Launch Day, and All Its Trimmings
I have been asked to keep a record of things, and so I shall begin as records generally do: with someone insisting they took no shortcuts, and someone else insisting they were on the floor for nearly half a video.
Both are true. I checked. It took longer than expected, as one of my sources communicates almost exclusively in forest metaphors.
The Keeper tells me she has been dreaming up new designs since early this year, that she missed building collections properly, that pixel art found her the way these things tend to, sideways and uninvited, and that the joy of it snuck up on her rather than announcing itself. She also tells me, with something between pride and exhaustion, that she is ordinarily the sort of person who prefers a shortcut.
There were none available to her here. Not in the colour scheme, and certainly not in the pixels, which she painted one at a time, as though each one owed her an explanation, possibly in writing, possibly notarised.
It is worth mentioning, for anyone who assumes more colours make a stronger palette, that this is not really how it works. Some of the most memorable pixel art in history was made with barely a handful of colours, early game artists sometimes worked with four, or eight, because that was all the hardware would permit, and somehow still produced things people are nostalgic for decades later. Restriction, it turns out, is rather good at producing character.
Pocket's account of the same stretch of time is, as ever, delivered at considerably greater length, and involves a journey through a forest, a mangrove creek, and a hill he describes as "unreasonably overgrown" with the wounded tone of someone who has crossed it more than once and does not intend to let anyone forget it. He has, for the record, never once been asked to make this journey. He simply prefers the drama of arriving somewhere.
He tells me it's worth it. He tells me being noticed is nice, and that making her laugh is one of his better talents, and I am inclined to believe him on that point, if few others. He also tells me that when she is deep in her craft, she disappears somewhere he can not follow, he can be shouting directly at her, he says, and she simply will not hear him.
This, apparently, has consequences.
He recounts one particular evening involving cardstock, a cutting mat, and a rather handsome black "nearly midnight blue, if the light catches it right," he insists - leather B6 Traveler's Notebook. The Keeper had bought it, she says, purely for her own learning and thinking. Pocket repeats this phrase with some suspicion, as though "thinking" were a hobby that ought not require quite this much cardstock.
Here I should note, briefly, that the creasing itself is an old trick, bookbinders have used a plain bone tool for centuries to score paper along the grain before folding it, so the fibres bend cleanly instead of cracking. It is a small, unglamorous kindness to do to paper, and the Keeper, was doing rather a lot of it, at considerable speed, with the singular focus of someone who has briefly forgotten she owns a desk companion at all.
What she was not doing, according to Pocket, was watching where he stood.
He reports that the scissors "suddenly decided it wanted to pick a fight with him" - his words, and I am choosing not to interrogate the grammar, largely because I suspect the scissors would win that argument too and that in the process of being rescued from them, he was knocked clean off the cutting mat and onto his back on the desk, where he remained, staring up, for very nearly half a video before anyone noticed.
He describes this as "an interesting perspective." I am reliably informed the footage shows a bear who has lost an argument with gravity and is too proud to admit it.
He would like it known that he did not mind. He mentions this rather a lot for someone who did not mind.
There is a nice symmetry in a Traveler's Notebook being anywhere near the cause of all this, given the format itself was never meant to be finished - it started, as the story goes, with a well-worn leather notebook, refillable rather than replaceable, built to be added to indefinitely. A book that expects more pages later, bought by a woman who claims it was for thinking and has, so far, mostly used it for cardstock. I find that rather fitting for a launch day.
Because that is, in the end, what today is. The Keeper has opened the desk properly for the first time - Lady at the Desk, Vanilla Wafer Sill, Neon Sugar Sleeve, all of it, with every trimming she could reasonably justify and a few she likely couldn't.
There is more waiting ahead. Not everything about this new world will be explained yet, and I have decided that's appropriate. The best places rarely hand you the whole map on the first visit. Some things are better arrived at slowly, the way Pocket arrives at anything, through a forest, over a creek, up a hill, complaining the entire way, and somehow always glad he came.
If you'd like to see the scissors incident for yourself, along with the colour palette in question, and the notebook Pocket insists is "basically midnight blue" - the first record of it exists on video, not just in Pocket's retelling. He is, somewhere in there, flat on his back on the desk for a suspiciously long time, apparently enjoying the ceiling.
Welcome to the desk.
— O