DESTROYER

She poured her third glass of straight vodka. When younger it was Budweiser or wine, until it turned into white Russians, then vodka over the rocks, by her sixtieth birthday she’d been drinking vodka straight from the glass for several years. 

Her husband, Michael, died three years earlier from a drunk driving accident. They’d been married for twenty years, but she had had enough of the married life several years before he wrapped himself around a tree after a night of gambling on NFL games. 

She grew increasingly distant from her sisters and brother. She retired from her job as a computer analyst early, took her dead husband’s money and locked herself up inside her house. One time it had rose bushes, garden statues of fairies and leprechauns, and every blade of grass meticulously kept in uniform by Hollins Landscaping. Now, dead leaves collected on the driveway, walkway, and lawn. A pane of glass knocked out by a storm hadn’t been replaced in a year. Her only recourse to the life she lived was to drink every day until the pain she caused turned into justifications. 

The house was cold, matching her skin, lips, and pursed face. She put on, “Let Your Love Flow,” by the Bellamy Brothers and sat down in front of a mirror. Long red hair from youth turned into a short greying mess. The song traveled through the cold halls, and stacks of newspapers, bills, and dust collected on the once obsessively polished furniture. A once warm house turned into a tomb, a waiting room, a fortified compound. 

Arthritic fingers reached out to the Styrofoam head set to the left of the mirror and picked up the red wig with side swept bangs and fastened it to her skull. She looked into the mirror and with slow moving hands she painted on blue eye shadow, then glued on fake eye lashes. She didn’t need to convince herself to pour another vodka it had become ritual. Next, she applied foundation to hide her aging spots, followed by a powered red lipstick. The look wasn’t for anyone but her, a way to convince herself that if she were beautiful then all would be forgiven.

The grandfather clock in the living room worked, but time was no longer a concern to her. She only ate a meal a day to keep herself alive and thin. If she didn’t value her own neck she’d stop eating altogether, food had become an annoyance she had to deal with daily. A pest asking questions about the future when she was trying to travel backwards. 

“Always Dusty Springfield,” she said, “I Only Want to Be with You.” She played the song again, allowing her body to contort in joy and happiness across the scuffed marked wood floors. Along with walls, the man hater thrust her body like a 1960s pop star in a psychedelic dream. Skin like lily white boneyard markers placed the glass on the fireplace mantle. 

Her photographs in silver frames stood in the same spots for the last twenty years. One of her honeymoon in the Florida Keys, back when cocaine and speedboats were a part of her collective consciousness. One of her father standing next to a swimming pool not long after he returned home from fighting the Nazis. The last photo was of Jack in nursery school. His fine blonde hair parted to the side, eyes young and blue, full of hope. She’d dressed him in a black V neck sweater pulled over a white mock turtleneck. When he was little, she called him, “Jackie.” 

By the fourth play of Dusty Springfield, she poured another vodka, and spit on the photo of Jackie. She didn’t like that he decided to grow up. When he was a little boy, she dressed him up in girl’s clothing. One time, in the aisle at Zayre he cried when she bought him an Easter dress. Customers looked at her, wondering if she was going to do anything about it, she did. She made him stay home from school for three days and wear nothing but the dress. If he cried about it, she beat him with a belt. His tiny body black and blue, red heat marks across his butt and thighs. 

“Only babies cry,” she said, clenching her teeth at the photo. “Only babies cry!” 

Years later, when Jackie reached puberty and stopped wearing dresses, she started sneaking into his room at night. He could fight her off most nights, until he couldn’t. Of course, to her, none of those things happened, a figment of Jackie’s imagination. If no one saw it, then it wasn’t true. She told herself that every day until she believed it. She cut her son off. Took him out of her will and never picked up the phone. By the next drink, she convinced herself that there never was a child. In the throes of denial, the music sounded good enough to dance to. 

The fall wind outside slammed the phone booth on the corner. She looked through her window and saw a man with a long black coat inside. A running black Caddy parked next to it. She narrowed her blue eyes like a serpent, studying the man. She couldn’t make out his face but could see his thick head of silver hair slicked back. He moved around inside the booth, mouth moving, hands up and down. Then he hung up the phone and stood there.

“What’s he waiting for?” She thought. 

She walked to her makeup desk, snatched the bottle, and poured another glass. By the time she returned he was back on the phone, hands moving and he was pacing back and forth inside the booth like someone had told him shocking news. She wondered what bad news the man had received, it excited her. 

“Good for you honey,” she said, thinking a woman had left him.

When the grandfather clock chimed four, she nodded off. When she woke thirty-two minutes had passed. The man was no longer in the phone booth. She stumbled across the floor, and put on “Out of Time,” by the Stones and quickly poured another drink before the shakes had a chance to set in, then sat in front of the mirror to freshen up her make up and straighten out her wig. 

She staggered to the kitchen and opened the freezer, pulling out a package of frozen breakfast sausage links, and tossed them into the microwave above the marble countertop where she once had a bar, now littered with empty vodka bottles, and prescription Xanax bottles. The Xanax was to counteract the hangovers and shakes she had every morning. Once it settled in, she began drinking and repeating the same ritual every day. Day in and day out, blaming everyone but herself. It was her father’s fault he had PTSD. Not the year he spent leading a tank brigade across Europe fighting Nazis. It was Jackie’s fault that he didn’t want to wear dresses as a child. It was completely his own doing for crying into the night and hugging himself after she left his room naked. 

She’d lost count of how many drinks she’d had and fell to the couch. The record player scratched. The ceiling lowered down on her and the walls closed in. She’d become a photograph of flesh. Her silver sequence party dress glowed underneath the chandelier glass bulbs in the shape of candles. Her wig and makeup both immaculate. She spread open her pale dagger like legs and set the glass in front of cotton blue panties hanging out from the short party dress. She tried to kick off her shoes, but she wasn’t wearing any, the ankles fought for supremacy with heels and toes across the museum floors.

The grandfather clock chimed seven when she woke up. The tremors set into her soul and rattled her bones like a locomotive hell bent on early arrival. She picked up her glass and downed the last of it, then picked herself up and touched up her makeup in the mirror. Her eyes fixated on the expensive bottle of unopened vodka. She couldn’t recall if she had delivered it but was too drunk to remember. She tried to recount her steps, wondered if she fucked the delivery man. It wouldn’t be an insane thing to have happened. She fucked the landscaper the year before and jerked off the mail carrier when he dropped off a box with new socks inside. 

“That’s the kind you used to drink,” a calm and even voice said. “If I remember correct.” 

She slowly turned around and, in the chair, next to the door the man in the long black wool coat sat with his legs crossed. She studied him for a moment, his silver hair slicked back, cut barbershop fresh. He had a matching silver goatee neatly trimmed under his nose and chin. The rest of his face, shaven razor smooth. Bright blue eyes leered at her like he wanted to tell a punchline to a joke. He held up his hand, inviting her to a drink. 

Her reaction was to say something, anything, but sickness aligned with her veins, gut, brain, and skin. She took a swill from the expensive blue bottle of vodka, then poured some in her glass. She took notice of his black shoes, shined up like mirrors. Pressed black pants, and white shirt tucked into them. She figured his waist must’ve been a thirty-four. 

“Couldn’t wear a tie?” she said, shoving more of the liquid down her throat. 

“Feel better?” He asked. 

“How did you get into my house?”

He pointed back at the busted windowpane and smiled. 

“Need to get those fixed on occasion,” he replied. 

She huffed and downed another mouthful, her brain let up on the nerves and skin.

“I’m…I’m…going to,” she slurred, “call the cops if you don’t get out…”

“Destroyer,” he interrupted. 

“Excuse me?” she replied. 

“You’ve been a destroyer of lives for as long as I can remember.”

“Who the fuck are you!” she screamed.

He got up out of the chair with a gentleman’s ease and walked over to her. Their eyes met as he placed his wide hand across her mouth. 

“Don’t scream.” 

She studied his eyes. They appeared lost, but also eyes covered in years of humor and well-built armor. When her throat settled down, he removed his hand and stood in front of her.

“Still playing the same records I, see?” He said, walking over to the stack of albums. “I like this one.” He put on “River Deep Mountain High,” by Ike and Tina Turner. 

She poured herself another drink and poured it down her throat fast, then poured another. She had no idea where she was anymore, the faint smell of burnt breakfast sausage rotting in the microwave hit her nose. She recognized the eyes standing in front of her. 

“I’ve always loved this song,” she said.

“It’s a good fucking song,” he told her, his hair unable to move from the hair tonic the barber had put it in earlier. 

“Where have you been all these years?”

“Around. Man, I tell ya, Los Angeles, Paris, New York City. You know, just last month I was in Frankfurt Germany. “

“You leave Boston?”

“I come here all the time. Work for people over in Southie on occasion. You wearing a wig now I see.”

“People don’t like a woman without looks.” 

“No, people don’t like you.” He told her with a warm smile. “You got exactly what you wanted after all, didn’t you?”

She shifted her body on the couch and snapped into attention. He walked back and forth across the deadweights of the floorboards. 

“And what’s that?”

“You are finally alone. After ruining everyone you met you got to build yourself a little temple of the damned to rot away in. No more husband. No family, just you and the denial you love to suck off whenever you get the chance.” 

“How dare you speak to me like that. I’m your…”

The blast from the sawed-off shotgun inside his long coat lifted her up off the couch and threw her back onto the floor. The music from the song played in the background as he walked around the couch and looked at her. The silver sequence of the dress soaked up the blood red carnage, staining the stomach with the hand of death. Her eyes, wide open, fixated the glossy whites awaiting the nothingness inside the return of his gaze. 

  “You don’t ever get to say that word to me,” he said.

On the way out he grabbed the picture of young Jackie from the mantle and made his way down the long driveway. He started up the Cadillac and took a handful of quarters from the console. The phone booth provided relief from the dark streetlight wind, he dropped in several quarters and dialed a number. 

“Who’s this?” A voice said.

“It’s me,” he replied. 

“Did you find her?” 

“I did. Send over Archie and Lenny. There’s a mess to clean up.”

“What do you want em to do with her?”

“On Colony there’s that abandon strip mall. At the end where the Zayre used to be?”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Bury her there in the ugliest Easter dress you can find.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, did you find the location of the priest?”

“Costigan?”

“Yeah, that cocksucker.”

“I did.”

“Give me the address.” 

The Spy Who Loved Bees

Moneypenny found Bond standing in front of the MI6 break‑room mirror, adjusting his tie with the solemnity of a man preparing for a duel—or perhaps, as he would later insist, aligning his throat chakra for optimal self‑expression.

“The name’sh Bond… Jam—” he began, only to be interrupted by her pointed throat‑clearing.

She crossed her arms. “James, darling, we’ve talked about this. You don’t need to introduce yourself to the coffee machine. It already knows your energy signature.”

Bond sighed, the sound rolling out of him like a disgruntled Highland bull who had just been told to ground himself barefoot in the grass. “Moneypenny, the world’sh changed. The ladsh don’t even wear tuxedos to work anymore. They’ve got… hoodiesh. And feelingsh. And meditation appsh.”

She stepped closer, patting his arm with the kind of affection that had been simmering in the background of their franchise for decades. “That’s called emotional intelligence. And speaking of which, we need to talk about us. Our dynamic needs to evolve. Spiritually.”

Bond straightened, suddenly alert, as if someone had whispered the word “martini” behind him or waved a sage bundle in his direction. “Ah. The old ‘will‑they‑won’t‑they’ shtory arc. Very meta, Moneypenny. Very self‑aware. Very… conscious.”

She smiled. “Exactly. It’s been sixty years of flirtation. The audience is exhausted. The universe is exhausted. We need to modernize. Harmonize. Co‑create a healthier relational paradigm.”

Bond frowned thoughtfully. “Sho… no more shlapping my way into your officeh with innuendoesh?”

“No more,” she said firmly. “We’re going to have a relationship based on mutual respect, healthy boundaries, and professional equality. A relationship that honors our highest selves.”

Bond blinked, as though she’d just suggested he switch to decaf and give up Aston Martins for bicycles. “That’sh… very progressiveh.”

“It’s 2026, James. People are doing shadow work now.”

He nodded solemnly. “Then I accept. From thish day forward, I shall be a new man. A man in alignment with his purpose.”

Two weeks later, Bond stood in a Scottish glen wearing a tweed jacket and holding a pair of binoculars, looking like a man who had been forcibly retired by the plot and gently nudged toward a mindfulness retreat.

“Ornithology,” he declared to no one in particular. “A nobleh pursuit. Birds don’t try to kill you. Usually. They simply mirror your inner vibration.”

He had taken up habitat preservation, lectured schoolchildren about wetlands, and even started a blog titled “Shparrowsh and Shpecie Preservation: A Journey Into Avian Consciousness.”

He practiced mindful breathing with the herons. He thanked the universe before every bird call. He saged the bird blind.

Moneypenny checked in via video call. “You look happy, James. Your aura seems less… weaponized.”

“Aye,” he said, adjusting his binoculars. “I’ve turned over a new leaf. A wholeh tree, even. I feel my root chakra connecting to the moss.”

That was when she appeared: Fiona MacHoney, beekeeper extraordinaire, cresting the hill with a smoker in one hand and a veil fluttering dramatically in the wind like a goddess of pollination summoned by the cosmos itself.

Bond froze mid‑sentence. “Good lord… she’sh magnificent. Her aura’sh golden. Like a sunrise over Glashgow.”

Moneypenny’s voice crackled through his earpiece. “James? Are you still there? Your energy just spiked.”

But Bond was already striding toward Fiona, chest out, accent thickening like a Highland fog rolling in before a storm—or perhaps like a man whose sacral chakra had suddenly awakened.

“Hello there, lassh,” he purred. “I’m Bond. Jam—”

She cut him off with a glare sharp enough to slice through his entire character arc. “I know who you are. You scared my bees. Their collective consciousness is very sensitive.”

Bond’s grin widened. “Ah, but I’d love to learn more about your… hive dynamics. Their group soul. Their shacred geometry.”

Moneypenny groaned through the earpiece. “James, no. We talked about this. Stay grounded. Stay present. Stay in your body but not… like that.”

But it was too late. The eyebrow arched. The charm activated. The theme music swelled faintly in the background, as if the universe itself had given up trying to stop him and decided to let karma handle it.

Fiona smirked. “You want to help me with the honey frames?”

Bond’s eyes gleamed. “With pleashure. My spirit animal may be the wolf, but I feel a deep shoul connection to the bee.”

As Bond followed Fiona into the apiary, Moneypenny sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Well,” she said to herself, “at least he’s flirting with someone who actively contributes to the ecosystem. And who can sting him if he gets out of line. A natural consequence. Very karmic.”

She closed the call, lit a lavender candle, and whispered, “The universe will sort him out.”

And somewhere in the distance, a bee buzzed in agreement.

Sacred

I’m here. At the Damian River. Today is the day. I’ve been praying for this day for years. Father Johannes is so kind and generous. He has taught me to be a lady in trying times. I, Marta, know now how to please a man and keep a husband thanks to Father. I am grateful that Father Johannes will do my baptism today. 

“Do not fear, Marta. The Father will take care of you.” My veil trails behind me, not touching the ground, thanks to the hands of my sisters in faith. 

“Whatever could I fear, when Father Johaness is there?” I smile.

“You’re right of course, Marta. It is only what is sacred.” My other sister pipes up with a serene smile. 

The Father speaks up then. “Leave us, sisters. You know how this must go. This moment is between me, Marta, and God.” The sisters bow out, laying my veil on the ground. I walk to the Father and kneel before him. He smiles genially down at me, taking out his Bible. “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” As he continued his prayer, I laid my head on the ground in reverence. 

“Come, it is time.” I look up and take his hand to gather myself to my feet. He leads me into the water and covers my face with my veil. “Lord, I take this virgin and dip her into the River Damian. I bathe her in the sacred seed of Fathers and rebirth her anew.” My eyes widen beneath the veil. What part of the Bible was he reading from?! I begin to struggle but his grip remains firm and he doesn’t give reprieve. The Father tightens my veil firmly around my eyes to blind me completely and then I am being dipped into the river. The river which is now thick and warm. Salty and sweet. It tastes of nothing I have ever tasted in my twenty years.

The Father holds me in the warm river while I struggle and I think to myself, wow. I am going to die here. I have learned so much from the Father. How to cook. How to clean. How to worship at the altar. How to be a proper wife for a man one day. And it was all for naught. For the Father is now drowning me. In a demonic river. I pray to the Lord, my proper Father that I am welcomed into his kingdom, even without a baptism. I stop my struggles and let myself sink to the bottom of the warm river.

I drown.

My death is long. So long. I drown for what seems to be endless hours. The pain in my lungs is painful and pleasurable. I taste the river, warm, salty and sweet. I see the Father’s face in my visage. And as I imagine him, Johannes becomes clearer and clearer. He appears to me. Like he never has before. Nude. And he is beautiful.

I’ve always known. I’ve always known that to make a man happy, I’d have to see him nude. I’ve seen church boys and imagined. Imagined how they’d look. What they might taste like, their lips against mine. But none of these imaginary ideals of mine compare. Johannes is a visionary. A man of the Lord. Sculpted by God he is. Tan skin, long hair braided down his back, lips so kissable, and hands rough from working with the boys he educates. I want him. I feel sin.

I feel like… a sinner. I’m having feelings in a region that never gets feelings. My nips are hard and tingly. My vagina is wet and sticky. I-… I might as well. The devil may be watching but I am already dead. What’s one more sin going to do? I’m sorry Father above. That I had a failed baptism. That I let temptation get to me even in death. I confess my sins to you. 

But I need this. I need my Father. I need Father Johannes. Right now. In the River Damian. Where virgins go to be reborn. I need him inside me. Father, please? 

As if the Father can hear me, he swims towards me. His naked body next to mine. He grabs me. He’s so gentle. Kisses along my neck, the inside of my wrists. The sides of my breasts. He says to me, “You are baptized in the sacred seed of your Father, in the River Damian. Praise the Lord and let this seed enter you. Be reborn as a sinner.”

And as he enters me, I know. I know I can never go back. I will never be reformed. I am a whore for the Father. Like my sisters in faith. I pray now to Father Johannes at the River Damian only. Father. Feed me your sacred seed! Let me be reborn! I feel alive again! 

My eyes snap open and I gasp. I sit up, grabbing my chest. I swim to the top of the river, shedding clothing along the way. The river is semen. Gallons upon gallons fill this beautiful river to the top. And as I edge the top, I swallow. I step out of the river, completely nude, save for my veil. I throw the veil to the Father and grin over at him. 

“I pray to you Father, that we baptize me again. Sacred acts such as these must be repeated after all.”

What Gets Remembered When Everything Else Burns

I’ve been thinking about the dead dog.

In the first cut of “Alphabet Burning,” the imaginary documentary my imaginary filmmaker Alex Chen made in my imaginary game about the real Lower East Side in 1978, there’s footage of a dead dog on Avenue B. The camera lingers on it for maybe eight seconds. No music, no narration. Just the dog and the garbage and the sound of the city. In the second cut, the one that got Alex a distribution deal and lost their reputation in the underground film scene, the dead dog is gone. Cut for being too rough, too real, too much.

I made a game where you have to decide whether to cut the dead dog.

This probably sounds strange if you’ve never played a solo journaling role-playing game, and maybe it still sounds strange if you have. Blank Generation asks you to play an artist trying to survive in New York City’s underground scene from 1977 to 1983. You roll dice to navigate crises. You track four numbers that measure your exhaustion, your visibility to threats, your money, and your reputation. Every session you create something and then choose whether to stay pure or compromise or sell out completely. The game asks a question it knows you can’t answer: was it worth it?

I didn’t set out to make a game about failure. I set out to make a game about documentation.

The mythology around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club always made it look so cool. The photographs are all dramatic angles and artful grunge. The documentaries cut together the best nights, the moments that mattered, the bands that made it. Even the oral histories tend toward the highlights, the war stories, the times someone famous showed up or something wild happened. What you don’t see in the mythology is the rent you couldn’t pay, the friend who overdosed, the choice between eating and buying film stock, the exhaustion that accumulated until you couldn’t tell if you were making art or just going through motions.

I grew up on those photographs. The Ramones at CBGB. Patti Smith at Max’s. Blondie before anyone knew who Blondie was. I thought it looked like freedom. Then I started reading the actual accounts, the zines and personal journals and less polished interviews, and I realized it wasn’t freedom at all. It was desperation documented well.

So I made a game where you track your desperation on a six-point scale and when you hit six you’re done.

The interesting thing about games, the thing I didn’t fully understand until I started designing them, is that they preserve procedural knowledge in a way other media can’t quite match. A documentary can show you what the scene looked like. A book can tell you what it felt like. But a game makes you navigate the same decision trees under the same constraints. When you’re playing Blank Generation and you’re at five out of six Burnout and you have zero Cash and someone offers you money to soften your work, you’re not reading about compromise. You’re making the compromise. You’re feeling the pressure of the numbers and the awareness that one more mark on Burnout ends your character and the knowledge that you need money to survive. The game forces you to understand not just that people made compromises, but why they made them and what it felt like in the moment of making them.

This is what I mean by games as documentation. Not documentation of what happened, exactly, but documentation of what it felt like to navigate what happened.

I’m planning eight books in the series. Four track New York from 1977 to 1999, watching the scene get commercialized and policed and gentrified until by the end there’s a Disney Store in Times Square and the whole thing is a museum. Then four city variants: London punk from the Sex Pistols to Thatcher, Berlin techno from the Wall falling to reunification killing the party, Seattle grunge from Sub Pop to Kurt’s death, Detroit from punk through techno through bankruptcy across thirty-six years. Each book asks the same question in a different accent. Each book documents a different way the city kills the scene. Each book tracks the same erosion, the same exhaustion, the same choice between integrity and survival that almost everyone eventually loses.

The more I work on this series, the more I realize I’m not making entertainment. I’m making an archive.

There’s a moment in the third session of my playthrough where Alex has to choose between going to Danny’s memorial or going to a career-making interview with a magazine. Danny was the friend who overdosed, the one Alex was supposed to check on but didn’t because Alex was too tired and too busy and too burned out. The memorial and the interview are scheduled for the same time. You can’t do both. Any choice that adds another point of Burnout ends the character completely.

I chose the memorial. I went drunk. I couldn’t handle the weight of it, so I walked out. I lost my last remaining reputation with the scene. Then I stopped making films because any choice that kept me making films would have pushed me past six Burnout and ended everything.

This isn’t a story about success or even about meaningful failure. It’s a story about stopping. About choosing survival over art because the alternative is not existing at all. Most stories about underground scenes don’t end this way because most stories about underground scenes are told by the people who made it, or about the people who made it, or are constructed to build toward some kind of meaning. But most people in most scenes didn’t make it. They burned out or sold out or left or died. They did a few things, lost a few things, and then stopped.

The documentation they left behind is all we have to prove they were there at all.

I keep coming back to the dead dog. Such a small edit. Ninety seconds out of twenty minutes. Alex could tell themselves it wasn’t really compromising, just making the work accessible, letting more people see the documentation. And Alex would be right. More film students watched “Alphabet Burning” because of that edit than would have watched the uncut version. The work reached further because it was softer.

But the underground film scene still knew about the cut. Still knew Alex had compromised. Still marked Alex as someone who bent when pushed. And Alex still had to live with knowing that the most brutal truth got edited out to make the rest palatable.

That’s the thing about documentation. You can document the eviction, the poverty, the violence, the desperation. You can document everything except the cuts you made to the documentation itself.

I designed Blank Generation to force those cuts. To make you feel them. To track what they cost. Every playthrough generates a story about someone who tried to document something true and then had to decide how much truth they could afford. Sometimes they stay pure and burn out. Sometimes they compromise and survive. Sometimes they stop before the choice kills them. There’s no winning condition. There’s just the question asked over and over in different ways: was it worth it?

The game can’t answer that question. Neither can I. But the game can make you sit with it, session after session, watching your numbers climb and your options narrow and your character erode. It can make you understand that almost everyone who was there had to answer that question for themselves and most of them answered it by leaving.

And maybe that’s documentation enough.

Twenty years from now, someone will stumble across Blank Generation in some corner of the internet. They’ll read the rules about Burnout and Exposure and Cash and Reputation. They’ll roll dice to generate a crisis. They’ll track their character’s deterioration across three sessions or five sessions or however long they can stand it. They’ll write in their journal about what they created and what it cost and why they’re still there. And when their character hits six Burnout or loses all their Reputation or just can’t take another session, they’ll understand something about underground art scenes that no documentary or book quite captures.

They’ll understand what it felt like to choose between the work and yourself. They’ll understand why most people eventually choose themselves. They’ll understand that the work existing is sometimes the only victory anyone gets.

I built a game where you track your desperation until you can’t track it anymore. Where you document loss until you become the loss you’re documenting. Where the question isn’t whether you’ll burn out but when, and what you’ll leave behind, and whether anyone will remember that you tried.

The dead dog stayed out of the final cut. The film students watched anyway. Some of them wrote letters. One of them said the work mattered.

Alex left New York with two completed films, zero reputation, and just enough money to leave. The work existed. The person who made it was gone. That’s the real story.

I’m making eight games to document eight versions of that story. Eight cities, eight timelines, eight ways the scene ends. Not because it’s fun, exactly. Because someone needs to write down what it actually cost. Someone needs to preserve not just that it happened, but what it felt like to be there when it happened. Someone needs to make a game where you cut the dead dog or keep the dead dog and either way you lose something.

The mythology says it was cool and free and pure. The mythology is a lie. The truth is it was desperate and exhausting, and most people didn’t make it and the ones who did make it usually made it by becoming something else.

But people were there. They made things. They documented what the city was like before the city changed. They chose art over safety until they couldn’t choose it anymore.

That matters.

Even when the dead dog gets cut. Even when the filmmaker leaves. Even when the scene dies and gets turned into mythology and nobody remembers what it actually felt like.

The documentation exists. The game preserves the procedure. The archive grows.

Someone has to remember. Even if remembering means tracking the exhaustion, the compromise, the moment you couldn’t do it anymore.

I made a game where you have to decide whether to cut the dead dog.

I hope you keep it in. I hope you can’t. I hope either way you understand why the choice matters.

That’s what games can do that other media can’t. They make you live the choice. They make you feel the weight. They make you document your own documentation, track your own tracking, remember what it costs to remember.

The scene is dying. The scene is being born. You’re broke. You’re brilliant. You’re burning out. You’re making something real. The city doesn’t care. The work demands everything.

Make something that matters. Even if you have to stop before you’re done. Even if the dead dog gets cut. Even if nobody remembers your name.

Make something that matters. Someone will find it later. Someone will understand.

That’s the only win condition there is.