the artifice of the ritual became apparent

The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.

"u cant save smth that doesnt want to be saved"

I Dreamt of Something Lost is a fake desktop game about data, grief, and memory. It is about the Facebook profiles of dead friends, about parts of yourself still stuck in a particular social media profile like a fossil stuck beneath layers and layers and layers of sediment, about the fragility of digital storage, about what it feels like to have your world shrink to the breadth of a computer screen. I made it back in 2023, during a particularly difficult time in my life. I was convinced it wouldn't come to anything; instead, it won a New Media Writing Prize and more-or-less launched my career. Funny how things work out.

I'm trying to grow my writing to the point where it can financially support me - crazy difficult, I know, but I believe in my work and what it can do. I Dreamt of Something Lost is possibly the best thing I've ever made - it would mean the world if you could check it out on itch.io HERE.

You can also buy it as a cassette game (with bonus creator commentary) or postcard HERE!