Dealing With Loss Near the Start of 2025

At some point earlier this year, I was going to write a post called "A Blog Post About My Dog Before She Dies". I was going to write about how cool she is, pretty much. This assumed that by the time I was ready to write and publish it, she would still be alive.

I dragged along with my process of making Figment Area posts, and my dog ran out of vital efficiency roughly situated on that month.

Her name is Shadow, and she was in declining health for a few weeks before dying on March 19.

Those of you who are refined dog enthusiasts will be even more sad when you realize that Shadow is a beautiful blue heeler, a sterling member of the world's greatest dog breed.

Blue heelers are an inherently likeable and eye-lighting dog breed, but Shadow was an extreme individual. She was beautiful on a ridiculous whole new level. "Cute" alone doesn't cut it. Shadow was among the stars. She was also a lot smaller than she could have been, probably half the volume of your more common blue heeler doggies.

I don't know if her size had something to do with how insane to look at she was, but now that I've had her for about 13 years, I think "small enough to fit on a couch four times" was the right size. And fuck did she look good on a couch.

Personally I wouldn't want to own a dog that was not allowed to be on a couch. If I have a dog, I want it to be indoor-accessible and cuddly. Shadow absolutely was.

Shadow was a creature I often used to think of as having "hundreds of faces". A lot of the time there was normal Shadow, who looked fairly good. This was what most people who knew us would have seen of Shadow. I was gifted with the position of actually co-owning Shadow, or at least owning her enough to have the ability to look at her at all times of the day. When she wasn't walking around or running after something, she'd look different, lying down on some comfortable surface and being decorated impeccably.

Here's another one of her many faces that in all time may have come out only once.

A while ago, Shadow got what is called a "Silver Whiskers Assessment", a health checkup for old pets that has a really cute name and sounded to me like exactly what she needed. Test results came back plainly saying "she has a heart condition". I thought she would be fine. More weeks passed, and her health declined, we couldn't find out exactly how, and her life ended.

It really feels like a curse that a dog can be so integral to your reality and form so strong a bond with you, and then turn that all into emotional damage with the fact that she's gone forever. One month you have a handy love quad who is always around, and the next month you find that water freezes at 25° Celsius. It was like a law of physics broke down.

This was made worse by the fact that my cat already died in 2022, meaning that as of March 19 I have no pets.

I may have forgotten to add something that I really wanted to say here. There's a lot about Shadow that you can say.

But there's no need for writing now. I will show you how precious Shadow was with pictures.

Failed Figment Area Blog Posts

Figment Area has been a pretty slow blog for a pretty long time. It started in 2021, skipped posts for a year, had four posts in 2023 before stalling chronically, and has only 13 posts including this one right now. In spite of how much work I've been doing in so many other places since 2021, I kind of wonder why.

One of the big problems that screwed Figment Area over for a while was the whole "separate special from dirty" compulsion that I have. When I work with creative pursuits, inevitably something I build that's really holy/sacred for me has to have an object of neutral quality to separate it from anything lame in some way that would otherwise be touching it. It's like not wanting to read a book about cute pigs after you read a book about forest fires, unless you read a book about picturesque hardwood floors first. The post I made that outlined the rules to Castle Walls - also my first ever blog post detailing how to play a card game I created myself - was considered a special object, and guess when Figment Area's chronic stalling of 2023 happened?

Compulsions and disorders requiring me to set releases apart on this blog has been trouble, and it affects my posting months after I told myself I would stop restricting myself in this way, but this post isn't quite focusing on cases like that. The truth is, this blog's got DRAFTS, and some of them just fell apart regardless of where they were going to be relative to other posts, and it gets ugly. This article covers some of the work-in-progress posts for Figment Area that I still have saved and that will probably never - no matter the tonal archive division - be fixed or made to be properly launched. Let's start with the oldest one.

Through the Eyes of a Disillusioned and Depressed
Twenty-Something in 2023

This post was made impulsively by me in late 2023 at the near-peak of a horrible mental health gauntlet concerned with an overactive thyroid, and I've always realized that the way it's written was a mess. Thank god I don't have an incorrect thyroid anymore, but the haunting memory of that time period remains. As for the post itself, while I think it's somewhat freeing to have plotted my weird self-insert bug monster's ability stats and commiserated about how unfortunate they basically were, there was pretty much nothing usable in there. And the post was about 1,860 words long.

This blog post was about myself, my mental health, the sorry state of the world we live in, and my difficulty with all of it. It's actually much like what I was more successful with on my blog at the end of last year. But one year can make a big difference, and if you were to read all of my written creations from newest to oldest, you would notice the experience getting worse. The unreleased 2023 counterpart to my 2024 post was an unstructured, poorly-phrased pile of my thoughts on reality touching on 2014 being a scary realization of how the world is, the way The Internet used to be more free and enjoyable, climate change, a doubtfully-sourced "Richard Feynman" quote, the passing of the world down from generations to generations, and 9/11. You probably think that sounds like a cool post to read, but I sincerely believe it isn't. Seriously, the post just sucks. It lacks confidence (for good reason) and is poorly-written.

It can be excused, even from the position of a harsh self-critic looking at his own terrible work over a year later, that I wasn't writing about the world and myself properly back then. My brain wasn't working, and I was painfully aware of that.

I hate that blog post and don't - even now - want to read it, but I'll keep it around. I might find it interesting to look back on one day.

On a lighter note, here's a post I couldn't finish about one of the greatest niche picture book author plus illustrators ever.

(Distant Comments on Media) A Shallow Dive Into Colin Thompson

It's somewhat odd to me, at this point, that in spite of thinking about it many a time and putting its concept layout in a side glossary-like page and making it somewhat synonymous mentally with the process of picking Figment Area posts, I have still never published a work on here that uses the label "Distant Comments on Media".

Colin Thompson would have been a great place to start. Of all the authors or illustrators there are, this man is the person I can boast rare fan knowledge of more than I can with any other creator I know, or probably the most out of all Colin Thompson fans too. I've read almost every non-middle-age book he's released, including the weird ones he didn't illustrate and the ridiculous novels that one might want to avoid. I even own copies of both out-of-print Future Eden disaster novels he wrote, after years of infrequent searching. But for some reason the post failed anyway. It was June, 2024, and I couldn't do it.

Those of you who already know Colin Thompson and like reading picture books will doubtless have been really excited seeing his name appear on the screen like that. But for those who don't know, Colin Thompson is an old odd English guy, I believe living in New South Wales right now, who has made tons of books usually aimed at young people, about ten of which are fascinating surreal trips in beautiful fantastical illustrations that have a lot going on in them, such as Ruby and Falling Angels.

These are the crowning series if I am to have a statement when it comes to Colin Thompson. I believe that nothing else he's ever made will quite come close to what these hyper-crowded magical illustration dreamtimes of writing and drawing give to the reader. The way they look is so powerful, I spent years of my rather early pre-adult and adult years basically trying to imitate them.

That last one is an early production picture of an artwork that has advanced more but still isn't finished.

You can use a search engine to look up Colin Thompson's original artworks right now. His 1990's ones, which are hand-drawn, are a source of inspiration to my ones which as you can see pale in comparison.

They influenced my dreams, too. I used to dream about Colin Thompson illustrations that didn't exist, and later I would wake up a little frustrated to find that either A: the canon explanation in my dream is that I was looking at illustrations by some kind of unknown mock-Thompson illustrator or B: the dream had convinced me there was another Colin Thompson book that I would soon have to notice did not actually exist.

But sadly, none of that so far has been able to come out in its own post, probably because I underestimated the sheer depth of the Colin Thompson topic. I haven't even gone over many of his small novels and story collections like The Floods, Pepper Dreams, or Venus the Caterpillar, all three of which honestly are worth covering separately in entire posts. Even though it seems scarily impossible in my mind to be the one to write them.

The actual Colin Thompson post I started writing, at said point in time, before it was declared to be said failure, contained roughly 510 words and a placeholder that was going to be an attempt at drawing my own new mimicry drawing of a Colin Thompson style so that in a non-stealy way I could "show the readers what I meant". This is a more bitter reality now as, after a long uptime, it's now impossible to see those legally-posted wallpapers on Colin Thompson's fully hosted up-to-date site. It's not up to date now because all of the surviving versions are in a Wayback Machine. The true web domain went down.

Colin Thompson's unreal and mysterious worlds actually provide a through-road to my next chapter here, the way I recently tried to make a post about how I, as a game developer, used to imagine the games I'd make that were designed and imagined very differently...

What My Games Would Probably Have Looked Like If I Started Successfully Developing Games Earlier

I've wanted to make video games for practically as long as I've been aware of my existence. Good news! In 2018, I finally succeeded. But I wasn't always confident that I could do it. In fact, for years, I wished I could make a game, but on and off deferred to even try. However, that doesn't mean that I didn't spend a lot of time imagining and drawing them...

None of my original paper drawings of this foggy era in my creative history seem to be in known locations or to have necessarily survived. There are still a couple of remnants visible digitally though in Flash projects - or .FLA's. I was trying to actually make one of them. In my present recall of the days I spent so much time imagining what games I wouldn't actually make, I have mere scraps of it left. There's not much I could do, even with my newfound level of practical skill, to do it right. In 2025 or later I couldn't make accurate and sincere video game adaptations of these former worlds due to my tragic amnesia. In fact when I worked on the original failure post and right now, I can't help but feel like these games wouldn't have been fun. Though, I do still remember the way I spent a long bloody time dreaming of and "planning" a Colin Thompson Fan Game, using my own artwork and Colin Thompson's way of designing spaces to make "his illustrations" playable, which I suppose is still ultimately possible. A Colin Thompson fan game would be beautiful and absorbing if I did it properly, too.

There's not much I can say about this unfinished post now. It only spanned about 280 words and I got about as far as describing the typical main character of these weird fucking ideas before... giving up and screaming, for some reason. This was a violent case of my blog posts that failed. However in another part of the post among all the rambling off, there is discussion of a thing to do with my imagination and creative ventures that could come up later and is interesting: my old imagination and lost ideas in general, specifically: how I can't tap into many of them anymore and how whole dreamworlds basically went extinct or disappeared. Let's hope that if I get to a post about that one day, I can get to the end of it without the sheer challenge of the writing being grating enough to make me flip out. I think it would help matters for me to think very hard about how much text content I can get out of a near-future post idea, running through the paragraphs mentally to detect ahead of time if there's even enough material to get something out of it.

(Distant Comments on Media) Accidentally Forming an Attachment to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

Another one.

This writing foray broke my heart. If I follow my best judgement and web browser history, I basically discovered Rocky and Bullwinkle for the first time in 2022, February 20, at which point it shortly became a bedtime mainstay and something pointedly significant to me. So I tried to talk about it, and talk about how in spite of the show's writing being hardly anything to do with why I like it, it became a show that I'm very fond of. And in this writing, I thought about it too hard and got cut off at "I think the art does it for me" when an attempt to praise something I like became hollow and nihilistic. And finding myself hit that point with a show like this one felt very bad.

It's not like I stopped being able to like or watch the show, in fact I've been putting it on my TV quite a lot since April 9 (though I have the Fairy Tales and other secondary shows disabled now), and lots of old cartoon enthusiasts - like real old, this basically happened in the 1960's - are really into The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. I just stopped being able to write persuasive praise on a draft Internet post about it. Though I think if I wanted to I could quite easily make a long and detailed post about all the hilarious animation frame mistakes I found when I watched it about three years ago. It should be repeated that I still watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. I actually watched supposedly all of it before now, too. Possibly to completion.

I still really like its mega-cheap retro cartoon art, which really rocks hard in spite of the cheapness. It just looks cool.

Also the sky is almost always brown... It works but I don't know the reason they had for drawing it that way.

I would say much of the art looks cool on account of the fact that it's old. It was made in an old way. I get enthused at any moment I get to see it do railway stuff. And of course, I absolutely love the storm bumper. The one that plays all the time after this anthology's main segments conclude, where our main characters rise among a bunch of flowers after falling into a split mountain chasm.

So it's a shame that my Rocky and Bullwinkle post couldn't come to be. Though, as you're probably thinking all the way through reading this, these so-called failed posts sure have a lot of published replication that doesn't seem very different in concept now. But I really do believe that writing about what these posts represented like this does not have the same result as with a different world where the original posts actually worked in the first place.

I naturally feel quite hurt when the process of releasing a blog post is cut so short and I don't have anything to gain out of it in the end. I want the blog to update fast and I want my work to... work. I also vainly hope that my blog will have mild fame one day, which seems like it requires lots of content to happen. Mostly I just hate the inconvenience and wasted time, and disappointment that comes with a post failing.

But one failed blog post idea I had, from roughly late 2024, is straight up tragic. It's a post I should have seized sooner, because the very premise of it was always running out of time.

The window of time to make the post, without sacrificing its core concept, completely closed last month. I wasn't decisive. I was perpetually trying to uphold a certain way of releasing posts on time and creating separations, and I took too long. I took too long and now the post can never be made. The post was going to be called "A Blog Post About My Dog Before She Dies".

Why You Should Start To Collect Screws

It's 2025, and this year it is a better time to collect screws than ever before. But why are screws such a hot item to pick up right now?

Today we will go over some of the reasons why screws are a must-get in our current day and age.

Screws can be kept on hand in bulk for all the things around the house that need to be fixed

Let's face it, at some point we all have to face doing a bit of DIY. It's good to get someone else to help, but one day they might get sick. In that scenario, screws are easier to use than you might think and can be applied to a surprising amount of home repair applications, including...

• Fixing a broken-hinged window
• Wood coming off wood
• Ceiling cracks
• Fridge
• The swimming pool
• Put screws in a piece of wood to make it look less ugly
  

 

Screws are the best in the realm of measurement

Measuring materials is so drab and limiting. Or, maybe it isn't, because now we have SCREWS!

Before, rulers and tape measures would be boring and keep you stuck on doing one thing, and not let you decide how much wood or fabric you need to make up a gap. At that point, there is only one correct measured amount to use. The way to go is to screws. Simply place screws alongside your material before you cut it, and count how many screws you lined up. "This block of wood needs to be cut down to five screws!" The useful trick here is that screws come in lots of different sizes, so the unit size is less rigid and you get to decide how big you want your craft to be when you're building. A hole in your fence is 30 centimeters wide? No worries, measuring in screws lets you use virtually any size. Gone are the days of having to conform!

 

Screws are great for making small arts and crafts

Arts and crafts are at a spike at the moment in popularity. With all the options for screws you can pick, why not try to craft a lot of small statues out of ordinary household metal screws? Just make sure you hide them at night, as local populations of marine limpets enjoy getting jealous and stealing them all.

They can help you scratch

At this point in time, itchy skin is a badly-timed distraction from all the crazy world events that require careful attention, and we all remember the times when we had an itch on our backs or some other out of the way place that you just couldn't quite reach. Screws work here because they are pointy. A pointy screw is the right apparatus to use to scratch your itchy skin. They also help with hard-to-reach places. Screws are great at eliminating this problem as even an average length screw provides an extra couple of centimeters to be enough to bridge that space.

 

Metal on screws is reflective

Here's one that has always been useful and always will be. We all have dark houses at night, and trying to walk around when you can't see the way to the button that turns the lights on can be a slog. But recently scientists discovered that screws are made of a metal that likes to reflect lots of light, making your efforts capable of lighting the way around your house at night simply by leaving the screws around, and you don't have to waste any water by turning the lights on.

Now that you know this, why not take hundreds of little yellow screws and leave them lying around pointed upwards in the house so you can see easier?

 

They provide a dark-conversation shutdown

Ever had somebody tell you that somebody or some group of people was screwed? This has increased in regularity a lot in the last ten years. With enough time taken to collect screws, you will now be able to reply "I've got the screws right here!"

 

Screws are the next currency

In the future, our economy is supposed to drift away from two-use cash and move toward poly-use metal asset physical currency. Forget Bitcoin, trading screws is the way of the future. They will have monetary worth, and you will be able to use a wide array of practical aspects of them. Forget that old way where some kinds of cash only had trading worth and a 1 in 2 probability flip to make randomized decisions, you can use dice for that. We will still write the dollar sign $, but it will be better because the S shape in that dollar sign will make it look like it's actually spelling the name of the screw if it had a vertical line crossing it. Have a look: $crews. See how acutely it works? There is no such thing as a sollar.

 

And that's that. With this new knowledge at hand, we can all start collecting screws and make life just that tiny extra bit easier. Now we know that screws are versatile and on their way to becoming an essential part of daily life, and that means you need to set a bunch of protected nature reserve animals on fire. Thank you for reading this helpful article.

The Toaster

You've all seen this appliance before. This inconvenient roast machine. This unimpeccable menace. The lot of us have the same irreconcilable unanswered question about what the numbers mean, the same feeling of loss as their bread gets ruined because this fucking thing imposes a multitude of transparency issues.

It's the toaster.

I hate the toaster. This stupid all-failing tool that somehow everybody has. We all expect our sliced gluten to go in there, stay for a while, and then come out changed, changed properly. But it's not as easy as it should be, as this device seems intent on burning it, and good luck if your bread gets stuck in there. You will not get it out in one piece. And god help you if you try to get the imprisoned wheat slab out but leave it plugged in.

If you think that was bad, try explaining to your kids why against all the nice stories they were told, in spite of all the false positivity, their hash browns are forfeit. Let's be honest. You can't actually put your hash browns in there. This string of poor optimism second-chance experiences almost made me think hash browns were useless, until I discovered actually functional ways to cook them. The toaster does hash browns a disservice.

This common household menace is a menace too common. This simple household fuckup is a fallacy of being called simple. The simple thing about it is that unless you really know what you're doing, you'll simply fuck up your toasting. Except it's not your fault, it's the toaster's. The toaster wants you dead. The toaster will burn your bread, not heat your bread enough before taking its second use to burn your bread, trap and disintegrate your hash browns, dump bundles of old bread dust if you try to get stuff out of it with shaking and gravity, break significantly so that you have to hold the lever down yourself, insult you, and probably burn your house down.

Pass the Pigs - When the Universe Ends

I spent much of my formative years being bored and waiting for it to be time to go home. To go home so I could rest, read books, and pass the time easily, where I would be significantly less bored. I had no visit-enabled friends to speak of, so I was hardly going to another person's house to socialize or ever really have any fun. This will not count the place of peripheral friends of brothers with the Playstation room. As my parents have - for basically all of my conscious life - been divorced, having an actual friend whose house I actually went to frequently to carry the remaining weight would have really helped. Or if I actually recognized the social potential of the owners of the Playstation room. In fact I usually ended up being locked into long-hour waits at buildings lived in by some friend of an immediate family relative. Nobody can tell me I'd have had better spent time if we "just got a babysitter". Believe me, mum looked.

The worst ordeals by far were the times when I had to deal with some temporary but prolonged exposure to unwanted waiting hours because of my dad. Often I'd be driven away to some rural dustbowl with nothing of interest for kilometers around, where I'd stay for hours in whatever car or ute we arrived in and the only thing I could do to pass the time then was play terrible games on a pre-2007 cellphone. No Internet, no Nintendo DS, no money, and for most of the time not even dad. Just me and the most difficulty-twisted primitive phone games with wonkiest 4-bit controls or whatever ever.

If I was at a house instead of some insufferable motorcycle dirt track, often there was a good chance that I could play by myself with access to board games. Whether they were meant to be single-player before I make stuff up or not. That also sucked, and I don't want to go through that again, but there was one "board game" in memory that stayed with me.

Pass the Pigs was a weird game that I looked at for a while, even though I probably knew that in spite of being me, in my shocking situation, I wouldn't dream of playing it no matter if I had a second person to share it with or not. It was a small green box with what I imagine to be a minimal set of contents. It seemed like a pretty miserable thing, where the goal was to toss two tiny plastic pig figurines at the same time and then practically gain points each turn depending on what positions pure luck decided the pigs landed in. Positions being connected to - though possibly not exclusively so, given the old status of my memory - how the plastic pigs landed on each other.

Actually at the time of revision before final publication I suddenly realize that this could be wrong. Maybe that's a really rare position in that drawing, or they're just meant to land on two individual places on the ground. I suddenly discovered in myself that it was probably about what side of their own bodies two separate pigs landed on, like if one landed with its tail down or something. That being said, though I don't remember much of the rules, and I could be remembering something wrong, I still have a fuzzy picture of how the game "worked" in 2025. To this day I have never played it, or the cheap equivalent that apparently exists where you just throw normal dice.

But one rule I saw on the leaf from inside the box stood out, and this rule played its cards so that I would never forget it.

This wasn't just any ordinary rule. It wasn't a rule that you just "follow". It wasn't even a rule that happens. It seemed like more of a philosophical entertainment than something that your ordinary rule-maker would logically decide to take the extra 13 minutes to add, or the extra ink to print. Have a look at this picture and see if you think it happening during standard Pass the Pigs gameplay is likely.

If you would respond to that with "the pigs are never going to land like that when you throw them", then to the best of my long-term memory, you're on to something.

The game rules themselves don't just say that this is impossible. They also provide a ruling for what happens in your game if the pigs land this way, even though they clearly just stated a few seconds ago that it's impossible. It's a directive that you should do something - if you meet a condition that never happens. If we believe everything that the rules say, then they have a rule that can never come into effect. But if it somehow did come into effect, and your physics duped, the rule is as follows:

That's basically how I remember it.

There's something unsettling about this idea. That you do something impossible and then the game tells you that it wants you to stop playing it. They could have just said that this is impossible and told you not to worry about it. Because you don't need to worry about something when you know it objectively won't happen, right?

But they do worry about it. They took the time and the cost of a small amount per unit sold in ink to put that information on the rule sheet for some reason that honestly I still don't know. And I tried to do this entire post from memory without doing any web searches for Pass the Pigs other than to find out whether its title's "the" should be capitalized or not, which considering my plan to go into this without interference went slightly badly. 

Maybe Pass the Pigs publishers of all people were trying to save people from wasting their time and effort, like they're not already bored and should bother to try to get this landing combination. Though the rule does appear to accidentally bring something interesting out of the experience. This odd feeling of unsettling logic about the game and the world that houses it ending.

I believe that since finding this game, I might think about this concept more than once every two years. The Pass the Pigs rule that The Game Ends that comes into effect if you do something that you can't do.

I find it less haunting than some things, and more haunting than a lot of them. I find it more haunting than the 64 ring Tower of Hanoi game where having 64 discs in play mathematically adds up to so many translations that following the rules it would supposedly take more time than there is time left in our universe to complete. I used to boggle my own mind often by trying to imagine the ways of our reality having no universe at all, that is, if there was no reality. No reality being something really creepy to think about when you fully resonate your thought with the concept. I have a brother who apparently used to ponder and experience the same philosophical no-universe thing. But this would be the first time in memory that I ever got creeped out about something like this by a fucking board game...

Speaking of universes, would you have to screw with reality just to make this play in Pass the Pigs happen? Would it be worth it in order to proactively get yourself out of this weak point-keeping game before turn 2? Is the rule sheet even right when it says that this is impossible? What would it actually mean if you got the pigs to do the impossible stack? Does it even make sense to ask that question? Are any questions about this right?

One thing I do know, from the value of thought experiments, is what priorities you should have after doing something that required the laws of reality breaking to occur. Obviously if you did you should give something else your attention. You really shouldn't keep playing Pass the Pigs in pursuit of game score in that scenario. If you land two pigs in that position, and it's because the fundamental rules of reality broke down, you've got bigger problems.