Let me be honest: as I was voting on the themes, sweeping the ones like “Potato” and various other overspecific or difficult-to-interpret themes to the side, “Minimalism” really stood out to me as one that had a chance of winning that I actively hoped would not, as opposed to the many others that I merely didn’t like much.

The straightforward ways of interpreting “minimalism” lead at first into very small spaces, in which most of the jokes and most of the serious work are inferrable enough from each other that they’ve been played out. It is possible to extract better material by digging deeper, but especially with the time limit, it’s almost as resistant to digging as the dungeon edges in NetHack. The main ways to deal with that seem to be (a) play it straight and don’t bother avoiding repeating things and/or (b) skew the theme to turn it into something weaker attached to the side of something else. I’m fine with people doing this, and I know a lot of you find it valuable anyway, but for myself, being shoved into that corner really saps my motivation.

I think I might have made it anyway if my preparation time over the past week hadn’t been eaten away by unrelated problems coming out of the woodwork and/or if my biology were being more coöperative just now. I’ve gotten plenty of internal view on where my attempt went wrong, so it’s still been useful, but it’s time to step back and figure out how to dig further into making my shaky environment less shaky at a more relaxed pace, outside the context of a jam event.

Good jamming and compo’ing to the lot of you; I’ll be in the background lurking at the entries as they come out.