Recently I have been making paint brushes. I have been making them out of bamboo cut from my parents garden and hair from the last time mine was cut. This act of carving cutting binding tying trimming and then at long last painting is almost a ritual, even though we cast no spells in this house. Ritualistic enough that I have considered turning the instructions for how to make them into a game.
Brush Making Game
[1]: Take a pot of bamboo no larger than the palm of your hand and plant it in your garden.
[2]: Wait 19 years.
[3]: Have a friend attack your hair with fabric sheers, and save the off cuts from the bathroom floor.
[4]: Wait 8 months.
[5]: Harvest your bamboo.
[6]: Wait a week.
[7]: Use your materials to make a paintbrush.
[8]: Wait until you are ready to paint something.
I have, in the past, referred to lyric games as poems that dare you to play them. In my previous overtly lyrical work these dares have taken the form of things that are unpleasant either personally, physically, or socially. The two primary examples being my tiny business card sized Larp “Behind Open Doors” and a longer more viscous list of D66 minigames called “See Crimson”.
Both present a very obvious kind of dare. What Brush Making Game asks of you is slightly less adversarial, but that does not make it less arduous. It doesn’t demand you be so outrageously in love that you are told to stop by a bystander, nor does it ask you to take advantage of someone. It just asks that to play it you set aside just shy of a quarter of the average British person’s lifespan.
It does this because I actually did plant the bamboo grove from which those pens were made 19 years ago. I was 8 years old at the time, obsessed with tigers, a fan of ornamental gardens, and had by that point I am near certain seen my first few Ghibli films or perhaps nature documentaries about pandas or perhaps grown fond of some zoo exhibit featuring a grove. I don’t remember, really, beyond the fact I begged my parents to get me some to plant. I was 8. Do people remember when they were 8? I think I was 8. I have only photographs showing a garden without bamboo from 2007 to verify. The timelines probably add up.
The real demand of Brush Making Game is to place down roots. To live in a place long enough that a grove of bamboo can over 19 years grow to pen harvestable condition. You could obviously use any old bamboo to make a brush. Any old hair too. You can make a paintbrush however which way you like, but you are only playing Brush Making Game if you wait the full 19 years.
The idea of listening only to the middle track “East Hastings” on the Godspeed You! Black Emperor album “F# A# ∞” is a certain kind of sacrilege to my mind. For while its majestic central swell, which plays right now as I write this post, is the most utterly overwhelming and compelling and treasured to my ears part of the album I could not conscience the idea of listening to it out of context. Both the proceeding 20 minutes and the following 30 are necessary for the song to work. A thing without context is a thing diminished. It is the same reason I cannot listen to “Off We Go Into the Wild Pale Yonder” off the Disco Elysium soundtrack or “Never Quite Free” off the album “All Eternals Deck” without listening to the full proceeding thing in order first. The artists behind these works made them like for a reason, and I am compelled most when that vision is experienced fully.
To the inattentive and distractible mind this poses something of a problem. If you are listening to an album for one particular track in the back end, and your mind drifts, or you are interrupted, and you miss it, you have wasted 40 minutes, an hour, or perhaps an hour and thirty minutes of pure anticipation. When that guitar solo hits in “Wild Pale Yonder” it grasps the mind but if you’re not paying attention to the prior half of the track it does not hit as hard. You not only need patience, but an ear sharp enough to pick up the delayed gratification not when it hits, but just before.
What happens then when you play Brush Making Game and wait 20 years instead of 19? Easy. You lose. Try again. Plant a new grove. Be careful though; you only get perhaps 4 tries, 5 if you’re lucky, and thats if you min/max from day one. Though, if you were really min/maxing from day 1 you would plant a fresh grove daily.
Assuming a rounded 80 year life span that would give you 22265 groves with 19 years to grow and, if you were optimistic about your chances and kept planting, 6935 groves yet waiting to be cut upon the day of your death. Even this absurd arithmetic relies on you playing fair and planting only one grove a day. If you had the time, the space, the funds, the obscene dedication you could double triple or factor of ten this number.
But, when I miss the track I like, I do not go back and listen properly. That would be cheating in the strange game of waiting I set myself. Why should making a brush be any different?
Brush Making Game [2nd Edition]
[1]: Take a pot of bamboo no larger than the palm of your hand and plant it in your garden.
[2]: Wait 19 years. In this time you may not plant more bamboo.
[3]: Have a friend attack your hair with fabric sheers, and save the off cuts from the bathroom floor.
[4]: Wait 8 months.
[5]: Harvest your bamboo.
[6]: Wait a week.
[7]: Use your materials to make a paintbrush.
[8]: Wait until you are ready to paint something.
I have a very bad habit of publishing my blog posts almost immediately after I finish them. It is common advice that you should not shoot yourself in the foot by releasing work at 2am on a Sunday night just because that happens to be when a thing is done. You ruin your reach, grab less attention, and do not reap the dividends of your hard work.
Now my TTRPG and blogging work isn’t exactly raking in the big bucks. The past 10 months or so of working at it actively have earned me, total, about enough to get two pizza orders in. I am lucky then that I have enough personal security that I can do this as a sort of weird hobby that makes me feel good rather than as any kind of profession without being likely i’ll need to move any time soon.
The house I currently live in has a garden plot outside. It is tiny. Less than a meter squared. In the almost three years I have lived here I didn’t plant anything in it and let the weeds grow wild. This past summer I planted a juniper tree and some lavender. These small shrubs look almost pitiful in the brash and pavement cracking heat of August. These long languid sweaty droughts were not the norm 19 years ago.
Will this soil sustain such plants in another 19? Will I ever get to see magenta, lilac, and purple flowers bloom across my porch? Will I still call this place home? I hope not. I hope so. I hope, stay or go, that the tenor of the space I write in has changed. That at very least by then I have bought a better fan.
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
I cannot cite this properly because of a flood of news websites explain its source behind a paywall. Those who don’t hide behind a paywall are people on Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter, each in turn recording their own disaster and therefore, understandably, not in the mood to offer citations. The vast majority are Americans recording wildfires and skies turned burnt orange by smog. It is a quote that stands out, I think, in the psyche of people like me because it is a quote about being in the imperial core. It is the soft launch of the fact that all empires end.
It does not reckon with the idea of the day after. It helpfully frames the end of the world as something that just happens. One day you will be the witness to the end, and it will end, it will be over, you will have had your moment of terror.
What happens the day after an immortal monolith of an era dies? I mostly share my work, at time of writing, on Bluesky. It is perhaps the most successful successor sites to Twitter’s slow dying throne but it is not by any means a secure one. Many other attempts have tried and failed. How many will see out the next decade? The next two? We once acted like social media was inevitable but its already finding itself in its decline in less time than it takes to grow a paint brush.
When all of this is over, when this strange online landscape I have grown up in and call in some perverse way home has finally choked, how will you look up the rules of Brush Making Game to make sure you have not forgotten the next step? Will you, in you near two decade recollection amidst floods and rain and fire, recall if I was kind enough to give you proper instructions in the part where you actually make the brush?
Brush Making Game [3rd Edition]
[1]: Take a pot of bamboo no larger than the palm of your hand and plant it in your garden.
[2]: Wait 19 years. In this time you may not plant more bamboo.
[3]: Have a friend attack your hair with fabric sheers, and save the off cuts from the bathroom floor.
[4]: Wait 8 months.
[5]: Harvest your bamboo.
[6]: Wait a week.
[7]: Place your hair into small bundles and bind them together with twine. Drill a hole a few cm down the length of the bamboo shoot and then thread your twine through that hole such that when you pull it taught such that the hair just barely enters the tip of the hollow tube and is held snug with a friction fit. Then wind the spare twine tightly around the bamboo to ensure the fit is secure, and to create a grip for your fingers. If you have some to hand use a small piece of pliable metal to create a ferule to better shape your brush, and then shape your bristles with a pair of scissors.
[8]: Wait until you are ready to paint something.
Time is a funny thing to design around. Recently I was playing Spire, and most playbooks in it have one or two “once per session” abilities. It struck me, as i turned this post over in my mind, that you might change those abilities to read “once a week” instead given the rhythm of your average play group. Your once a scene abilities might instead read every half hour.
I have also been playing in a lot of 1 hour games. A format in which those of us who cannot find the time to sit around a table for 3 or 4 hours instead snatch our fix of Delta Green on a lunch break and manage perhaps just the one or two scenes total. In those contexts a once per session play might become almost gamebreakingly frequent.
By contrast the various Cataphracts games im in treat time to some degree as sacred. Everything is by the day or month. I can travel 6 miles like so or 12 with horses or 18 with a forced march but always measured in days and weeks and months. It takes real world seasons for the consequences of mistakes to play out in terrible fog of war uncertainty.
A little joke among my particular ’phracts circles is the idea of “Lucaphracts”. Luca is an important town strategically, and so it requires a garrison. To staff that garrison a commander is hired and told in no uncertain terms that they must not leave Luca. It could be weeks, months, or even the full in game year before anything happens in Luca. Every day that commander has to weigh up the pros and cons of staying or leaving because mechanically they are perfectly capable of just getting up and going somewhere more interesting. To do so would be, in all likelihood, a strictly suboptimal play; but they can do it.
Surrounded by a massive play by post wargame of people having a better time than them the person playing Lucaphracts enters a one person durational performance about the nature of boredom. How long can you endure nothing happening before you choose to press a button and give yourself the strategic equivalent of an electric shock?
You might reasonably at this point ask, why do you need to hold onto the hair for 8 months? Its rather simple really. Thats about how long I spent staring at a bundle of loose hair on my desk wondering what exactly I should do with it.
Part of Brush Making Game is perhaps the way that you can cultivate the kind of self that collects stray parts like that. A self that knows it will find a use for discarded hair, and a self that is willing to decide, entirely arbitrarily, one August afternoon that the use, at long last, for this clump of debris is to make a paintbrush. It is about developing odd habits, and not doubting your impulses.
The best time to plant a tree was 19 years ago. The best time to use that health potion was 3 fights ago. The best time to start taking E was before puberty hit. There is still time. There is still time. There is still time.
Brush Making Game [4th Edition]
[1]: Spend 19 years developing an idiosyncratic art practise entirely unique to who you are and how you have chosen to live in the world
[2]: Work out how to make a paintbrush.
For a few, pensive seconds, the Gardener observes the Sister. He nods and then shifts, making space next to the plot where he was working.
“Work with me. Kneel, here, as I am. I want you to put your hands in the garden.”
She limps over with her cane and gets to work. Her vestments, thrown over her ruined streetwear, almost stop her looking out of place
“If my stitches open you will have half the girls on the station coming for your blood…”
“We are turning over the soil. Adding in more nutrients, looking for any bits of stone, debris, steel… the precursor to cultivation.”
The Gardener pushes his hands into the soil and lifts up small heaps as he sorts through, inspects, adds in from a bag at his side. He finds a bit of steel and sets it aside. He does this work silently, contemplatively, walking on his knees down the row as he does so. It is work that could be done by machine. It is work that could be done by anyone at all.
The Sister works with her best impression of attentiveness. Most of her gardening is done with stolen soil. She begins forming strands of connection in her mind.
After a while, maybe ten minutes, or half an hour, the Gardener sits back.
“Alright, Sister, I want you now to look.”
She observes the bed of soil, the discarded steel, the wheat, the chaff, the garden entire. The soil in front of them looks exactly the same as the soil the Gardener had previously worked; almost exactly the same as the unworked bed next to them.
“Do you see what we’ve done?”
“No.”
“And have we done good work?”
Her hands are weary, her side aches. She does not see it. She feels it. In her fingertips and all along her arms
“Of course.”
“And thinking ahead… will this work be worth it?”
“Yes. Of course it is.”
The Gardener Smiles.
“Of Course it is.”
He shuffles down a little more, starting to till the bed again.
She joins him in the work.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about Brush Making Game is that it is not a nice neat number. It would be so easy to remember 20 years rather than 19 years 8 months and once week. Unfortunately, I am not a patient woman. I am a creature that seizes moments as they find her.
Would I remember Brush Making Game in 4 months time as the year turns? No, probably not. I don’t even remember to put my Estrogel on every morning, and its doing the long slow multi year work of making me who I want to be. The act of transition a kind of durational performance of the self. A work a lifetime in the making. Womanhood a poem that I dare myself to play.
What does help me remember though is making a game of it. The last week or so I haven’t missed a day because I make a point, every time I get out of the shower, of applying it straight away and listening to one of several audio files between 4 and 5 minutes long. I do this because those files were a gift from someone very kind, and because I know the act of doing so makes them happy. A little poetic performance of gifted song and good habit.
I do not mark an end to this little dance nor do I count the days I do it. I do not aim for things in advance, I am no good at forward planning. I can only write games about waiting in retrospect. In more speculative works I must trust the same intuition that thought 19 years 8 months and 1 week was the right amount of time to make a brush. I have no easy thesis here to speak either; only that time is an interesting plaything, and these brushes I have made a toy pleasing enough to me to warrant the years and with that our revels now are over.
Listen. Be patient. The work is speaking.
Brush Un-Making Game
[An Expansion for Brush Making Game]
[1]: Play (and win) Brush Making Game.
[2]: Use that brush as often as you care to.
[3]: When the time is right: burn it.
