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    Pick for a second, an arbitrarily small unit of time like the second. How much can you do in one second? What does your body do in one second if you do not consider involuntary tasks to be your doing? What can two people do in one second? What can eight billion people do in one second? What can more than eight billion people do in two seconds? In a day? In a year? In twenty thousand years? Forget people. What can a near infinite amount of atoms and molecules do in 13 billion years?

    They can do today, right now.

    You stand bare, in front of you is a large jagged structure with medium-large bright-colored spheres dangling off of each branch. Your stomach makes a familiar pain. You are starving. You pick off a sphere, and it is plump and coarse. You, out of necessity, take a bite. It is bitter and hard, but your teeth reach it’s soft and sweet innards. You eat it. You do not know your name. You do not know where the orange tree came from. You do not know the names of the things you see. You do not see anything but the prickly ground you stand on for miles.

    Recently I saw a comment on a YouTube video I saw after playing Dredge. It talked about how Lovecraftian horror is often done very poorly in media. It said that all we really have now is fearing the unknown, and we are never explained it. It used the example of an ant that comes across a microchip and does not fear it because it is new, but for a moment it understands the wires and structures and can never go back because it has realized there is so so so much more to the world than pheromones.

    Regardless of if I agree with this random comment, I thought “Wow! That must be a really difficult kind of media to write! You would have to present a world as absolute and complete, then rip it all away and put you back with a semi-complete knowledge of just how utterly flawed and incomplete your life was. Worst of all, there’s nothing you could do to continue living on that higher level of what-ever.”

    Then it dawned upon me that I had had a very similar and much more personal experience. That this experience this random YouTube comment called “Lovecraftian horror” was something that happens much more often than I thought. Not with technology but with cultures and ideologies and entire lifestyles and worldviews. It is the experience of the apostate, the deserter, and the rebel under tyranny. It is also, I thought, the life of the artist.

    If I were to die in a car crash tomorrow, I do not want the life I live to be one where my last thoughts before nothingness would be “Damn! I really wish I had the time to learn how to make a nice front-end with React and TypeScript; had the time to learn more about H.P. Lovecraft’s terrible mother affected his self-image and writing; had the time to learn about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire(s); had the time to learn about how Isaac Wood's departure affected the Band’s music; had the time to learn about how John Carmack’s work in ID Software in the 1990s influenced the next decades of games to come; had the time to learn about how the goddamn Krebs cycle works.”

    I wish to do these things because I feel like the ant now. My only wish is for more time worrying less about the grades and the schools and university and the food and the money and the time, oh my god, the time. I turned 18 this year! Happy Birthday, me. Time to invest in the S&P 500 like you always wanted to, but oh wait you need to do a million other different other things first!