Hello world! I'm Reid JS, the founder of hazybridge. The intention of this blog is to record all the thoughts, ideas, ambitions, etc related to hazybridge.

What is hazybridge.com? Truth is, it's a cheap '.com' domain with two recognizable words as the title. It's memorable enough, hazybridge evokes an image in your mind, does it not? Of a foggy dawn in San Francisco, driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge metaphor is meant to symbolize this website/business/service as the connective tissue that holds my other projects together. In order for a project to succeed it requires a LOT of focus and attention, long after the novelty wears off and it's no longer fun to work on. hazybridge is the 'owner' of all the projects I ship or half-ship.

One of my projects that has shown *some* success, is called Bay Area Weekend, "The Bay Area's Podcast for Local Events and Stories." I say that line at the beginning of every episode, I don't know if this is annoying to the listeners or not. The podcast is produced by me and my friend David, who I met through the Bay Area's local stand up comedy scene. When covid hit, stand up comedy become very hard to do(there were no stages to perform on, afterall) so we started a 'podcast' which was basically just a phonecall we recorded one evening. We decided to keep doing it, recording one almost every week for the following year. It has attracted a good following of people, about 25-50 regular listeners, way more than I thought it would ever get. We honestly haven't changed much since the first, but we have gotten A LOT better at keeping the conversation going and making it less inwardly focused. We invite our friends on every now and then. I think it would be interesting to reach out to 'celebrities' and 'influencers' we find notable, and talk about... something. I guess we could interview them? I think people like 'off the cuff' conversations, which is what me and david are best at. We plan for maybe ~5 minutes before every episode, just to warm up our voices mostly. There isn't much structure to it, it's really just a conversation.

Another project I shipped this year, Van Life Game, an artistic-indie video game that I produced to be displayed at the Pancakes and Booze Art Show in San Francisco. It's a text-based adventure style game, where you try to get as far as you can in your van before succumbing to one of the enemies: depression, anxiety, loneliness, etc. The game isn't going to sell any copies nor will it get any accolades, but it reached a point where I considered it finished, people played it, seemed to enjoy it for 5 minutes, that's about as good as I could hope for for my first video game. I learned that is is FREAKING HARD to make a game fun. I went through so, so many iterations of the game play, it really looks NOTHING like it started. It all seemed to obvious in the first week how it would work, what the levels would be, the enemies, etc. I watched a ton of GDC content, read about 5-6 books on game design, spent an embarrasingly long time working on certain parts of it (much of which didn't even make it to the final cut). Eventually I had to call it quits, it was taking up too much of my time and not really showing much improvement. I decided to wrap a bow on it and call it finished so I could focus on other things. I would one day like to remake it, perhaps, I think it's an interesting concept, Van Life, that is slowly making it into the conciousness of america, and yet there is not much media about this lifestyle except for a bunch of 'influencer' accounts on social media. There isn't really a definitive movie or game on Van Life yet. Maybe it's not as interesting to other people as it is to me.

There's much more to write about, but that makes a decent first post. You can reach out to me at reid@hazybridge.com if you are interested in collaborating or something. Thanks for reading.