The only thing I can say is that something magical happened. Some force took over. And I don’t necessarily need to examine it that much further, but I would be lying if I said that I totally understood it. To this day, I still think about that time as this insane dream I had, or like, this insane alien abduction that I’m not even sure really took place. But the memory is so vivid, and the evidence is so clear, and the effect it had is so undeniable that like, all I can do is just look at the results and go: Wow. That happened. Wow.

Right now in the video game, we’re trying to figure out how to deal with my dad’s suicide.

We’ve gotten to the point where you’ve made all the choices that lead you up to that moment in France, where like, I’m recording all of the piano songs for Roses and Mud and I get that message on my phone from my dad with that crazy cover of the song with Deez, and then it’s like: What do you do from there, you know? What are your options?

We’re trying to figure out the decision tree for that moment. Which things at that point would’ve led to my dad not killing himself? What would’ve happened then?

I don’t believe in fate or whatever—part of the point of the whole game, you know, is to remind people that we’re always in charge of our lives, there’s no big puppet master who’s making all the decisions for us—but there is this part of me that sort of feels like my dad HAD to die when he did, you know what I mean? Like, now that I’m sitting there with Roger and Ines, like, actually thinking through the possibilities, it just feels like the only real way it could’ve gone down is the way that it actually went down in real life. I guess it’s just one of those things that once it happens, it sort of gets locked into your reality, you know?—locked into the fabric of time—and so it seems like the world was always leading up to it.

But we’re having a tough time figuring out all those different options, and it’s also a problem because, you know, like I said, every time we try to add more options and expand the world, we have to sacrifice something else because the engine can’t take it. Like, the graphics look kind of janky already, and it’s like, I don’t really care THAT much about it—you know, like, I don’t need it to be the prettiest game on the market—but it still feels like a bummer to roll out something that looks like shit. That would just be kind of disappointing to me, you know, as an artist.

One option I came up with the other day is like: Instead of ignoring all those Content Bucket videos, you start watching them obsessively after you receive my dad’s message, and like, you start looking for clues about where he is. And if you watch them all really closely, you can see that there’s this one video he made where there’s a glitch on the green screen—like, this actually happened. He didn’t frame it perfectly this one time, and so a corner of the basement wall was just peeking out—and you can see on the wall that there’s this little bicycle rack that my dad made when I was eight that I guess the people who lived there after us never took down from the wall.