the fool

This year, a data loss left me with only a handful (here below, one of that handful) of the images of planets I’ve collected playing No Man’s Sky. Hundreds of beautiful coincidences of color and form and light. Crushing, though I do feel a little bit silly, being so crushed.

But they weren’t just random screenshots, they were an extension of my photography, something I poured a lot of creative energy into, and more, they were the references I paint from, so they represent this huge lost potential — now they’re all paintings that will never exist.

After a few days of trying not to think about it, I loaded up the flash drive I keep in my paint kit to see what I still had. If I’d been backing up properly they’d all be on there, but of course I was not. Instead it was only the first dozen planets or so. Among them were two of the three I thought of right away when I realized what had happened. Gone, perhaps a hundred more.

Well, I guess two out of three ain’t bad. The only thing to do was start again.

I only started taking screenshots of the game two years ago, after an update somehow subtly stripped the magic from the most beautiful planet I’d ever seen. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different. And I couldn’t go back and see that lovely sunset over the cold, island-dotted sea. So I learned to take pictures.

The game looked different in ways that I still found depressing, but it also hinted at something new, like there could be anything out there now. Suddenly, I had to see it all. I streamlined my inventory, untethered myself from home base, and started planet hopping, experimenting with a subsistence style of play that amused me. Once I set about documenting my continuing adventures, a new sense of loss crept in. All those years, all those updates, Mandela Effect after Mandela Effect! Why hadn’t I been doing this all along?

Well, there was nothing to do except to start. I raced across the universe, insatiable, and found there was still beauty in it.

This is Triangle Head. She is an explorer, a painter and photographer, and her bicycle is a butterfly and her dog is a camel. Today she set her ship down on Dreka II, Corrosive Planet, in a lush hill country of spoongrass meadows and mushroom savanna, at the start of a new adventure.

I admire Triangle Head. She is the consummate minimalist, carrying only the barest survival necessities, and her paint kit, and like a GoPro, and that’s it. She explores the universe with half a dozen animal companions, strictly adhering to Leave No Trace principles, and she never worries about her hair because her head is a triangle. She is living my best life, which is great because I am her, at least some of the time.

On Dreka II, rain hisses down and collects in scalding puddles. The rings of a nearby planet dominate the sky so that the sun sets behind a shimmering veil of silver-white. It is absolutely lovely, but I stay only long enough for a first impression, down the first hill, one snapshot, two, and leap back into space.

I need to slow down, but I’m impatient, I’m beginning again. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

I flipped back through that flash drive of screenshots before I started this post. They’re all from when I was still learning how to take the kinds of pictures I wanted, so they’re maybe not my best, but they’re the ones I remember most vividly because they’re the first, and there was so much possibility in them.

That potential is still there, it goes on forever. I will visit one hundred more planets and then one hundred more again. I would never have done all of those paintings anyway, and now I will do none of them. I will do others instead.