Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Website Progress
Spent pretty much the entire day working on my new website. It's really starting to come together. I've posted a couple teaser screenshots of what it's looking like. But yeah, expect to see it up and running by the end of the week, assuming we don't run into any more issues (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer...)
Thursday, July 23, 2009
New Day's Dawn
Woke up at 7:00 this morning to find my backyard draped in a ghostly fog worthy of some shots.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The Beard Project
Sketches of what Joshua's beard activity might look like after a few weeks of walking around purgatory without a proper razor.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The undeniable feeling
that all of this has happened before, and not just once but countless times, over and over again, a closed loop, and you are merely retracing steps you've already marked for eternity. You are living a memory, a memory that will never end.
In a sense this is already true: this moment, everything you are sensing now, is merely a memory your future self is accessing, somewhere further up ahead. Pre-determined. Nothing you do now in the "present" has any spontaneity; your future self is merely recounting it.
In a sense this is already true: this moment, everything you are sensing now, is merely a memory your future self is accessing, somewhere further up ahead. Pre-determined. Nothing you do now in the "present" has any spontaneity; your future self is merely recounting it.
Remember
You've had a breakdown. You might have known it was coming, and
here it is.
It's become an image. It's become your tool for grabbing "success."
You've become so caught up with comparing yourself to your peers, judging your "worth" as far as society is concerned, you've lost sight of what it was originally for.
It was never for anyone else but you. You were never supposed to play to an audience, shock people into new modes of awareness.
You were a kid with an imagination, telling yourself stories.
All that shit you thought you wanted, were brainwashed into thinking you wanted, that's not for you.
You didn't care about any of that shit.
You were above it.
Remember when it was something you did to entertain yourself? To imagine new realities because your current one sucked?
You've been out of touch with reality for years now. Your reality has been a lie, an illusion crafted by you, a joke. It was never meant for you.
Remember when you didn't have the internet? Remember when you didn't have a portable, easy-access means of comparing yourself with your peers? Remember when you weren't plugged into an electronic social network? Remember when you didn't have all these various online portals you used to validate your worth as a human being?
Remember when you weren't pressured into achieving certain rewards by a certain age?
Remember when you were self-motivated?
Remember when you didn't have to worry about putting up a facade?
Remember when you had all the time in the world?
Remember when writing wasn't easy,
(it's never been easy)
but you braved the obstacles anyway to write something nobody but you was ever going to see?
Remember the enjoyment of it? Remember when it wasn't your job?
Why do you keep trying to fool yourself? You've never felt like an adult in your entire life, and you never will.
here it is.
It's become an image. It's become your tool for grabbing "success."
You've become so caught up with comparing yourself to your peers, judging your "worth" as far as society is concerned, you've lost sight of what it was originally for.
It was never for anyone else but you. You were never supposed to play to an audience, shock people into new modes of awareness.
You were a kid with an imagination, telling yourself stories.
All that shit you thought you wanted, were brainwashed into thinking you wanted, that's not for you.
You didn't care about any of that shit.
You were above it.
Remember when it was something you did to entertain yourself? To imagine new realities because your current one sucked?
You've been out of touch with reality for years now. Your reality has been a lie, an illusion crafted by you, a joke. It was never meant for you.
Remember when you didn't have the internet? Remember when you didn't have a portable, easy-access means of comparing yourself with your peers? Remember when you weren't plugged into an electronic social network? Remember when you didn't have all these various online portals you used to validate your worth as a human being?
Remember when you weren't pressured into achieving certain rewards by a certain age?
Remember when you were self-motivated?
Remember when you didn't have to worry about putting up a facade?
Remember when you had all the time in the world?
Remember when writing wasn't easy,
(it's never been easy)
but you braved the obstacles anyway to write something nobody but you was ever going to see?
Remember the enjoyment of it? Remember when it wasn't your job?
Why do you keep trying to fool yourself? You've never felt like an adult in your entire life, and you never will.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Issue #1...
Is finished!
Well, part 1 anyway. Of the first issue of the first part of the sprawling epic otherwise known as "Fiends of Nashville." The very first issue, when completed, will be about 40-48 pages long, a two-parter of which the first part is now complete. A couple weeks ago I was sitting around trying to figure out how to tell a chronological story that takes place in the afterlife, a place where time is eternal, there is no passage of time. I finally figured out the answer, and it's so good it scares me.
Anyway, part one starts off with a single title card: 1989. Then, we're introduced to Joshua Danton as he's walking into a Louisiana bayou roadhouse. Very choppy storytelling here, we're flashing brief, small details as Joshua is hit with a flood of sensation. This is the last moment of his life, and it's going to be preserved in his memory for the rest of eternity. Before he dies, we're cutting ahead to things he hasn't even seen yet. Before his eyes the bar starts to take on western properties, foreshadowing where he's going. We start to make the transition to the afterlife even before he's "killed" so it seems that much more seamless.
On page 19, Joshua dies, and by the end of this first part he arrives in Purgatory. We don't know a whole lot about how he got here, except in the literal sense. We know he was looking for his wife, who he thought was taken prisoner by these guys with guns, but it might be that she simply walked out on him.
In the next part, Joshua begins to explore his new bleak, bare world, and in doing so, builds it from the ground up. Technically at this point he's just a disembodied mind floating in a stream of electronic data. His reality is undefined, so he has to construct his own from essentially nothing. The reality he's going to construct for himself is a western, straight out of a John Ford movie. But in the beginning, there is only chaos. So the second part of this "pilot," so to speak, is told mostly through flashes of random-but-not-so-random imagery, memories of where he's been, scraps of dialogue that he took with him to his grave.
Anyway, just thought I'd share my progress. I'm pretty excited to get back to work and see how this thing starts to come together, because right now it could be anybody's guess.
Well, part 1 anyway. Of the first issue of the first part of the sprawling epic otherwise known as "Fiends of Nashville." The very first issue, when completed, will be about 40-48 pages long, a two-parter of which the first part is now complete. A couple weeks ago I was sitting around trying to figure out how to tell a chronological story that takes place in the afterlife, a place where time is eternal, there is no passage of time. I finally figured out the answer, and it's so good it scares me.
Anyway, part one starts off with a single title card: 1989. Then, we're introduced to Joshua Danton as he's walking into a Louisiana bayou roadhouse. Very choppy storytelling here, we're flashing brief, small details as Joshua is hit with a flood of sensation. This is the last moment of his life, and it's going to be preserved in his memory for the rest of eternity. Before he dies, we're cutting ahead to things he hasn't even seen yet. Before his eyes the bar starts to take on western properties, foreshadowing where he's going. We start to make the transition to the afterlife even before he's "killed" so it seems that much more seamless.
On page 19, Joshua dies, and by the end of this first part he arrives in Purgatory. We don't know a whole lot about how he got here, except in the literal sense. We know he was looking for his wife, who he thought was taken prisoner by these guys with guns, but it might be that she simply walked out on him.
In the next part, Joshua begins to explore his new bleak, bare world, and in doing so, builds it from the ground up. Technically at this point he's just a disembodied mind floating in a stream of electronic data. His reality is undefined, so he has to construct his own from essentially nothing. The reality he's going to construct for himself is a western, straight out of a John Ford movie. But in the beginning, there is only chaos. So the second part of this "pilot," so to speak, is told mostly through flashes of random-but-not-so-random imagery, memories of where he's been, scraps of dialogue that he took with him to his grave.
Anyway, just thought I'd share my progress. I'm pretty excited to get back to work and see how this thing starts to come together, because right now it could be anybody's guess.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Purgatory
Like being in a fishbowl. That's what purgatory must be like. Swimming circles in a fishbowl, without any concept of time or space. Awareness only of the present moment, mind numbed. Perhaps a vague hint of either past or future, the blurred shapes beyond the glass membrane of your reality non-discernible.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Project Update: Fiends of Nashville
So I hope to post periodic updates on the statuses of all my current projects here, and the one that's starting to emerge as the most realized and tangible at this point is a little comic my friend Josh Richter and I are putting together called "Fiends of Nashville." Alternatively you'll be able to view progress on "Fiends" on a separate blog Josh made a while back dedicated entirely to the comic. That blog can be accessed in my list of links to the right. There's not much there right now but a badass logo and a bunch of preliminary templates that Josh made. The concept has taken a near 180-degree turn since then, so I'll try to fill you in on the basics of what Josh and I have been cooking up recently.
So. Where the hell to begin?
"Fiends of Nashville" is the story of Joshua Danton, and I suppose there's no better way to introduce the comic than to begin with him. Joshua is a pretty interesting guy. For starters, he's a little rough around the edges. He's got a complicated, mostly estranged relationship with both his brother and father, who are each living exemplary pictures of the classic American hero. They worked hard and earned their stations in life; Joshua is a taker. He split home at a young age and carved out his own life first as a biker, then as a gangster. In the eighties he took a wife, settled down, had a kid. Lived the American dream.
In 1989 he died.
That's where "Fiends of Nashville" gets a little complicated. Because that's where it starts.
Not in 1989, in the shallow bayou out back behind a Louisiana motorcycle bar where he was beaten to death by the Cowboy Boot Man. Not even in 2009 when a fully-conscious Joshua Danton "wakes up" in a hospital bed in a young man's body.
And I guess it doesn't really begin in purgatory, either, where Joshua Danton spends an entire eternity, since the concept of "eternity" implies a place without time, implies a scenario where stories cannot take place in a chronological fashion. No, the story of "Fiends of Nashville" doesn't properly begin anywhere, but it takes place largely in the life beyond this one, theoretically anyway.
By now you're utterly confused. Don't worry about it.
"Fiends" is basically about consciousness. Well, it's about a lot of things right now, a clusterfuck of ideas and themes inspired by a semester of western film studies, long late-night talks about heaven, hell, and Dante's Inferno, shared accounts of broken relationships, the eighties, and George Carlin. Did I say it was about consciousness? I guess I was referring to the fact that it's about what life after death would be like. Not just shooting-the-shit philosophically, but scientifically. What if your consciousness could be "saved" after your physical body dies? What if it could be encoded digitally? Stored as 0's and 1's on some huge server? Could that data still be considered a person? What if that data was moved into the dormant body of a new individual? A vegetative coma patient, say? Well, that's essentially the question "Fiends" examines, but it goes deeper than that. What does your consciousness experience in the state between bodies? What kind of dreams take place in this electronic purgatory, so to speak?
That's where the western element comes in. "Fiends" is also about the American frontier. What is it? Has it vanished? And where has it gone?
At the heart of Joshua's character, he is simply a man without fear. He has no fear because in his mind is the frontier of the old American west. He goes where he likes, he does what he wants, and the only one who can stop him is the man who's a faster draw. He chooses not to acknowledge the boundaries and restrictions that would threaten to hinder him from living his life the way he decides. The western frontier doesn't just exist in his head and in his dreams; he acknowledges it all around him. And if some pissant little guy with a uniform and a superiority complex tries to get in his way, Joshua tells him plainly to fuck off.
So "Fiends of Nashville" is a western. It's about what would happen if a kick-ass-the-old-fashioned-way American hero with a bad attitude and a bad mouth were to be plucked out of the west and dropped into bleeding-heart-liberal, politically-correct, paranoid 2009. It's about the clash of two different Americas, the old and the new. The reality and the myth. It's about fear. A man with none surrounded by a society with too much. The conflict between a man who lives life the way he wants to, and those for whom life isn't real, for whom life takes place only on the other side of a television or computer screen, the consequences of which are dealt to imaginary characters or digital avatars. It's about a lot of the problems I struggle with as an individual and it's about everything I think is fucked up about my generation and this great society we live in.
I realize I've been talking a lot and painting only a broad picture of this comic. Probably because my mind has been caged without a proper outlet for way too long now, cause if you know me in person you know I don't talk a lot. The only time I rant is when I write. And I'm finally coming back to writing after too long an absence.
Bear with me.
So what kind of fears does a man without fear have? Joshua may be unhindered, unchecked, and unfazed by the systems that keep us locked down in a state of fear on a day-to-day basis, but underneath all that ruggedness lurks more than a fair share of demons. Joshua takes what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. But why?
He's afraid of death. He's afraid of age, and he's afraid of time. He's afraid of working hard to attain so little. He's afraid of being a slave. (This thought process, and a lot of this idea in general, was born two summers ago when I was working ten-hour days under the hot sun, pitching tents for a rental company called Grand Rental Station. Long days of pure physical labor afforded me plenty of time to think about cool story ideas. I remember heaving huge iron stakes out of the hard ground with a sledgehammer, literally drenched with sweat, and seeing a vision of a character trapped in hell, doing the same thing, taking a brief repose to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and look up to regard the thousands of stakes sticking up at odd angles for miles of desert scrubland all around, then returning back to work, robbed of the mental faculty that might have allowed him to reason with this reality, conscious only of his own heat exhaustion.)
But these fears only explain the kind of person Joshua is before he "dies"--depending on what your perception of consciousness, or a soul, is. What happens when this person goes through purgatory--eternity--itself? What happens when this person is suddenly confronted with a world of people who take no responsibility for their actions, who think they're entitled to cheap and easy rewards, to money without honest work? With an society that believes every child is a winner? With an America that is swift to medicate its problems instead of dealing with them head-on?
Joshua is a crusader against BULLSHIT.
Against pretentiousness, cockiness, hipness to the mainstream. Against bureacracy, false idols, and the illusion of safety.
Oh yeah, and did I mention he listens to Genesis? Don't complain if he switches the radio to eighties pop, or he'll crack you in the face.
There's a lot of other cool stuff at work in "Fiends of Nashville," and I haven't even managed to get around to the plot yet, but I'm running out of steam. Consider this a teaser, with a promise of more once I've shocked myself into a new mode of awareness. I'm getting tired, so I'll sign off here, but I'll be back. Tomorrow I'm going to write up Issue #1. Or is it Issue #0 in the comics business? I don't know.
Peace out.
So. Where the hell to begin?
"Fiends of Nashville" is the story of Joshua Danton, and I suppose there's no better way to introduce the comic than to begin with him. Joshua is a pretty interesting guy. For starters, he's a little rough around the edges. He's got a complicated, mostly estranged relationship with both his brother and father, who are each living exemplary pictures of the classic American hero. They worked hard and earned their stations in life; Joshua is a taker. He split home at a young age and carved out his own life first as a biker, then as a gangster. In the eighties he took a wife, settled down, had a kid. Lived the American dream.
In 1989 he died.
That's where "Fiends of Nashville" gets a little complicated. Because that's where it starts.
Not in 1989, in the shallow bayou out back behind a Louisiana motorcycle bar where he was beaten to death by the Cowboy Boot Man. Not even in 2009 when a fully-conscious Joshua Danton "wakes up" in a hospital bed in a young man's body.
And I guess it doesn't really begin in purgatory, either, where Joshua Danton spends an entire eternity, since the concept of "eternity" implies a place without time, implies a scenario where stories cannot take place in a chronological fashion. No, the story of "Fiends of Nashville" doesn't properly begin anywhere, but it takes place largely in the life beyond this one, theoretically anyway.
By now you're utterly confused. Don't worry about it.
"Fiends" is basically about consciousness. Well, it's about a lot of things right now, a clusterfuck of ideas and themes inspired by a semester of western film studies, long late-night talks about heaven, hell, and Dante's Inferno, shared accounts of broken relationships, the eighties, and George Carlin. Did I say it was about consciousness? I guess I was referring to the fact that it's about what life after death would be like. Not just shooting-the-shit philosophically, but scientifically. What if your consciousness could be "saved" after your physical body dies? What if it could be encoded digitally? Stored as 0's and 1's on some huge server? Could that data still be considered a person? What if that data was moved into the dormant body of a new individual? A vegetative coma patient, say? Well, that's essentially the question "Fiends" examines, but it goes deeper than that. What does your consciousness experience in the state between bodies? What kind of dreams take place in this electronic purgatory, so to speak?
That's where the western element comes in. "Fiends" is also about the American frontier. What is it? Has it vanished? And where has it gone?
At the heart of Joshua's character, he is simply a man without fear. He has no fear because in his mind is the frontier of the old American west. He goes where he likes, he does what he wants, and the only one who can stop him is the man who's a faster draw. He chooses not to acknowledge the boundaries and restrictions that would threaten to hinder him from living his life the way he decides. The western frontier doesn't just exist in his head and in his dreams; he acknowledges it all around him. And if some pissant little guy with a uniform and a superiority complex tries to get in his way, Joshua tells him plainly to fuck off.
So "Fiends of Nashville" is a western. It's about what would happen if a kick-ass-the-old-fashioned-way American hero with a bad attitude and a bad mouth were to be plucked out of the west and dropped into bleeding-heart-liberal, politically-correct, paranoid 2009. It's about the clash of two different Americas, the old and the new. The reality and the myth. It's about fear. A man with none surrounded by a society with too much. The conflict between a man who lives life the way he wants to, and those for whom life isn't real, for whom life takes place only on the other side of a television or computer screen, the consequences of which are dealt to imaginary characters or digital avatars. It's about a lot of the problems I struggle with as an individual and it's about everything I think is fucked up about my generation and this great society we live in.
I realize I've been talking a lot and painting only a broad picture of this comic. Probably because my mind has been caged without a proper outlet for way too long now, cause if you know me in person you know I don't talk a lot. The only time I rant is when I write. And I'm finally coming back to writing after too long an absence.
Bear with me.
So what kind of fears does a man without fear have? Joshua may be unhindered, unchecked, and unfazed by the systems that keep us locked down in a state of fear on a day-to-day basis, but underneath all that ruggedness lurks more than a fair share of demons. Joshua takes what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. But why?
He's afraid of death. He's afraid of age, and he's afraid of time. He's afraid of working hard to attain so little. He's afraid of being a slave. (This thought process, and a lot of this idea in general, was born two summers ago when I was working ten-hour days under the hot sun, pitching tents for a rental company called Grand Rental Station. Long days of pure physical labor afforded me plenty of time to think about cool story ideas. I remember heaving huge iron stakes out of the hard ground with a sledgehammer, literally drenched with sweat, and seeing a vision of a character trapped in hell, doing the same thing, taking a brief repose to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and look up to regard the thousands of stakes sticking up at odd angles for miles of desert scrubland all around, then returning back to work, robbed of the mental faculty that might have allowed him to reason with this reality, conscious only of his own heat exhaustion.)
But these fears only explain the kind of person Joshua is before he "dies"--depending on what your perception of consciousness, or a soul, is. What happens when this person goes through purgatory--eternity--itself? What happens when this person is suddenly confronted with a world of people who take no responsibility for their actions, who think they're entitled to cheap and easy rewards, to money without honest work? With an society that believes every child is a winner? With an America that is swift to medicate its problems instead of dealing with them head-on?
Joshua is a crusader against BULLSHIT.
Against pretentiousness, cockiness, hipness to the mainstream. Against bureacracy, false idols, and the illusion of safety.
Oh yeah, and did I mention he listens to Genesis? Don't complain if he switches the radio to eighties pop, or he'll crack you in the face.
There's a lot of other cool stuff at work in "Fiends of Nashville," and I haven't even managed to get around to the plot yet, but I'm running out of steam. Consider this a teaser, with a promise of more once I've shocked myself into a new mode of awareness. I'm getting tired, so I'll sign off here, but I'll be back. Tomorrow I'm going to write up Issue #1. Or is it Issue #0 in the comics business? I don't know.
Peace out.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Apocalypse
This is a series I'm working on now. I got the idea driving around the main drag of my town, and noticing all the places I used to eat/shop at, etc. that have closed their doors in the wake of the recession. I thought, what a feeling of pure desolation these places give me, and then I thought, why not do a photo series on them and call it "Apocalypse"? So here's the first few to trickle in:
"The Flat"
Right, I know the title sucks, but it's a working one. Anyway, I got this idea for a feature script around last October I believe, in fact I can pinpoint the exact night: Halloween, and I was walking back to the Buckingham along Wabash barefoot, well in socks anyway, clad in a Batman, form-of: Adam West costume. It was that night that propelled me onto the train of thought that would become this script idea, because somebody at Zac's party mentioned something about how they never had any time to get anything done anymore, time seemed to be flying by so fast now, and something about that really clicked with me. Reason being that I felt exactly the same way; I was a 22-year old graduating college student who couldn't--still can't--manage time and could only watch helplessly as it slipped fleetingly through my fingers as if it were something tangible like sand. The days and nights were blending together and it was becoming much more difficult to square away even a couple of hours to write. I realized I was subconsciously re-evaluating my values in life and spending time in new, ultimately fruitless ways. The "time" wasn't going anywhere but out of my own scope of awareness. I was just wasting it, plain and simple. Willingly. I realized that my perception of time was constantly changing as I grew older. Each unit of time that I lived became a smaller percentage of the grand total, out of all the units I had spent and was spending on this earth.
So naturally, I decided to channel this thought process into something useful, my next creative endeavor.
That was 8 months ago. Jesus. Anyway, 8 months, one birthday, one semester, several failed writing projects, and a whole shitload of needless drama later, here I am. I still have the idea.
And part of the reason I'm excited to get to work on it now is because of a flurry of inspiration that came last night when I blinked back at the following facebook status:
"(Name) rushes toward the center of time, where the moment is frozen forever."
Apparently it's from "Einstein's Dreams," where the following quotes exist:
"At the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go."
"Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time, there is no life."
"Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case."
Needless to say, I really dug this stuff. It got me thinking again, about my idea and what I could do with it. It's about our perception of time, how we perceive that invisible force that pushes us along, changes us, erodes us, kills us. What is time, anyway? Does time exist? If there is no passage of time, can sensation, and consciousness, even occur?
What if you found a room where if you entered it, time froze on the outside? Your physical body would not age and only your consciousness could perceive the passage of time? You could theoretically remain in this room for days, years, lifetimes, and complete entire bodies of work, while your consciousness aged but everything else froze still. What if your consciousness could age independently of your external reality?
This setup, while simple, brought up a bunch of other inquiries. Story possibilities. What, then, if your consciousness started losing its ability to detect the passage of time while within the room? you would be unable to determine for how long you stayed inside. A day could be a hundred years could be one second, and you wouldn't know the difference. Could you even leave the room? Would you be trapped forever in eternity? In one frozen moment forever? Does the inside of the room even exist in space?
I realize I am implying the existence of a soul. If your body does not age inside the room, and your consciousness is merely electrical signals and chemical processes in your brain, then how else could consciousness even be possible?
If no time passes inside the room except for your consciousness, how is physical work/the creation of art/etc possible? To do anything physical, to make any imprint on reality, requires the passage of time. If time does not exist, then nothing outside your consciousness can happen. Your physical body cannot move, because doing so, moving from point A to point B in three-dimensional space, requires the passage of time, the fourth dimension. Your consciousness, in this scenario, would be trapped inside the room forever.
Obviously more deliberation on this is necessary. In any case, the concept of a room with special temporal properties is still one that interests me. And maybe the title "Flat," as it refers to a scenario in which the fourth dimension, time, is removed, causing physical reality to be frozen, applies after all.
So naturally, I decided to channel this thought process into something useful, my next creative endeavor.
That was 8 months ago. Jesus. Anyway, 8 months, one birthday, one semester, several failed writing projects, and a whole shitload of needless drama later, here I am. I still have the idea.
And part of the reason I'm excited to get to work on it now is because of a flurry of inspiration that came last night when I blinked back at the following facebook status:
"(Name) rushes toward the center of time, where the moment is frozen forever."
Apparently it's from "Einstein's Dreams," where the following quotes exist:
"At the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go."
"Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time, there is no life."
"Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case."
Needless to say, I really dug this stuff. It got me thinking again, about my idea and what I could do with it. It's about our perception of time, how we perceive that invisible force that pushes us along, changes us, erodes us, kills us. What is time, anyway? Does time exist? If there is no passage of time, can sensation, and consciousness, even occur?
What if you found a room where if you entered it, time froze on the outside? Your physical body would not age and only your consciousness could perceive the passage of time? You could theoretically remain in this room for days, years, lifetimes, and complete entire bodies of work, while your consciousness aged but everything else froze still. What if your consciousness could age independently of your external reality?
This setup, while simple, brought up a bunch of other inquiries. Story possibilities. What, then, if your consciousness started losing its ability to detect the passage of time while within the room? you would be unable to determine for how long you stayed inside. A day could be a hundred years could be one second, and you wouldn't know the difference. Could you even leave the room? Would you be trapped forever in eternity? In one frozen moment forever? Does the inside of the room even exist in space?
I realize I am implying the existence of a soul. If your body does not age inside the room, and your consciousness is merely electrical signals and chemical processes in your brain, then how else could consciousness even be possible?
If no time passes inside the room except for your consciousness, how is physical work/the creation of art/etc possible? To do anything physical, to make any imprint on reality, requires the passage of time. If time does not exist, then nothing outside your consciousness can happen. Your physical body cannot move, because doing so, moving from point A to point B in three-dimensional space, requires the passage of time, the fourth dimension. Your consciousness, in this scenario, would be trapped inside the room forever.
Obviously more deliberation on this is necessary. In any case, the concept of a room with special temporal properties is still one that interests me. And maybe the title "Flat," as it refers to a scenario in which the fourth dimension, time, is removed, causing physical reality to be frozen, applies after all.
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