Sean Barrett's unpretentiously titled home page

elements

computers Q programming
games Y playing and developing
music X writing, recording, and listening
text F writing and reading



compounds

Y Q : computer game development
F Y Q : interactive fiction
X Q : computer-assisted music
F Q : online writing
F X : lyrics



complete site map


















Elemental void

Me

so how do I stop?

Comics

While I am not an artist in the visual sense, I have worked on some minimalist "comic strips" inspired by Red Meat, and it would seem odd to call these "writing":

And in a somewhat similar vein:



Computers

Q

I've been programming computers since I got started with BASIC in 1980. There's some overlap between this section and the game development section.

The computer index page lists:

Games

Y

I develop computer games for a living; I play all sorts of computer games, plus videogames, and a few non-electronic games as well.

The game index page lists:


Music

X

I'm a guitarist by trade, but I play bass, drums, keyboards; I sing (but prefer not to), I engineer my own multi-track recordings, and I write original music.

The music index page lists:


Text

F

I like to write although I'm not a particularly good writer. I've done all sorts of writing; a couple of movie screenplays, a long sci-fi novella, some ultra-short stories, poetry, etc. Most of my writing has been for the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre.

The text index page lists:

Computer game development

I entered the game industry in 1994, although I'd been programming games since I started to learn to program in 1980.

Computer-assisted music

ACID is a neat program that lets you take existing loops and match tempos automatically and overlay the loops against each other. The end result is that you're hardly "writing" music, since all of the notes were recorded by someone else; and yet you may well be combining them in ways that nobody else ever thought of.

Online writing

I experimented with keeping a web journal for a while. Nowadays I update it once a month instead of the almost once-a-day I was doing at the beginning. Entries range from philosophical ramblings to lists of activities performed lately.

Also, I wrote a response to Scott McCloud's "I Can't Stop Thinking" articles about Micropayments; this work was designed with its online appearance in mind.

Interactive Fiction

When I was 14 or 15, playing Infocom text adventures, I decided I wanted to be a professional game programmer. When Infocom collapsed, games began to be filled with graphics instead of text, and the industry switched from being a single person developing an entire game to large teams, I stopped thinking about pursuing that career. (But I ended up getting into the game industry after all at age 27, ironically doing high-end computer graphics.)

Lyrics

I don't like to sing, so for a long time I just wrote instrumental music. Unfortunately, I don't write very good instrumental music; I don't know how to structure it so that an audience other than me can find interest in it. I do know how to structure songs with vocals, though, so I started writing actual songs, with lyrics. Here are the lyrics from a few songs I wrote in 2000.