The Patreon Letters - July 8th, 2017 (Patreon)

 Hello friends, M here again with a new Patreon letter for a new month. Let's get down to business!

• A new Abnormal Mapping came out yesterday! We liked our big soundtrack episodes in December so much that we decided to start doing them every six months. We're a little late, but only because it was so big to put together and we've been so busy!
• Amory Score has updated again, at great cost to Jackson. They and Molly are nearly done with the first Coheed and Cambria album, which has been An Adventure.
• If you haven't please check out the new recommendation post and recommend a game for us for August! We don't have any games yet and we really need some!
• Jackson's nearing the end of (or has finished, who can say, it's Wednesday as I write this) Mega Man 6! It took half a dozen games but Jackson has finally 'gotten good' as the kids say. Enjoy the last of our morning series, as we're probably taking a sizable break from them after this.
• My Life is Strange LP wraps up episode 2 of the game, and it really feels like it's moving along at a good pace now. I'm glad I decided to play this.
• We went on a domain buying spree this month, so please enjoy the novelty URLs that point to our various shows: thebestgame.club, startrekpodcast.space, ineedmayo.com, and of course goof.zone.

I have one other thing for all of you $5+ patrons. We've been writing these letters for a while now and I really do think they're great content that is worth the support tier we're asking. That said, I'd love to be able to give people a sample of our work greater than what we've been doing in the odd twitter screenshot when we advertise each piece. To that end, I'd like to float the idea to all of you that in the month after they go up we select one of our letters and make it free for everyone to read. You'll still get it first, of course, by one to four weeks depending, but it'd be nice to have some fraction of the writing out there for people to enjoy. 

Do you hate this? Let me know. Patreon is a quiet medium driven in large part by inertia, so I have to take silence as agreement that I can go ahead and do this. So if you feel really strongly that giving a quarter of these letters away free after publication would impact your support, let me know now. I'd rather keep you happy and figure out some other way of telling people about the work we do.

Okay, onto the main bulk of the letter.

I decided about two weeks ago that it was time to frame my art. I've had a small number (a dozen or so) small pieces of art kicking around my living space pinned to the walls with blue tack for years now. It's easy and effortless. You just spread it on the corners and stretch the piece tight against the wall and it mostly holds flush with nearly zero damage or effort. 

The only framed piece of art I've had is a Three Colors: Blue movie poster my partner got for me years ago for a birthday or anniversary present. It's singularity against the relative teenager-ness of postcards and small watercolors and beloved drawings gifted by friends all pinned up bare was and is something of a strange friction point for me as a person. Framed movie posters have always been the stuff of talking heads movie documentaries, wizened sages of cinema who fill their living and working spaces with carefully chosen objet d'art to reflect them or their studies. That isn't me. I'm the person who grew up with a literal wall in my childhood bedroom devoted to one page mini posters I tore clumsily out of wrestling magazines and scotch taped to the wall.

But then I recently bought a nicer print than I normally spring for, something larger than usual that I didn't want to get damaged. Which brought me to frames. I picked up a frame for this print, and I got some hooks to mount it on the wall with, and suddenly the one monolithic framed piece in my room had a friend. That poster wasn't special. It was just one poster adjacent to another framed piece of art. That corner of the room went from hypocritical to established with one small purchase and 15 minutes of labor. And quietly, deep in the recesses of my brain where decisions are made without much conscious input from me, a switch was flipped—it was time to frame all my art.

Picture frames are mysterious objects. They're arguably strictly utilitarian support objects, meant only to protect the piece within. In that way, they're not much different than book covers on textbooks or bags and boards for comics or a dozen other protective solutions for the beloved detritus of personhood. But picture frames also belong to that category of objects that have no ceiling for spend, for little discernible reason. You know the type, the thing where a perfectly average one will do but for some reason right next to it is the same thing with one or two more features for triple the price. Even that one has a ton of bad reviews, suggesting instead that the only right choice is a version that doesn't seem aesthetically much different but is made from only the most bespoke materials and thus costs half a paycheck for the honor of owning. This is a stupid category of late capitalist goods that includes notebooks and fancy burgers and plastic bins to store knick knacks in. There's barely a functional difference between the $5 the $50 and the $500 versions, but they sure do exist to make you feel like shit for being poor. Picture frames are like this, but are extra special in that even the cheap version is half likely to cost more than the print or poster you're going to put into it for no discernible reason. Is plexiglass that rare a resource? I'm no expert, but I assume not.

So I'm framing my art now. But to frame my art I need to not have clutter on the shelves the art hangs above, because why would I frame something only to have a teetering stack of mail and receipts and books I bought and never opened obscuring that overpriced metal and plastic housing a big sheet of paper I bought off the internet? So I had to do a big declutter. Which I'm still in the middle of. Because throwing things away is exhausting and I spent most of my vacation this July 4th doing it and while I'm not grumpy about that, per se, I definitely recognize it as vaguely misplaced energy when this mostly started as 'I don't want this one picture to get wrinkled or gross'. Which is why at 1:30 in the morning on the 4th of July I was staring at my pile of Star Trek paperbacks and thinking that maybe it wasn't worth chasing having the pile because I literally do not have the space to display such a stupid collection with the panache it deserves, and instead should switch to digital like Jackson is doing.

What does this have to do with picture frames? It's very easy to forget that I'm in my 30s because I feel unchanged from who I was at 17. Much of my life isn't even that different. My interests haven't drifted that much. I haven't grown and dress much the same. I think this is true for lots of people in my generation, if not the generations around me. If you don't sign up for the normalized aging track of careers and kids and house ownership and whatever else, then you're instantly cut adrift from the clear delineations of adulthood and childhood. The most expensive thing I own that isn't technology or my car are a full set of Sailor Moon figuarts. I had to add wings to my bookshelf on top to house them all because they span longer than I had displace space for. Is that so different than a mural of raggedy pictures of Goldberg and Sting? 

But buying a frame turned what still felt like an adolescent space into a 'mature' one, in which the word mature has the fuzzy definition of 'that which is not childish because it contains a sense of permanence and care that only grown ups seem to really have, a sense born not from knowing a thing will last but fearing deeply that it will not'. The identity politics of being cut off from traditional age milestones are very real. I've held a steady job ever since I left college. I own my car. I am debt free. But only when I frame a video game poster I bought off the internet did I stand back and look at my life and go 'oh, I guess I'm an adult now.' Which doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of my three dozen amiibo, but it does mean that suddenly I felt the obligation to dust them more often. It means that I bought more frames and hung more art, which only made me feel worse about the stack of magazines I have that I haven't read. I should get rid of them if I'm not going to read them. And while I read them I should go through my iTunes library and take out albums I don't care about anymore. Who needs a bunch of movie soundtracks I got off an MP3 blog a decade ago for movies I haven't and probably will never see? 

I'm an adult. Adults don't do this.

There's no moral to this story. Before I sat down to write this I was putting bookmarks into the books I'm reading, unfolding the dog ears I've been using since I was a child. I bought a pack of very cute bookmarks off amazon. They're shaped like various drinks. But they're just a heavy stock paper, they aren't coated in any way. I've been toying with getting a lamination machine so I can laminate them, and other small things that might serve being laminated. Y'know, so nothing bad happens to them. You never know.

This will pass. All things will. But it's where I'm at this week, and maybe sometimes you feel the same way. Sharing is what I want to do here, so I hope maybe my manic summer cleaning is the cartoonish exaggeration of something you see in yourself. It's okay to give into that impulse to throw your shit away, or to act more adult even if it's a lie, or even to go the other way and be a slob. Just remember to look at yourself and take yourself as not seriously as we all deserve in those moments. Laughing at myself is the best kindness in times when kindness is hard to muster. Maybe it'll work for you.

Until next time,

M