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
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".