From the archives...

Ten years ago I wrote a review of a game called Flywrench and put it up on Medium. 54 people have opened up that review since it was published, and 14 have kept it open for longer than 30 seconds. You can now read that review, and 8 other essays from 2018 or earlier, right here on chard.ooo. I hope you can stomach them for longer than half a minute, but I’m not keeping track.

Normally I hate revisiting my past work, or my past decisions, or my past self in any way. “Cringe” doesn’t do the emotion justice. There’s a sharpness to the shame, which quickly becomes a panicked urge to drop whatever I’m holding and sprint in a straight line and close every door I pass through and get underground, or at least underwater if I can manage that, really to do whatever I can to sense nothing at all except my own skin and whatever it’s touching, until the self I was briefly confronted with can’t see me and I can’t see him and we can both agree that as far as we know the other one never existed. What’s the point of growing, if after doing the growing you still have to put up with that guy who didn’t know and feel everything you know and feel now?

But these posts from an earlier me are… actually ok? I might even be proud of them? Is that ok? They’re not perfect by any means, and of course what I dislike about them is exactly what makes me most self-conscious about my writing to this day. I wish I’d get to the point instead of trying to WRITE so much, and it’s when my point is not well defined that I tend to WRITE the most¹. And sure, I couldn’t keep myself from editing all of them during the transfer, tweaking some phrasing here and there for clarity or variety. But I can’t deny that there are bits of prose in these old pieces that I find delightful, and ideas that I’m happy to revisit.

In this cute retrospective between Adam Sandler and Timothée Chalamet, when they’re discussing the upcoming Marty Supreme, Chalamet says it’s a movie about the (maybe idiotic) confidence you’re capable of having when you’re in your twenties and have a goal. When independence and capability are unburdened by responsibility, a certain type of person simply goes for it. I am not a very ambitious person. I basically never have simply gone for it. But when I read my own writing from 7+ years ago, I’m struck by the confidence I sense in its diction, cheekiness, and, yes, even its length. Having a single clear idea of what Kentucky Route Zero was about was not a prerequisite for spewing 1500 words about it. Possessing only a rudimentary amount of filmic taste and knowledge did not prevent me from dunking on a decent movie. I have no idea why I thought this was worth anyone’s time, but quantity can be its own quality I suppose.

There’s an invisible but massive difference between writing as information conveyance and writing as art. Age (and time in the professional world) can really dull whatever sense is responsible for distinguishing between the two. I’m glad to have these funny little essays in my archives, and I’m glad they’ll stand alongside my informational blog posts. I don’t regret writing anything that’s already on this site, but I do think I’m due for a temperature change. Hopefully this batch of re-issues is just the start.