There is a running gag in the Youtube channel Game Grumps:

For those that don’t want to click, their episode begins with the following:

Arin: Bringin’ it back, ya’ll! [beat boxing over a play-through of Zelda: A Link to the Past]

Dan: It has been zero days since Arin beat-boxed.

I like this for a lot of reasons. First, it’s maybe my favorite way to call someone on their bullshit. Second, as a computer programmer, it speaks to my weird, mechanical mind that clicks and whirs beneath layers of social emulation engines.

Among the random shit I have coded I have made a number of “count-up” clocks. “Count-up” being the opposite of “countdown,” in that rather than counting down to something it will tick away the amount of time since an event.

I build these because, well, quite frankly, my perception of time is poor. Things that happened recently feel adrift and ephemeral. Things that happened a while ago really happened decades ago. Children born yesterday hit the double digits, or even worse: start high school. Back to the Future day (October 2015) came and went. My passport expires this year.

I build count-ups because they give you an objective sense of the passage of time. It helps so that the inevitable, “Can you believe it’s been this long since that?” conversation is not as crushing when it finally comes. Also, they help you to remember birthdays.

Anyways. At time of writing, it has been 981 days since last I blogged (July 2013). In my last post, I went on about good data practices, computer truth, file formats, and digital legacy. Nothing new, if you’ve been around me at a party when I’ve had a bit to drink. I ended with this:

It will not be boxes of photographs that our descendants (theoretical, or otherwise) will have to sort through after we’re gone. With any luck, it will be a hard drive, or flash media, or whatever holographic crystal storage medium supersedes them with a password sticky note hastily taped to its side. It won’t seem like much to them. Tiny files with old, old timestamps. Maybe there will be gaps, or just nothing before a certain date. Hopefully the contents will help them to realize it’s a hollow, horrible, dark feeling to be unable to account for lost time.

I am just a riot at parties.

At the time of that post, we (Mike and I) had already been working on the Skysail novel for a year (June 2012). We would meet in secret for our book jam sessions hiding our secret passion from friends and loved ones. We established our core theses (from which my last blog post was inspired), constructed outlines, built characters, and debated what we would eventually call ‘odeum’. Three months after my blog post we would begin principal writing on the narrative portions of the book (October 2013).

But even before that we were still working on Skysail. Even if we didn’t realize it. And by we, I really mean Mike. He had been a part of a writing community for the better part of a decade, writing with people he met on the hallowed gaming forums of yesteryear. There he found people with a shared love of fantasy, airships, and Final Fantasy fan fiction.

Unfortunately, by the time we started working on Skysail the community had been waning for years, with membership and updates slowing to a crawl with the onslaught of adult life. Each time their forum host would be bought out, or become less free, or unexpectedly disappear, old members and old content would be lost.

I (Josh) had stumbled across their community by accident (early 2011), finding a fascinating microcosm of creative fantasy. I read their backlog of posts, learning about the universe, the characters, and the authors who wrote them. I never understood the game that was being played but I did end up writing a short story based on a throw-away character being left behind at port after an airship was forced to make a hasty escape (October 2011).

That throw-away character’s name was Vasili Mikhailovich. He would eventually turn into our protagonist for Skysail.

So, in ye olde 2016, as we are nearing the completion of our first draft, it’s weird to go back and objectively account for time. I have records and tools that tell us exactly who did what and when. But when it comes down to it, it feels both like an eternity and yesterday. We’ve done a ton of work and yet it doesn’t seem like anything. We’ve been working on the story long enough that it feels like it has always been written. All that exists now is the unendurable weight of the work we have left to do.

Anyway. It has been zero days since Josh blogged.