Five years ago I was sitting in a strange apartment, in a strange city, without work and with the last kopecks on my account. I had left a large corporation two months earlier. I thought I was too good for what I did in it. I wanted to do something useful, sublime and change-the-world-for-the-better - and not wither and fatten in a corporate canteen.
In parting, I was told that I was a complete idiot, because I would not find the same money anywhere in my profession, that even in the best places they would pay me three times less, and fight five times more. I thought - even if I'm too young to relax, before thirty it won't hurt to take a sip of a preventive shit.
But a couple of months with a bare ass was enough to break.
In the darkest moment of that time, I was offered a job, good money and a test task. There is a mobile game, eye-catching match-3, its entire game design is built on tricks that draw money from the player, and between sessions of folding in rows of sweets and pebbles, fish vomiting with joy pop up on the screen - and praise the player as he is fucking smart that handled this incredibly difficult level.
I was asked to write replicas for these fish. Concentrated meaningless, positive, no more than 110 characters long.
I really didn't want to, but I really needed money, so I started trading with me. Any argument against it sounded like the quirks of an arrogant snob. It seems like it’s good to reflect, sit down and write - but I didn’t read Robert McKee’s textbooks, the plays by Martin McDonagh and Stephen Knight’s scripts for this, I didn’t blow my head for this with Dave Wallace and Cormac McCarthy, I didn’t learn to write for this - to invent lines at 110 characters for stupid fish.
, , . , , , ( ) , .
, , , — .
, — . , , .
— ?
, — , , — , . , , , , - . , . , , , , — , .
, — 110 . — , , . ?
,
— 1: , , ?
— 2: ( ) «»?
, .
«»
, . — , — .
:
, , , , , , , , , , —
.
.
:
, 99 , 700 .
, , , , , , .
, , , — , . — , , , .
, , 10 , 20 , , .
:
, . , , , - .
:
, . — , — . , , , , — .
, , , () () , .
:
, , .
, . , , , .
. , , .
, , . , , , . « , » , - .
« » , - , — .
:
— . — .
:
, — , , . , , — .
:
That in this world the mind will breed dullness and serve it, because the mind as such will no longer make sense that all aspirations will turn into garbage, the search for meaning will lead either to hedonism or to magical self-deception, and any essence, upon close examination, will turn out to be a recursive void.
And imagine:
That at one point, people will realize that something has gone wrong, but it will be too late.
It's good that we live in a different world, right?
Watch my podcast - We Are Doomed