Mr. Hands

I often delay small tasks for no good reason. Things that are often twenty minutes or less to do become insurmountable obstacles in my mind, and I especially struggled with this when I was a teenager. I would sit around not doing much of anything and then lament it was "too late" to do the things I initially set out to do. But it's only too late when you're dead. So today it was already 2 PM on my day off when I decided to finally clean the muck off from my non-retractable garden sunroof. I hopped on my bike, bought a telescopic garden hose extension, found out my garden hose was busted, and rode to the hardware store to get a replacement. After that, cleaning the roof really was only twenty minutes of vigorous scrubbing, and I had a freshly cleaned sunroof at 4:30 PM. Because very often, the only person who thinks it's too late to start something new, is you.

Someone on here sent me this PDF when I was feeling bummed so I'm passing it on to you: The Cleantech Revolution, a somewhat puffy but not inaccurate document of the ways the climate outlook is actually getting better. The trend is better than I knew about - a lot of places, including countries that aren't rich or aren't known for progressive politics, are moving towards renewable electricity as a power source and away from fossil fuels, and the incentives for them to keep doing so are growing. The EU now uses fossil fuels for less than 25% of its electrical generation, a change that's happened quite rapidly in the last few years.

I know that's not a direct response to a concern about democracy in the US, but it's good news that's big and real, and sometimes it's easier to accept hope outside your current worry, so I wanted to give you that.

As far as the US... this is the worst period in our history, except for all the others. I often think "remember when politics wasn't like this, when the stakes felt lower and the tone more tolerant," and when I catch myself doing that, I ask myself what fucking year exactly. Am I thinking of the warm bipartisanship of... the Iraq War? The AIDS pandemic? The Patriot Act? US politics has always been a shitshow and through it all most of us have still been able to live our lives where the things that mattered most were the people close to us and the small comforts of daily life. I don't meant to say it doesn't matter who's in charge or what the laws are, but it's not the only thing that matters and for most people on most days it's not the biggest. We--in many senses of "we," your local community or cultural community or your family or chosen family or queer or online or lefty communities or...--we will be here for each other regardless of which criminally wealthy sex offender is trying to fuck it up for us.

And not just in a cozy "the Sun will rise regardless" way, but in an active way where we have learned from the past and we're better than we were before at supporting each other no matter the conditions. It may not feel that way when you're seeing stupid little arguments on the microscale, but I'm remembering one of those stupid little arguments that was very relevant--people were getting overeager to offer their own "safe houses" or "natural abortions" after the Dobbs decision, and were told not to, because organized abortion networks exist. The structure for people to get safe, medically supervised abortions despite living in anti-abortion states is not perfect but it is so much better than it was pre-Roe and it's getting stronger. There are more ways to resist than winning elections or waiting for some glorious revolution.

...Also, Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of years left in him and everyone else the Republicans could conceivably run for President has the charisma and electoral power of a debate team captain crying that women haven't provided logical justifications for not dating him. So there is that.

When I joined the Wanderstop team in 2019, the game was being made by a very small team. In terms of full time employees, I think I was #6. My job would be to rig, animate, and implement the animations of every character in the game. Eventually, years later, the animation team would grow to as many as four simultaneous people. But I didn't know that at the time - I simply knew that, like many previous projects, there was a lot of work to do and just one Me.

For this reason, my initial priority was on finding shortcuts. There's only one way you animate an ambitious, high-detail game like this as a single animator, and that's by finding ways to save yourself from having to do absolutely everything by hand. For this reason, I spent a lot of early Wanderstop dev setting up animation tech to automatically deal with a bunch of situations.

Let's explore some examples below the cut!