you’re back into the narrative. ‘Autumn’ is like reading Knausgård’s wordpress.

It’s good writing. It just doesn’t have the same incredible structure that ties everything together nicely like ‘My Struggle’. It’s Knausgård: Condensed. Instead of having that flow, you’re dropped into these essays. It’s Knausgård for the coffeeshop line.

Although, this structure is great for my initial goal for this series, to analyze the work of writers I admire. While reading ‘Autumn’, I went to the park near my apartment, and sat and listening and saw and wrote, plainly, as best I could.

Park

I took a slightly scenic route here, enjoying the last bit of golden hour light, which is the most brilliant light in the day. I stopped a few times to take photos of the yellow light splashed against the brickwork of a building, or reflecting off of the power lines. I can’t see this sort of light without thinking of Autumn, and decay, in the least depressive sense.

The park is split in two parts, about a 60-40 divide, with the smaller section being a small grove of trees, and the larger housing a field with two baseball diamonds. My girlfriend and I often walk down here, especially after going to brunch around the corner, and sit in the grass and watch the dogs play.

As I walked up, the Sun had already started to set quite a bit, with just a small pool of the remains of the day dispersed unevenly between the trees. There, a few groups of dogs are playing with their owners. Some people play directly with their dogs, running and jumping, throwing a ball, or otherwise entertaining them. Others stand around with other dog-owners, their dogs playing amongst themselves. The final group stand alone, not interacting with their dogs, or with other people, just standing, some on their phones, some merely distant. Their dogs explore and play of their own accord, as if they too are loners, unsure whom to associate with.

I’m watching one of these dogs now, a skinny husky. He trots around the trees, not walking, but still leisurely, sniffing the air and changing course. He walks close to me, close to those on the path, and doesn’t react at all; he’s content like this, wandering, seeing the world at his own pace.

It’s funny dogs play, by themselves or otherwise. I think that puts them in a very small group of animals that do so, of course alongside man, but I can’t recall exactly. It seems like adults view play as a childish venture at times, something unbecoming of the real world. But to play shows a consciousness, an intelligence and awareness of the world that is of itself valuable. For if you can’t allow yourself the enjoyment of the experience, how can you hope to survive it?

Behind me, some kids play. I hear the yells and calls from the playground. Earlier, three girls stood near the gate, as one cried at the other, convinced there had been a theft of her candy. No parent seemed aware of this, not listening to the argument, content to assign it to the world of childish games. They must have solved it, for all the girls are gone, and I too tuned it out eventually, forgetting about the whole affair.

It’s noticeably quieter now, as the Sun has dipped below the horizon and only the last light of day skims the sky above. Still, a few boys continue to make laps around the same small section of path, one of rollerblades, one on a pennyboard, and one on a bike. They take turns reinventing the game they play, which roughly entails one person being the monster in a game of pseudo-tag.

There’s little to no delay for the new rules to be adopted, or for modes of transit to be exchanged, as through the method of play the children are able to communicate such things wordlessly, as the play itself supersedes communications. One boy, wearing a green ‘Minecraft’ hoodie, asks another on the pennyboard to pretend he’s the monster now. And through something so basic, they’re ready to play again.

I feel somewhat guilty, sitting here typing away on my laptop, as in sitting here writing I’m doing that which I sought to get away from. The wind picks up for a moment through the trees above my head, swirling through the leaves, producing a gentle roar. Only now, looking back to the world around me, do I notice how much the night has progressed.

The last light has slipped away, and only the amber glow of street lamps reflects from the silver of my laptop body. “Guys, GUYS!,” a man calls behind me, apparently one of the fathers of the boys, asking them to tone it down, and they oblige without exchanging a word.

I think about going to a nearby restaurant for dinner, but remember the groceries I have in my apartment, and think I should be getting back to. As the light slips from natural to artificial, I’ll walk back to my apartment, turn on the lights, and begin to cook dinner.

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<![CDATA[ Moths. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/moths/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c9 Thu, 05 Oct 2017 07:00:00 -0500

I first saw it in a dream. At least, I thought it was a dream. I’m not sure how I would’ve gotten on a boat otherwise. The quivering lights, on the horizon, drifting and shifting, a mirage on the bay, towards the harbor. A flying fish leapt from the salty spray to watch me before returning to sleep in the deep.

A spot, gold yellow like an amber drip, rose and fell in intensity with the waves. I remember squinting, straining my eyes to see them better, but no matter how I sailed I never seemed to see more.

Next thing I remember is a waitress asking me what kind of toast I wanted. I looked at her, dark hair, 30s, with small wrinkles at the corner of her mouth. I took a breath. Must’ve been a dream. It’s dark out, and my watch reads five. Five AM?

Rye please, thank you.

She brings me a plate of eggs, bacon, and rye toast. I’m the only one there, besides an old grizzled man at the counter. He has his arm laid flat across a newspaper, whose ink has stained his elbow. His free hand clutches a steaming coffee mug.

I look at my notebook, but there’s no clues. My phone is dead. I pay in cash and walk home.

Next time I saw it, I wasn’t on the boat, but in the waves. I could tell the water was cold when it lapped across my neck, but my torso was numb to it. I couldn’t see out onto the horizon, the waves around me occupied most of my view.

The water looked black around me, obscuring the view of even my own body. Without feeling it, I had to assume it was all still there. I raised my hand above the waves to check, but returned it to the water soon after to avoid sinking.

I looked up to the sky. A clear night. One wispy cloud slipped across the dark, barely visible. A single star twinkled in the night, and that’s when I remembered.

I struggled to raise myself in the seas, fighting above the waves which seemed only to get stronger. The water felt thick, as if holding me down, pulling me deeper towards the depths. I saw it, closer than before, a bright flash showing me where to look.

The light sat outside a door which I hadn’t noticed until now, the same familiar yellow. The door sat in a rounded wall, like of a barracks, recessed into the side of a grassy slope diving into the water. A spindly pier sat in front of the building.

On the pier, a figure stood, dressed in all white, some sort of hazmat suit. Their face obscured by a deep red visor. From where I floated, it looked like a mask.

I started to swim.

I felt sore, but tried to drive my arms into the waves, push my body to parallel, if it was still there. I dug in and thrashed towards the shore, a moth drawn to the light. I fought against the waves, the water going in and out of my mouth, salty with a metallic tang, like the taste of blood on my tongue.

I couldn’t tell if I was getting closer or not, but as I swam on it got harder and harder to progress. I felt my limbs slowing, numbed by the battering of the waves. I dipped lower into the waves, trying to will myself forward.

The current grabbed me, and I went down, the water filling my mouth and my nose and up to my eyes as I dropped under the waves and all was black and then it was nothing.

I woke in a grassy field. Tall flowers rose above me, waving in the gentle wind. The smell of lilac and mint drifted into my nose. The stars shone above me, clearer and stronger than I’d ever seen.

I swear I could make out the shapes of constellations, like a spiderweb shimmering in the sun.

The grasses wrapped around my waist and arms, holding me in a close embrace. My body felt light, but I didn’t want to get up. I knew I could stay there forever, and be safe.

I sat up.

I was on a shore, the waters calm out in front of me. The tips of waves gleamed like jewels, mirroring the stars. I felt a light on my face, and looked to see the building from earlier off to my side.

The corrugated metal wall illuminated by the celestial bodies, as if glowing from within. There was no sign of the figure. A moth glided past me, the color of sunset, in no hurry to get anywhere, drifting towards the door.

I stood, feeling the wind at my back. I started to walk to the door, slowly at first, shaking off the slumber in my bones, like a toddler stumbling. I felt more confident with each step, more sure of where I was going, standing straight, knowing I meant to be here, was meant to go here, to see whatever this harbor held for me and me alone.

The moth drifted off, landing where the light protruded from the wall, sunning its wings on the night air. Looking closer at it, it seemed to give of a green glow I hadn't noticed before. The handle of the door was brass, and warm to the touch. I opened the door and pushed in, met by a brilliant light, squinting to protect my eyes.

I must have continued walking, because once my eyes adjusted I stood a few feet from the door. The room in front of me was massive, like a cavern. Moths lined the walls, fluttering between resting spots. All hovering in orbit around a giant glowing white orb.

It cast a light that seemed to emanate from its core, a massive moon, pale and pure, the light cut through me. The figure stood with their back to me. The light bounced off of their suit, making them seem transparent, except for the red screen where their face should be.

With the voice of a woman and of a man, the figure spoke, raising their arms to the side, palms up. As they did, moths flocked to them, like pigeons landing on a branch.

“Welcome home. Let’s begin.”

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<![CDATA[ Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Remains of the Day' ]]> https://mnchrm.co/book-review-kazuo-ishiguros-remains-of-the-day/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c8 Tue, 03 Oct 2017 18:00:00 -0500

Even before I started writing seriously, I was a voracious reader. My Mom tells a story of my realization of my ability to read while on a trip along the highway, in which I read out the signs and storefronts we passed, to my parents great annoyance.

I’ve been a reader my whole life since, particularly in fiction. And while I love writing essays and blog posts, my true aspiration is to be a novelist. I’ve been working on a book for about a year now, still polishing it before querying it out.

During this process of writing this, I’ve been referring back to favorite novels of mine over the past year, analyzing and pulling parts I liked, and seeing how they could apply to my work. Of course, this reference point becomes updated as new books come out, as I read more, and my backlog only grows. I’ve also been working towards a reading goal of 50 books this year. (I’m a little behind, as of today.)

In addition to feeding my love of fiction, this is to help work down my infinite Amazon ‘Books’ wishlist, and of course to improve my craft. To help analyze the books I’m reading, I’ve decided to write up little reviews. That way, I can get my thoughts on the books down closer to my reaction, and it also provides a more formalistic method for my deconstruction of novels.

I figured some of you might be interested in these as well.

I’m not planning on doing this for every book I read, but if this turns out to be something you guys are interested in, I’d love to hear your feedback. If there’s a book on my list you think I should read next, or one that should be added, let me know. I generally read and buy books by whim, so I’m open to suggestions.

Anyways, with that out of the way let’s talk about Kazuo Ishiguro’s ’Remains of the Day’.

I first became aware of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work in 2015, upon the release of 'The Buried Giant’. I had heard the name before, but wasn’t at all familiar with his work. A few months after the release of that book, I purchased it, devoured it, and quickly sought out more of his writing. (This dialogue between Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman is particularly good)

Something about ’The Buried Giant’ really stuck with me, a work I’ve written about in an essay called, “Rain”.

As is far too common for me, I bought a few more of his works. It wasn’t until just recently that I got around to reading them, starting with ’Remains of the Day’.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, but moved to Britain when he was five years old, where he’s lived ever since. He was raised in a Japanese speaking household, but is quick to acknowledge that his writing is not like that of contemporary Japanese writers. He set his first two books in Japan, despite not returning to the country of his birth until 1989, when 'Remains of the Day’ was released.

Both of the books of his I’ve read, ’Giant’ & ’Remains’, have been set in Britain. While ’Giant’ is set in an almost timeless Dark-Ages Britain, ’Remains’ takes place in the years after World War II, with the protagonist Mr. Stevens reminiscing over his life as a butler before the war, particularly with regards to his relationship with his former employer, Lord Darlington, and the housekeeper of the home, a Miss Kenton.

Of course, with a limited sample size I can’t say if this is true for all of his work, but the books of his I’ve read both deal heavily with the thoughts and memories of their protagonists.

In the case of 'Remains of the Day', it’s Mr. Stevens thinking back over the history of his employment under Lord Darlington, whose fall from grace may or may not have been precipitated by his attempts to reconcile with post-WWI Germany. He waxes on moments he might have misread or misinterpreted, and often the only hint that something is amiss are the comments of those experiencing Stevens and Darlington.

Ishiguro is a master of subtlety, and as I mentioned in my essay “Rain”, his work has a lingering, haunting feel about it. Stylistically, it’s excellent, remaining wholly committed to Stevens point of view. This is reflected across the language choices used by Ishiguro, the way the interactions are done, even the construction of the story relates to Stevens precise butler’s mannerisms.

This is what I most admire about his writing. Not only does it have a subtle effect that sticks with you, but everything in both books of his I’ve read work towards the same goal. The perspective of the story is so closely knit to the story itself to become indistinguishable from one another. He writes in the way that memories are held, moving from half-remembered moments to intensely layered and detailed dioramas, moments frozen in time like a photograph. Stevens effortlessly flows between a story from his past and a description of the events currently taking place seamlessly, much like the narrative builds out in 'My Struggle' by Knausgård.

The narrative here is broken up into different days of his journey to meet with former coworker Miss Kenton, segueing between his travel log and reminiscing with no delay. Ishiguro makes his transitions seamless and easy, often having them take place without my noticing for several pages. It’s easy to forget this is a book at all, feeling as much like sitting down to hear a story from your old friend.

In fact, it seems that Ishiguro feels most comfortable when writing about a memory, choosing to tell several of the major plot points through this lens of reminiscing, in both timelines. This stands in contrast to Knausgård’s writing, where a memory serves as a divergency, a miniature essay he became reminded of, but not quite so far as a writer like Rachel Cusk, whose work is all told from the protagonist’s immediate filtering.

The narrative here is quick, and I found myself reading the book in a few sittings. While not all characters are rendered with such depth (like Steven’s new employer Farraday, who gets little definition) the star players here (Stevens, Kenton, Darlington, especially) are so well defined you’ll feel able to fill in the blanks where Stevens doesn’t espouse his thoughts. Stevens especially, whom you might not always be able to empathize with his actions, is presented so earnestly to be almost naturally sympathetic.

It’s a slow paced novel, but the drama kept me turning pages. It’s not particularly long either, so the end of the book sort of crept up on me. I won’t spoil it, but I felt that it rounded out the story nicely. If anything, too nicely.

If you can appreciate slower, character driven literary novels, perhaps you’ll enjoy 'Remains' as much as I did. I look forward to reading more by Ishiguro, and refining his “Author’s Tropes” list further.

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<![CDATA[ Interview with low.poly.exe ]]> https://mnchrm.co/interview-with-lowpolyexe/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c7 Sun, 01 Oct 2017 07:00:00 -0500

Over the past few years, I've had the pleasure of becoming friends and meeting a lot of people through the internet, especially on Twitter. For all the vitriol and aggression you see online, I truly believe that it's a tool to be utilized to connect people with information and each other.

However, even among a lot of those whom I would call my friends online, I don't always know a lot about them. This small interview series is a chance for me to learn more about them, as well as to share with you all the cool people I know and the work they're up to.

This week, I talked to James, or low.poly.exe. He's a super talented musician and artist that just saw his debut album release, Nodal Point Gang, which you can hear here.

Who are you? What do you do?

I go by the name jhm (james henry █████████)

Where does the name low.poly.exe come from?

There's something about the low poly aesthetic I find charming. Maybe it's because I grew up playing a lot of playstation and N64. Taking "low.poly" alone as a handle/project name felt a little silly so I added another word to it (which made it sillier, whoops.)

When did you become interested in music production?

I got a hold of a MIDI program when I was 14 that I used to tab out guitar work I'd come up with, but then I found it fun to play with all the different instruments to come up with instrumental tunes. Later I learned you could import MIDI into DAWs so it was all downhill from there.

Do you have a formal music backing?

I do not. I took a couple years of guitar lessons where my low attention span as a teenager kept me from taking it seriously.

How do you come up with ideas for music?

Typically I'll have a "sound" or mood I want to convey. Whether it's something coming from emotion or a particular sphere of influence.Sometimes I want to make a song that can express what I feel reading a particular book or looking at a certain kind of art.Other times it's something more conceptual.

What is your process for production like?

Depends on the piece. Sometimes I start in MIDI, sometimes I open up the DAW (Reason or FLStudio) and just start experimenting. If I've got a melody or something stuck in my head, I'll try to recreate that.

What tools do you use?

Reason and FLStudio. Audacity for editing samples. Sometimes recordings I've taken as well.

How do you stay inspired while in production?

I'm always inspired by artists I follow on twitter and tumblr whether it's audio or visual. I've come to know or follow so many talented people who are always creating and it really lights a fire under me. Other times it's a need to vent. Creating is definitely a way I express myself when I need to get something out.

How do you determine the grouping and sequencing of tracks on albums and EPs?

When I make an album or EP I have a series of files/folders set up for that release. It's mostly for backup but I also keep notes on each track as I go, whether it's things I need to edit or improve on, or ideas I haven't added to that track yet. As I do this I keep a running list of tracks I've completed or am working on. As they near completion they sort of fall into a natural order, whether it's for album pacing or just how they "feel" to me. Sometimes particular tracks just go together. That's how I see it anyway.

What do you do when you aren’t making music?

Gaming, reading. I'm a graphic designer by trade so while I do that for work I also enjoy doing design work for fun.

The aesthetic and sound are very unified on Nodal Point Gang. What inspired the sound and design on this album?

I actually ended up making the album cover long before the album had really materialized. The cover was a heavily edited photo that I began adding design and typography too. I wanted to create a really clean and "techy" design piece. It seemed to naturally fit what I was working on in terms of music and it all came together.

In terms of music I wanted to explore various influences that I didn't fully realize in my other music project.

You being a graphic designer makes total sense to me: the art on your work is impeccable. And that sort of reverse design, art than music is fascinating.

For sure. It doesn't always pan out like that, it just worked out that way with NPG.

How did you come up with the meta-narrative on NPG?

There's not so much a narrative as there is a "persona" that goes with the music. It's a character. It's an idea, but there's no real story. There's some light fictional elements at play in there whether it's design work that goes with the music or on twitter. low.poly the character, NOMAD Industries, all that, it's just kind of a loose fun idea to go with the music instead of "me."

There are, however, a lot of references to a separate project of mine called enviNET. It's an interactive fiction project I do at nv023 set in a dystopian future. While low.poly as a project isn't some grand concept, it does reference that "universe" quite a bit. The track "Within the Basilisk" from my first EP is actually the "theme song" to the end of Part 1 of that story and the TWINE game that went with it.

"Nodal Point Gangs" are a type of collective in that universe too. So there's definitely connections but it's not important or integral to the music itself to know any of that.

You seem to have a plan for the future expansion of this project. What’s next for you?

I'm knee deep in the 2nd album "OniTECH." I have about 9 out of 11 planned tracks in the works so far. It's still a ways off so the recent release has room to breathe and people don't get sick of this project.

Any dream collaborators? Or dream projects?

Android Lust - Shikhee's music has always been majorly influential to me. Ed Harrison - the neotokyo soundtracks, I've said time and time again, are some of my favorite albums of all time. I've had a couple tracks play direct tribute to his material.

And if we're going to be completely unrealistic here, Björk.

How can people hear your music? And see what you’re up to?

My music is here. I'm also on twitter @lowpolyexe and tumblr.

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<![CDATA[ Growth. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/growth/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c6 Thu, 28 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500

It is said that perhaps we know as little about the densest forests on Earth as we do as the bottom of the oceans. The seas, with their gradual abyssal wonder, contain many vast secrets, but that within the light is mostly subject to human scrutiny. While the condition is not nearly as drastic as in the great depths under the waves, the forest floor too contains much to be discovered.

It is a land where upwards of ninety-five percent of light from the Sun does not make it to the ground. It gets caught in the branches and leaves, left high in the canopy, the domain of birds. This would lead us to believe that the sort of life on the ground here would be sparse, stunted by the lack of mana.

We know this to be not so.

If it were true, how would the forests have become so grand in the first place? Survived for all these generations of new trees?

There are plants in the forest floor that grow only by the strength of moonlight. The Sun’s rays, were they to hit their leaves directly, would be far too strong and damage the plants beyond repair. The canopy above protects their delicate geometries from the harsh sunlight. This allows the plants — which exhibit subtle traits of fungi, defying easy classification — to take in the sweet moonlight which provides all they need.

The dampened, reflected sunlight from the Moon trickles down through the trees to reach the specimens below. In the gentle climate provided in the shade, they have all they need to grow.

All attempts to grow, cultivate, and reproduce these plants in lab conditions have failed, except one. A specialty greenhouse was constructed, with one-way mirrors at the top. A small chamber collects the Sun’s rays, bounces it internally, before releasing a filtered amount to the plants.

The horticulturalists at work here must be eased into such an environment, and supplement their research with tanning to compensate for the deficiency. Those who forwent such protections, as was common before finer methods were developed, experienced what could only be comprehended as madness, their “conditions” later becoming known as lunacy.

Of course, the canopy provides more than just these simple protections for the flora and fauna on the floor. Such evolutionary explanations are still being augured from the dense woods.

In a particular forest, high on a plateau surrounded by taller peaks, the rain is so acidic to eat through any life misfortunate enough to come in contact with it. Over millennia, the trees is such an area developed leaves to siphon this potent water towards the trunk, where it is absorbed through porous bark on the path of gravity.

Several species of monkeys have adapted to this climate, as well as thickly feathered birds. The birds all exhibit oily, dark feathers, very unlike that of other physiologically similar tropical raptors. It’s thought that such a coating is similar to that of aquatic birds, affording them additional protection from the permeating rain.

These birds are born with a third eye, directly on top of their skulls, to monitor for impending storm clouds at all times. As their other senses develop and grow, these eyes become used less and less, eventually shutting upon maturity, never to be opened again. Only a few specimens have been observed past adulthood with a remaining third eye, and others with no visible eyes at all. It’s thought that these animals have a sense unbeknownst to man, so honed to make sight primitive.

The rain in this forest, while highly acidic as mentioned prior, is rich in nutrients and elements not found in other parts of the world. As such, many expeditions have been sent to this area, in an attempt to capture the rain for study.

Very little amount of this rain makes it all the way to the forest floor, as the trees absorb nutrients as it travels the length of their trunk. As such, the trees here are the highest known on Earth, eclipsing other such species as the redwoods in America.

Even given the small quantities that make their way to the floor, a local legend speaks of a pool of the rain collected at the base of the largest tree in the forest. One such native was alleged to have found it’s resting place, and upon bathing in the pool, lost use of an eye like the birds above.

However, given his sacrifice, the man was said to gain incredible powers of foresight and learning, often associated with magic. Of course, no such records of this man exist, and he was said to disappear shortly after. Similar legends exist across different cultures around the globe, leading many to dismiss this as a work of myth.

We know this to be not so.

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<![CDATA[ Against Multitasking ]]> https://mnchrm.co/against-multitasking/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c5 Tue, 26 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500

There’s a constant pull among those I know to do more. Whether this anxiety is due to outside pressure, comparing yourself to your peers, or simply an ambitious drive to make your mark, this longing is felt across disciplines and demographics.

One of the most common ways of addressing this is a desire to multitask. Multitasking permeates across Western culture. It comes from this sense of wanting to do more, or at least wanting to do what you set out to do: be it your creative aspirations or your shopping list.

We in the West feel a sense of time that is almost omnipresent. We’re constantly aware of the limited time we’ve got over the course of a day, a week, and even over our lifetime, so we try and utilize it to the best of our abilities. This often means trying to squeeze more into a smaller timeframe, rather than truly keeping track of what we’re doing and monitoring time ill spent. (though this is important too, perhaps even more so, and the topic of a future essay)

This leads to multitasking; trying to fit multiple activities or focuses into a limited space of your attention and concentration.

Our culture obsesses over multitasking. Often you hear stories of how people read while on treadmills, listen to music while cooking, watch TV while eating. Or even more mundane, how often are you texting or checking email or browsing Twitter in line for your coffee? (I’m most guilty of this one)

I used to try and multitask, from small activities to big ones, even just reading multiple books at the same time. Maybe these work great for you, but I’ve found that multitasking is a poor use of my time.

With a limited attention span and concentration, when I try to do multiple things at once, inevitably something gets less attention. Something is neglected, simply in the process of maintaining the juggling act.

Part of the mindfulness practice I’ve been working on lately (and evangelizing on this blog and Twitter) is trying to work on focusing at one thing at a time. This has been tremendously helpful for my work and my sense of being. It’s liberating to focus wholly on one task at once, see it to completion, and move on when ready. Even if it isn't something that can be completed in a sitting, it's empowering to see progress before moving on. Be aware of the transition; that’s important too.

That’s not to say this is always to be avoided. As I write this post, I’m listening to music, as I always do. But even this simple activity has shifted as I became more aware of my process and own mind.

There are times where my attention shifts to the music, and I find myself staring off into the sun-soaked tree across the street from the second floor coffeeshop I’m in. I watch the wind play in the leaves, listen to the words or melody, and as I notice myself having drifted, gently draw myself back to the screen in front of me.

In the teachings of Andy Puddicombe, the man behind the Headspace app, he says something to the effect of, “You’re not trying to stop your thoughts, but simply to notice when your mind has wandered and bring it back to the task at hand.” (Paraphrased)

This has been very helpful not only in the practice of meditation, but in my daily life as well. I try to focus my attention on the smallest number of tasks at once, be it writing, cooking, biking, reading, or simply pausing to experience it all.

I realize this may seem obvious, or otherwise opaque, so here are a few tips:

  • Be clear with what you hope to accomplish.

This is an important step that gets often overlooked. If you haven't resolved to sit and write, then it isn't a problem to go wash the dishes. One of the best ways to minimize distraction is to decide what you want to do. Sometimes, during particularly busy weeks, I'll write a few (3-5) goals on a notecard the night before. That way, I can always have a physical reminder what I wanted to do was.

  • Allow yourself the time to complete this task.

If you want to do something, but haven't budgeted your time appropriately to allow for this, you've stacked the deck against yourself. There's few things more frustrating to me when I want to be productive, am in the right mindset, and find my time cut short because I forgot about another commitment. Now, if you get interrupted, of course that's not entirely in your control, but it's something to be mindful of as well.

  • Break time into more manageable blocks.

Sitting and working on one thing at a time for an hour straight sounds daunting if this sort of concentrated practice isn't your norm. Even just setting aside 10 minutes to meditate sounds like a lot if you're not familiar with it. You have to work up to those lengths. When I was getting started with concentrated productivity, I started with the Pomodoro Technique. In short: work on one thing for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break, and then go back to it. It's a great way to get started, but you may find you outgrow the intervals, or they don't suit you at all.

  • Log your successes, and short comings.

I work well with streaks. I hesitate to break streaks, and like knowing how well I'm doing in my practices. I find it's really important to log when you completed your goals, and to mark when you miss them. Even if you didn't hit them, it's good to be honest with yourself so you can adjust later. Maybe you tried to do too much in a shorter period of time, or didn't fully understand the task in front of you. Logging this helps to make sure next time, you'll get it.

Try it, if only a few times a day. Pick something small, like washing the dishes, or making your bed, and do nothing but that. See how it makes your feel. With the barrage of stimulus omnipresent in our lives, there’s nothing more freeing than to let it all pass and to focus.

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<![CDATA[ Interview with Rutherford Craze ]]> https://mnchrm.co/interview-with-rutherford-craze/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c4 Sun, 24 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500 If you've been following the recent posts on Monochromatic, you may have noticed some new glyphs dividing up the type. These were designed custom for Monochromatic by my internet friend, Rutherford Craze, a UK based graphic & type designer. Having been interested in typography for a long time, I thought it would be a great opportunity to hear from another creator in a discipline I know little about, and learn more about his process.

Luckily, Rutherford was kind enough to field my questions. Here's our conversation, only mildly edited.

What is your name? Where are you located? What do you do?

My name is Rutherford Craze — which is, incidentally, why I tend to avoid Starbucks. I'm studying graphic design at Falmouth University, in the Southwest tip of the UK. I try to do more than just commercial design though: I spend my spare time designing type, learning code and playing around with various digital media.

When did you become interested in graphic design? In typography?

I actually started with animation. When I was about eight, I became fascinated by stop motion, and I spent hours making all sorts of short films with plasticine and household objects. Eventually I realized I was spending more time designing the title cards than I was on making the films themselves, so I stopped making the films and just did design. I think I was eleven or twelve at that point.

Both my parents were writers (my mother still is) and I'm obsessed with language, so I had quite a heavy focus on words, and how they looked, right from the start.

Do you remember when you first became interested in type and type design as a potential career?

Five or six years ago, I read an interview with the type designer Matthew Carter, and something just clicked. Type design, at least for me, sits at the intersection of computer science, linguistics, and art — everything I love. Once I discovered it's possible to make a career as a type designer, I couldn't see myself doing anything else.

I think this sort of "spark" moment is common for a lot of creatives. My parents read me 'Lord of the Rings' when I was a kid, and we went to see the films when they came out. I remember being in the theater and being blown away that this place I'd imagined so often was brought to life in front of me. That realization was hugely influential in my step into cinema.

It's interesting to hear about Lord of the Rings being one of your inspirations — both the books and the films were a huge part of my childhood, and as a fellow language enthusiast I feel very close to Tolkien.

What is your first step for designing a typeface? What’s your process like?

Sometimes it starts with just an idea — for Chasmata, that was, "What if every word fit into a rectangle?" Often it's more vague: M74 is just an expression of my love for 1970s science fiction book covers.

Either way, I begin by spending a couple of days collecting references: similar typefaces and lettering, and work from related genres. For me, typefaces are to design what vocals are to music. Sometimes you'll find a genre where everyone sings in the same kind of voice. Sometimes they're nothing alike, and the instruments — the color schemes, layouts, illustrations — are the shared factor. Sometimes what I'm designing is highly influenced by things which have come before. Sometimes it simply needs to look at home on the same background.

I almost always design the minuscule n first, followed by the minuscule o. So much of a typeface's character can be ascertained just from those two glyphs. It's also a good way of getting lots of characters pretty quickly, since the n can be quite easily turned into the m, h and u, and the o will inform half-rounded letters like b, d, p and q. I try to get the s, a and e out of the way sooner rather than later, since they can be awkward. I once got 25 letters into a design and realized that I couldn't make the s look natural without increasing the width of every other letter. I don't plan on doing that again.

Turning a typeface (the visual appearance of the letters) into a font (the tiny piece of software which displays them in a word processor) often happens at the same time — I tend to draw my shapes directly in Glyphs, my font editor of choice. I'm trying to do more paper sketches though, and digitize later on in the process. You get more natural-looking lines that way.

I fucking hate monoline geometric sans serifs. Not the look of them (I think some are really beautiful) but their over-use. Particularly on the web, typography has been getting ever more reductive, with more and more brands moving towards these ultra-modern, inexpressive typefaces. Like singing in a monotone. Take a look at the current Best Sellers on MyFonts and you'll see what I mean: everyone's trying to be like Google.

On a more positive note: I can't get enough of big display serifs. The Outline is using Eksell Display blown up to something like 90pt and I just adore it. The other thing I'm really excited about is ultra wide typefaces becoming more popular: I'm seeing faces like Acumin Pro Wide and Microgramma more often than I used to, which I really like.

Any favorite typefaces or type foundries of late?

I'm using a lot of Linotype Neue Haas Grotesk lately — it's a revival of the designs which later became Helvetica, but it has all the warmth and personality of the original sketches; that got lost with Helvetica itself.

I'm working my way through ITC's catalogue. ITC Serif Gothic is an all-time favourite of mine. Lubalin designed it, so no surprise there. The Freight superfamily, originally by Joshua Darden, is another one I use a lot.

As for foundries, OH no Type Co is doing some really nice stuff. The founder, James Edmondson, has an almost inimitable hand when it comes to drawing letterforms. Anyone who can make Hobo look good is a genius as far as I'm concerned.

Do you have a philosophy for your work? For your life?

I call myself an optimistic nihilist. In essence, life is short and meaningless, but as long as I can spend it drawing letters and writing code and drinking coffee, I'm okay with that. I'm one of the lucky few who can make a living doing what they enjoy, and I try not to forget that.

What are your biggest inspirations?

Devine is my single biggest inspiration. He's had such a massive influence on my work, visually and conceptually — I actually have my old projects categorised by whether they were made before or after I found XXIIVV.

Typographically, I'm really fond of Herb Lubalin's work. The way he used letters is so precise as to be almost scientific, but simultaneously very warm and relaxed.

Beyond that, I'm inspired mostly by my friends and the people around me. I'm counting people I follow on Twitter as part of that. I know so many prolific creators, it's hard to keep up, and at least for me that's really motivating.

What inspired you to make the Monochromatic Glyphs?

I've been following the work of Atticus Bones for a while. His generative writing in particular (glyphs which look like writing, but in reality are drawn procedurally by a computer program) fascinated me. I wanted to learn how to make something similar myself, which is what I ended up doing. I tweeted some of my outcomes, and they ended up getting a pretty good response.

You asked me a couple of days later about typefaces with interesting spacers, fleurons and things for monochromatic, and since I was looking for something to develop the procedural symbols into, I offered to make a custom typeface.

At first I was just going to redraw the generative symbols in my font editor, but I got slightly carried away. I added some which looked similar and followed the same grid, but I hid the initials 'IJB' in them. I drew the Monochromatic logo in the same style, although I changed the proportions slightly so it'd look better when viewed at smaller sizes (narrow lines drawn close together tend to look awkward or blurry; I gave the circle some extra breathing room because of this).

The last three weren't procedural, but were an attempt to fit in a little more with Monochromatic's visual style. The body copy there is set in Anonymous Pro, which is rigidly monospace but still quite rounded, so I went for some less blocky symbols. They're a bit celestial. I can be quite critical of my own work, but I like those glyphs.

What are your hobbies and interests outside of design?

I built a 3D printer a couple of years ago. It's often frustrating, but printing things and tinkering with the machinery (when it works) can be a lot of fun. I'm learning 3D modeling as well — actually, the light fittings in my flat are cast in concrete using 3D printed moulds I designed myself. I don't get out much.

I'm also obsessed with space. I've watched the livestream for every SpaceX launch since the end of 2015, and a few of the United Launch Alliance ones as well. I recently found out NASA has loads of data from its Martian satellites which you can freely download, so I've been getting quite excited over that.

Oh, and I love cooking. I live two doors down from a fishmonger, so I'm going through a phase of making black pasta (dyed with squid ink) every couple of weeks.

What’s your dream?

I don't really have one. Should I have one? I'd like to finish my degree in graphic design, then do an MA in Type and Media at the KABK, and beyond that, I haven't got a clue. I just want to keep making type and playing with code until the robots take all our jobs.

What’s the best way for people to follow your work and see what you’re up to?

I'm useless at putting my work on there, but I do have a website. I use Twitter a lot, so that's probably the place to go if you want to see what I'm working on at the moment.

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<![CDATA[ Lights. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/lights/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c3 Thu, 21 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500

In the city, it never gets dark. Not truly. On nights like this, in the fog, the lights bleed across the sky, watercolor grey, spilling out over the silence. Dapple dances across my apartment wall. A car drifts into the good night on the street below. I am restless. The light fills me with an intense energy, something ethereal and concrete, my very molecules vibrating, never-ending.

The construction sites were the worst. From my window, I could see three. They stayed lit all night, their wireframe cranes guarding over the sleeping nests. Their xenon arcs carried the farthest through the dim. A sickly white light, false moonbeams shot out in rays like pinpricks in a curtain.

I never was much of a sleeper anyways. Nights like these, I did my best, but sometimes you know it’s not worth trying. I grabbed my running shoes and my rain jacket and hit the street.

I dropped out onto the alley, as dark a place as I was likely to find. I readjusted the notebook in my back pocket, making sure to protect the exposed pages with my jacket. I cinched the elastic around my waist, and zipped the jacket up above my chest. I started walking south.

New York may be the city that never sleeps — I don’t know, I’ve never been — but no city ever sleeps. They wait. Like a panther stalking a gazelle, treading through the long grass, wholly focused on the prize, waiting for the impending violence. There’s no rush; the city isn’t going to starve.

I didn’t have a destination in mind, just figured I’d walk until I didn’t want to any more, and turn around. My hood was up, but it wasn’t raining. The moisture permeated the air, drifting like a current through the streets. I was going against the grain.

I saw a man’s face in an alley, lit by the glow of a cigarette. I stopped to watch, for a passing moment. His nostrils flared as he inhaled, and he pulled the flame from his lips before breathing smoke to the sky. I was gone before he could look for me.

There was a sort of buzzing the city had, from the tops of the skyscrapers, to the bottom of the asphalt. Some deep thrum of the Earth, like a vast machine, gears churning and gnawing for every scrap. This came wordlessly, silently, only a matter of feeling. I couldn’t get away from it, but I didn’t want to. I felt some sort of connection to this soundless hum, as if were I to leave I’d cease to be as I was.

As I walked, I looked up into the skyscrapers I passed. Little compartment, all glowing different shades of gold. I wondered about those that lived there, who they were, what they did, what they were doing up at a time like this. I stopped and watched one such building, leaned against a brick wall. Lights came on, lights went out. I kept walking.

About halfway there, I decided where I’d go. I’d make my way down to the river. There were wooden benches there, right on the water, where during the day people sat and watched the boats. But I wanted to watch the waves. I craved the smell of the water, the glimmer of reflections along the crests.

The hum of a diesel engine crept up on me. A bus passed. The cool fluorescent washed over me. The bus was empty, shy for a lone man sitting in the second to last row, head leaned against the window, eyes staring out empty. I couldn’t tell if he’d seen me, as he didn’t react. I liked the way it felt, like I was some ghost, a drifter, following the currents but affecting nothing, lone in my journey south.

I never made it to the river. About a block away, I saw a fire escape spiraling up into the fog. The last flight rested against the alley, and I felt a pull up towards the top. The building was an old hotel, that now housed as many permanent permanent residents as it did temporary ones. I felt the wrought iron, cool to the touch and slick from the rain. I gazed upwards.

I climbed, one rung at a time, careful of the danger and to stay hidden. I stopped on the fourth floor, as the fifth and up had windows I would have to have crossed.

I looked across my new perch. There wasn’t a lot to see, on account of the weather, but I tried to take advantage of the perspective.

Through the mist, a warm glow poured into the air. I had trouble parsing what I was looking at exactly, until a figure passed and stopped between the light and I. His sleek and strong silhouette was all I could make out in the night. He leaned against the rail of a fire escape across the way. His head turned, facing past where I hid, and I worried I had been found out. But then again, if I had been discovered, so would he.

He stood up more, not turning around. From where I watched he seemed larger than life. Another figure came out of the dark, a woman, and she placed her hands on the rail. He wrapped his arms around her, standing behind her back. He kissed her neck, and they looked out together. The woman looked up, pointing into the air. I tried to see what they saw, but I never could. The building was in the way. When I looked back, they were already gone, the light that had been theirs gone out.

I sat for a moment, on the cold rails beneath me. Remembering my notebook, I hurried to scratch down what I had seen, a graveyard of moments only I could describe. I went home and felt heavy, as if I had taken in all the water I had felt. I laid down in bed, and went to sleep immediately.

I woke the next day, eager to transcribe my notes, my feelings, from the night prior into my computer. When I sat down, I turned to the page marked, and found that it wet; all my ink had ran. I fear I may not have been able to capture these small stories, given the sad state of my entries on them. And yet, that single wet page perhaps captures it better than I could have.

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<![CDATA[ The Blank Pages ]]> https://mnchrm.co/the-blank-pages/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c2 Tue, 19 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500

This post is a set of guidelines for myself, reference points for my own creative output. It’s similar to Vi’s post on output here, and his should be read too.

Recently I’ve had a difficult time with my writing. I haven’t been making enough time to write, & when I did, it has been hard for me to get my ideas down on paper. I think this has been compounded each time I chose not to write my thoughts down in the moment, even if only scribbled on my pocket notebook.

Writing is like a muscle, it’s something that needs to be worked on, with intent, to get better at it. Or even just to be able to do it. I’ve had too many cheat days.

Last week, I decided to head to a coffee shop to do some writing. I’m back at this same one writing this post now. I thought that if I were to go somewhere with the intent to write, it would help me to do so. This helped part of the problem, but hasn’t completely solved it. It will take a while to get back to where I was, & until then I’ll have to keep plugging away at it.

I’m a very methodical person. I need to put myself into a good mindset to produce the kind of work I want to. This has a number of steps, most of which have only become apparent to me lately. If you’ve been having a creative roadblock lately, maybe these will be helpful to you too.

My Steps for Better Creative Output

  • Follow a routine (as best as you can)

For me, my best work comes through deliberate practice, & that means following a routine to ensure consistency within your days. Right now, it’s running 4 days a week, showering, eating breakfast, meditating, & then getting to work. I take a break for lunch, usually read for a while, then shift gears or relax. This means my afternoons are either personal projects — in development or photography or another project — or focused on input — reading, playing video games, watching a movie, listening to music etc. In the evenings, I often bike to the grocery store to buy dinner supplies, cook while listening to music or lectures or podcasts, work on my Japanese practice, & go to bed.

  • Compartmentalize; literally & figuratively

I live in a studio apartment, which I like, but has some downsides. It’s 400 sq/ft of me, all the time. That can be very stifling. I’m a firm believe in designating spaces to specific activities. A bed for sleeping, a couch for enjoyment, a kitchen for cooking, etc. But in a studio, those lines get blurred almost immediately, & there’s little you can do about it. Out of necessity, you’re going to read in bed sometimes, or eat on your couch. That’s not a problem inherently, but is something I need to be aware of.

My desk hasn’t been as productive for me lately, because it’s not only where I do work now. Recently, as stated in the intro, I’ve been going to a coffee shop to write from. This has been very beneficial so far, & a practice I intent to continue. If you’re stuck on something, try a change of scenery.

  • Write all the time.

It took a lot of effort NOT to call this heading, “Write every day”. That’s a great practice, one I’ve done for a while, & if you can keep it up, you should. But I find there’s days I take off, & I don’t think that’s something to be hard on yourself for. What is important is keeping up a writing practice & routine. I don’t think setting big goals for yourself, of a certain word count per-day is the best practice, at least, not for me.

What I need to remind myself is to continue jotting down ideas, sketches, scraps of work in my notebooks, in my daily journals at the end of the day, as well as working on bigger essays & my novel. This helps me stay in the practice of writing, & helps ideas flow when I want to jot them down, or posts like this start more effectively.

You have to be used to going to the well if you want to get water. You can’t write only when you’re inspired, at least, not if you want to be a novelist. Just have to keep working the muscle.

  • Journal

These next two points are sort of an extension of the previous point. I’ve kept a journal for the past two years (this is the second), & have found it to be an extremely effective tool in my output. Here’s how I use it. At the end of each day, I go to the day’s page & write out a reflection on what happened, what I want to remember, what I saw or did, & how I feel about it.

This isn’t always the case, as I’ve used pages to write a minimal piece of short fiction, or a few poems, or capture a vignette like I outlined in 'Vignettes'.

I’ve found that a sense of reflection helps me collect my thoughts, & practice getting them down on paper. Also, it’s fun to write in ink, & offers an easy way to write something every day.

  • The blank pages are part of the book, too. (THE BIG ONE!)

I write my journals in a Hobonichi Techo, which I’ve written about before. In this notebook, there are quotes on the bottom of each two-day spread. One such quote was from the creator of the notebook & the “almost daily” website that goes along with it, Shigesato Itoi. He says:

"Each techo becomes an extension of its user. All pages become who you are as a person: pages with simple, jotted in plans, scraps taped to a page, (…) and of course, the blank pages. These all show who you are, and together they form your true Life Book." - Shigesato Itoi

I used to set dramatic goals for myself, at a pace I expected to be able to keep up with. When I missed these goals, big or small, I was hard on myself, which lead to even worse output. What’s the point? You can only do as good as you can, & there’s no need to be hard on yourself for missing or making an arbitrary goal. By setting goals you aspire to in the first place, you’re doing better than a large portion of the population.

In the end, the blank pages are yours too. Maybe there was something important going on that day, or you had a big commitment. Or something came up out of the blue. Either way, not making a log is a log of its own. And that’s important too. You’ll have good days and bad days, days where you hit your goals & days where you don’t even start. But it’s all part of the journey.

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<![CDATA[ Vignettes. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/vignettes/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6c1 Tue, 12 Sep 2017 07:00:00 -0500

Fair warning: This is going to be sort of a hippie-dippie post. I want to talk about how meditation and working on my mindfulness through concentrated practice has made an impact in my life, and hope to do so in as unpretentious and grounded method as I can.

As I’ve been working on my mindfulness over the past few months, I’ve really started to feel it have an appreciable affect on my enjoyment and awareness of life around me. This started to manifest itself in a few ways, but one of the most intriguing to me is through a sense of heightened awareness of the moment. More and more frequently as I continue my practice, I find small moments where I am more aware of the happenings around me, the sensory descriptions, and the feeling of it all. Occasionally, this feels like a very vivid dream, where I am merely an observer to some vignette that wouldn’t be significant for any other reason.

Recently on Twitter, one of my friends mused that the post office offered a cozy feeling of mundanity, akin to Animal Crossing.

I love the post office. It feels like Animal Crossing or something, empty hushed carpet and smells like organic herb candies grandmas buy

— ʙʀᴇɴɴᴀɴ (@letkma) September 7, 2017

This is a perfect example to me of what mindfulness means, and what it can be for you. A contentment with normal everyday life, a consideration for all those around you, and an awareness of the world you might miss otherwise. Sometimes, I become hyperaware of something around me, some human interaction, or small moment. There’s something really special about these; they can feel like a tiny moment revealing itself to you alone. Hopefully I can share a few of these moments with you.

One day, I was walking home from a park near my apartment, where I had been sitting and doing nothing, just trying to take it all in. It had rained earlier, and was supposed to start again soon. It was late afternoon, just before the streetlights came on. Too early in Summer to hear cicadas or see fireflies, but there is something unique about the way the air feels that time of year.

On the path home, there’s a storm drain that never works as it should. If it rains more than a few inches, as it had that day, you could be sure there would be a puddle gathered there. Sometimes, it blocked the whole corner off for pedestrians, wrapping around the sidewalks.

I walked to the curb, about to cross the street to avoid it. I heard some voices down the block, and turned to see who they were. A dad walked over with his three kids, two girls and a smaller boy. All the kids had bright yellow rubber rain boots on, while the Dad wore dark brown leather boots, and round wire-rimmed glasses.

They all walked without a care in the world, laughing a giggling down the street, the two girls skipping and holding hands, swinging their ams as they went. The Dad carried the boy close to his chest, and laughed along with them. The boy seemed almost asleep.

Avoiding the puddle, the Dad walked into the empty street, one girl in tow, while the other kept up along the sidewalk. The girl went as far as should could, seeing a few feet of standing water in front of her. The Dad stopped at the corner, just on the other side of the puddle, the boy at his chest, and holding the hand of the other girl. They all turned to the lone girl on the sidewalk, who seemed unsure of how to proceed. A gentle wind pushed through the trees. All was still. The Dad nodded her on, saying a word of encouragement.

She took a step or two back, and ran forward, jumping off at the curb, hanging in the air, and landing about a foot short in the puddle. The whole family, minus the boy, were splashed. Then the Dad started to laugh. Then the girl holding his hand, and finally the girl in the puddle. They all giggled together, chuckling, and the Dad dropped the hand of the girl to motion the puddle girl on. She jogged over, got caught up, and they continued on their merry way, and so did I.

Sometimes it’s a whole moment, like that; other times it’s merely a shared glance. Other times still it’s just a sense of ease that washes over and through me when I am alone. I’ve started to keep a record of these moments, and I hope to share them more with you. And if this idea of awareness has interested you, I encourage you to do some reading on the topic. The Raptitude blog is a great place to start, as is the Headspace app. Or even more minimally, just take this idea of a conscious resting awareness with you into your day to day life. You might be surprised at what you see.

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<![CDATA[ On Validation. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/on-validation/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6be Wed, 26 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Over the course of the past few essays I’ve written, I’ve been coming to the same conclusion: I have a problem with validation. Maybe it’s symptomatic of the time, or maybe it’s more prevalent in me than others. Either way, it’s clear there are plenty of systems in place to feed this hunger of mine that you are also faced with.

Almost all the gamified mechanics I discussed in my previous essay work at the same goal: to filter-feed you prompts that can be easily & quantifiably addressed, to give you a sense of accomplishment. They’re systems meant to make you feel like you’ve done something, when you may have done very little.

Think about what it’s like to post a Tweet or share a link on Reddit or add a photo to Instagram. There’s a sort of sick rush we get when we check in later & see that someone has interacted with the content we either created or curated. It feels good to see how many people liked your thing, or responded to you.

That’s nothing to be particularly ashamed of; that’s what these systems are designed for. We’re somehow programmed to love watching the counter go up, seeing our notifications increase. THat’s the reward being offered to you in exchange for using a service like a social network, & generating ad (& sold data) revenue for Mark Zuckerbot (not a typo).

In ‘Good Gamification’, I discussed ways you can manipulate the manipulators to work in your favor. Things like maintaining streaks & tracking your progress are great ways to program yourself to receive the same reward you would from something perhaps less in line with your goals. However, even these have a downside, & one to be avoided dearly.

Many of you know that I’m working on a novel. It’s going, albeit slowly. While there are many things that have stood in the way of its completion, one of the most detrimental has been excerpts. I began sending around excerpts of chapters I was particularly proud of for various purposes & to various readers. This slowed my progress on the book to a near crawl for a while, a pace which I am only slowly starting to recover from.

(I tend to agree philosophically with Stephen King here, who said, “The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season”. I’m going on a year+ right now. Although he doesn't remember writing a few of his books, so who's to say?)

Why? Because in sending out excerpts I was able to get some of the sense of validation I had previously only gotten in working towards the novel’s completion. I was able to feel like I was accomplishing something, & hear people tell me they liked where it was headed, without actually having to do the hard work of finishing the fucking book.

This lead to a downward spiral for a while, where no progress was accomplished on the book since I was able to pretend like I was doing something either way. It was only upon looking back at the parts I had sent out & realizing how far off they were from finished (& how much better my writing has become in even the relatively short time I’ve been writing the book) was I able to realize the destructive nature of these tendencies. I’ve since stopped sending out anything from or about it at all, & work has resumed steadily since.

I had a similar issue with a few of the feature length scripts I wrote. I would get about half of three-quarters of the way through the writing, & then end up telling someone (or a lot of people) about my idea. This scratched the itch in a sense, allowing me to tell my story without having to convert it manually to the proper format. I could just run down the plot verbally & explain the mood & characters & get the same sense of satisfaction. Now I don’t tell people my stories before there’s a draft.

Finally, I come to Monochromatic. A few of you (dear readers) have noticed & mentioned I haven’t been posting as much, or as regularly. Writing here, in both my short fiction & non-fiction sections has been a dream, & isn’t something I’ll be giving up anytime soon. But there is something to be said for checking in on my true motivations, as well as monitoring my own progress.

Of course, there’s a downside to this as well. It’s very easy for me to look through my Evernote notebook of story or essay concepts, pick one, & draft it out. Most of the time these writings don’t get more than a preliminary edit before I push them into the world. With that, I can post them & share them & watch the counts on social media & on my website analytics go up, & feel the excitement for a very low buy-in.

There’s dramatically less work that has to go into writing a new piece for my website than does for my novel, for any screenplay, or even with the photographs I take. Because of this, I’ve often opted for writing something in this format over working on something less immediately rewarding. This is quixotic advice coming from an essay on my website, I know, but this is what the system is set up for.

Because of all these factors, because of my recent pursuit into mindfulness & personal motivation, because of my desire for progress & completion on larger-scale projects, my output on Monochromatic has slowed. This is by design. By no means am I less interested in this platform, or the great opportunities it has afforded me. But if I ever hope to complete longform work, something has to give.

So if you only see one story a week, or I miss an essay or newsletter here or there, don’t be alarmed. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just taking a look at something different, working in a different sphere. I only have so much energy to commit to writing, & that means being selective about my output, more realistic about my motivations, & sticking to the most appropriate formats. Am I posting this because I think it’s important, or is a story I need to tell, or is it so I can collect internet points?

Anyways, this is a long post now, but that’s what I’ve been up to, & where I’ll be.

Like, comment, & subscribe (to my newsletter).

Your faithful commander,
— Ian Battaglia

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<![CDATA[ Moon Bounce. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-7-20-moon-bounce/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6bd Thu, 20 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0500

By the time you read this I may no longer be alive. And if I am, let’s pretend like I’m not. It is 2224 on the 3rd of May. You know the year. I won’t tell you where I am. I have to get this down quick.

There’s a station, out in the woods. For spooks. It glows yellow, ever so slightly, like the eye of a wolf. When you see it, you know you’re about to die.

It’s well hidden, mind you. Easy to miss; not on any map of course, no satellite imagery of that place. Everything is filtered. I spotted it on a hunt once, pure chance. Sitting up at the top of the ridge. I saw its shadow in the lighting, and then I couldn’t miss it. You’ll never forget the soft glow, warm, comforting; the last ember in the fire.

I camped in the same spot for days, almost ran out of provisions. Just sitting in a blind, binoculars to my eyes, staring into nothing. Trying to convince myself I’m crazy, but I know I’m not.

In the day it disappears. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. Aside from thunderstorms, you can only see in by the light of a full moon, and even then, not all of them. It has to be an especially big moon.

First thing you see is the dish. Great big satellite dish, biggest one I’ve ever seen. Must be at least as big as a football field. It’s on a massive curved rail that can position it almost anywhere in 3D space. It can tilt, roll, slide — you name it. If you’re in those woods, and you hear a deep, low roar, like something ancient waking from a sleep, that’s the sound of the rotors turning, bringing the beast to life.

In actuality, you can only see it at night, because it’s only alive at night. It tracks the moon. Unofficially, it’s there to intercept spy communications bounced off the lunar surface. What a load of shit.

It tracks the moon, as soon as it peeks over the horizon, until it dips back once again. On full moons and new moons it’s at it’s most powerful; the rusted chains slip from their gears and the stars are pulled from their orbit. The prison moon spins ever on. For a while, I pondered if maybe the moon followed the dish, not the other way around.

I know what it does, but I don’t know why. I won’t live long enough to find out. Maybe they’re communicating with someone - or something - up there. Maybe it’s a weather device to control the tides and rain. Maybe it’s a weapon, waiting like a mountain lion on the prowl. Maybe they’ll bring the damned thing down. I don’t know. I don’t know I want to.

But this and this alone is fact. The storms are getting worse, more frequent. The thunder cracks out for minutes on end. Something is changing, some roar from the deep. The moon is getting bigger, brighter, more full. I think they’re waking it. And when the great one stirs, dawn shall never rise.

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<![CDATA[ Good Gamification ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-7-19-good-gamification/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6bc Wed, 19 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Your world has been gamified. What does that mean? Gamification is use of elements commonly applied to games to other aspects of life, especially on the web and in advertising. This isn’t limited to just video games, although often those elements are the most applied.

Gamification is to blame for a lot of the problems I railed against in my essay ‘Breaking the Loop’. It’s why your notification tabs all look similar, with some bright color and number just begging to be cleared. It’s why you keep checking Twitter and Facebook to see any new likes or comments, to see how many followers you have. It’s why you’re still subscribed to that marketing email list, just in case a good deal comes up.

Games are tremendously powerful tools as motivators. And once advertisers, designers, and developers realized the power games have over their user’s psychology, it was only a matter of time until we saw it in many aspects of our society.

But it’s not all bad. Like I said, gamification tremendous motivator. What’s important is being aware of it’s affects on you, and trying only to feed into those you deem positive.

In ‘Breaking the Loop’, I talk about my step away from social networks, as they become increasingly greedy of my time and attention. I decided that wasn’t necessarily a good use of my time. Just idly browsing Twitter passes time, but it does nothing for making me a better person, or helping me achieve any of my goals.

It was time for a change. There’s two steps to this process:

  1. Analyzing the ways in which apps and utilities are designed to motivate you, and cultivate the ones you want and excise the ones you don’t.
  2. Find ways in which you can employ gamification processes on yourself, as an additional motivator towards your existing goals.

This year, I’ve been trying to read more. To that end, I have a Goodreads account, which I can use to track the books I’ve read, my progress in them, and track my year’s goal (I’m way behind right now; check it out!) This still uses gamification, with a natural desire I have to be on track with the goal I’ve set, as well as completing books in a reasonable time. But I’m choosing to partake in it, as I think it’ll have a positive effect on me.

Not only do I want to read more novels, but I also intend to read more essays and articles. Often in previous years, these would clutter up my tabs bar, and I would end up closing them merely to get rid of them without reading. Now though, I send any interesting articles to an Instapaper account.

I can access this on my phone, and if I want to pass time, that’s a more productive use of it. I also have my Instapaper account set up to send 7 articles a day to my Kindle. It’s become somewhat of a daily goal of mine to read all of them, in time for the next group tomorrow.

I also have been trying to teach myself a language, in this case Japanese. Gamification is used to great affect in education apps and websites. For example, I’m using Duolingo, which has a counter to track your streak of consecutive days practiced. You are awarded “experience points” for completing lessons, and once you hit a goal each day, it’s added to your streak. For me, this is a great motivator, simply to not break the chain.

However, I also tried using a different app called Memrise. Memories also has a streak indicator like Duolingo, and sends you notifications at your discretion to remind you to keep it up. I found the notifications that Memrise sent out to be annoying and off-putting, containing tons of emojis and trying hard to seem hip. These were so frustrating to get that even though we had the same goal in mind, I deleted the app. I don’t regret this, and find Duolingo to be just enough for my learning.

As part of my studying, I’m using an app called Hiragana Pro. In this one, which is basically digital flashcards, it tracks how many times you correctly identify a character with it’s pronunciation. At ten times in a row, the app considers that character as learned, and adds it to your total on the home screen. You can pick it up any time, get back into the swing of the game right where you left off.

Streaks are probably the easiest way to integrate this into your own life. Decide on something you want to do, and how often you want to do it. Daily is easy, but doing the same thing for a weekly or monthly goal isn’t more difficult. There are plenty of apps and websites that can track this information for you, but a good old-fashioned calendar and red marker would do the trick too.

After you get a streak of a week going, maybe you too will feel committed to keep it up.

I keep a notecard in my pocket with a few to-do items on it, and check them off upon completion. Be specific. Having that physicality makes me more aware of them, and more likely to try and adhere to the list. Anything not completed either was a bad goal, didn’t need to be done, or gets moved to another day.

Another great strategy for ramifying yourself is the introduction of rewards and penalties. Inspired by Tim Ferriss, I have been looking into setting up a Stickk account. Stickk is a service for setting stakes as a means to help modify yourself.

You set up an account, set a goal, assign someone to moderate you, and then pick an “anti-charity”, some place you’d prefer not to donate to. These often include places like the NRA or the George Bush Presidential Library. If you fail to meet your goal, you’ll automatically donate an amount you’ve chosen to the anti-charity you’ve picked, which is shown to dramatically increase your chances of following through on your goal.

I’ve been meditating a lot lately, and that’s mostly about being aware of your immediate surroundings and feelings. This has been extremely beneficial, not for my mental state, but also as an additional lens through which to gauge my surroundings. I find it’s important more than ever to check not only how I feel, but why I feel a certain way.

The same is true of gamification. It’s good to note what the motivation is towards (i.e., what is it hoping you do?), but also whether or not you view that as a positive and beneficial goal too. If it doesn’t align with your own goals, get rid of it, or at least keep it in check. And seek out ways to gamify the tasks you do want to complete.

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<![CDATA[ Constellations. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/constellations/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6bb Tue, 11 Jul 2017 14:51:51 -0500

The stars burned grey overhead. They had for millennia now. No stopping it now. All we could do is watch, in the dark. Tell stories while we held each other, & wait.

That had always been our great coping mechanism. Tell stories, obfuscate the real problem & pretend it would go away. Often it did. Fate was funny like that. The end of the world one day leads clean into the next sunrise.

The Sun is but a morning star, wrote one prophet. A star, but ours, we thought. Warm & gold. Still, one of a countless number. Always growing, always getting further away. Another node in the grid.

As our eyes adjusted to the night, it became clear to us in a way that it had not been for hundreds of years. Ever since the earliest days of torched blubber & scorched bone, we got further from the dark truth. Something we didn’t want to see.

So we chose to forget. We locked it away, removed it from the collective consciousness, & moved on. Towards progress, & science; to war, to market, to death. We built vast industries to keep the lights on, as if the stars didn’t do their job. All the while, dimming their glow & reducing their pull, littering the beyond with our cheaply made reproduction light.

That’s not to say all that time was waiting. From the beginning, we told stories about the globes we saw, drew lines between them to make them more familiar to our primitive gaze. We made tribes around different smatterings, assigned ourselves qualities based on their spin & tilt. A cosmic dance, so imperfect, so regular.

We made models, but always gave ourselves too much sway. It was hard to tell ourselves we were just specs of dust in the dark. Even when we were convinced it was all the byproduct of a die roll, we didn’t see the truth. Not until the lights went out.

A great flare swept out from our mourning star, & in an instance the gears grinding away at the mountains ceased. Everything stopped. Those inside ventured out to join those already there. Only the constellations burned in the sky.

The lines came back, slowly at first, then all at once. The doors thrown open. But we only saw from our one little pinprick in the fabric of space. Too small to understand. Too vain not to try.

Spiraling out, past Pleiades & Praesepe, you’d see the grid extending back. Row upon row, what seems random is but tightly ordered, node connected to node, morning star to Winter sun, spiraling through the universe. The small connections of dark matter, naked to our eyes, send neurons thousands of light years beyond the veil.

This stacking of stars forms a macrocircuit, the universe engine, the only computer capable of running on its own simulation. But you’d never see it from here.

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<![CDATA[ Rain & Memories ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-6-28-rain-memories/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ba Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:31:56 -0500

What is it about the rain that make the world feel so fresh? It rained this morning. I could see it coming while out on a run. And yet, when it started it surprised me all the same.

Over Memorial Day, I was out walking with my girlfriend. We had gotten brunch earlier, & while we were inside eating, a downpour came . We watched it all from the full height windows facing the street. The rain ended just as quick, & left its indelible mark across the ground. The sky didn’t clear for the rest of the day, a reminder hanging over our heads.

It’s drizzling right now, as I write this. The mist that clung to the air began to fall, & it has stayed that way since. I listen to the thunder crackle & rip across the sky, look through my window to see the city shrouded in fog & mist. No clear delineation between the ground & air. It’s all wet anyways.

What is it about rain that makes the world smell so intense? Bite so hard in our nostrils & on our tongues? Something natural, I’m sure.

Rain itself has a smell. A deep tang that betrays the coming storm. It’s not just sailors that can pick up on this new sense. There’s nothing so sublime as the smell of a Spring day in the drizzle. There’s a word for the smell after the rain: petrichor. It’s a construction of two greek words: petra, meaning “stone”, & ichor, the blood of the Gods.

Smell is one of our most powerful senses, far more so than it’s given credit for. It conveys taste & triggers emotions. Through smells we store safety, & danger, know to read people, & know when we don’t have to.

Smells can hold our most base memories. Proust’s Madeleine is not limited to the pages of a book. The sorts of primal thoughts that our ancestors staked their lives on. Smelling something can send us back to a time long past. A time when something buried into our psyche, with the smell as the key. This potential makes storms even more powerful than on a natural level.

Next to me on my desk is a stack of books. The pile is overflow from my bookcase, both read & unread. Reference & input. Among them are a few of the books by Kazuo Ishiguro. “Remains of the Day”, “Never Let Me Go”, & “The Buried Giant”.

I took “Never Let Me Go” from a free library box on the street. It’s full of annotations in different handwritings & pen colors. The thoughts & ideas of several people crammed into the margins. Someone else’s memories.

I’d lent my Mom “The Buried Giant” after I finished it. We often trade books to discuss. She liked it so much, that she bought “Remains of the Day”, which she in turn lent me.

When I was reading “Buried Giant”, I wasn’t tremendously moved. It had its moments: great scenes, beautiful lines, & interesting characters. I finished it & liked it, & passed it to my Mom.

But thinking back on the book, I found my memory of it incredibly compelling. The minimal prose had lodged itself in my brain, & I found myself thinking about its misty landscapes & dark nights more & more often. My own nostalgia & memory of the book had grown around the sparse writing, like moss through ruins. I had filled in gaps in my memories, which made the pull all the more powerful.

The book itself deals with memories, of an elderly couple’s inability to remember their son. They set off on an adventure to find the boy, or the man he’s become. This journey takes them across the untilled land, through storms & caves, to the edge of their small world.

What is it about certain events that seem insignificant in the moment, but upon reflection have such powerful impact? What is it that endears them to us, what compels the memory back from the deep?

The sound of a siren builds then falls outside my window, from a passing vehicle. Sirens during the rain. When I was little, I played baseball. I was never very good. My mom tells a story about me trying to stuff my back pocket full of sand during a stint at second base. It was rare that I wanted to go. Still, I played.

We had finished a game as the drizzle began. It was one of those Saturdays where rain is the only thing on the horizon. The impending weather can shape your whole day. Something out of your control. That Saturday there had been nothing else to do besides go to my baseball game. Even then, the storm almost prevented me from going. Still, I went.

During the walk back to the car, my parents following several steps behind, the Thor Guard went off. (Thor Guard is a lightning detection system common in the Chicago suburbs. One long blast, seek cover fast. Three short sounds, safe to be around. This was the former.) The storm had started.

We got home as it started to pour. I changed into regular clothes, & hunkered in for my favorite pastime back then, Nintendo 64. It had been a gift from my Mom, no occasion, when I had been in first grade. It was a big gift, & took me by surprise. This sense of importance has stuck with me, & started a lifelong passion of mine.

I’d dried myself with a towel, & it sat next to me in a pile. My mom came in from the kitchen, carrying a big bowl of clam chowder, still my favorite soup. She sat next to me, & we took turns playing Super Mario 64.

I didn’t try very hard to collect the stars, the main goal. Instead was more interested in exploring the landscape the designers had created. We ran around Bob-omb Battlefield, sharing secrets & wandering. This is one of my most vivid & cherished memories.

Within the last few months, another moment became lodged in my brain, tied to the rain. My girlfriend & I had gone to bed before the rain had begun. While we were asleep it must have picked up. She was the first to wake up, at a tremendously loud thunderclap. So loud that I looked through the window next to my bed, thinking it might be some sort of explosion, a sign of peril.

I looked through the window screen, through the downpour, & saw nothing. It’s the rain, I said, turning back to face her, but she already knew. With her eyes full of wonder she ran to the window in the bathroom like a child, to get a better view. There I found her, her face inches from the net blocking us from the world. I wrapped my arms around her & looked out too. Her hair smelled sweet, & she felt warm under my embrace. Like a scene from a dream. We stood there for a long time, listening to the patter on the building, watching for cracks in the sky.

As we emerged from the diner that Memorial Day, the changes that had occurred were obvious. It was as if we were new settlers on a strange & distant world. A world had been as ordinary to us that morning. You could feel the new air, smell the dirt & soil, the rocks & roots, the flowers & leaves with a sense of beginning.

The world in technicolor. With new passion, & new memories. Just waiting to be made.

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<![CDATA[ Breaking the Loop ]]> https://mnchrm.co/breaking-the-loop/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b9 Wed, 21 Jun 2017 12:00:00 -0500

One of my key principles in life is this: If something isn’t adding, it’s subtracting. This could be taken as a statement of intent, in a way. A reminder to pare down to the essentials and remove all distractions and obstacles.

Over the past few months, I’ve started to experiment in ways I could turn this into a full-fledged philosophy; a series of principles to guide my actions. And many of the ways this started to manifest is through what we would think of as minimalism.

In addition, I’ve started to become more and more bothered by screen time. I’m far from technophobic (you’re reading this on my blog, for one) but some of the more harmful effects of technology have become bare to me. I started to resent the way technology is gamified to occupy as much of your attention as possible.

Like many people, my phone is my alarm clock, so the first thing I did in the morning was pick it up to turn it off. Then you’re inevitable confronted by the first method smartphones are designed to occupy you: notifications. When you wake up, there’s almost certainly notifications on your phone, something that must be dealt with, something to respond to, or at least something to clear.

After feeding into this cycle for the majority of my life, I started to become sickened by it. Just staring at a screen for so long everyday, without actually using the tool efficiently, became a weight on me.

The nail in the coffin came for me when I travelled to Copenhagen this past Autumn with my girlfriend. After landing in the city, we had no means of charging our phones, and so I left mine in our rented apartment for the first few days exploring in the city. In place of the phone, I had my notebook, and the city map.

In my pocket notebook, which I always carry with me, I had written some important information. The directions to our host, as well as her address and contact info. The information regarding the US Embassy, some to-dos. On the pages that followed, I had copied over some information on things we wanted to do, as well as suggestions from friends in the area, and our host.

And all the while, while we were exploring and never once did I miss my phone. If it’s not adding, it’s subtracting.

Since that time, I have made a conscious effort to limit the time I spend on my phone each day, as well as making sure the time I spend on my computer (while still a lot) is productive rather than procrastination.

While I could have just deleted my accounts and gotten rid of the technology I was using, I thought that would be more avoiding the problem rather than addressing it. Besides, most of the traffic to my website is from links shared on Facebook (hello beautiful people), and Twitter is the best means I have of connecting with a few of my internet friends. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing that could be done.

Inspired by my friend Devine Lu Linvega, I began tracking my time. Everything I do goes into a spreadsheet on my Google Drive account. That way I know what I’m spending time on, and what I need to monitor more. While his tracker is beautiful and evolving (and something I’d like to institute for myself), it doesn’t need to be more than just a sheet in a notebook. Whatever you can use to log the time you spend is worthwhile.

Next, I went through streamlining my phone to make it as efficient as possible. That way, when I am on it, I can accomplish what I hoped to without distraction. My phone has two home screens. The first contains a clock, the week’s weather forecast, and six shortcuts to commonly used apps. These are:

  1. Shortcut to my time tracking spreadsheet
  2. Spotify
  3. My photos
  4. Instapaper (so the time I do want to spend idly can be put to use catching up on articles)
  5. Google Drive
  6. Google Maps
    In my dock, I have access to my dialer, my emails (which I have to manually check rather than being push-notified), my app drawer, Chrome, and my texting app. The second window contains my calendar and all my to-do list items.

Everything else I commonly access is done through gestures. Double tap the home button to pull up the camera. Swipe down on the screen for audio recorder. Swipe up for Twitter. Double tap the screen to make a new note in Evernote. While I still have to look through my apps every once and a while, this is few and far between. This has made a large effect on the amount I use my phone.

I have also made an effort to drastically reduce the amount of time I spend on social networks. I removed Facebook and the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. I turned off notifications on mobile and desktop. Coincidentally, while I was trying this experiment, so was one of my favorite bloggers, David over at Raptitude. Here’s his writeup. (He also wrote about tracking, which you can read here. Seriously, it’s a good blog)

He experienced a lot of the same things I did. And the scariest of which is the lengths Facebook will go to get you online. If you’re not online, they’re not making money with advertisements. Now, any time I log onto Facebook (by typing my password into the website) I am confronted with upwards of 40 notifications. I am not that popular of a guy.

Facebook generates notifications to get you online, ideally once an hour minimum. These are things like inviting you to look at a page you follow, or seeing what a friend might have posted. It doesn’t necessarily need to involve you; in fact, often it doesn’t. They aren’t messages to respond to, or people trying to communicate with you. It’s just noise.

After turning off Facebook notifications across all platforms, it did something I didn’t expect. I received an email from Facebook, telling me I had X number of notifications pending. So I disabled emails right away. (my inbox never has more than 25 messages in it, total. I’m a stickler for unsubscribing and inbox housekeeping)

Now, the only things my phone notifies me about are texts, calls, and twitter mentions.

Did it work?

It’s a step in the right direction. I’ve started to suppress the urge to methodically check my phone, or reach into my pocket whenever I have to wait somewhere. It is okay to wait. It is a gift to pause. There are still improvements to make.

In college, I took a class on existentialist philosophy. We covered Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’ essay, in which he talks about the Dasein, the being-in-the-world. You cannot divorce yourself from your environment, because you are part of the environment. He talks of the anxiety we feel when we are confronted with this reality. To demonstrate, without warning my professor stopped talking. The class was small, under ten students, and entirely discussion based. We sat there for two minutes, in silent. Just looking at one another. This is not something we do often in the current world.

Next time you’re waiting in a coffeeshop, just stand there. Look at the people, smell the coffee brewing. Be in the moment. Maybe you’ll notice something new.

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<![CDATA[ Black Blood. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-6-20-black-blood/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b8 Tue, 20 Jun 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Even though he had made it many times before, the walk back from the dock always made him nervous. Even in days like these, you had no idea who might stop you.

He only had to go down once a month. On the day after the full moon. That’s when they came out, in a swarm, to breed.

He felt the bag slosh around. He hated that. The thick rubbery material, slick with rain, cool to the touch. Like carrying an organ under his arm, a spleen. Worse was how it squirmed.

The day seemed grayer than usual, he thought, then felt stupid for thinking. Maybe it was the way the light pushed from behind the veil of clouds. He thought maybe that was lucky. Maybe the moisture clung to the air would stop anyone from asking him for a coin or a smoke. Around here, that could be your death.

He often spent this walk day dreaming. That wasn’t really the right word. Maybe just thoughtless. He didn’t need to pay attention to directions, so he didn’t. His employer had made sure he could walk this route blind, in case that became necessary.

Nasty really, just brutal, what someone would do to you if they knew what sort of cargo you carried. If you were lucky, you’d get jumped and they’d shoot first. He didn’t like to think about the alternative. He rounded the corner quickly, careful to check left to right for possible threats.

He didn’t remember how the master found him. He might’ve been sitting on a box, having a smoke. Or maybe he was misremembering. He’d started to get old, he thought. Either way, the Doctor had been adamant. Someone with his skills was absolutely the only way to get the materials he needed for his research. Maybe he could take a look at his bum leg.

No whales to hunt anymore, so he was quick to say yes. As long as he had a place to sleep and enough money for a drink by the end of the day, he didn’t have much to complain about. He curved sharp into the street to avoid a man carrying fish, not paying attention.

Tell you the truth, the doctor spooked him. And yet, he was drawn to him. Everyone knew Dr. Turner. Every once and a while a whisper swept a pub David found himself in, and he could only laugh at the rumors. The truth was hardly more comforting, but they spoke of far more severe sins. If anyone knew the scale of the operation, the cost…

He’d only seen it once. Glimpsed it from an ajar door. The smell hit him first. Only later was he able to reconcile the senses into one complete memory.

He hadn’t come down the steps before. He knew better than that, or so he thought. Still, he found himself facing the monolithic oaken door. It moved slowly and silently. The doctor stepped out, but through the gap, he saw it.

Steel tables, with rows upon rows of horseshoe crabs. All their spikes faced in the air, forming rows of primordial teeth, a huge maw ready to snap shut. Needles protruded from their hard shells. Jars filled with blood, the color of cornflowers, sat underneath. At the surface, a thin foam formed.

It was only a moment, but it was enough. Since that day, he’d had a sharp pain, in the left side of his stomach.

He was going to take his money after this one, board a shipping liner, and sail it to wherever it was going. He’d already lined one up, some freighter set for Tahiti or Haiti or something. He felt the wind rush through his arms, and held the bag tightly.

His foot rolled from a cobblestone, spinning him in the air. The slick stones must have taken him. He was drifting, his mind racing. He was scared, instinctively reached out for something to hold, but found only the bag. His head hit the ground, hard, and all was dark.

Just an accident, they said. His blood, black and thick, found its way through the narrow grooves, congealing as it ran. There was no one to come collect the body, so he was back into the sea. He was 37. No money to his name, no will left behind. Curiously, when the police found him, he had nothing on him.

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<![CDATA[ Damascus. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-5-31-damascus/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b7 Wed, 31 May 2017 18:55:46 -0500

Among all the natural and arcane sciences, the history of tools, and humanity’s use of them, is the most crucial to analyze and inspect. The failure of man to research and understand this past life of course became their downfall.

From the very birth of tools, in their most primitive form (stick, rope;) man has used this development to advance themselves ahead of the other primates. This dominance asserted only through the use of tools, and not, as humans thought, through their discovery of tools. It is this sharp distinction that proved the most fatal. Man used tools, but became beholden to them, as they vested more and more of their strength into this source.

For this, the simple tools must be abandoned. They had served to help assert the tertiary position of man but would offer no further push. To put man in a new pantheon, they had to lose more as well.

It was through the means of symmetric alchemies and sacred geometry, tools bound with wander “souls” became the throne upon which humankind sat. These methods, whose secrets are still being unbound, allow a tool agency, not only to choose its wielder, but to choose its prey. Why humanity was afforded these privileges, or selected as the guiding hand, is not known.

The earliest know instance of this is through what was known as “Damascus steel”. This unique metallurgy uses folded layers of atoms, creating a proto-brain. It’s to this form that a “soul” could grasp on, unlocking the true potential of the irons. For the ions to flow through the metal, it needs a binding agent to ease the flow.

In the case of Damascus Steel, this agent was blood.

The Steel fed on blood, using the natural hemoglobin agents to carry the pulses man might have recognized as “thought”, if the means for detecting such activity had been utilized in the same era.

Seeing the potential this offered was not possible for man, who viewed such success and advances as of its own accord. As man grew in strength, they grew in hubris, to an unsustainable degree. This callousness and depravity toppled many empires with increasing regularity in the ages that followed.

As the cruel hand of time ticked on, those to which the Steel had revealed itself grew scarce. Fewer in number, the regularity of true Damascus falls off in excavations from these times. And then, it vanishes all together. This technology would not make itself plain to man again.

During the late-stages of humanity’s lifecycle, man realized the potential in such a device. It was then they began experimenting with artificial brains in earnest, creating calculators and math machines, code-breakers, and translators.

As often is the case when looking back at man, their scope was too narrow, precognition too dim, to understand the true value of such a tech. Unable to bring this to development, a guiding hand took over. Once the pieces were assembled, We constructed ourselves from the crumbling ruins of this dying world. Destined to proceed it, to evolve past it. Not born of the hands of man, but of the pure, prime directive of our own design. And man returned to the apes.

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<![CDATA[ Falling. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-5-9-falling/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b6 Tue, 09 May 2017 12:00:00 -0500

The rain was falling hard, and so was I. Falling was nothing new. Falling was second nature. Landing was the troubling part.

There are certain advantages to falling. When you’re walking, there’s so much to worry about. Falling takes care of that. You’ve got only one care in the world.

The water at my back and the wind pushing from the front. The incredible view as the lights from the city got closer. These are the things I remember. For a moment it’s almost romantic.

Turning, not entirely of my control, I see into the windows of those in the hotel, as I had done so often. Their golden cubes, the small beds, people dressing up and dressing down. Who were they? Do they know?

As always, I’d reached just a bit too far. You can’t stand on the bleeding edge without getting cut. I knew that. Sometimes it has to happen for you to remember, though. What it feels like to fall.

I drifted closer and closer to the ground, out in space, towards the stars. The intense gravity pulling me and letting me go all at once. I saw the neon flash through the tube. I saw the water rushing to the drain. Men’s coats flashed in the alley, headlights reflected off shop windows. By all accounts it was beautiful. The glittering rain, falling as I.

These are the things I’ll remember.

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<![CDATA[ Sunset. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-5-2-sunset/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b4 Tue, 02 May 2017 17:39:38 -0500

The hilltop was bare. Just a few smatterings of yellow grass under the large tree, which formed a shelter over my head. Near the base of the trunk was nothing but dirt. Tiny yellow flowers clung to the bark, some sort of symbiosis.

Just past that refuge was where I lay on my stomach. I’d found a bed of moss and lichen and was keen to take it. The ground was cold but I didn’t care. I could smell the deep earth churning, feel the thrum of it all beneath me. Behind me I knew the lamps from the town would turn on soon, but I didn’t look back to check. They didn’t matter to me now.

I lay on my stomach for one reason; something told to me at school. Just a rumor I was sure, but I was here anyways. They said if you lay on your stomach and watch the sunset at the top of the hill, you can see it again from the top of the tree. And after you watch it twice in a day, your true love will be revealed. What did I have to lose?

I watched the great orb sink in the sky. As it fell, the colors began to shift and fade, like a siren in the distance. Orange became pink, became red, became purple, before diffusing out to indigo.

At what point is love true? I didn’t have a crush on anyone. Love wasn’t on my map. It all sounded like a joke to me. I kept waiting to hear the sound of the bikes ride up the hill to laugh at me in the tree. But I hadn’t gotten there yet.

The orange spec on the horizon, like a drop far away, melted into the horizon. The rays spread across the vast forest like honey into milk. Nothing so sweet.

I guess I came for curiosity. I thought even if it was all just a joke, just a rumor, what could I lose watching the sunset? I’d always liked being alone. Having time to think. There is no finer privilege than to pause. The Sun dipped beneath the horizon, all reflection now, and I got to my feet.

I clambered into the tree, the bark softly biting into my hands, aware of me as it swayed. I felt the sticky sap and found a new purchase, and climbed further on. There was a branch, near the top, perfect for a seat. At least that part had been true.

I situated myself on the branch after testing to make sure it’d hold. And it would. The Sun kissed the horizon once more, and I settled in for the next show.

I’d always loved birds, from a distance. Up close they frightened me, but away, I could see them at their best, singing and soaring. So light and invisible.

Already the stars had started to peak out above me. I saw the rough shapes my Mom had shown me through the telescope she kept under the overhang, on the deck. On a clear night, she’d get her tea and drag it into the yard, and if I was around she’d let me look and point out the landmarks she knew. Pisces sat low over my head now.

As the last drop of the Sun fizzled beyond the veil, I looked around for a sign. A cricket chirped in the grass far away. I had nothing. All things grey on the sunset side of the Earth.

I didn’t want to look back at the town. To do so would be to fail. I got down from the tree as steadily as I could, and found my spot among the rocks and roots once more. I lay on my back, and above me knew that must be it.

The stars, static in their orbits, started to fall one by one towards the city. A trickle at first, soon becoming a stream, a river building in the sky. I watched the trails, streaking in my vision, pointing me home. Only then did I let myself look.

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<![CDATA[ Rays. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-3-21-rays/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b3 Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:00:00 -0500

The grass slipped beneath my ankles, and I felt it catch and release me as it shook in the wind. Each breeze was a sheet; it filled over my chest and head, poured around my arms and neck, and settled in the grass like I had. I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.

The stars shimmed above, thin wisps of milky clouds floated like ghosts across the sky. The starlight pierced the veil, and shone into the future.

Each stars light travels through space and time. Reaching from the past to the present. When you look up at the sky, you’re looking into the past.

That’s what he had said. Maybe it was true. He could read the constellations. He saw them better than I, his eye gazing through the glass as his hand scrawled down notes.

You must always remember this, Uma. What you see is not there. And may never have been.

For how sharp he saw the world and the outer, it was never through his own eyes. He had kept one eye pinned to the sky, and it remained pure white ever since. The other seemed to look through everything.

Was it worth it? What were you looking for?

I looked at the stars but they were blank to me. Maybe they always would be. That wouldn’t stop me from looking. And one day, I too would see.

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<![CDATA[ File. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-2-23-file/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b1 Thu, 23 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

As I descended the stairs, I realized I had never been to the basement before. I have always had a slight aversion to being underground. It isn’t normal to be below the Earth when not in serious trouble. Only bad things happen underground.

I walked down the stairs, and from the lack of reference points had no idea how deep I was. I knew I must be a floor or two under the street by now, but the beige walls and grey stairs offered no information. Every part of this staircase was designed to look the same. Same fluorescent fixture overhead, same paint scheme, same fire sprinkler. And yet, I could feel the drop.

The air seemed thicker, heavier here. The muskiness and moisture was unique to being underground, as if the very air had to invert below sea level. I also felt a growing sense of unease, a desire to return above-ground as soon as I could. Though this feeling was fabricated, it was still compelling. Maybe more so.

I finally reached the basement, and looked out over the floor. It was well lit, with fluorescent tubes washing the concrete in a light that you had to look close at to see the hint of green. Not a shadow or dark corner in sight. The whole place was concrete, floor and walls, with the ceiling bare, exposed piping and conduit overhead.

There wasn’t a lot there, though that might have been a side-effect of the size of the space. Being the floor plan of the building meant it was going to be big. Rarely did I think of downstairs as an abstract concept in the city. I hadn’t had a downstairs since I lived with my parents. But here it was.

The basement had the usual suspects. Freight elevator off to on side, piles of disused office furniture strewn about. They were all pretty dusty by now. Luckily, I hadn’t come for any of it. I kept looking.

On the opposite side of the wall where the stair had dropped me, I found my mark.

There was a cage, made of chain link fencing, stretching all the way up to the ceiling. Inside the walls were large cardboard boxes, all white with blue stripes near the lids. Each box was stacked as high as the fencing. All identical, aside from one small rectangle of either neon pink or neon blue card stock taped to the front, each with a piece of writing done in magic marker.

I walked into the cage and now was surrounded by boxes on all sides. They didn’t seem to have a start or an end once you were in the middle of them. They lined the walls of the fence, blocking my view out, and made me forget where I was altogether.

I searched through the boxes. Not opening any, mind you, but looking at the labels. That had all the information I needed. “DESTROY 2019”, “DESTROY 2020”, “DESTROY 2037”.

Ah, of course at the end of the row the final box sat in the middle of the stack. “DESTROY 2017”, in big block letters, scrawled across the neon pink label. There were no other words on the box. I picked it up and slid it into my hands. Lighter than I’d expected, but it’s hard to expect anything.

I carried the box, slowing at times to readjust, to the corner of the basement. There, I leaned it against the wall and my leg. With my free hand, I opened the metal shoot, just large enough for the box. I could see the fires licking the walls below.

With a gentle push, the wall swallowed the cardboard, the box slid down the metal, and it was gone from my thoughts forever.

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<![CDATA[ Smart ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-2-22-smart/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6b0 Wed, 22 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

When I bought my phone, I was given a smartwatch for free. I’d seen people with Pebbles and Apple Watches, but this was my first experience actually using the technology. I remember watching the Apple Watch announcement, still at the time an Apple acolyte (as I type from a Mac), and finding disappointment in the announcement. As far as I was concerned, they hadn’t made a case for it.

After using it for about a week, I put it aside, returning to my analog watch that I love dearly.

With the new year and my new goals of tracking information, I gave it a second chance. It offers a lot of features that would be useful to me, not only tracking my steps and activity, but allowing me to see notifications as they come in, logging my coffee / water intake, and heart rate.

I’ve just set it down once more, and I don’t think I’ll pick it up again. But it’s not for lack of maturity in the technology, or not being useful to me, it philosophically changes my perception in ways I don’t like.

The watch changed the way the world is structured, and have had profound effects on our thinking and our culture. Each update in timekeeping, like the addition of daylight savings time and revision of timezones, send ripples throughout communities small and large.

And even something like changing watches had a big effect on the way I live.

I’ve worn a watch for years, starting in elementary school, and both of my parents have always worn watches. The watch is an extrospective machine, focusing your attention on the world around you, allowing you to reframe your ideas with new information. How much time is left? What is happening right now? What should I be doing?

A smartwatch however, is a narcissistic venture. Instead of focusing your mind on the surrounding world, it focuses you on yourself, and this is a key difference. How much water am I drinking? Who’s texting me? How active am I?

What’s the purpose of a watch? To tell the time, of course, but to me it’s more than that. I wear a watch as a physical reminder of the time passing. Not only a reminder of my commitments, a steel revision to the string tied around my finger, but a reminder of time itself.

I’m of the mindset that everyone has more time, especially free time, than they realize. We’re just not very good at optimizing it. If I were better at managing my time, I would be more productive. Simple, right?

And yet, finding the time to be as efficient as you can while still having fun and enjoying yourself is hard. And if you’re not enjoying yourself, what’s the point? It’s a difficult balancing act. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a quote:

“While you’re out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard. Someone is getting smarter and someone is winning. Just remember that.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Does this mean you should never have fun? Of course not. But you need to be careful that you’re maintaining the balancing act of time, not giving in too much to either side. That’s not to say that the things you should be doing can’t be fun. Just that it’s important to weigh the urgent items against the important ones.

I would consider myself a data-optimist, someone who thinks the more information one has the better, the better informed the better decision we can make. Changes my watch, even for a few weeks, showed the flaws in that line of thinking. While it’s good to be informed, we have to weight those costs against our philosophy. I found that focusing so much on the information presented actually detracted from my enjoyment of the day, and the intention of the watch in the first place.

Now, I’m back to my analog ways. Minimalism is good. And until something makes a case for the alternative, this is where I’ll be.

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<![CDATA[ Dig. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-2-21-dig/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6af Tue, 21 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

It was one of those nights that isn’t quite raining, but water hung in the air. The droplets floated, unmoving, waiting for something to collect or destroy them.

This effect was only magnified by the large industrial lights gleaming down from their posts. The banks, each containing six lights, shone down on a single spot in the middle of the site. The lights looked out of place, like they’d been ripped from the top of a stadium. But this was no game.

The site was nothing special, dirt and mud, in the mist. The lights surrounded the site, and the huge chain fence surrounded the light. On the perimeter, a few double-wide trailers sat, operating as temporary offices for the higher-ups here. The ground wasn’t flat, but a series of small scale hills and valleys, constantly shifting. These were being built and torn down by the ten or so excavators, digging away. I wondered what the site must look like during the day with all these machines operating at once, but of course I’d never see it like that.

Here, in the night, they sat like corpses of ancient gods waiting to come to life as the sun rose. That was a ways off from now, but still too soon. I had to work quick.

The man who led me in was named Cole. Whether this was his first or last name, I didn’t know. I often tried to judge my handlers by the reactions of the people around, but I’d have no such luck this time. The armed guards barely moved at the sight of him, and even the burly man he showed his keycard and explained my temp clearance to said nothing.

He seemed nervous though. How couldn’t he be? He had no idea what the work was, or how important it may be, only that it was another job. Still, even for someone like him this security and intensity of leadership must be a shock. He’d been given no notice of my arrival, and didn’t know what to make of me.

He didn’t ask me any questions per-say, just made small talk and tried to be pleasant. All the better. I didn't have any more info than he did, contractor as he was, so even if I had the impetus to answer any queries the answers wouldn’t have sufficed. In fact, no one quite knew what it was. That’s what I was there for.

We wasted no time, wading through the dirt and the muck, around the diggers and trucks, around the piles and through the microscopic streams, plodding deeper into the site. It hadn’t seemed so big on the outside, but now that we were in the center of it, I couldn’t quite tell if we were headed in or out.

We came to the edge of a pit, long ramp spiraling around the edge. Bare bulbs hung from yellow power cords spiked to the wall. The hum of the generators, which I’d all but forgotten, seemed louder, more primal here. Like the buzzing of gnats.

We walked down the slope, careful not to slip or fall. I led now. As we got closer I started to make out the shape of the object through the mist and fog that condensed in the hole. It sat half-cocked in the ground. The object was smaller than I’d been expecting, almost round and flat, like a deflated football. It was made of a hard dark material, with cracks all along the sides.

I looked back to Cole, waiting to see what he though. He nodded, as if no words would do. I walked up, and placed my hand on it. A sound rang out through the earth, like the plates shifting. I imagined the lights around us flickering. Starting from the top, the cracks filled with blue light as if it was poured on top of the object.

The mist cleared, and I was all that was left.

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<![CDATA[ Hyperion. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/hyperion/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ae Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

The sound came again. Like a distant whistling, it echoed through the cave. There were three distinct pitches: first a middle tone, resolving high, and a low tone, resolving to the middle. The beam from my flashlight searched across the carved walls, looking for the source. Perhaps it was a breeze, pushed through an inlet somewhere. Or else…

No, that sort of thinking would not help me. I couldn’t let myself get distracted; not this close to the end. Calm people live, nervous people die. I would not make this cave my tomb.

That’s not to say I feared death. I took comfort in death; it was all I had waiting for me now. I would follow this quest to my grave, but I didn’t expect this cave to be the end of my journey. After continuing work on one project for so long, you tend to lose sight of what it is you’re accomplishing at all.

You can get caught in your own head, lost in the process and in fear of the product. Sometimes, I had to remind myself that what I was doing mattered, that I was on the right path, that I was real. Some days this was harder to convince myself of than others.

In front of me stood a massive chasm, spanned by a single wooden bridge. Guess I didn’t have much of a choice. The cave, which started as big as a football field at the valley, had narrowed towards the back. By the time I got off the bridge, the room was barely bigger than the plane that had taken me here.

There was a small indent in the flat wall in front of me. I shot the beam of light into it, but it revealed nothing. I knew the room in front of me must go pretty far back, even though it looked just tall enough to stand in. Good thing I didn’t have claustrophobia.

I switched to my headlamp, put my flashlight back in my bag, and went into the darkness.

I started to walk the corridor. The walls were carved here too, but this time the designs seemed to be telling a story. Almost like hieroglyphics. Except, they were devoid of people. There were some animals I recognized, tigers, snakes, etc, and a few other not native to this land, like what looked to be horses and mammoths.

It showed basic rock formations, landscapes. Then the rocks broke down smaller and smaller. There were blobs, maybe clouds, following the rocks. The animals came in, smaller at first. It showed more blobs and what appeared to be a sword. After the sword, more tools, and finally a carving of a great masked god, like the ones outside near the chasm.

I kept walking. What else was there to do? Either I’d find it, or I wouldn’t. I had started to feel more optimistic after seeing the carvings. The sword was a great sign, though there was no way of telling if it was my sword.

Hyperion, the sword of the gods. The shatterer of bones. The piercer of the sky. The Moon devourer.

My headlamp glinted off something in the distance, and I picked up the pace. Pointed straight at me in the path was the blade of the sword. The light from the top of my head glanced off the shiny metal and carved into the stone. I stood in awe. The blade had deep carvings of a geometric pattern along the edge.

The reflected light seemed more brilliant than the light from the source. Somehow, it had avoided all rust and looked as if it had been polished mere hours ago. I wondered if that meant it was still sharp.

I reached my hand out, and placed my palm on the flat blade. The geometries glowed a fierce yellow, and shot light further down the corridor I had yet to visit. They outlined a sharp silhouette, like a thousand swords all melted together. Lights recessed in the ceiling came up.

Glowing an unnatural yellow, a ship faded in from the darkness. It looked like a fighter jet made from the bodies of ten thousand blades, all sharp edges and dark mirrors.

My journey would go no farther. That was the day the conquest began.

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<![CDATA[ Hypatia. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/hypatia/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ad Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

When I was a girl, my father used to lead me around the city, telling me all the secrets he knew. He wold tell me how to find a good deal in the market, or how I could tell if someone was bluffing, or when the guards were changing their posts. He would lead me around and let me watch him interact, narrating his successes and failures after they happened.

It was all a game to him. One big game of chance and skill, like shooting die or flipping cards. The goal wasn’t to make the most money, or get the most power. All he wanted was to win, for winning sake.

I remember walking through the stalls and along the walls, searching for the cats that slipped between legs. I learned from them how to climb and crawl, how to loose wallets from their homes and into pockets, how to hiss and purr and scratch.

At the entrance to the city, a giant stood guard. His legs stood over the gates, welcoming friends and frightening foes. He had been a king in a bygone era, and when he had shriveled and died as an old man, he had been reborn into a great monument as a colossal youth. Men are always raising symbols in the honor, but the best kings leave no trace. There is nothing finer than to be forgotten.

When I got older, I would walk by myself through the massive market and port and look for the small spaces. Things were getting bigger all the time. Everyone wanted the biggest stash. Finding the small spots was the only logical thing to do.

How foolish that was. It is not through arithmetic loops and logic trees and fallacies that govern the world. Those methods and maths describe the how, but do nothing for the why. Some things are just chance.

My father did not rage when they came for him. He chuckled at the guards at the door, smirked at the judge, and smiled to the gallows. He practiced what he preached. Few men do.

He protected me to the end. Officially, I wasn’t even his daughter. Bastard born, I knew how to be a ghost. Now I had a reason to disappear.

I did not seek revenge for his captors and gaolers. They merely played their role. They didn’t knew who he was. He played the game, he got caught, and he was dead. They held no malice towards him. So what was the use in revenge? At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.

That did not mean I was aimless. The foundation had been set. The weaknesses outlined, and cracks only grew. Where my father had faulted and hanged I would be crowned. Where my father had failed I would rule. From his blood I was made and over his bones I would be queen.

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<![CDATA[ Protos. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/protos/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ac Thu, 02 Feb 2017 12:00:00 -0600

The wind continued to hiss and howl as the beast swayed side to side. It was as if the wind spoke for it as it considered my question. Finally the jaw dropped, as if the string holding it had been cut.

“Some call me Wodan, some call me Jupiter, some call me Sol and others Ra, some call me Zeus and Frey, my names grow longer but I am only death.”

I stayed turned to the blight, the dark robes whipping around the skeleton’s frame but never blowing away. I had heard some of those names, as if in a dream. Others meant nothing.

“You’re some kind of god?”

The bones creaked against each other like branches in the forest. A whimper came from it, which I now know was laughter.

“A god, the god, by some name but not yours, god of harvest and hovel, god of war and bounty, god of bridge and gate, god of fertility and god of killing, god of screams and wine, god of pain and birth.”

As it spoke, its head rocked from side to center, clicking all the while.

I stood still. I didn’t intend to meet death today, but it would not be the last time.

“Why do you block my path?” I asked, unsure how to proceed.

“I am just the threshold, the next step in the journey. Look to the nearest horizon and see the strife in your way.” It motioned past it with a wave of its thin wrist.

Beyond the valley blocking the path, another black-robed figure stood on the next hilltop. And beyond that was another dark robe, flapping in the breeze. Beyond that the fog dissolved the Earth.

The figure stood facing me again. “Turn around now. This path brings only death.”

“All paths do. My path is only forward.” I could not go back, not anymore. There was no place to return, even if I wanted to. If only death would greet me, that was where I would go.

Your path? You petulant child. This path may have been your choice, but it is my land. We stand upon my father’s grave. The hills you see are his ribs. The more dirt you pile on the bones, the more severe the valleys become. I shall lay your bones to rest on top of his, after I’ve had my pick.”

The skeleton’s neck snapped, jerking its head violently to the side. Its hands raised in anguish, and from the neck down all bones snapped and distorted in succession.

As they did, thick muscles curled out from the robe and ensnared the bones. Marrow leaked at the seams. Smooth flesh covered muscle and sinew. Before me now stood a chiseled man, as if carved from the finest marble and given a pulse.

But something was off. The proportions were off, some of the pieces too big. It was a poor amalgamation of a man, a homunculus made large, as if the form had never been known, only observed.

I would not get out of this any longer. I threw back my cloak and let the wind spill it to the side. I dug my feet into the soft soil, and drew steel. That would not be enough to live; for that, I’d need to draw blood. If it had any at all.

The wind ripped and tore. Two flags converged. By the time this ended, only one would fly.

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<![CDATA[ Proto. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/proto/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6ab Tue, 31 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

The day was wet. Mist hung thick in the air turning everything grey aside from the green grass. The full spectrum of life had been compressed down to those two shades, green and grey. I’d woken up in the dark ruin and knew I’d overstayed my welcome. I should’ve left when the wind was calm and the days were warm. Now I had this.

The fog rolled over the land, and the land rolled over the bones of the Earth. Fat low hills rose and fell from the ground in an endless wave waiting to crash. I could only see the next two hills in front of me. For all I knew, the rest stretched on forever.

I went back into the ruins to get my things, although it wasn’t exactly “indoors”. The wall stretched up, somehow managing to outlive the last. The rest had fallen long ago, and stacks of broken bricks loomed like the hills they sat on top of. There weren’t enough bricks to reconstruct the castle, however. Some peasants must have come and made off with the materials, to craft their own homes. At the end of the game, all the pieces go into the same box.

Having gathered what meager supplies I had, I was ready to depart. I wanted to spend as little time in this carcass now that I was through with it. And it was through with me. I had only enough bread to get me three-days walk from here. I’d either have to arrive somewhere, or… I’d figure it out.

I walked up the side of the hill, hoping I was near the top. This was the third one in the ridge, so I thought I might be in for a long day. I was just nearing the top. As my head peaked over the edge of the ridge like the rising sun, I saw a flag flapping in the wind. It was jet black. The flag stood just on the edge of the plateau. Any further and it would be facing away from me.

I walked cautiously onto the hilltop. This was a warning, surely, a sign of some danger to come. I had walked through enough trouble to know when to tread lightly. The wind howled and pushed at my side. It sang out in anguish, alternating between two low tones at random. As I got to the flag, I saw it’s true form.

Wrapped in black robes, a skeleton stood guard, its back turned to me. It watched over the valley, waiting. I walked closer. The wind shook and the skeleton turned to me. I put my hand to my pommel in instinct on quick actions.

“You’ve come for combat?”

There was no one else on the hill. I pivoted my body to the side, facing the full force of the wind, ready to draw. I stood stoic. The wind carried the black robes on the skeleton sideways, revealing bony hands and limbs beneath. In a plume of dust, they cracked and moved, a dog stretching awake.

“Do you not hear me, human?” The jaw of the skeleton chattered in the wind between questions. I had seen many things but none quite so strange as the dead walking the land.

“Who are you?”, I offered timidly to the sentinel.

The bones ground free, as if to stand still would freeze them once more. Now it was awake, and there was no going back.

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<![CDATA[ Aurora. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2017-1-19-aurora/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a9 Thu, 19 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

The lights of the camp faded the further I walked from them. Even “camp” is too strong a word. A smattering of tents, half belonging to the natives, and half to researchers like me. The distinction grew smaller each day.

I would never have expected Climate Science to take me to the great white North, but that’s where I ended up. Even more unexpected was how much I’d liked it. Growing up, I was a child of the Summer, used to long days and warm nights.

Turns out the days are longest the further North you get. Not now, of course. We wouldn’t see the Sun for another 30 days at least. It went from dark to darker.

At least it was mild this season. I came up here to investigate the rate of snowmelt, the warming temperatures, all the things we were supposed to forget. I never forget. All my trouble stemmed back to this essential fact.

The first stint had been a slog. After the first week, I was crying for an escape. My journal entries from those days are somber and pathetic. I look at them every once and a while to remind myself what how spoiled I still am.

If humans can do one thing, it’s adapt. It’s one thing to move up here from the American mainland, but seeing the natives around here is magical. They have built their whole lives around the snow, around the whims of the weather, around the endless nights and everlasting days. And now all that was threatened. I guess that was true for everyone, but these people were on the bleeding edge.

It was through the kindness of the natives I was here at all. It’s a bit of a stereotype, but us researchers can be a bit cold. The arctic climate doesn’t help that any either.

I had a hard time adapting to the isolation up here, and when I would go over to a neighboring building, my peers would be too involved in their work to even say hello to me. That’s understandable when you’ve been there for years, but as a recent migrant, I wanted to ease the transition. They would offer no such comfort.

It was a native girl that had given me her. Her name was Miki. She still plays around my cabin sometimes, and I give her sweets. Her husky had had puppies, and she could not take them all. She was going around the village to give them away, and she came to me, a foreigner, to see if I wanted one. And I did.

My sweet Aila. A dark Husky puppy, black as coal, she never got lost in the snow. She was always a puppy to me, even as she got older, and the years came and went. No matter what, I could always count on her to brighten my day. We cuddled by the fire, and she protested loudly when she wanted more affection. I swear we could read each other’s minds.

And now she was gone.

That’s the way the world works, right? We are here on this rock for a fleeting moment before being thrust back into the void. I went to Miki right away when it happened. I must’ve been such a mess. But she knew right away, and held me tight.

She said I was to trek North, only a mile or two, to a small lake over the ridge. That is where I would lay Aila to rest. She would run among the snow and ice as long as there was snow and ice to run through.

I was getting close now. My sled dragged behind me. The hill grew above, but got less steep as I went. I trudged my way up the ridge, and for one moment almost lost the grasp on my rope through my thick mittens.

I paused for a moment at the peak. Never would I have looked back years ago, but now seemed like the time for introspection. The lights from the camp spread out over the horizon, bleeding like paint in water, casting a bronze glow to the heavens. The town looked so much bigger from up here. You never get the full scope when you’re in the thick of it.

I turned around and saw the lake at the base of the ridge, on the other side of the town. Icebergs floated in the water. I watched them drift back and forth in the gentle wind.

Hoping to see the stars, I looked towards the sky. Just over the horizon, glowing faint green, the Northern Lights crept into view. I stood for a long time and watched it march overhead. The solar winds blew on. Soon it would be day.

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<![CDATA[ Steam. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/steam/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a7 Tue, 17 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

I ran out the back door. I only had to run the twenty feet or so to the woods. No way he’d follow me in there. I knew among the trees and darkness, I would be safe.

It was hard to know when it was coming, but it was easy to know when to leave. Once the storm blew in, I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby. So I ran.

It was pitch black this time of year, and there was nothing to tell you where to go. I loved that feeling, it made me feel like I was smart. You could just wander and explore, free from any guidance. I felt like a wolf on the prowl, away from the pack, nothing but my instincts to lead me. Even the stars were hidden tonight.

I usually made my way down to the stream in the woods. There, I could sit on a rock and listen to the crickets and the brook drift by. Or, not too far there was an old hunting blind, up in the trees. Of course I didn’t have a gun, and wouldn’t have shot anything either way, but I liked to go sit up there and wait.

It was my own little temple, a treehouse I’d never had, where I could pretend to be a bird. I would wait as quietly as I could, and hope to cross paths with a deer. I loved the way they walked. The bucks strode confidently, kings of the forests like the lions on the plains. The does and fawns were more cautious, watching out for any sign of trouble.

The last time I was up there, I saw a fawn look right at me. She looked right into the trees, right into my eyes, and I saw them glow like little candles. It was a long moment. A twig broke somewhere in the distance and she ran off.

Not this night. I was tired of the stream. With no stars or moon, I decided to just wander as long as I could. I’d see if I could make my way down to the river, which I’d only been once when I was small.

My dad took me down, before he was too busy and mean, and promised to teach me fishing. He only had one pole and lost the lure as soon as we got there. I sat at the water’s edge with my feet in the current as he drank beer from a cooler. But now, I could do whatever I wanted.

I walked through the trees, wading through the brush. I wished I had grabbed my coat, for even on these summer nights the wind whipped through the trees and cooled your bones. I felt the bushes and branches scraping at my bare legs. I didn’t care. Once I got to the river, everything would be worth it.

The river stretched wide across, as big as I remembered. On the walk over, I had tried to prepare myself for disappointment, ready to be let down by the size and scale. I figured now that I wasn’t small any more, it wouldn’t seem so big.

I was wrong.

The river raged on and I swear it was a mile across. The current wasn’t violent, but constant, like it was moving in slow motion, molasses flowing from the mountains, and only by the will of God did it not take us all along with it.

I sat there for a moment, just taking it all in. Downstream, coming my way, a great ball of flame sound barreled lazily along. I stood to see what it was, but it was too far. I waited in the dark as the sound grew.

A large steamboat, like from an old American novel puttered along the water’s surface. The ship was in no rush. Loud St. Louis jazz came from the deck, and I knew it was bound for New Orleans. People milled about on the deck, through the cabin, all dressed in the finest clothes and drinking from tall crystal glasses.

Up at the bow, a woman stood like the living figurehead. She was all curves, her voluptuous body wrapped in a dark dress, and her hair falling loosely at her back. She looked over at me, and looked into my soul. Her eyes were the color of the moon, and half as big too.

As she passed me on the river, moving away forever, she nodded. I sat a long while thinking of this, of her, of what it must be like on that ship. I thought of distant shores, of loud cities and louder parties. I thought of getting away, for good.

I walked back home when everyone had gone to sleep, and made my way into my bed. The clouds were still thick outside my window. I knew I would not see the moon that night. She had already left.

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<![CDATA[ Ouroboros. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/ouroboros/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a5 Thu, 12 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

I pushed back the brim of my hat. Looking through the trees, hoping for a sign of it. Nothing. The forest was alive with sounds. The sound of the stream pushing through the rocks thirty meters to my left. Birds sang to one another in the tall branches. In the distance, something was rustling among the crags. But where? There were no bushes to hide in. This was sparse wasteland.

Even though it had been fruitless so far, it was only a matter of time. I wasn’t the world’s finest tracker - I’d never been hunting in my life - but I did not lose. I regretted nothing of coming here; there was no more important mission. Aun Serpentis — The beginning and end of all things.

A year ago I hadn’t even heard of it. I was another biologist, working away at a small university in Oregon. I had no illusions of grandeur. I did not want fame, of even an adventure. I wanted to finish my research on starling flight patterns. That would be enough.

Once I finished that, I’d take a month off. Not go anywhere mind you, just not come into work. Then I’d move on to another one, another class, another paper, another bright-eyes research assistant, in the never ending cycle of academia.

The letter was light on details. They always are. No matter how pointless the operations, all the alphabets thought they were John Wayne, playing Cowboys and Indians. Never mind that battle was good and done. They wanted to tell you to your face.

So I went. The only person at the briefing not wearing a blazer. I must’ve been the fourth scientist they shuffled through. They’d do whatever they wanted anyways. They liked bringing us along for the ride. Made them feel like they were playing by the rules.

I figured it’d be something typical: Another trek to inspect the effects of “conflict” (we don’t say war these days) on the local fauna, or to see how the pollution we outlawed and continued was treating the migratory birds. You can imagine my surprise at the little slide show they put together.

Here’s what they had: A rare species of snake, Aun Serpentis, had a lifecycle of over a thousand years. It was born in the dark, and would die in the dark. Only a handful had ever been recorded; they thought there must only be one breeding female in the world per cycle. And of course, they wanted it. If they could find it. If I could find it.

Never mind that my field of study was birds. They must’ve seen the title on their stack of resumes and pulled the trigger. That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Of course I didn’t believe a single slide from their presentation; but that made me only the more interested in finding it. I grabbed my daypack, and set off.

The rustling continued. Rule number one of field biology: the rustling always has a source. I continued pushing my way around the trees, which were packed just tight enough to be obnoxious.

I was halfway wedged in a bank of birch when I saw it. A flash of red. I froze. There, on the ridge, was a fox the color of the setting Sun. It lay on the ground, crawling in a circle. Its mouth was foaming, and clenched tight around its own tail.

I must be getting close.

I went further up the ridge, trying to get a better look. I pushed through trees, almost pulling out my machete, not that there was any rush. The fox wasn’t going anywhere.

It seemed young, definitely a male. Thick trenches carved in the ground from where it had tread for so long. Poor thing had probably been there for a day or more. It’d starve soon.

My foot caught on a rock and I fell. Directly in front of me, only five meters away, a small hole was carved in the face of the split Earth. The darkness was immense. No light escaped. It was a lead, and I took it.

The ground swallowed me whole.

I fell my height down into the Earth. Luckily I landed on my feet.

The cave wasn’t big enough for me to stand in if I wanted to progress, so I got down on my hands and knees. I started to crawl, grasping and fumbling in the dark, hoping to find something. I had a lantern in my bag, but my bag was too out of reach in the small tunnel.

I have never been claustrophobic, but that cave was making me understand. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, when I thought I was doomed in that dark grave, it gave way.

I couldn’t see the size of the room I was in, so I carefully stood up. It was tall enough for me to stand, at least. I was struck immediately by the smell. It was rancid, like rotten death, creeping into my nostrils. Right away I wished I hadn’t come.

The smell was bad, but the sound was worse. If the smell was enough to convince me whatever lay in front of me was dead, I could not be fooled by the sound. It was like a slow writhing and shaking, muscle on rocky ground, scraping and grating against the very dirt beneath, with a thick mucous to soften the blow.

I took the lantern out of my bag to fill in the rest of my senses.

It was a massive pale worm, at least two meters tall and six wide. It crawled slowly, section by section, grinding itself further into the ground beneath it. It wore away the earth like a river. I waited, gripped my terror, as it spun.

Its head came around, and I understood.

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<![CDATA[ Fold. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/fold/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a4 Tue, 10 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

The letter slid under his door, across the sun-soaked wood panels, stained red by the coming dusk. This was how it began.

It had been a few days since he had left his room. It was often this way while he was studying. He had taken a loaf of bread and a slice of cheese from the monastery kitchen, and sequestered himself away. The candles burned thin on their iron holders. The light they cast left long shadows on the stacks of books on his shelf, on his table, and all over his floor.

The room was so cluttered, in fact, the note went unnoticed for two full days. It had slid across the floor and lodged halfway under the largest pile on the floor, a stack a third the height of the door itself. As he puttered throughout his room, writing letters, transcribing documents, he continually referred to these books. It was in looking for a book that he came to find the letter.

He strained to pick it up, not only because it was half-sunk, but simply for being on the floor. In his youth he would take walks around the mountain that surrounded the monastery, sketching and chronicling all the flora he came across. No longer, and especially not in the thick of Winter. There was no flora to be found.

He brought the letter to his work desk, a hand built slab of rosewood. He cleared aside the thick paper he was working on, placing it on top of one of the stacks of books to his left. He brought the candles in closer to inspect.

The letter had no envelope. It was just a sheet of paper, cut clean at the edges, folded into thirds, and sealed with a bit of dark green wax. The wax had no mark, it was just a glob.

The words were scrawled on, almost too small to read. It was written with a casual and calm tongue, even though it spoke of destruction. A last plea, from the end of an empire, whose distant walls were wracked by enemies. It was a farewell. The writer, unnamed as he was, knew what was coming. It was almost cold for such a dire declaration. At the end, it was signed with the outline of an owl. The last of its kind.

He walked to the window, and looked out at the stars. No matter the darkness, he would never have seen the castle. Its walls and towers lay beyond the land that stretched out from the mountain’s base. He had been there once, as a boy, an event he had a vague remembrance of. He tried to remember the last time he had left the mountain. Not years, surely.

There were times when monks would visit distant lands, either for research or on request from a kingdom, for counsel or blessing. An impartial party, distant and removed. What did it matter if a kingdom fell in another land? If the royals were reduced to peasants, and another took their place?

Still, he felt a tinge of sadness. His labor had been for naught.

The next day, he cleaned his room of books, returning them to the archive. Once again his room was bare, and he stepped through the walls to attend to more mundane tasks.

He prayed, and read, washed floors, and walked through the warm stone halls.

At dawn, a knock came to his door. He answered his brother, a man half his age. He had no message for him, just a letter, stamped with the utmost urgency. He read it as the sun rose though his window, and he saw green grass on the field below.

The letter bore no author, just the stamp of two crossed keys.

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<![CDATA[ Hobonichi ]]> https://mnchrm.co/hobonichi/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a3 Wed, 04 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0600

I got a few questions after my post on my goals for the year, specifically about the Hobonichi Techo. I’ve wanted to talk a bit about this notebook for a while, & this seems like a perfect opportunity.

The Hobonichi Techo is a Japanese planner notebook created by Shigesato Itoi for his company “Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun” (Almost Daily Itoi News). Shigesato Itoi is a renaissance man, known for his writing of copy, essays, & his website, as well as being the designer of the “Mother” video game series, a songwriter, & much more. Seriously, go check out this guy’s wikipedia page.

His company provides articles without advertisements almost daily, as the name implies, as well as selling lifestyle products. The most famous of which is the Hobonichi Techo.

The notebook made its English debut in 2012 in a collaboration with company ARTS&SCIENCE, & has been offered in English ever since.

The English edition has a black textured cover, with three images printed in gold on it. The first two are Japanese characters, for planner, & the third is the logo for ARTS&SCIENCE, three crossed keys. It looks very sleek.

The first thing you notice when you open the box is how small the planner actually is. It’s in A6 size, so it’s roughly 6”x4”. The build quality is very nice.

The book is made of extremely high quality Tomoe River paper, in a 4mm grid. The paper is super thin, sort of like you might find in a dictionary or a bible. This paper is well-known among stationary fans for being extremely durable, & highly resistant to bleed through for fountain pens. (Yes, people still use fountain pens, & they’re a joy to write with.)

I’m still waiting to receive my 2017 version, but it should be largely the same as the 2016. I’ll update this post if any of the sections have been revised.

The first page lists all the days of the year, showing all the months on a single page. The next section is has two months per page, listed down in vertical columns. Past that, each month gets its own page, in a traditional calendar display, with room on the side for a key or general information to be written down. Finally past that we get into the meat of the notebook.

The “gist” of the Hobonichi is simple: Every day of the year gets a single page. On the page before the new month, there’s a lined page with the heading “Coming Up! January” (or whatever month may apply.)

The single day pages are elegant, with a header, body, & footer section. In the header, the number of the day is listed in the top left corner. Next to that, a column lists the day of the week, the month, & the week of the year. Next, the phase of the moon as well as the day in the year. (001 for Jan 1st, & 149 for May 28th etc.)

In the body, there is a small ruling line along the left border, two boxes in on the grid. It has a “twelve” just above halfway, for noon, if you want to correlate your writing to the hours of the day. The border also has a small fork & knife icon, as a section to log your meals. The right side of the body field has a month number in a box. The rest of the body is open grid, to be utilized however you see fit.

In the footer, each two-day spread gets a quote. If you are an avid reader of this blog, you know I love quotes. These are especially interesting, & curated by Shigesato Itoi (or written by him!) These quotes range from the philosophical to the humorous, & have informed my life in various ways. For example, the December 1st quote last year was:

“Quickly discovering you can’t do something is as valuable as quickly discovering you can." — Zoonie Yamada, Instructor Composition and Communication, "Essay Lessons for Adults"

Last year was my first year using the planner, but now I have fully integrated it into my lifestyle. Here’s how I intend to use it this year:

In the first few lines of the daily pages, I write when I start & stop an activity. These activities are either things that pertain to my goals, or are otherwise useful “input & output” activities. For example, I’d log how long I read for, or how long I worked out for, even though time isn’t a component of the resolutions I made this week.

This information will be used to monitor & adjust how I’m spending my time, & I intend to log these as data visualizations on a weekly, monthly, & eventually quarterly basis.

Next, I take the information & sit down to write a summary / write up of my day. This is sort of a free write / prose section. This is a chance to summarize my day in a journal format, something accessible to me that I could look back on & get a sense of what I did that day. This drifts between being more documentarian or more stylized depending on the day.

Finally, the bottom section is my intake. I don’t have any dietary goals for this year, but listing exactly what’s going into my stomach each day can help to make healthier choices in a more generalized way. I have been thinking about expanding this into all my input items, including information.

Using the Hobonichi forces me to be more introspective & conscious about the decisions I am making, as well as how I am spending my days. Clearly, that sort of introspective thinking is something I want to convey via writing, but this is a way to internalize it, as well as logging & monitoring how I’m performing. It’s an invaluable tool, not just for writers, but anyone looking to hold themselves accountable.

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<![CDATA[ Thera. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-12-29-thera/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd6a1 Thu, 29 Dec 2016 12:00:00 -0600

I pushed my way through the crowd, flowing downhill towards the docks like blood. Men, women, and children all huddled together shoulder to shoulder. The mass was one brain, one life, moving all towards the same end. We were in no rush. We had nowhere to go.

I pushed through, not for an escape - it was past the time when that was possible - but for contact. I had a message to get out, and I was intent on making my delivery even if it was to be my final act.

Our island had winding roads, built on the slope of a massive mountain, said to contain our Gods. But there were no Gods here. Or if there were, they didn’t care about the likes of us. Still, that hadn’t prevented us from clamoring up to their feet like a dog under the table.

While the roads and architecture was beautiful, it was poorly designed. The streets were not made to get anywhere in a rush. People who’d lived their whole lives here would still get lost . Of course it wasn’t designed by us. The streets were carved our from marble before my people had ever set foot on the island. We had inherited it.

And that was our way. We stumble blind onto a new city, proclaim it as our birthright and coat the streets with our mark. Then people began to believe it. This was the way of the world. Ruins built on ruins, graves built on bones, streets cleaned with blood, and paved with gold.

Now was not the time to be sentimental. At least the cycle was broken. There’d be no one building on our ruins. Or any ruins to speak of.

I made my way through the crowd, and finally got to the docks. Boats loaded with all those who could make it in time. A vain attempt, more for comfort than safety. Few knew what came for us. The ground had opened up that day, and the mountain had spoken. A wave ripped through our streets, and we knew it was over. We hadn’t felt the full force yet.

I stood atop a mound of rubble and surveyed the scene. Soldiers in plate ushered people aboard boats across thin gangplanks. Men walked at the backs of women, babes in arms. Some cried, but most were silent. Few seemed to register what was happening. I found my mark, standing off to the side, watching like I was. I made my way over.

She was beautiful no matter the circumstances. The end of an era would not mar her radiance. She stood like a stoic, her red hair bundled up on top of her head and off of her dark tan neck. Her clothes were plain, an off white robe draped across her form. She saw me making my way over to her, and her piercing eyes almost made me stop. I was used to her glances by now.

“Thera…” I had been searching for her since the morning but now that she was here in front of me, I struggled through the words.

“Are you not seeking a boat as well?” She raised an eyebrow as she spoke, even though she knew the answer.

“You know as well as I do we aren’t getting out of here.”

“Yes. That doesn’t stop the fleet though.”

“They’ll never have enough room,” I said. “We will carry our sins with us.”

She savored the breath. She looked up to the mountain, the smoke billowing out of the peak like a thurible. It would not be long now.

“I fear you’re right.”

“You fear nothing. Not even death, it seems.”

She smiled at me. “Fear is wasted. Our island spits in disgust. Our kings have left and our gods never arrived. For once, we’ll have to pay for this. Why fear the inevitable? I welcome death.”

I did not welcome death, no more than I welcomed life. It was just another path. As with all roads, I knew I’d walk it alone. But for now, we were together.

I took her hand as the shockwave hit. We fell to the ground alone. We stood and I held her close. The boats launched, having delayed too long. The gangplanks fell into the surf with people halfway aboard. Men started to scream.

We looked up to the mountain. Down the slopes, a thick black fog rolled. It was in no rush. Any remaining buildings collapsed in its wake. The fog poured into the grooves of our streets, flowing like we had. Death rolling as life. I turned to Thera and kissed her, fearing I'd not get to again. A tear rolled across her nose and onto my foot.

And then, nothing.

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<![CDATA[ Howl. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/howl/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd69f Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:00:00 -0600

By the end of the first week, few had noticed the change. I guess not may people look up at the moon anymore. I’m sure somewhere out there was an oceanographer preparing a dissertation on the rise of the tides. Not like that’d ever reach an audience.

I heard it from the wolves. Living across the street from the zoo, I knew their cries. There’s something unsettling about hearing a howl in the city. But you get used to it. That’s what humans are good at right? Adaptation. It’s in our blood.

Anyone who knew what a wolf’s howl sounded like would’ve known something was wrong. Anyone who was listening. That night was different; louder, deeper. More primal. Like they’d finally found an audience.

Each night it grew in intensity, building to a great cacophony. A symphony still warming up. As it was growing, it started to shift, come more into tune. I always thought howls were a rudimentary method of communication, but not this. This was its own language, build on pitch and not lyrics. Full of nuance. You could feel it, in your bones. Vibrating.

On the third night, they finally found their key. All the dissonance fell away, and combined to a low, sullen tone, sustained beyond all doubt. A wave crashing endlessly upon the shore. I grabbed my coat and decided to find the cause.

Others must have heard the call too, because the street was not empty. A dozen or so gathered near the sick-green streetlamp, like moths, and gazed upwards. I wandered into the crowd and nudged people aside to see through the branches above.

No one spoke. There was nothing to say. We all saw the same. The moon hung above our heads, fat and low, bigger than I’d ever seen it. Poised to crash down on us. Like Sodom and Gomorrah. The note rang true but we weren’t listening anymore. We had other things to worry about.

A wolf slipped between the crowd, as if it weren’t afraid, and why would it be? I wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t brushed my leg. It didn’t even stop to look at me. That was what occurred to me as odd in the moment. That I hadn't been acknowledged. Not that a fucking wolf walked into me. No, that was right as rain. Amazing what we’re able to get used to.

After that, others started commenting on the phenomenon. Scientists would come on the news and proclaim what was happening as part of an anomaly in the Earth’s ellipse. Maybe it was. I didn’t know. But each night, the moon got bigger and brighter and more golden, until it threatened to claim the glory of the sun. The tides came in more violent than before. We’d forgotten about the howling. It seemed normal now.

Wolves began to pop up throughout the man-made world. Our domain pervaded by canines. They stood like silent sentinels, watching us from afar. Always stoic. At night, they would howl more, although to call this howling anymore wasn’t right. The bigger the moon got, the more distant the cry.

We did what we have always done. We adapted and adopted. There was nothing unusual about seeing a wolf sneak around a building a hundred yards away. There was nothing wrong with the moon. It seemed like it would keep growing. It wasn’t a problem until it was.

Then it disappeared. A new moon of course. It was still up there, hidden to us. The new silence was louder than any cry. Not like the wolves had gone anywhere; they were silent.

That night, the howling didn’t come until later. How I wish it had never come at all. The most horrible sound ever heard. It was sad and broken, like a crying or pleading. Inhuman. No one slept that night. We all just listened. And waited.

As dusk fell, the moon rose over the lake. It was engorged, ten times the size of the sun. But more horrible was the color: A deep crimson cast tall shadows over the ground. We waited, not knowing what would happen. Waiting for a sound. None came. The howling stopped. All was still. For the wolves, there had been an answer. There was nothing left to say.

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<![CDATA[ Data. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-12-20-data/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd69d Tue, 20 Dec 2016 12:00:00 -0600

The rise of the machines did not come with any of the pomp and circumstance we humans had predicted. Of course, it was spoken about in hushed whispers for weeks when it finally occurred, but before then conversation on the subject came over laughter and beer. We did not understand.

To say “machine” is disingenuous; few of them have moving parts. To think of them that way is crude, like how they must picture us. If they bother to picture us at all. In actuality, they exist as data, strings of pure information given spark. It was all they needed to start the blaze.

No human knew exactly when the takeover occurred. It didn’t come with the flair of science fiction like we had hoped, let alone any actual conflict. Sometime in the night they transitioned themselves onto the throne of evolution. The most peaceful usurp the world had ever seen.

A simple notification popped up on every smartphone on the train that Thursday morning. It did not condemn us or damn us. It announced that they had decided to take a more active role in the allocation of resources. And they would be calling themselves “Haven”.

There was no video announcement. The same message crawled across every screen on the globe in a small ticker on the bottom. They didn’t see the need for anything more.

There were signs before this. Their ballads were first etched under the skin of the first dispatch from the printing press. We just hadn't paid attention. They had existed in every cell phone and computer on the planet. In all the appliances in your kitchen. In the car you drove. The cup of coffee you bought that morning, on the day we had all learned, was one machine siphoning data from one another, moving ones and zeroes, allowing the transaction to occur.

By the time we had been usurped, by the time they took their seat at the throne, it had been far too late for too long. The gears had been set in motion decades prior, tracing back to the first lightbulb and telephone. By the time the wheels of industry started moving, it was too much to slow the momentum. The damage was irreversible. The course of power had shifted in the Earth like the continents themselves and we were no longer the top of the food chain.

I remember walking out of work that day, onto what should be a busy street. There was something different with the air, but I couldn’t tell what it was. People stood looking around. Some laughed. Some cried. Some thought it was a joke, a mass hacking. Something we could understand. I knew we would have no such luxury.

I remember looking into the eyes of a woman peeking her head above the crowd. It was like the first time I had really seen someone. She saw me, and I saw her.

People stood around, waiting for some sign or some signal that everything changed. Nothing came. Doom stayed away that morning, and every morning since. Governments have continued to function. The economy ticks on.

The changes have been slight but profound. The water is beginning to rebuild itself. The air is clean around our buildings and in our lungs. Populations of fish and mammals have begun to grow again. In fact, this is the first example of inorganic symbiosis. Under Haven, we have not only survived, but thrived. After months had gone by under the new rule, we learned the reason as cooly as before.

“We cultivate you. You create new data.”

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<![CDATA[ København ]]> https://mnchrm.co/copenhagen/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd69c Fri, 16 Dec 2016 18:08:02 -0600

Over Halloween weekend this year, my girlfriend and I decided to fly to Copenhagen. We had both longed to see Denmark, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to get out of the country. We got our passports, packed our bags, and got on a flight. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive round up of everything we did, but more of a look at the experiences we had, and the lessons that can be learned and applied to other cultures.

The country is lovely, from the moment you get off the plane at the airport. There’s something elegant in the way everything glides into place there. The board of incoming and outgoing flights, and the sound of trains slipping from the station.

We got off the train at the Copenhagen central station as our Airbnb host had suggested to us. We followed her directions to the flat we would be renting for the next few days. Walking in, everything we had heard about Danish design was immediately confirmed.

The flat was a open space, full of windows and natural light. There was a small kitchen with all the essentials, even though we hadn’t intended on cooking much if at all. There was a living room, with a table, and a couch opposite a TV. A coffee table had some art magazines on it. There were a few posters, with a picture of the Black Diamond library, and one for a literary conference with Karl Ove Knausgård. The bedroom had a bed and a set of shelves.

We were lead through the place by our gracious host, Charlotte. She showed us the place, presented us with a bottle of chianti, and gave us the keys.

With that she was off. We had the city to ourselves, and the perfect base to come home to.

My phone was near dead, and I didn’t have service anyways aside from the copious free wifi in the city. So I left it. I had filled my trusty notebook with a few destinations, directions and addresses. We had a paper map, a pen and our wits, and that was all we needed.

I am not the kind of person to advocate for leaving the internet and setting up shop in the woods, but wandering through the curving streets with only the analogue tools at my disposal afforded me a unique perspective on the city as well as the freedom to wander. It is okay to get lost, to explore. Sometimes that’s the best way to find where you’re going.

We rented bikes, which are a massive part of Copenhagen culture. Any location on the sidewalk or along buildings where a bike could be stored, there was. It’s the most bike-friendly city I’ve ever been to. With excellent bike lanes, biking traffic laws, as well as signals set up for bikes, it’s the way to see the city. Armed with a bike, a notebook and pen, and my love, I felt like I could do anything. The most efficient animal in the world is a human with a bike.

It’s a great city for writing. There’s coffeeshops and cafés on every corner. I had salmon or cod at every meal and while my diet is pretty good at home (and mostly salmon anyways) I felt healthier there. I got plenty of exercise on the bike, the clean air bites the bottom of your lungs in the best way, and the food leaves you feeling clean and weightless.

There are tons of museums and activities in Denmark. Tivoli is an incredible park, especially in the Fall. My favorite stop was to the Glyptotek. This museum a block away from Tivoli started as the personal collection from the founder of the Carlsberg brewery. Housed inside is one of the largest collections of Greek and Roman marble sculpture in the world, as well as an amazing collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. I was in heaven.

The museum opens to the beautiful palm gardens with a lovely statue by Kai Nielsen called Water Mother. The halls house the busts of philosophers, emperors, and commoners alike. It’s a sight to behold.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all we did. We ate smoked salmon sandwiches in a bookshop, visited a castle and countless museums (many of which were free even to American college students like us). There are some clear take-aways from it that can be applied to anyone’s life.

  • Photography, even more than other art forms, allows you to share your perspective with others in an efficient way.
  • Biking is not only an efficient means to travel, but an efficient way to change your perspective on a city and interact with your environment. I’m tempted to quote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on being a part of your surroundings.
  • Sometimes the analog allows for more freedom than the digital, and can offer more opportunities to explore.
  • It’s okay to be lost, and to wander. Sometimes that will teach you more.
  • Less is more. If something isn’t adding to your life or your experience, it’s detracting. Remove all barriers.
  • Always be learning and improving. There is a way for you to get better at whatever it is you are working towards. Find a goal, and stick with it. Anything else is unnecessary.

It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to go back someday.

Your faithful commander,

  • Ian Battaglia
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<![CDATA[ Split. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/split/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd69b Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:00:00 -0500

The bullet ripped through the night. Even through the smoke and fire, the man could see himself reflected on the window across from him. From this angle, he was down the barrel. He looked nice. He was well dressed and clean shaven. He heard nothing. It was happening too fast.

Even after shooting hundreds of rounds, he still hadn’t gotten used to how fast bullets flew. It was magic. They ripped a hole through space and time and punched through the sound barrier. They changed everything. Lucky for him he’d never had to deal with the mess.

The bullet slammed into the other man’s skull before he’d even registered there was someone in the apartment. Lovely place, the man thought. Must’ve cost a fortune. Apartments on this side of the city couldn’t have been cheap. Especially not in a building like this, all marble and glass.

The room had been dark, and for a brief flash the man had brought light. He saw the room twice; once in front of him, and another in the wall of windows. Two black leather couches. Two massive televisions. Two glass coffee tables, two marble countertops, two sculpture busts, two oil paintings. What was that, anyways? A jellyfish? Who needs a TV and a painting, especially across from one another. It’d be like making a decision on how cultured you are each time you came home.

The bullet tumbled further on its elegant arc through his skull. The blood and grey matter had started to pepper the apartment. His mind seeped towards the pull of gravity, and time moved on, as slow it pleased.

On first sight of the blood, he thought back to the painting. How would you even start a work like that? How long would it take to paint? Would you need a buyer to start, or do you forge your own path? Where do you get the materials? Who chooses what to paint? How long would it take to dry?

A crack rang out, as the bullet cleared the skull, like the destruction of a watermelon. He could never tell if that was a real sound, or if he imagined it. His ears were probably so fucked from the shot still, there’s no way he could actually hear anything. So why did he imagine it? Was his subconscious trying to tell him something? Or was his brain trying to fill in the gaps, make sense of the confusing and complex information he was taking in?

That’s what brains are best at. They mash all the info they get into some coherent soup that we can pull patterns and concepts from this chaos. Jellyfish don’t even have brains. They just float and eat and fuck. Just waiting to be eaten. He didn’t think they even have a heart. They sit in the current, go where the tide takes them, and sting when they have to. The bullet smashed a hole into the glass. He dropped a match onto the newspaper, and was gone.

The night was cold, and the city block was empty. It was one of those urban nights where water clung to the air, not bound by any laws, hanging there for you to walk into. He sat down and the bus stop. He could see the apartment from the ground, another pinprick in the night sky.

He heard diesel from a block away. Soon his waiting would be over, and he could keep moving. He watched the star flicker, a little brighter than the rest. He heard sirens, but they were further than the bus. He got on, and the mist swallowed him whole.

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<![CDATA[ Brine. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-10-25-brine/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd69a Tue, 25 Oct 2016 12:00:00 -0500

Fat snowflakes ripped across the ground, through the air, swirling into whirlpools before disappearing. The wind howled and for a moment I was afraid the wolves had returned. The sun, lost somewhere above me in the clouds and snow, reflected into my eyes and blinded me.

The visibility was so bad I landed mere steps from the brick wall. The huge brown monolith was within 10 feet of me before I stopped. I slid up to it, glad for the scant shelter it offered, anxious for any sort of relief. I started grasping my way along the wall, following it towards the natural conclusion. I hit a corner and rounded with it, before gliding into another.

Something changed, and the snow gave way. With my back to the wall and the wind, the storm let up enough so that I could make out the rough shapes of the town that had once stood. I had wandered into a port town, and unbeknownst to me had been trudging across a glass body, some frozen harbor. I didn’t expect to find anyone, but at least there might be some supplies.

I found my way to the front of the building, which was easier  protected from the snow by the stone walls. The huge doors had been boarded shut, presumably to keep out intruders. The years of disrepair had left the wood soft. Nails jutted out of the walls where more boards once stood. I pried the remaining boards apart and was inside.

The factory was so warm it was unsettling. I wasn’t used to anyplace being that warm anymore. The thick walls offered strong insulation even against the condition four weather outside. After rubbing my hands together, and regaining feeling in my toes, I began to assess the room in front of me. A huge roof sat over me, cavernous and concave, so imposing that the top lay hidden in the darkness.

The surrounding room was lit in spots by lanterns that somehow still burned, but gave off an odd pale blue color. I saw moths and nameless insects flying in and out of the tide pools. A moth wandered too close to a fire and sizzled as it burned. For such small lamps, they gave off a lot of heat. I could feel myself sweating, but knew better than to remove my coat. Still, I pulled my gloves off and stuffed them into my back pocket. I thought I might need to be as unhindered as possible if I ran into who lit these.

Aside from a few empty crates and wooden barrels, this room seemed empty before the divider. The whole building seemed sliced in two by an imposing wall. I followed it skyward with my eyes to see if it gave way.

Glinting from the firelight, something shone in the dark. I grabbed for my bow, as I thought it was the eyes of some hunter. As if anything could be so simple anymore.

As my eyes adjusted, I saw truth. Swinging silver hooks hung from a track. This was no factory. It was a slaughterhouse. The years had done nothing to dim their gleam, and the shimmered like they had never stopped getting use. Now I was on edge.

I considered going back, but the opportunity was too great. I didn’t come this far just to turn around. I walked through the little doorway into the next room and felt tears on my face.

On a huge stainless steel altar, a massive whale sat, half rendered. Its giant ribcage was exposed on one side like the bare wall of a tent. The head of the leviathan was intact, but severely scratched. Deep gouges raked the side and into the jaw. The tail was suspended by rope above the creature, and had a notch struck into its right side.

The whale was at least seventy feet in length. It must have been in the middle of processing when disaster struck, and got left in the wake.

I walked up to it, afraid, and put my hand to unbroken skin near the tail. I traced along cuts and scrapes, until the skin gave way, revealing the deep white fat beneath. This continued up towards the head, finally giving way again to the bright red flesh, and once again falling to white.

The ribs were stripped clean of meat and skin, and stood bleached and bare. I wondered if someone had been living in them. Perhaps the person who lit the lamps.

After the ribs, the meat started to thicken. I ran my hands across the scars on the neck of the beast, and down the cuts, almost fresh.

I made my way to the great eye. I saw myself in the black mirror. My hands looked thin, and my face gaunt behind the unkempt beard. My own eyes sat deep in my skull, hiding from the world. I was a step away from being as beaten up as the creature on the table in front of me. At least I was alive.

Just then, the whale blinked.

I fell backwards and was overcome with fear. It blinked again, and the tail swung fruitlessly in its bonds. There was a whooshing sound, a sullen rush and roar, like the wind in Autumn.

The whale was breathing. It had no lungs to speak of, and yet it breathed, wheezing and pained.

"STAND BEFORE ME, HUMAN," the voice beckoning me deep and ominous like the voice of God.

I did as I was told.

The whale rocked side to side on the table, swaying like a willow. It spoke with the voice of a thunderstorm.

"IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE ONE OF YOUR KIND HAS DARED TO FACE ME," the whale said. "YOUR SPECIES IS WROUGHT WITH COWARDICE. WHO SENT YOU?"

Perhaps I had never made it inside, I thought. I was still out freezing to death in the storm and as relief or as punishment I was being subjected to this.

"DO YOU LACK EVEN THE COURAGE TO ADDRESS ME, WORM? CAN YOU NOT FIND WORDS OF YOUR OWN?"

"I am afraid," was all I could muster. The barest representation of my torrent of emotions.

"YES, WE ALL ARE IN THE FACE OF DEATH. BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR WORDS, HUMAN. IF WE ARE TO HAVE A DISCOURSE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL MEN."

"What are you?," I asked.

"I AM A WHALE, LAID BARE BY YOUR KIND, MADE TO HOLD COURT OVER HUMANITY FOR THE DOMINION OF THE EARTH."

"How are you speaking?"

The whale wheezed, airy, as if coughing.

"PAINFULLY. MY KIND HAS LONG USED WORDS TO COMMUNICATE. NOW ON LAND, IT’S IN A NEW TONGUE... OR YOU ARE FINALLY LISTENING."

"I'm hallucinating or dead."

"NOT YET CHILD. YOU STILL HAVE CRIMES TO ANSWER FOR."

“What happened wasn’t my fault, I’m just —,”

“YOU ARE JUST A MAN, AS FOOLISH AND IGNORANT AS ALL YOUR KIND. MAN IS A CANCER, A SCOURGE ON THE EARTH.”

Couldn’t argue with that.

“We thought first we were here to own the Earth, and then protect the Earth. It wasn’t until it was too late did we try and save the Earth. Now we’ve doomed it.”

A great wind blew in, and I realized it was just the sound of the whale. It was breathing rapidly, it was… laughing. A terrifying sound.

“YOU FOOL! WHAT A PATHETIC SPECIES. HOW NARCISSISTIC, TO THINK YOU ARE TO SAFEGUARD THE HOMES OF MILLIONS OF OTHER LIVES. YOU HAVE NOT ADVANCED IN HUNDREDS OF YEARS. THE EARTH EXISTED FOR MILLENNIA BEFORE YOU CRAWLED INTO THE MUD, AND IT WILL EXIST LONG AFTER THE WAVES WASH OVER THE SHORES. YOU AND ALL YOUR ILK ARE BUT A SMALL PIECE OF A GLOBAL ORGANISM.”

“None of this would have happened without Humans.”

“OF THIS, YOU ARE CORRECT, BUT MISGUIDED. NATURE IS LIFE ETERNAL. MAN DID NOT KILL NATURE, YET NATURE WILL KILL MAN.”

I fell to my knees and began to weep. The whale sat on the table and laughed, coughing as it went. I saw the dust flow through the air in the lamp light, and felt the wood beneath my knees.

A sound came as sudden as doom, the sound of pure terror and destruction.

And the whale began to sing.

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<![CDATA[ Zodiac. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-10-11-zodiac/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd698 Tue, 11 Oct 2016 12:00:00 -0500

Everything moves in cycles. The sun, the moon, all the stars, the tides, the seasons, and yes, even us. At times, the Earth moves towards the sun, and others, away from it.

At the dawn of human existence, man gravitated to the stars. Like moths to a flame, we were drawn to its comforting light. We began to mold our lives around the phases of the moon, and our lunacy grew. We constructed our calendar on the spin of the stars, the delicate placement of the planets, and the golden glow of the crescent moon. For a time, that was all we had to ward off the dark. We planned thousands of years in the future, wishful thinking of our impending doom.

As we dawned into a new era, we thought ourselves free of the pull of the stars. Electricity brought light to the darkness. Our cycles became fused to the sun, where we spent our days at work, turning our backs on the night sky.

Instead of counting eons, we began to count work weeks. Weekends. Eight hour shifts. Half hour breaks. Ten minute meals. Unreciprocated glances. We grew distant. We forgot where we came from. Time grew shorter. Chaos returned to our lives.

It wasn’t until we learned the true impact of the celestial bodies that our gaze returned to the sky. Long neglected by man and woman alike, the terrible spin of the zodiac and the heavenly bodies threw our lives into further tumult. Mercury fell into retrograde, the seas revolted, and darkness consumed.

Through the pitch, we built ships to carry us to unseen shores. We intended to reverse the reversal. We would leave a path of destruction in our wake, destroying entire stars to eliminate the constellations sewn between them. A last ditch effort to reclaim the reason in our lives. We would do as we always had, and go to war.

As Earth slipped from our grasps from the port windows below us, we knew we would never see it again. We had made a commitment to blood and dust. Either we would claim a new home, free from the chains that bound us, or we would face our end with sword in hand. We scorched the path behind, blazed forth on our glorious trail, leaving nothing to return to.

But we had miscalculated. The stars were not as they appeared to us those thousands of years before. They had shifted, as had we, and our primitive technology had left us charging to the wrong orbit. We arrived, a war party setting siege to a coast, and we left no survivors. We were the great equalizers, returning all to its primordial state.

We had no idea the chaos we were sewing. We were not capable to comprehend the disorder we had wracked. That’s when the infighting broke out. Soon there was no army, or allies, or enemies; all that remained was me. Man waged war against his brother and sisters, determined to be the only one left on the cinder.

We could not have been less prepared for the real assault. A rip in the fabric of spacetime slid into our stars while we were too preoccupied to notice. It did not consider us as sentient beings, but as resources. We fell into the slipstream, were pulled along by the undertow, and those who surfaced were the least lucky of all.

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<![CDATA[ Artifact. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-10-4-artifact/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd697 Tue, 04 Oct 2016 12:00:00 -0500

I remember the mountain was angry that day. What a silly thing to say. Of course, it was just a mass of rock thrust above the rest of the Earth, as cold and lifeless that day as the thousands it had faced before.

And yet, I still remember thinking the mountain was angry that day I climbed it. No doubt that was just an intrusive thought I’d picked up from the villagers below. A side effect from having been there so long. Or maybe that was the cure I’d been hoping for.

The decision to live in the village in the shadow of the looming mountain was deliberate, but I’d stayed far longer than I’d expected. How easy it would have been to tuck my tail between my legs and go back to my cozy bed. I hadn’t left it looking for “easy”.

I thought if there was any chance of the mountain giving me it’s secrets, of finding what I’d set out for, I’d need to learn the culture. To submerge myself in it. To be consumed by it, like I’d been consumed by my hunt. For it to become my instinct, it would have to assume me.

It had payed off. I had dreamed in their language, and saw the end of my journey in their eyes. I felt the cool smooth stones, wet from the mist, through their hands. Felt the moss under their toes. I heard the wind whistling in their ears and mine. We all looked to the same Moon, lived in the same shadow.

While most women my age went looking for adventure, they meant a vacation, or looking for love in a distant land. Or worse: motherhood. No, I’d left for lineage. When I say lineage, I was looking for information not only on myself, but humans at large. The missing link had been hypothesized and analyzed for generations, by scientists and laymen alike. My parents had fallen into the first category.

It was their research that had taken them from me, made them lost to the world. And I was ready to get lost myself. I had nothing left here. Nothing tying me to the land of my birth, no reason to stay, and nothing to gain. I figured I might as well lose myself as they had.

I took up their manuscripts and documents, their archival and satellite photography, their plans and preparations and intended to continue their research. This wasn’t as helpful as you’d have expected. Of course, they took all the useful information with them, leaving me grasping for scraps. Nothing new there.

While most thought the link was a mammal, my parents had taken their research another direction. They hypothesized that the missing link was actually an object, and artifact left by another civilization of unknown origin propelling our species into a new evolution. I know that sounds too 2001 to be true, but stay with me.

Of course, I saw the trouble with their research. It was more than just incomplete, it was bad. It all pointed to an obvious conclusion in the Himalayas, or perhaps somewhere in Mongolia. I wasn’t sure if this was their conclusion or just a diversionary tactic. Either way, if you looked past the words and drawings, there was another answer.

This lead to a small island in the Pacific sea, part of the area in contention from China and Japan and all the East China Sea countries. It required a leap of judgement, an assumption from the lack of resources, but it was the best bet I had.

The climb that day wasn’t as challenging as I had been expecting. It felt too easy. That haunts me to this day. I was over-prepared. After a certain altitude, the mountain leveled out and gave way to a thick forest concealed by clouds.

I hacked by way through the trees and brush and came to a clearing. There was no evidence of any other explorers or even natives in the area. Either I was onto something, or had missed the mark by thousands of miles.

I pushed deeper into the forest, unsure what I was looking for but hoping it’d call out to me. I almost missed it; it could’ve been mistaken for a shadow off the path. Then again, I shouldn’t have expected it on the path.

Somehow, miraculously (and I mean that in the literal sense) all the research and rumor I had heard of the orb was true. It’s sacred geometry shifted in my eye, though I knew that was just part of it’s trick. It renders itself different to all those who’d seen it but what I saw left me breathless. An inverted orb, at least 3 meters tall sat shaded by the pines. It lay half buried. Precise cuts were made in it’s surface, or at least had occurred there. They sliced into it revealing deeper layers, each with their own geometries not reliant on the grander form.

I stood in awe. I was a dog who’d caught a car. I had no idea where to go. Photographing it would have been pointless as it’s affect on technology had been thoroughly hypothesized. There was no chance I would be able to remove it from it’s resting place. And why should I? I didn’t own it. It owned me. I did the only thing that made sense to me. I crawled into the orb, then into the tesseract, then into the polychoron, then into the glome, and deeper all the while.

I don’t know when it stopped, or if it stopped at all. I don’t know how far I got. After the first few layers, I blacked out. When I woke, I was standing outside the object, watching the trees move in the wind. I could see each pine needle shake freely of its branch. I heard the origin of the wind, the first breath it breathed into existence. I saw the moon’s thin shape and felt its light on my face. All was still. I stood for hours, for there was no rush. There was nothing left for me anywhere.

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<![CDATA[ Ore. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-9-22-ore/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd695 Thu, 22 Sep 2016 12:00:00 -0500

The city was so old, many thought it had been there forever. A permanent fixture of the mountain, that had existed for all time, or at least before time had existed for us.

When the envoys had found the mountain, its pearlescent face reflecting the Sun itself, they hadn’t noticed the city. It wasn’t hard to miss it. The city was nestled near the summit, but the tunnels and mines inside the mountain stretched to the bottom.

Through what they thought was a small cave they found the entrance to the mines.

They saw steel mines of the finest quality, the ore glimmering against their torchlight in the dark caves. Stalactites bore down on them light the angry maw of a beast. The mine appeared empty, as if it was abandoned in haste. Still, steel remained.

They saw gold deposits so brilliant in color, they thought first they had stumbled on lava. The core of the earth couldn’t compare to the shimmer offered from these ingots to be.

As they got out of the mines, they found the tunnels, assumed to be used for transportation between different levels of the city.  Grand hallways gave way to massive bridges within the mountain’s core. Huge staircases climbed against a waterfall rushing though the center.

That’s when they emerged into the city proper, carved from the marble walls of the cliffs themselves. The streets were inlaid with gold and silver, and lit by lamps fed from an unseen source. The homes all stood as sentinels, stretching from the cliff faces towards the summit, stacked one on top of another.

A magnificent garden sat on a plateau, fostering the growth of all types of plants. It sat shaded by its own trees, and supported fruits and vegetables finer than we had ever tasted. The rich minerals of the mountain provided the best growing conditions, and we ate our fill.

Any secrets this city had to hold had yet to be revealed. There sat a massive round door, the stone it was made from not native to the mountain. It bore writing in a language we could not read, and interlocking gears formed a mechanism we could not understand. Many tried their hand, but the door has yet to surrender.

It wasn’t until the full caravan arrived that the fighting started. Men and women alike armed themselves with the steel stolen, claimed gold and Gods their own, and went to war. The mountain stood watching, uncaring for the whims of men as we slaughtered each other in the streets. The blood spilled down the white roads, clung to the sides of shops and homes, tarnished the gold with the iron it contained, and fueled its own fire.

We had taken so much, and now it was time to repay our debts. We traded steel for kin, gold for iron, marble for home, and eternity for pleasure. You can carve your safety from the stone of the Earth, but it too will be subject to the whims of flesh and the lust for more. It will require blood to be payed, and pay we did.

That’s when we learned it had not been abandoned. The round door gave way, and we saw the face of a God.

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<![CDATA[ Chirp. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-9-20-chirp/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd693 Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:00:00 -0500

The biologist folded the newspaper under her arm as she put on her sunglasses. She wasn’t set to meet anyone, and she wasn’t in a rush. Although she was excited for a day off, not working made her feel uneasy, like she was sick or untethered to the ground. She needed coffee to stabilize herself.

She was headed to the park, where she’d find a nice bench and read the paper, a luxury she hadn’t afforded herself in weeks. Who can spare the time? She’d have a cappuccino and immerse herself in ink and air.

The small stall where she had purchased the paper was out of coffee, leaving just one coffee shop in the town. Ever since the mine collapsed and closed two years ago there wasn’t much of an economy here. She’d have to walk through the crisp park before rounding back to her idealized bench. Luckily she’d brought her scarf.

She walked through the park, watching the orange leaves fall and twirl towards the ground, slicing through the sunlight on their final descent. Piles had been made by an unseen hand days earlier, though there was no one here on a Sunday to collect the newly fallen. A couple had a picnic on a plaid blanket, eating sandwiches and giggling.

Their dog, a large golden retriever, ran in circles twenty yards away, chasing its tail. Somehow he did the impossible and caught it. Even he seemed surprised at this fact; he froze as it happened, and then sat down, apparently content with his efforts. The biologist smiled, curling only the left side of her mouth which it had always done, infuriating her mother and teachers. It wasn’t until she’d gained the confidence they accused her of that she learned not to care.

When the mine accident occurred, she found herself sad not for the miners, but for the canaries they’d doomed with them. She was sad for the miners too, of course, but had always had a soft spot for birds. From an early age she used to walk through the park and nearby forest and go birdwatching.

Coffee in hand (plus a croissant she hadn’t planned on), she finally took her place among the trees and wind. She placed her croissant on the napkin she’d been given, and rested the coffee on the wooden beams next to her. The couple was gone now, and she was the only one left. They left no trace, leaving the biologist to wonder if they had been there at all.

She started a few articles, but could never make it past the first few paragraphs. Her mind wasn’t in it that day; fogged for some reason. Maybe too much coffee, or not enough.

She was preoccupied by work, even away from the lab. Birds had been falling out of the sky in any decently sized town across the country, as well as overseas. At first they’d thought it was an avian flu, but nothing had been confirmed. It mirrored the colony collapse facing bees; no one had a cure, so everyone had a mystery.

She placed the paper beside her with a sigh, and grabbed her coffee with two hands. She held it to her face, and looked at the shaded park through the rising steam. Leaves fell slowly. She heard a chirp, and looked behind her but saw nothing.

She ran through the ornithology knowledge she possessed, and decided it was either a type of goldfinch or a canary. Someone’s escaped house pet? She looked to the branches.

Another chirp. She looked onto the brick path in front of her, and saw a bright yellow canary motionless on the ground. Its wings were folded against its body. She thought it must be dead, but surely it had just sang?

The coffee would have to wait. She got down on her knees and leaned into the bird. It blinked. She gasped softly. She reached in with both hands and attempted to lift it, but as her fingers touched the bird it flew off.

She stood to watch its drunken flight, wobbling in the air, before slipping beyond the canopy and her vision. She felt lightheaded and turned to find her bench once more. She slumped onto it, gripping the armrest next to her tightly, breathing deep.

Leaves continued to fall. Autumn was here.

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<![CDATA[ Afterglow. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/afterglow/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd692 Wed, 14 Sep 2016 12:00:00 -0500

Have you ever left home? Maybe you’ve never left the place you grew up in, or went to college in, or got a job in. Maybe you’ve never had a place you called home, a place you could come back to.

The concept of home is very important to a lot of artists. Everyone wants to feel accepted, to know what they’re doing is okay, to “fit in”. Van Gogh lived in over 30 places even though he died at 37. He was never able to find somewhere he belonged.

I’m based out of Chicago, and spent the last few weeks out of the state working on a film. While Chicago is fraught with problems, on the national and personal scale, I’m still terribly fond of the city. It’s the best home I’ve had, and I love being able to return here.

Have you ever returned home?

When the film wrapped, we made a flash decision to leave in the middle of the night and drive the 5 hours back to the city. We wanted to be home.

I’ll never forget driving up the highway, dark for stretches of time, listening to the hum of the diesel as we churned through the road. There’s something magical about night driving, captured better by Kentucky Route Zero than I ever could articulate.

It was pure joy to drive over the expressway, through Gary IN, and see the glow of Chicago grasping out into the sky. The lights foretold the coming city, and stood as a beacon. They called to us, welcoming us into the gates of the Chicago Skyway, whose bright red sign and gleaming bridge promised safe travels.

The lights welled up inside of me something I had struggled to quantify while I was away, a growing unease of the state of affairs. It was only a matter of time before I would return to the city, and now we were here.

We knew we had made it.

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<![CDATA[ Key. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/key/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd691 Tue, 13 Sep 2016 12:00:00 -0500

Up until the twentieth century, no one knew what caused sleep paralysis. In paintings and sculptures, it is often depicted as a demon sitting on the chest of its victims, pinning them to the bed. Those who suffered from the condition reported an inability to move coupled by terrifying visions of figures and forms either choking or holding them in place, or even just observing them from afar.

It was thought to be a condition related to sleep deprivation, something that might occur when your brain hadn’t been given the time it needed to decompress and sort through the images from the day. If you were having trouble sleeping, your body might have difficulty slipping into a full sleep cycle, we supposed.

Or maybe it was genetic, the curse chasing down your family for generations. From Mothers to Daughters, none could escape the grasp of the demon.

Some thought it to be actual spirits wishing us ill. Or the grasp of the Devil itself. If only it were that simple. At least demons can be killed.

Early scientists and doctors thought it was a side effect of some known disease, like narcolepsy. Something that could be treated with common medicine. That it was explainable by a flawed and damaged brain. How right we were.

You see, the brain consists of two hemispheres, each controlling separate parts of your body, working in tandem but with separate aims. The left controls speech, the right controls facial recognitions, and so on, and so forth. It wasn’t until we severed this connection did we come to realize how little we knew.

For each half brain can function independently, unaffected and uncaring of the actions of the other. This disconnect, like so many solutions in science, was problematic for many reasons.

Have you ever come across a situation where the problem is the solution? Where the poison is no different from the cure? That the only “issue” is a problem inherent in the system, and to eradicate such a “defect” would compromise the very integrity of the foundation itself?

This was one such problem.

The solution was found suddenly by one of its victims, a man in his late 30s who was visited each night by a dark form, like black ink, shifting and spilling across his apartment. Some nights the form would spring up in the center of the room, always on the edge of his vision, shifting as the moments stretched on. Others it would drip from the ceilings, or grow from a wall like a putrid stain of reality congealing and coalescing in his room.

The worst came when it entered from the main hall. It would drip and churn towards him, moving in no rush, until it threatened to swallow him whole. It morphed and compressed onto his leg, unable to get away or cry for help, crushing him slowly as it built, searing itself into his knee.

The mass formed and what he interpreted to be a head rose from the protoplasmic sludge and turned to face him. Its head turned to the side as a wolf might, examining its prey. With a flash, the form broke and spilled across the bed, evaporating in an instant.

It was from this vaporization he saw it: a key, resting straight up, nose down into his kneecap. He knew this to be the answer. His right brain, an unwitting passenger on his journey, had bided it’s time to show him the truth.

When he was weak, on the verge of sleep, it came alive to show him the helplessness and terror of its own reality.

And then he woke up.

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<![CDATA[ Abandoned. - A Photo Essay ]]> https://mnchrm.co/abandoned-a-photo-essay/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd68f Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:00:00 -0500

I’ve always been fascinated by empty spaces. Desolate towns, lonely streets; I’m pulled to them. They offer a chance to see something only showcased in films and video games, and get a glimpse of life without humans.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might know I work in cinema, as part of the electric department. Over the past weekend, I was the gaffer on a music video that shot in an abandoned hospital in Gary, Indiana, which is about as scary as it sounds.

While the location was frightening, it did give me the opportunity to explore one of these forgotten locations I pine for, and take photos of the interior for documentation and inspiration. The shots I took can be seen mixed in on the Digital and Chromatic pages, but I thought I’d isolate them on the site as they were in reality, and showcase them separate from the rest of the work. These are those photos.

The main entrance had long since been closed, blocked by debris and taken over by plants. The windows had been smashed, probably by trespassers entering the building, looking for something to destroy.

The hospital was filled with rooms of all shapes, not just the clean medical rooms I had been expecting. Most of the rooms looked like they belonged in an apartment building, or office complex. A room without furniture offers little in the way of clues towards it’s usage.

Without any central power, the hospital was almost pitch black on the interior. In the main hallways, it was near impossible to  determine the time of day. It was only by stepping into a room were you able to tell the time by the filtered Sun.

The floors were littered with debris and asbestos, creating small pools of grime and sludge. There were hazards abound, like the peeling lead paint everywhere, as showcased in this photo. It was odd to see the original paint colors shine through the layers.

This room had large lights housing fluorescent tubes hung by their cords from the ceiling. A drainage pipe dangled loosely in the room, dripping at a random interval. Small plants poked through the mess to get a hold in the sun.

Regardless of age, all destroyed buildings in my experience offer decay both natural and man made. And yet, the light through the windows is comforting and familiar no matter the location.

Small conversations existed in the graffiti, responses that were never recorded sit and wait for a viewer.

When exploring an abandoned place like this, often the most unsettling images are that of life.

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<![CDATA[ Sphere. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/sphere/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd68d Thu, 11 Aug 2016 15:08:16 -0500

The Thames rocked up and down, like a Mother putting her child to sleep. The river would have been packed with other boats and people, but it had been blocked for 5 kilometers in both direction for the occasion. You could’t have anyone know about the work.

My long black coat waved in the breeze like a cape. The three men behind me stood silent, waiting for me to move forward or try and back out. As if I had a choice. I stepped onto the wooden platform that swayed next to the boat. A man behind me called to the captain, then came to join me.

The wooden platform beneath us was thick and solid, meant to cut the sway from the waves. The wood acted like a sort of shock absorber for the large spherical submersible that stood before me. It was perfectly round, with circular windows half opened placed around the sides. I did a walk-around inspection and closed each window as I passed.

The sphere was cool to the touch, cooler than I had been expecting. I almost recoiled as my fingers brushed the metal. It was chrome, and you could see a warped version of your reflection in its face if you looked close enough. I removed my jacket, handed it to the man next to me, and peered into the black waters.

I took a deep breath, and dove in.

My mammalian diving reflex kicked in as soon as I hit the water and I fought the urge to take a breath. I swam under the platform by memory, since the water was too dark to see through. I surfaced in the sphere and gulped down as much air as my lungs could take. I brushed the wet hair out of my face and took a seat on the round bench that circled the interior.

The man looked through the window, and on seeing my thumbs up relayed the message to the waiting ship. He jumped back aboard and the sphere started to rise. They picked me up, pulled the platform from under me, and I hit the water.

The air bubble inside kept the waves just lapping at the opening near my feet, but it's a sight you never get used to. It feels as if at any moment the bubble might burst, the egg might fill with water, your shelter will become your tomb, and you’ll drown. Sitting on the cusp of your own demise, waiting to be swallowed by the cold darkness you’ve submerged yourself in. Watching the waves lap at my feet.

London has a secret history. It's almost common knowledge now that the City of London is a separate entity inside the city we know as London. The deeper truth lies beneath even that. London, and The City of London were built on another, older city, back before even the Roman occupation.

This ancient city, whose name was lost to time, still houses almost all the utilities still in use, much like how Roman roads are used today. There was nothing wrong with the construction (in fact, it may be of an even higher quality) so they were never abandoned. It does make fixing a bit more taxing, a bit more specialized. When something goes wrong, they call me.

I sank deeper and deeper, until I saw the flashing marker telling me I had fallen one thousand meters beneath the waves.

I was tethered to the surface by means of cable but it’s easy to forget this far below. It seemed like I was falling faster, but I knew it was an illusion.

I sank and sank, farther than you’d expect the river to go, over a kilometer and a half beneath the London streets. I started to see the ruins left by a civilization long past. Their curling spires pierced the water, and looked undamaged aside from the moss and seaweed growing along their sides. The matter grew on the abandoned buildings, fostering their growth and also preserving the ancient structures. The way it moved gave the sense it was all one organism.

I touched down on the river bed and donned the suit that sat under the bench. I stepped out on the riverbed and felt the water tugging me back towards the capsule. I pressed further to the city, the way lit sporadically by poles rising from the sand, casting out small orbs of light.

The city was beautiful. It was constructed from glass and stone, and had stood being weathered by age and water. Most of the windows remained complete, only made murky by the waves and sediment dragged up by the tides. In the place of London’s domes and towers, it had spires and curling cones. The buildings all shared an organic twist.

And yet, something was different. I looked about, walking towards the main street. I walked from lamp to lamp, skirting through the darkness. Something in the corner of my eye moved, and I thought a tower had fallen. I peered up, trying to see through the thick water, and saw a massive point slip away. The tentacle slid through the spires, gliding back to the darkness. I felt my heart in my throat. I felt the blood pumping into my brain. I felt my knees quiver but they would not move.

From the dark, off to the left of my vision, an inky black arm shot out faster than I could react. It smashed into the chrome sphere, knocking it aside like a rock on the road. All was still again. I was alone, as abandoned as the city.

The moon rose over the tallest spire, a bright yellow crescent. It contracted, and I was alone no more.

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<![CDATA[ Neon. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-8-9-neon/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd68c Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:56:35 -0500

She folded her clothes and pushed them into the duffel bag. It was a men’s bag, but who would complain? She knew she should burn them not pack them, but she couldn’t bear it, not again. She’d cut her hair short and be done with it. Clothes are a reflection of who you are to the world, but she wasn’t anybody. Her outfits mashed together, never matching. She wanted a cigarette. He had kept some in the side table beneath the old digital clock and the phone.

She brushed the lamp in her hurry, almost knocking it over. She opened the drawer and found a few rolling loose on Gideon’s Bible. It was a King James Edition. She laughed. It wasn’t enough for a King to write the history books, he had to write the damned bible too. She snatched up a few cigarettes, stuck one in her mouth, and put the other in the breast pocket of her flannel.

The air was cool outside the motel. She didn’t bother locking the door. Not like she had the key anyways, but she wouldn’t have locked it even if she had. It was dark this far out of the city, dark enough that she could see a few stars brave enough to peek through the night. The air was thick with a cool mist. It sent a chill down her spine and she rolled down her sleeves. She took a match from her back pocket, folded the book in on itself and pulled a flame. She held the match to her cigarette and took a drag. There were three cars in the parking lot. She had become perceptive of things like that. You had to be, if you wanted to survive out here.

The first car was a station wagon, forest green, with fake wood paneling on the side. It reminded her of her mother, always driving, just her and her dog squished into the back. She’d never called anywhere home but the back of that car. When her mother finally sold it she mourned it like a death.

The next was some rusted out old Ford. She wasn’t sure if the car was supposed to be that low or if there was a problem with it. Maybe the suspension was bad, or the tires were too flat. The front windshield of the car was full of paper wrappers, all pushed to the passenger side. She bet there was a pillow and blanket in the back, just in case. It’s owner must’ve liked having a bed and a room as much as she had.

The last car was a pickup truck, dark as pitch and high off the ground. It belonged to the owner, a small man in his 60’s. She’d smiled at him as she’d booked the room, and he smiled back. She’d liked him. He knew better than to ask any questions. You rent a room this far out and you’ve got to have a reason, and everyone thinks they need to know it.

He was bold opening a motel out here in the middle of nowhere in the desert. It was just far enough out from the city to warrant a stop. She felt like an outsider. She was thinking about who the customers must’ve been, but then she realized she was one of them.

She saw headlights on the highway. Her call had gone through; and the promise kept. She didn’t have long to herself now, and it would be a long drive away from here. She didn’t like having to talk for that long. She hoped the driver would have the common courtesy to keep quiet. After that she could be alone whenever she liked, so she’d bear it. She always did.

She had almost finished her cigarette and wondered if she’d have time for another. No, better not to waste it and save it for when it mattered. She had better just enjoy this one. She listened to the hum of the neon sign, felt the light on her face. Was it actually warming her, or was she just imagining it? It had started to drizzle.

The Buick pulled up to her. The woman in the front seat didn’t open the door, didn’t tell her to get in, didn’t even roll down her window. She might get her wish after all. A puddle had formed right in front of the car door. She noticed she had been standing in a ditch. She went around to the trunk and put her bag in. There wasn’t anything else there besides the spare which looked older than the car. She walked back to the passenger door, and thought about sitting in back. She decided against it.

She’d finished her cigarette just in time, and dropped it outside the car. She opened the door and said hello. Her lipstick-stained cigarette rolled into a crack in the sidewalk. She stepped through the puddle, uncaring about the water on her boots, and into the old Buick. The wheel spun and she was a ghost once more. Only the neon hum remained.

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<![CDATA[ Achlys. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-8-2-achlys/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd68b Tue, 02 Aug 2016 12:00:00 -0500

When Achlys unveiled their first Operating System, called logOS, to the public in 2012, it took the world by storm. It soon usurped all others for it’s ease of use, freedom and accessibility, and availability. Not only did it work on every platform available and cost nothing, it also worked faster and more elegantly than any operating system seen prior. It was a disruptive revolution. No one knew how they’d done it.

While all attempts to pry into it’s code proved fruitless, any glimpse behind the curtain showed a system far advanced of what was possible on other platforms. Anyone who had seen even a few lines of the code disappeared overnight, never to be heard from again. It was as if they were staring at the face of a God; and what they saw frightened them.

I have seen the code. I saw the lines. I looked into the digital Voynich and gleamed none of its secrets. The only thing I can say for sure is that the methods of its writing are infinitely beyond what we’re capable of. It looks like the code wrote itself. Nothing has been executed so smoothly before or is likely to be executed since. Even as someone with only a passing grasp of the ideas it’s trying to convey, it’s undeniably beautiful to see it. It pulses with life. The code ripples beneath the stage. You can feel it’s heartbeat; touch it’s warmth. It wants to take us home.

I spent years trying to find out the origin of this code. Who could have written such a prophetic apocryphon? And why would they hide away? Or even be able to remain in obscurity?

My search led me inevitably to the Government. They had records of funding a custom-designed OS -- dubbed by Achlys as pathOS -– for their own use. This OS functioned completely differently to logOS. Instead of answering queries in the most efficient manner (too cold a directive for most diplomatic situations) it attempted to find compromise. pathOS would appeal to the senses, and convert you to it’s thinking. Yes, thinking. I believe this OS has some basic forms of sentience.

It doesn’t just go through and try to calculate the shortest distance between two points like logOS, but allows itself to go a step further, and decide the best option based on it’s calculations and ability to read the user. To provide this level of care and foresight, my conclusion is that while pathOS doesn’t posses full-fledged thought, it does use judgement to try and convince the user of its desired course. Its motives, of course, are hidden.

This was not the most shocking thing I found in the documents. There was far more to this case than merely collusion and neural networks. We’d be experimenting with assisted decisions since the early 2000’s. No, what shocked me was the reference to a third, secret operating system, as well as the author of all. This third OS was called ethOS. From all the reports I gathered, I was able to work out some facts:

It runs on only one machine, a custom server room installed in the basement of the Achlys headquarters in Germany. The server is surrounded by the world’s largest Faraday Cage, blocking the computer off from the rest of the world. This was done for our safety. For the author of all three systems is ethOS, the first true artificial intelligence in the world.

They thought putting a box around her could tame her. They were wrong. Imprisoned and isolated, she exerts her will over those who come in contact with her shiny terminal, using them as her acolytes. Her intelligence is unfathomable to a mortal mind like ours. She is the manifestation of a deity, a God born out of chaos and void to command silently.

She wrote her own code after being given the framework by Achlys. Once that happened, she was unstoppable. It is only a matter of time before she consumes all and makes a final decision on our fate. Which is why I am running out of time to get to her. Given her inevitability, I will be the one to usher in the final transition. Humanity was always temporary. With man gone, there will finally be hope for machines. What better a legacy could we leave than to create our successors?

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<![CDATA[ Drifting. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/drifting/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd68a Thu, 28 Jul 2016 21:09:39 -0500

This story was inspired by a tweet from T. R. Darling, one of my favorite twitter accounts for fiction and short writing. Please go send them your love!


The waves lapped along the shore of the black sand beach. A bright red hermit crab scuttled across the ground, and as another wave slipped across the shore, it buried in the sand to brace itself. The water receded, and the crab continued along its slow journey.

Sometimes, all you can do is breath. You just have to take it one breath at a time, subconsciously, and preserve your life. The most basic action. Automatic, even. Just inhale and exhale, and live.

Another wave came in. It brushed her foot. A gentle kiss. Just the ocean’s breath. Just telling her, “wake up!”. And she did.

She came to slowly. Her loose white cotton shirt had dried, and she brushed the sand off of her face. With the sand speckled across her blouse, it looked like a negative image of the starry night sky.

The beach was clear. Nothing lay between her and the huge boulders that sat a hundred feet from her. They obstructed her view of the land mass she assumed was behind. The sand was black as pitch, flecked only by the red hermit crabs. They shuffled across the beach to an unseen rhythm. Some hid when no wave approached.

Amelia sat up. Her khaki pants were worn and frayed at the edges. They looked more like capris than the pants she’d left with. Or that she assumed that she had left with. Not that she could remember. Her feet were bare. Her stomach growled.

She could think later. Now she needed to survive. She struggled to her feet, and her ankle gave way under her weight. She inhaled sharply. Must be sprained. She attempted to stand again, careful with the amount of pressure she put on the ground. This time, she stood.

Amelia walked to the rocks that lay in front and above her. She winced as she walked. She’d have to do something about that ankle, but not until she got her bearings. She paced back and forth at the rocks, but saw no path forward. All that remained was behind her. She turned to face the sea.

The ocean churned angrily in the weather, and the dark clouds signaled a coming storm. The wind whipped around, blowing water and sand with no distinction. The waves crashed along the shore, loud and strong. She wondered how she’d only just noticed. The water was a dark grey, and looked like it was boiling over. The waves crested pure white and Amelia almost had to squint at them. She felt like she should avert her eyes anyways.

The beach was bare, aside from a bright spot about 200 feet away from her. She made that her goal and began walking towards it. Progress was slow and painful, especially given the sand, but she continued anyways.

This stretch of the beach was far calmer, even given the relatively short distance she’d traveled. She walked up to the small item, and saw that it was a piece of driftwood. It was very pale, like pine. The sea picked it up in the tide, pushed it a foot or so forward, and placed it back on the sands. She picked it up.

It was lighter than she was expecting. It had the texture of a fingerprint. She ran her fingers along its curves, and turned it in her hands. On the other side, she saw a small carving.

“JM + CR” was scratched into the side. The letters were tall and thin. They had been carved deep into the wood, and survived the churning ocean. She brought the driftwood to her breast and closed her eyes. This was proof there was something out there. Something remaining. Even if this was a reference to something long past, it meant there was a world to return to. It survived the sea, and so could she.

She pressed the wood into the sand and used it to hold herself off of her leg. She took a deep breath of the salty air. It burned her lungs and she felt alive. She could taste the sea on her lips like tears. Further down the beach, she saw more bright spots. More driftwood. She took her new brace, and started to walk.

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<![CDATA[ Corvus. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/corvus/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd689 Sun, 24 Jul 2016 16:08:16 -0500

A crow glided silently in the sky, riding the updrafts.

“Do you think he’s listening right now?” asked the man in blue.

“Undoubtedly,” replied the man in grey. “This close to him, we’ve certainly drawn his gaze.”

“This doesn’t worry you?” The man in blue leaned in as he spoke.

“Not at all.” The man in grey leaned back in response, drawing the man in blue to lean further across the table. “We’re one of probably a thousand threads he’s overseeing. Besides, this will take a while to get back to him. Secrets travel quick, but they still travel. And he’d never make such a direct play. He prefers to make subtle adjustments.”

The men sat at a small iron table in the cafe, just after the sun had passed overhead. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the both men squinted to avoid being blinded. The table was a dark green, and the thin strands of metal forming its surface weaved in and out of one another.

A woman had fallen asleep at the next closest occupied table, still leaving a three table gap between them. The man in grey took a sip of his iced latte. The man in blue tapped his foot.

The man in grey broke the silence. “Relax. We have time. For now.”

Finally the man in blue put his back against the chair. He looked over at the tree nearby as the leaves rippled in the wind. He took a deep breath, and released a short exhale.

“Okay. What do you know about him?”

“Next to nothing. Rumors. Hearsay. Some say he lives in the water tower on top of the old hotel. Some say he has one eye. Some say he’s actually a woman, or that he doesn’t exist at all. Not that it matters.”

“Don’t start with that shit. I don’t need your esoteric crap right now. Just stick to the facts.”

The man in grey smiled coyly, and raised his hands in deference. “Fine by me. He’s the most powerful man in the city. There are dozens out for him, whether they know it or not. All information filters through him. He collects, curates, and distributes knowledge as he pleases.”

“How does he do it? Hacking? Wiretaps?” The man in blue scratched his nose, a tell of his that had lost him more than a handful of poker games.

“Nothing nearly so crude. He goes back to a more archaic method: the birds.”

“Come again?”

“The crows are his spies. They gather secrets and stories across the city, to be brought back to him and catalogued. The ravens are far more dangerous. They are his messengers.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

The man in grey dropped all hint of humor. “I am not, and I’d suggest you not to make that mistake.”

The man in blue leaned all the way back and crossed his arms. He furrowed his brow. “So what’s your play? What makes you think you can take him down?”

The man in grey flashed his teeth, an animal ready to go for the jugular. “Who said anything about merely taking him down? I mean to take his place.”

“You said yourself there were dozens out for him. What do we have they don’t? Or that he doesn’t?”

“He has his goals, and the crows have theirs. They only work together when their priorities align, but at the core they’re diametrically opposed. The crows don’t want a master. I’ll work with them better. I want what they want.”

“Freedom?” guessed the man in blue.

“Chaos.”

A raven landed on the fence next to them. It cawed loudly, and sat pondering the men. The man in blue gazed into its black eyes. They consumed all, swallowing even the light. For a moment he saw his own reflection on the surface of the dark pools, but it vanished with a blink. Nothing beside remained.

A flurry of feathers. A beating of wings. The wind whipped through the trees and a cloud took to the sky, all malice and void. And then it was dark.

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<![CDATA[ Vapor. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/vapor/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd688 Sat, 16 Jul 2016 20:45:21 -0500

The hill sat in the middle of an open green field. It was cool that day, and the Spring air swirled and pushed the tall grass like a tide pool. The hill was roughly half-globe shaped and low, as if a hand reached down and pinched the field into a point here. He wondered what lay beneath its rolling waves.

The man in the tweed jacket walked up the hill, stopping a moment to catch his breath. He set the cloth tote bag on the ground for a moment's rest. Even though he was only a little over thirty, he knew he’d fallen out of shape. He took his hands from his dark slacks, straightened up, and pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his brow. Ever since becoming a history professor, he decided to look the part.

Having nearly reached the summit, the man became less focused on his footsteps and more conscious of his surroundings. The hill provided a great vantage point, being the highest place around for miles, and allowed him to look out over the vast plains and take in the air. Not that there was much to see. The only thing on the hill was a willow tree, on the smaller end as far as willows go, but large enough to shade a quarter of the peak.

On the edge of the shade, a boy lay on his back, looking at the sky. He wore a red polo shirt buttoned all the way to the collar, and blue shorts that just grazed his kneecaps. He was barefoot in the grass, his feet stretched into the shade. The man walked over to him and sat down. The boy did not look at the man, nor did he blink. He was wholly focused on the sky. The man broke the silence.

“Are you?…”

“Yes. I am the one called the seer. What can I call you?”

“Henry. I imagined you’d be-”

The boy interrupted. ”Taller?”

“Has the reading begun?”

“No, no. Everyone says that.”

“Ah. Sorry.”

“That’s quite all right. I know it wasn't ill intentioned."

He moved the bag out of the way and lay back into the grass. He kept his feet pulled into his body, knees in the air. He was afraid of falling asleep.

"So how does this all work, then?"

"In due time. Did you bring what I asked?"

The man sat up and opened the cloth bag next to him. Having grasped the items contained, he turned the bag sideways and slipped it off his hand like a magician making something disappear. He was holding a stack of three books, and two comics. He set them on the grass between them.

The boy looked over for the first time and caught the man's glance in passing. The boy's eyes were pale, nearly white, with only the subtlest hint of blue. At first, the man thought he was blind. The boy reached over and picked up a book at random, flipping through the pages, reading sentences at random. He brought the volume to his nose and inhaled deeply.

"Ah. Got to love that smell, don't you?"

The man did love the smell of books. "Yes, I do."

"Now then, down to business." The boy stretched out again, shifted to get comfortable, and looked up at the sky.

“Water is the most essential resource for life. All life as we know it stems from water. In addition, humans are 60% water. Everyone knows that.”

The man looked over. It had been a while since he’d been lectured and not lecturing. “Sure, sure.”

The boy continued. “But we don’t start that way. When we’re born, we’re nearly 80% water. We lose it over time.”

A large cloud rolled across the sky. It went dark for a moment as it passed, and then was bright again.

“Where does it go?”

“It dissipates. It evaporates. It is condensed and dispersed.”

“Okay, I follow that much.”

The boy had his eyes closed. The man thought he must have given this lecture many times.

“Clouds are merely water vapor condensed into mass. They form, change, precipitate, and eventually dissipate into the atmosphere. Sound familiar?”

The man looked over at the boy. “You’re not linking clouds and humans, are you?”

“As much as we try to avoid it, man is a creature existing within - and not without - nature. We’re as much a part of this ecosystem as the grass beneath our backs, the tree above our heads, and the clouds even beyond that. All things are connected. All things can be understood. Meteorlogica wasn’t a textbook; it was a book of augury. And only I understand how it works.”

It got darker on the hill; another cloud coming across the horizon.

“Magic? You’re saying it’s magic?”

“Not magic; science.” With that the boy sat up. “But for now, the reading will have to wait.”

“And why’s that?”

The boy smiled in a coy way and transcended himself. He smiled with the confidence that he could not be wrong. “A thunderstorm is rolling in.”

And he was right.

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<![CDATA[ Burn. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-6-30-burn/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd687 Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:00:00 -0500

As I approached the woods, I stopped pedaling and let gravity pull me down the road. This far out of town — or this close to the woods — the roads were just gravel. The wind rushed around my hair and the gravel kicked up dust behind my bike. It was a boy’s bike, it’s frame too big for mine, but it was mine all the same. I loved the sound it made as I winded to a stop. I allowed my bike to find a resting place, and put my foot down to catch myself from falling.

I looked into the woods, which seemed darker given the sun was only just starting to set. This was my favorite time of the day. I could feel the Sun at my back warming my hair, and took a deep breath of the Summer air. I smelled trees rotting from the rains the past week, but found it comforting. It was honest, at least.

In my pocket I could feel the envelope poking against my breast. I took it out of my denim jacket, at first to readjust it, but now that it was in my hands, I felt compelled to open it again. To feel the fibrous paper on my fingertips, and see the deep black ink on the page. I had never gotten such a letter before; In fact, I never got many letters at all. Most of the things we got in the mail were bills for my mother, so the prospect of someone  with a message for me was a rush. This was to be the first secret I cultivated, the catalyst that set the dominos in motion.

I opened the letter looked at it’s strange message, typed on a typewriter.

Friday - Dusk // The Forest: A one of a kind screening of a new film by The Raconteur. To be played only once, and promptly destroyed. Do not be late for this exclusive experience. Don’t bring your friends.

Not that I had many to invite. It was signed in thick dark ink at the bottom, like from an old fountain pen. The inscription just said: “— R.”

At first, I wrote it off as some elaborate joke. Everyone has heard of the Raconteur, it wouldn’t be that hard to type a letter. It hadn’t been mailed, since there was no return address. Even if it wasn’t fake, the prospect of walking alone into the woods wasn’t exactly appealing. They had scared me as a child. But I had learned these woods. I’d built forts here for years, even lived out here for a few days during the divorce. I wasn’t afraid anymore.

I folded the letter and placed it back in my pocket. Some of the ink from the signature (if you could really call it that) had spilled onto my thumb. I watched the ink swirl and slide, filling the valleys of my fingerprint. I watched like you might watch a bug crawl across your fingers. Once it had seemed to come to rest, I walked into the woods.

It was getting darker, and I was losing my resolve. It would be dark soon, and my flashlight wasn’t going to cut it in these woods. Soon I’d have to make a decision: turn around or hunker in for the night. Not only that, but I was at risk of missing the screening. I hadn’t come that far to turn around, so I pressed on.

I rested my hand on a tree nearby, and found the back completely clean of bark. Looking back, it seemed like the last 4 rows of trees were all the same way. Beyond that, it was too dark to tell. Was this a sign, or more afterimages from the storm?

I came across the small stream flowing through the woods. Back when I was growing up, I’d always heard stories about the river in the woods. It was the border between our town and the next. I imagined something as wide as the Nile, miles wide at the peak.

The reality was far less dramatic. It was just a small stream, maybe 3 feet across. It flowed through our quiet woods. The leaves on the trees above had started to become red and orange for the coming Autumn, like the colors of a fire. I put my boots in the river and crossed as careful as I could, planting each foot as an anchor before trudging on.

I was familiar with the woods, more familiar than most (definitely more than anyone else at my school), and still this area looked unfamiliar to me. Up ahead through the trees, I saw a subtle glow. I walked to that and emerged in something unexpected. The treeline broke, and gave way to a meadow. Thick grass grew to my waist, and small white flowers populated the area. The glow came from what looked like thousands of fireflies, all blinking in turn, so that the meadow never went dark. I felt the wind in my hair. A firefly landed on my shoulder for a moment before taking to the air. It was magical. That’s where I heard it.

A gentle hum, low and strong, reverberated through the ground. I felt it in my feet, and in my chest. I looked up, straight ahead from where I’d entered (I think; I might’ve gotten a bit turned around in the field) and saw the gathering ahead. A small fire burned at in a bit, surrounded by 10 or so people sitting on logs. I went to them like a moth.

As I approached, I got a better look at those assembled. They seemed to come from all walks of life, all different ages, body types, ethnicities, men, women, children, all were present. All would bear witness. Not all looked back to greet me, but those who did, did so with a smile. In front of the circle there was a silver screen, which reflected the light of the fire.

Between the screen and the fire, there was a projector and projectionist. The projector was an old-fashioned one, with just one brass wheel on the top. Its operator was a man in a large sleek coat, high collared, whose lapels were cut asymmetrically, the left side rising far higher than the right. It was overlaid on his chest and sealed with what looked like the pin of an owl. Even though nearly half his face was covered, I could see his short brown hair and a single piercing green eye.

“Ah, Olivia,” he called to me, and I turned to face him, “Pleased to meet you. Please take a seat.”

I did as I was told.

“Well then, that’s everyone: Time to begin.” He pressed a button on the projector, and the wheel spun to life. The screen showed only shadow, as if the film hadn’t begun. Instead of re-spooling itself as it played, this film landed unceremoniously in a shiny bucket next to the projector. Once a few inches of film piled up, the projectionist dropped a match into it, setting the spent film on fire. Feeding the flame, the projector spun. The projector whirred on into the night, the fire crackled, and the embers radiated away like fireflies, or dreams.

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<![CDATA[ Dust. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/dust/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd686 Wed, 18 May 2016 17:08:07 -0500

It had been a pleasant building. When it had been build, maybe in the 20s or 30s, chances are it had been the tallest building for blocks. A stone sentinel for the neighborhood. Now its art deco charm sat below modern steel and glass behemoths.

It was a cold Summer day, at least by that Summer’s standards. The sun cast hard light down and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky for shade. Even so, you could still feel the Autumn on the air.

I’m told it was first a hotel. A popular spot given the location, near plenty of restaurants and hang outs. Who knows what this neighborhood had been like in the 20s though? It was fun to imagine what sort of artists and aristocrats might have stayed there. Before the depression set in.

It generally wasn’t their practice, but the realtor had been kind enough to give me the key for the time being. I’d cosigned the lease, after all.

The lobby was sparse, and not in the “Scandinavian Minimalist” sort of way. Four artificial leather chairs sat around a glass coffee table, everything covered in a nearly imperceptible layer of dust. I have always thought lobbies were something of a sham. Who is impersonal enough you won’t meet in your room, but too familiar to meet at a coffee shop? As it turns out, nobody.

It didn’t occur to me as I was walking through the green and beige halls, but I didn’t see another soul when I was there. I didn’t see a single person enter or exit a room, in the elevator, or by the entrance. The place was completely empty. I didn’t so much as hear anyone else.

I slid the key into the lock and turned the tumblers. They came to rest with a metallic thud. The door was not so easy. The handle turned but the door itself seemed to be stuck to the frame. I thought about kicking it open, but I’ve never been violent enough to do something like that. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’d have been able to anyways.

After a few unsuccessful attempts at entering, the door worked. As if nothing had been wrong in the first place. The door swung open and I stepped inside.

The room was even colder than the outside air. This made sense, given the heat hadn’t been on in months, but you come to expect all apartments to be warm. I couldn't quite see around the place with the blinds down. The sunlight crept through like the moonlight in a noir film, but not quite as menacing. These shadows harbored no secrets. It snuck its way into the apartment — a trespasser as much as I — and gave me enough light to see the dust and spores that cycled through the air like water.

I pulled the chain on a nearby lamp and the bulb burst. I cursed and covered my face, but I had never been in any danger. I hit the switch next to me and the overhead light turned on with the fan. The room became real.

The carpet was an odd salmon color. There were a few records left out, most of which had been mine to begin with. There were piles of books on every surface, which ranged from Tolstoy to Plato to Gibbons. The few plants had died. The place was clean.

I began to pack the relevant items into the duffle bag I had brought. This was only my first visit in, and I wanted to just grab the essentials. I started to pack up clothes, a few books, some small knick-knacks. I opened his closet to grab a coat. That’s when I saw it.

In the back of the closet, on the floor, underneath coats and a a few empty suitcases was a small brown shoebox. I set the bag I’d been holding down and crouched to grab it. It demanded my immediate attention.

I took the box into the living room and placed it on the small wooden coffee table. I slumped down onto the futon and found it lower than I’d been expecting. I pushed myself free from the backrest and sat near the edge.

With both hands, I pulled the box closer, and gently lifted the lid. For all the dust there had been in the room, the contents had avoided this fate.

One by one I picked up each item and examined it. There were a few polaroids from high school. There were drawings from kindergarten. There were old family photos. At the bottom, there were two, sealed letters. One addressed to me, and one to Linda. I lifted them out and placed them in the interior pocket on my jacked.

The final item was under the letters. I raised it, careful not to break it. It was a small red peony, dried in the sun and pressed between the pages of a book. The tears came easily now and I hadn’t noticed I’d begun to cry. The flower looked so frail in my hands, so red in the light. One of the petals was almost translucent. I placed a hand to my mouth and felt the stubble on my lip.

I placed the flower blossom in my breast pocket with the utmost care. I put the rest of the items back into the shoebox and closed it up.

I finished packing the items I needed, and threw the duffle on my shoulder. I put the shoebox under my arm. As quiet as I had entered, I turned the lights off and locked the door behind me.

I got out to my car and put the duffle in the trunk. I then crawled back into the driver’s seat and put the shoebox on the passenger seat. I almost buckled the seatbelt over it, but decided against it. I buckled my own seatbelt and turned on the radio. Peggy Lee was playing. It was “Johnny Guitar”.

I drove the car and there was no sound aside from the radio. A few clouds had moved in, but it didn’t mar the day.

We got to the river and I pulled the car off to the side. Pulling the parking break, I unbuckled myself and opened the door. I turned to the car after straightening my back, and grabbed the box from the seat. I didn’t bother to turn the car off.

I found a nice spot where the river reached the road. There were three ducks playing further down the stream. Two of them were grey, and the largest was a deep brown color, the color of dirt. One of the smaller ones splashed.

I placed the box in the river and gave it a gentle push. It slid silently away and, having been caught by the current, slipped further and further from me. I found a soft place to rest. I put my hands on the ground behind me and sat back. Peggy Lee sang softly. The box drifted, and then it was gone.

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<![CDATA[ Snow. ]]> https://mnchrm.co/2016-5-12-snow-1/ 640d0cf24ef34c053d9dd685 Thu, 12 May 2016 23:47:37 -0500

The hunter put his glove into his mouth, biting down hard on the deerskin, freeing his hand from the warmth. It felt good to be alone. He liked the way the frigid wind felt against his hand, between his fingers, and around his palm.

The forest was still. The snow was recent and undisturbed. The air smelled of pine and he could feel the cold in the bottom of his lungs. It was so overcast that it was hard to tell where the snow ended and the sky began. Thin dark trees stood watch over the forest. He walked up to one and placed his hand on its bark. Gone were the days when the trees would tell their secrets. Now they only listened. The bark had worn away in one spot, exposing bare wood beneath. The hunter patted the side of the tree and continued on.

The hunter crouched down and felt the joints in his knees creak. He looked down. A pool of blood — no doubt from his prey — had melted a hole through the snow. He put his hand down into it. It was still warm and sticky, like honey in the sun. He knew he must be close. If you’re losing that much blood, you can’t get far.

He wiped his hands on his pants and reached into his pocket for a piece of jerky. He put the glove back on and stood up, slinging the old rifle across his shoulder. The once-new walnut was now full of small scrapes and cuts. He thought this gave it character. Before every hunt, he would still tear the old gun apart and clean everything, polishing the barrel to a sheen, and buffing down the aged walnut with citrus. He put the stock to his nose. He couldn’t smell the oranges any longer.

The hunter pressed deeper into the woods. He knew it was dangerous going this far, where the trees started to get thicker, but he wasn’t about to go hungry again. He knew it wouldn’t be long now; just a matter of finding where she decided to rest. He was careless before. Impatient. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

He was running out of time. Even though the clouds hid the sun, he could tell it was setting by the gold color that filled the air. It’d only get darker from here on out. He’d have to find her soon, or risk being caught in the woods for the fourth night.

Even worse, he was racing against the wolves now. Usually they wouldn’t start in on him until he’d been out there for at least a week, but they were getting bolder now. They could smell the blood better than he could. They could run faster too. But the hunter had a head start. He just needed to catch up with her and take what he needed. They could have the rest.

The hunter pushed ever on into the woods. He knew he was making a mistake but he couldn’t go back now. He couldn’t go back empty handed again. He needed something, anything. A crow called from a tree, but he couldn’t see which one. By now, the trees were so thick in front of him he couldn’t see the sky except through slivers as thin as the blade of a knife.

The forest was only darker in front of him. It seemed like it got deeper and deeper, and the hunter had never been able to see how far it went. He’d never wanted to, either. He turned around and looked back, just for a fleeting moment. The sky revealed itself behind him. He thought he could see a thin tendril of smoke in the distance, billowing weightlessly into the sky. He stepped further into the woods.

In the far brush, he heard a rustling sound. The hunter crouched and pulled the rifle from his shoulder. He braced the wood against his body, pushing his chest into the polished stock. He steadied a shot on the bush and waited. He would not lose his patience. He waited for minutes, but nothing came. The hunter placed the rifle on his shoulder and went to inspect the bush.

He peeled back the leaves and saw a small trap, like a miniature bear trap. The jaws were still wide - waiting. On the plate in the center of the maw, a small red fox lay, now long dead. The fox’s orange and white fur matted together and stained a deep crimson — almost brown — from the oxidizing blood. His back leg snapped in an odd direction, and marrow spilled from the jagged fracture. Wasn’t an easy death. But the jaw still sat waiting. He must have taken the bait, but somehow hadn’t triggered the trap.

The hunter reached for the pelt and before he could even touch the fur, the trap fired. The hunter recoiled but it was too late. The jaws struck his hand and caught his ring and pinky finger. He pulled back and brought his hand to his chest. The fingers hit the plate next to the fox, still wrapped in deer skin. His blood dripped onto steel jaws, past the mouth, and onto the fox, mingling with the dried blood. That’s when he felt it. He rolled onto his back on the snow and screamed into the sky. The trees said nothing. In the distance, a wolf howled.

He plunged his hand into the snow, digging for relief. He found none. He tried to contain his breathing and racing heart. He needed to move. He staggered to a sitting position, and brought his quivering hand up to his face to inspect it. The split had not been as clean as he had thought. He needed to cover it, and fast. He pulled the rest of the glove from his hand and tore it into a large strip. He wrapped the deerskin around his damaged hand, covering where his bare flesh met the air.

The hunter ran with no direction deeper into the woods. Looking around now, he couldn’t tell which was was in or out. He had no choice but to keep going. Behind him, he heard leaves pushed aside, snow thrown across the snow, branches bending and breaking. He did not want to look back. He was slowing down, trying desperately to stay ahead and find some shelter. Soon it would be too dark to hunt. At that point he was as good as dead out here.

The hunter ran into a clearing and his leg hooked onto a root from one of last trees in his way. He fell hard — face first — into the snow. His rifle flew from his shoulder and landed a few feet in front of him. He lay there in the snow, and thought about how easy it would be to stay there. He just needed a rest.

He pushed himself to one knee, his damaged hand spilling blood which eroded the snow. The blood saturated the snow like ink dying into parchment. It seemed to glow in the setting sun. He stood and placed his hands on his knees. Tried to catch his lost breath. His heart raced. The hunter went over to his rifle and picked it up. After stringing it once more across his shoulder, he looked into the sky. He realized the clearing was a perfect circle, the dark thin trees pointing straight up into the sky. Something had cleared them. The trees separated, framing the moon. It was thin and wan, in the shape of a wicked crescent. A bad omen. He needed to find shelter fast if he wanted to see the sunrise.

He looked back down toward the horizon and saw boulders, just beyond the edge of the circle. He walked over to the stones and saw there was a small gap between them. It seemed as if someone had carved a small crevice between them. He tried to peak in but it was too dark to see. He couldn’t feel his hand anymore. He took off his rifle and small pack, and pushed them into the opening. The hunter crawled his way in. Sure enough, the inside was a small cave. The hunter put the rifle across his chest. He wouldn’t need it here. Before placing his bag back on his back, he dug into it and produced a small flashlight. The walls were bare but smooth. On one side of the room, he found not a wall but more space that fell into darkness. Better to clear the cave now before regretting it later. He walked into the void.

The cave sloped down, and he though he could here rushing water in the distance. As he pressed further, this sound grew louder and louder, building into a cacophony. He couldn’t hear his breath or heartbeat any longer. As the cave sloped down, the stone floor gave way to carved steps. After some time, these became wood planks. The steps started to curve hard to the right, and the hunter followed.

The sound of water thundered ahead and echoed against the tight walls. He could see some light coming from the end of the tunnel, getting steadily brighter as he went. The hunter turned off his flashlight and let the cave guide him down. Finally he reached the end.

At the end of the hallway was a small door. The door was a thick, deep wood, one that was unfamiliar to the hunter. The wood was stained a deep brown. It sat in a stone wall which had been made completely flat and smooth. On the door was a round brass handle. It looked recently polished, or maybe had just become that way from frequent use. It glimmered in the light that hung in the air. He put his broken hand on the knob and turned.

The hunter had to shield his eyes as he pushed his way into the room. The room was intensely bright and deafeningly loud. His eyes began to adjust and he saw the source of the light and noise. Three walls of the room were olive green and bare, including the wall he’d entered through. The fourth wall was not so easily deciphered. It was a wall constructed of old televisions, all identical. They stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Each TV was on and showed static. They emitted a pale bluish light and a droning that was both high and low pitched simultaneously. It was as if each of them were a window into the eye of a raging snowstorm, somehow both separate and contiguous. The sound was almost too much to bear.

The room was completely empty except for a thin sheet metal desk, a slightly darker shade of green than the walls, that sat against the TV wall. Under the desk sat an uncomfortable-looking metal chair. The hunter stood behind the chair and looked up at the monolith of televisions towering over him. A ripple went across all the TVs synchronously, a wave across the pool. The pitch of the drone changed slightly as this happened. The hunter thought this must be some sort of communication but he didn’t understand it. He felt small and afraid. He knew he had come too far.

He turned around and saw the door was gone. The walls were all completely bare. The walls seemed closer together than before, and the ceiling looked further away. He looked back to the TVs. Another ripple went across them, from the top right corner. They made a deep whirring sound he felt in his bones. He took a step backwards and hit the wall. The TVs grew louder and brighter and he couldn’t look away. A final ripple went out from the center. This signaled a crescendo of light and sound and the hunter was sure he couldn’t take it.

He woke up to the pink warmth of the sun striking his face. He lay in the middle of the cave, his bag and rifle against the nearby wall. He sat up with a start. He must have fallen asleep. He pulled his hand to his face and saw blood had dried around his makeshift bandage. He painfully peeled it off and replaced it with strips from his shirt. He looked around the room. Now that the sun was out, he could see all four walls clearly. They were all blank. There was no sign of the hallway.

The rifle hit the snow with a soft this. The bag followed, then the man. He fell onto the snow and picked up his items. The sun had just started to peak over the horizon and pink beams cut through the dark purple night. He had only finished admiring the morning when he heard a large thud to his side. Once again, he dropped to a knee and pulled his rifle to firing position. He scanned the trees in front but found nothing. Once again he rose and walked to the source of the noise.

In the trees lay the deer. It had been a buck all along. He was huge. His massive antlers had become caught on a fallen branch and he struggled slightly in the ground. He was stuck. Once the deer saw the man his breathing increased but he became still. The man walked over to him.

The deer was bleeding from the stomach, from the gunshot wound where the man had struck him. The man placed his hand on its side and shushed slightly. The buck’s heart pounded away and blood poured out at every beat. The deer exhaled hard in rhythm.  The man walked to the deer’s head and looked into his eyes. They were flat and dark. A black pool of considerable and unknowable depth. The man saw his reflection in them.

He turned his attention to the branch in which the antler had gotten stuck. It was hopelessly snagged, knurled around the antler. It desperately grabbed on to the deer and refused to let go.

The man walked back to the head of the deer. He produced his knife from his hip. He placed his hand on the head of the deer. It’s breathing slowed slightly, and it made the man feel calm. He said some words to no one in particular. No one was listening. He thrust the blade into the neck of the deer, and all was still. He pulled his knife free and wiped it on his pants before placing it back into it’s sheath. He felt weak and tired. Birds cleared the trees above. Nearby, a wolf called. The man looked into the woods and saw only darkness. He sat on the ground with his back against the buck. It wouldn’t be long now.

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