aw jeez | 3/22/25

Welcome to make you think, a newsletter about being alive in the endtimes. If you just signed up, welcome! You can find previous editions of the newsletter right here. If you know someone who might like this, click that little forward button and pass it along!

last week i should've said i was going to miss this week but folks,,, here we are on a saturday morning with the first late edition of make you think. apologies for the delay but in my defense i was hanging out with my friends and working!

i've spent the better part of this week in san francisco at gdc (the game developers conference) and i've had a truly delightful time. i've seen a bunch of friends, had a lil fanbyte reunion, and met new folks in both the games press and the game dev camps.

this is the first time i've been to this show and it is incredible how different it feels from something like pax or summer game fest. pax and sgf are shows about products – the games you are being shown are done or almost done and you are have either already bought them or are about to buy them. from a coverage perspective, our job is to translate that firehose of information into either entertainment or criticism because the thing we're talking about is a complete thought. gdc is a show about process. it's about learning how the sausage is made, about being around other people making games and reveling in the fact that you get to make art with the computer. these things are clauses but not yet sentences. if you are a suit, it is a show where you use the company card to pay for a dinner you'll never remember with a guy who will stop emailing you back in 3 weeks. everyone wins.

a lot of folks i chatted with talked about how different this show felt compared to previous ones. the show floor smaller and more corporate, the attendance lower and less international, the city of itself becoming more and more technohellscape coded. while i don't have the context for the ways the show is different, it's easy to understand how tenuous they're feeling about it.

we are in the midst of a full throated fascist takeover at the highest level in this country. critical to institution of fascism is the intentional strangling of creativity and external opinion and thought. the us government is intentionally making it harder for non americans to enter the country so they don't come. the show gets smaller. capitalism is also an extremely important arm of this era of fascistic rule. companies use artificial squeezes that to keep new people out and suppress wages and morale through violent, cruel, and unnecessary layoffs. the show gets smaller. years and years of constant demoralization of the artist/worker will eventually result in the destruction of the art form (at least at the level and scale we have come to understand it to have). so, we push back.

our obligation as the oppressed and disenfranchised is to stop looking up for safety and solace, but instead looking down and to our left and right. companies will not save us. the people who are paying us will not save us. colleagues and not bosses. our collective ability to actually do the creation that makes people money is the real power – we just have to be willing to try to help each other make that realization.

you make the small video game with a friend. you leverage the access you do have to get someone to send you out to gdc. you learn from and hang out with your friends. you sneak into that party you weren't on the list for. you live your life in conjunction and companionship with your peers, because continuing to live a life full of laughter and joy is the only way to create light in this darkness. it is hard but worthwhile.

and, critically – we can do it.

my camera is very sick. i am going to put it in the mail to be repaired by my friends at fujifilm when i get back to la because the way that it treats focus, exposure, and the EVF feel completely broken to me. i love this camera a lot but i also do feel like these issues i am running into are reminiscent of the ones i had with my x100t back in 2020, but i need to do more learning on whether or not i have the right lens/settings for the job i'm trying to do (which usually is take photos of my friends in low light spaces).

also at this bar yesterday i ate a few bites of lamb wrap before i realized that there was a layer of paper underneath the foil layer. am i going to die

catch y'all next week and sorry this one was a day late! have a great weekend.

-

niki