Thoughts on the Ten Minutes I spent with the Demo for "Titanium Court" by AP Thomson

I am never on any kind of pulse. This blog’s very raison d’etre* is predicated upon the notion that I’m writing about that thing everyone else liked a long time after everyone had their two cents on it. But through luck (and possibly a brilliant PR strategy), I have found myself in a position to be able to yell at you loudly to find a to play AP Thomson’s Titanium Court.

Before I get into this, I want to make clear that even the small amount of Titanium Court that I’ve played indicates that this is the sort of game that will work best if you go in cold. You can read the Steam page for more information. You can even just straight up play the same demo I did since it’s now part of the current Steam Next Fest as of the time of writing. It might not seem like it’s helpful, but I promise it’s a very good indication of the game’s tone.

I’m now going to post some screenshots that will pose more questions than answers, and then I’ll go into some details. You have been warned.

A list of things I enjoyed in 2022, two months into 2023, that existed before 2022.

Akira by Katsuhiro Ōtomo
Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino / Visions of Gideon by Sufjan Stevens
How To Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy
Kimi wa Tennenshoku by Eiichi Ohtaki
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild by Nintendo  
Moonlighter by Digital Sun
Pocahontas by Neil Young
Riddles by Ed Schrader's Music Beat
Teenage Wildlife by David Bowie
Thrills by LCD Soundsystem

A list of things I enjoyed in 2022, two months into 2023.

Action Button Reviews "Boku No natsuyasumi" by Action Button/Tim Rogers
A Life Well Wasted - Episode 8, "Memory" by Robert Ashley
Colin Stetson at Union Chapel, May 2nd 2022
DESASTRES by Marco Fusinato 
Diaspora Problems by Soul Glo
Documenta 15
Elden Ring by From Software
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, directed by Daniels
Heaven Come Crashing by Rachinka Nayar
Kae Tempest at All Points East, August 22nd 2022 / The Line Is a Curve by Kae Tempest
Moonage Daydream, directed by Brett Morgen
New Body Rhumba by LCD Soundsystem
The Real Work by Party Dozen
Snowglobes by Black Country, New Road
William Kentridge at Royal Academy
White Science by John FM
Worldbuilding at Julia Stoschek Foundation

The September Accountability Society: Week 1 - "Then it's no failure".

A sticky note on the wall of my study bears the message "Anything can be fixed, but if you do nothing then nothing will be fixed." This used to be stuck to my monitor at a former workplace; a reminder that the task I am avoiding will only continue to be difficult to finish the longer I put it off. 

In this moment, I want to be able to direct you to the completed project from last week, but despite eating into two days of this week's work, it still hasn't quite come together. I have decided to post it online nonetheless, and leave it as a work-in-progress. It is called Pause, and you can view it here.

Daniel Green and the September Accountability Society

In 2012 I took part in Weeklybeats, a project where participants uploaded one new piece of music a week for 52 weeks. While the project's founders and participants are largely made up of members of the Chipmusic community, I would say I'm casual producer of music at best. This said, I've taken part in every edition of Weeklybeats as it returned every two years, even managing to complete the full 52-week cycle in 2018. If you're interested, you can find this music here.

In years where my artistic practice has slowed, I enjoyed being part of Weeklybeats as an exercise in just doing things. It was an easy way to maintain a creative output with an externally-imposed and inflexible deadline. If your track wasn't uploaded by the end of the week, the project just moved on without you*, and you had to start on next week's piece.

At some point during one of the years Weeklybeats wasn't running, my partner suggested to me that I embark on some sort of other weekly project as a way of maintaining creative momentum. While I completely agreed with this in principle, I knew that my problem with self-imposed deadlines is that I could always just ignore it. There was no external website with a countdown timer to work towards, and if no one knew I was even doing this who was there to hold me to account for my inaction. So what was the point?

Of course, having seen many friends and people I respect undertake similar "do x for y period of time" projects over the years, it's taken me this long to realise the answer to my problem is just to tell people you are doing it. So here we are. K., you were totally right. Again. 

Daniel used to live in Sydney but now he lives in London: 10th October 2016

It’s 3:28pm on Monday afternoon, and I’m waiting for Francis out the front of my building. With me are my laptop, my camera, and a copy of Grayson Perry’s Playing to the Gallery.

Other tenants of the building keep walking by and giving me odd looks; it’s cold, and I’m sitting on top of the structure that houses the bins for buildings inside. Also, none of these people know who I am, other than maybe a manifestation of the one of the people they’ve heard in apartment three.

I am completely aware of how insane all looks, but I don’t care. Between 3:20 and 4:20pm, Francis is going to bring me the clothes airer I’ve been waiting for since last Thursday. I never put so much mental energy into a clothes airer before now; come 4:20pm I never want to think about it ever again.

Daniel used to live in Sydney but now he lives in London: 6th October 2016

These are our boxes. There are many like them, but these ones are ours.

Today, I felt the cold indifference of waiting for an Amazon delivery to arrive. To begin with there were these two boxes, which strangely arrived at exactly the same time. Then there was silence; just the boxes and I.

So I decided to do the logical thing available to me at the time, and take many photos of said boxes utilising different lighting options and focal points. 

Daniel used to live in Sydney but now he lives in London: 28th September 2016

As you leave Finsbury Park station to head to our apartment, you pass a store dedicated to selling merchandise for Arsenal Football Club. I found this novel when I first saw it, joking that this resolves the eternal expat dilemma of working out which club I'm supposed to support. The penny didn't quite drop though that this would also mean that I would be living at Arsenal Ground Zero, and that I can hear the reactions to bad umpire calls from our living room.