deadsuperhero

I often spend a lot of tme writing about the Fediverse, publishing, digital networks, and stuff like that. One thing that I’ve been thinking about, though, is that my online persona does not always reflect the things I’m passionate about. I also fail to blog about them, and sometimes leave massive gaps that go back for years and years.

I have a lot of emerging ideas about the “Digital Self”, and what personal identity means as a whole, but that’s not what this post is about. Instead: as a bit of an experiment, here’s some fun Other Sides of me that I don’t normally talk about.

My Artist Side

Over the years, I’ve produced a decent amount of abstract art, primarily due to an exposure to psychedelics in my early 20s. A bit of a revelation for me, on an acid trip, is that I’m pretty goddamned terrible when it comes to realism. What was liberating, though, was realizing that I didn’t have to be realistic in any of my work at all.

What this ultimately did for me was open up an entirely new world of form. It helped me explore a lot of ideas with color, shape, and light that I otherwise wouldn’t have taken seriously.

So far, I have three collections, of middling quality. I hope to incorporate them into my site over time.

• Disreality
• Picked Apart
• The Not Exactlies

There are bits of an unfinished fourth collection titled CounterFunction floating around random social networks, but it’s still unfinished.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “you run your own news publication and write roughly five or six articles a week!”

My Writing Side

I mean, yeah, We Distribute has been a pretty good vehicle for getting myself to write. But, I also have a ton of unfinished stories and narrative worlds that still need fleshing out. My cloud drive for writing is something of a graveyard.

Unfortunately, I very much had a come to Jesus moment when looking over the graveyard. A lot of it is truly terrible! But, here are a few fun entries that I consider to be “The Least Bad”.

• Hexxels – What happens when you drop acid and try to write a Planet Earth-style documentary about an extremely alien species?
• Ghost Train – What if The Only Sane Man survives a world-altering experiment and goes crazy in the process?
• A Fistful of Shelter – What if we did “A fistful of dollars” but with troglodytes? What would a cowboy western look like millions of years before cows?
• Have Yourself a Glorbtraub Day – What if you woke up in a world you literally no longer recognized?

I haven’t tried to write anything in a considerable amount of time, but I think I’d be a lot better now. What’s kind of frustrating is all the stuff I can’t easily convey here: I actually have a fair amount of developed concepts for multi-story science fiction anthologies that cover a lot of fun, weird ideas. I have no idea how to get myself to write them! It’s so frustrating! But, entire universes of my own weird making live in my own weird head.

Maybe the act of sharing here is a way to tease out some creative habits.

My Poet Side

Actually, I really like writing poetry, but I’m often afraid to share it. What if people think it’s terrible?

Who are we, but Narcissus, peering into the endless and reflecting on hope?

Restlessly chasing dreams, drafting utopia, missing pieces. Rube Goldberg contraptions of quick hacks and crackpot ideas that expend too much, and fall too short. With strained eyes and shaking hands, staring at the back of our skulls.

Drunkenly sputtering a forgotten oral history; arcane symbols and wiring holding dusty old thoughts. Suspended by cobwebs, reciting incantations for another fine hit of what could be.

Drowning in punctuated sadnesss, mumbling if only, if only. Painting over the present with the future, trying to get the now and a thousand yesterdays, crying to God: release tomorrow, and take me with it.

We’re building a ladder back to creation with whatever we can find, and cast our hearts to deep damnation, should we leave it all behind.“Narcissus”, Sean Tilley

Maybe it is sentimental garbage, but I like it. I hope to actually publish a book of poems someday.

My Musician Side

My brain is capable of hallucinating music. Not just bits and snippets of things that I’ve already heard – but interactive compositions that I have control over. Unfortunately, I’ve always been limited in expressing music through what my hands can do with instruments. My fingers tend to involuntarily twitch or freeze up, and I can stumble over incorrect patterns and forget what I’m doing. But, over the years, I have managed to compose and record some of my own music.

I actually have a vault of recording snippets, and try to record them when inspiration strikes me. Often, they don’t go anywhere. Sometimes, though, I think that I might have something decent:

Here’s a couple of unfinished songlets, I guess. They’re just recorded in a Voice Memos app on a phone. Some of them are really old. Sometimes my voice cracks. Please be gentle.

Into the Sunset

Under your skin / What do you still think

Worry and Comfort

Sleepy River

Miserable Village in Squalor

I have hundreds of recordings like these. I really hope they turn into something, someday! It’s a long-time frustration that I rarely finish one.



My Game Developer Side

This one is a little bit more well-known in my social circles online, I guess. For whatever reason, I discovered Adventure Game Studio a long time ago, fell in love with it, and tried to make games. I have failed to finish a game hundreds of times, but I’ve come up with some really fun ideas:

Rather than switching to a newer engine like a sane person, I keep delving into weirder and weirder projects, as I modify the layers of AGS to do things it was never intended to do.

Such as:

an InfoCom Text Parser! The whole engine is designed to use a GUI, so everything is hacks on hacks on hacks using a text-scrolling system. It even remembers prior things that the game said to you.

A fakeOS designed to mock LinkedIn, where every interview you go through is progressively more horrible than the last.

Other efforts, some of which were in the first video:

• A (currently very broken) dialog-and-memory game where you’re a dude with anxiety at a party, and have to use gossip and fakery to gain people’s acceptance.
• A weird and quirky RPG based on the stories my brothers and I made up with action figures. It’s overly ambituous, has way too many features like a time-based character scheduling system and a day/night cycle, barely anything to do, and a Bethesda-style quest system.
• A weird custom ring GUI for action verbs in point-and-click adventure games.

I would include more screenshots and videos, but I have to get my game development environment up and running. So, maybe look fowards to a Unicorn Sausage game showcase somewhere down the road!

In Conclusion

My head is kind of a mess, mostly filled with unfinished things, and I’m often sad about it. I want to finish these things, because the act of creation makes me happy.

Because I live day-to-day with suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, and self-hate, I sometimes worry that my shelf-life might be at risk of being much shorter than most other people’s. I don’t say that because I want anyone to worry, but as a direct expression of a sad loneliness, of a desire to create wonderful, silly, awesome things with people.

Should you decide that you, too, would like to share in the act of creating beautiful, funny, and wonderfully weird things together, please reach out.