# Apartment

<p class="post-imgs">
  <img src="/pics/apartment_1.png" width=500px>
</p>

<p class="post-imgs">
  <img src="/pics/apartment_4.png" width=500px>
</p>

## Lily

in February 2025 we had managed to raise enough money to try and
move again, after renting a couch in a neighbors' crowded
1-bedroom apartment since the beginning of November 2024. as we
were looking more seriously at moving, i wanted to create a
memento which captures the the atmosphere of that apartment- to
recreate its particular flavor of bleakness.

the windows were blacked out with trashbags- the air a smog of
cat piss and stale cigarettes. every surface was encrusted with a
thick skin of dead cockroaches- you could not even put down your
food for a moment or roaches would crawl in. every time i went in
the bathroom, dozens would scurry off when i turned on the light.

the only regular source of light came from the two large
flat-screen TVs which they had at max volume blaring cop shows
and the kind of thrillers where people scream constantly. when we
first got there it was a few days before the presidential
election, and sensational campaign ads featuring the Dangers of
trans people punctuated these shows.

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  <img src="/pics/apartment_2.png" width=500px>
</p>

at various points anywhwere between 2-5 other people would be
crammed in there as well, all just laying around on couches and
beds watching tv or scrolling their phones. the mother and
daughter almost never talked except when the daughter would get
drunk- the one form of interaction they had was for her to enter
her moms' room to harass her. when she wasn't drunk, they both
just laid in bed, silent and motionless for days.

<p class="post-imgs">
  <img src="/pics/apartment_5.png" width=500px>
</p>

there's a lot more i want to write about this eventually, but in
short, it felt like we had left the world of the living and been
reborn in some incredibly specific buddhist hell- a plane
populated by themes of cruelty, repetitively played out over and
over, between long silences- these vacant routines of violence
and boredom. in trying to capture the rhythm of the life there...
o'm toooo tired eh

## Zoë

Lily and I worked on this game for a while during the tail end of
our time at our last place. It's inspired by the place we were
staying before that, where we were renting two couches in the
living room of a cramped one-bedroom apartment.

<p class="post-imgs">
  <img src="/pics/apartment_3.png" width=500px>
</p>

My two main fixations with this game have been to (a) produce the
deepest and most responsive simulation of a roach infestation
ever in videogames and (b) to try to capture the melancholic
social atmosphere there, with like, the sense of figures each
living in completely different worlds but alongside each other.
Between many of the people in the apartment there was a feeling
of like different sea anemones brushing against each other.

Part of the work I did towards these aims is present in the game,
namely the roach aspects. Right now they're still rather
rudimentary compared to my ultimate plans, but they will
continuously spawn and seek out food in a kind of complicated
organic way using little sensing antennae organs I gave them.
They have glowing lights above their heads showing their
"mindstate" for my benefit as a programmer (although maybe you
can enjoy this as well).

<p class="post-imgs">
  <img src="/pics/apartment_6.png" width=500px>
</p>

I also created a
[multifractal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifractal_system)-based
conversation generator for communication between the different
people in the house. I tried to give it a really wide range of
possible outcomes so that it could paw at the complexity of human
socialization with the shifting moods of the participants and
their efforts to accomodate each other's speaking styles and all
that sort of thing. I'm really pleased with the results I got in
that regard actually, the wide-ranginess regard, but I need to go
to sleep so I think I'm going to demo that multifractal text
generator in another post this evening or something like that.
