Matthewせいじ
LightNews LightNews
banner
matthewseiji.com
Matthewせいじ
@matthewseiji.com
1.5K followers 420 following 270 posts
Matthew Seiji Burns is a writer and director who works on game-like things and other things.

Author of the novel Process and the visual novel Eliza.

https://www.tuneandfairweather.com/collections/process-a-novel
Posts Replies Media Videos
matthewseiji.com
The meme of "my body is a machine that turns 'the passage of time' into 'not writing'." This is a joke about writing and how so much of writing is not writing— or at least, that's what I tell myself when I am avoiding writing, which is a big part of my actual job. I mean writing, not *not* writing. Bosses: do not look at this, especially if you are expecting something from me soon. Obviously, everything is going great. I am not procrastinating by making this meme. I am not deliberately wasting time in every possible way I can think of after already having made breakfast int he most laborious way possible, catching up on email and slack messages, engaging in some discord discourse, and checking every social media feed I have the misfortune to remain entangled with, and I fully intend on starting to write for real the moment I hit the button to send this tweet. Yes, I still call them tweets. It's an act of resistance at this point, calling them tweets. I remember there was some discussion of what to call them, and I have to say I did laugh about "skeets," since the act is comparable in some ways: it feels good in the moment, but results in something useless and gross just moments later... is this too much to get into here? I don't know if the wrongheadedly censorious people who run this platform even check descriptive alt text, come to think of it. Anyway, I should get back to writing, for real, which I will do now. That reminds me, did you catch the discourse the other day about dialogue choices in games? I don't have much to say, really, other than that creative works can be literally whatever you want them to be, so arguing about them isn't as productive as simply making the work you want to see in the world (and which I'll get back to doing in just a moment). If you want to see my approach to dialogue choices, why not play my visual novel, Eliza? If you've made it this far and haven't yet, I suggest you check it out. Okay, back to writing for real now. Definitely.
November 11, 2025 at 8:00 PM
matthewseiji.com
Wim Wenders: [sharing grandly philosophical thoughts in German-accented English over lingering shots of 1983 Tokyo]

Me: Impeccable vibes... this could only be topped if, like, Werner Herzog showed up

Wim Wenders: Then I ran into my friend, Werner Herzog, at the top of Tokyo Tower
An astonishingly young-looking Werner Herzog (shot in 1983 so I should not be so surprised) in the observation room of Tokyo Tower saying, "One has to search through this ravaged landscape..."
September 21, 2025 at 4:07 AM
matthewseiji.com
How do I apply to direct Death Stranding 3. Tell him I’m the banana bread tweet guy
Headline claiming that Hideo Kojima has ideas for Death Stranding 3 but “doesn’t want to direct it.”
August 29, 2025 at 4:41 PM
matthewseiji.com
You know what else features a project code-named Prometheus? The novel Process, by Matthew Seiji Burns
An excerpt of the novel "Process": It took at least three of these reset cycles before I realized Prometheus was cursed. I don’t know a better way to explain it. We were losing so much time to the engine and the direction changes that our schedules, always optimistic to begin with, became known as works of fiction. The team started staying at the office later and later to try to get something, anything, done. We were never told long hours were mandatory, but the behavior was so widespread it may as well have been. The result of that was a good stretch of time, nine months or more, where I came into the office around ten in the morning and worked until one or two in the morning. Home only served to host a quick run-through of a few biological things required for the maintenance of a corporeal form before I departed again to do battle with our infuriating technology. I imagined myself a
July 14, 2025 at 3:58 PM
matthewseiji.com
If you need me in the foreseeable future I will be in eWorld
A screenshot of eWorld, an online service operated by Apple Inc. between June 1994 and March 1996.
June 16, 2025 at 4:14 AM
matthewseiji.com
Chapter 8: Dieter shows Lucas a “demo”

Process, a novel

#BookSky
He reached into the messenger bag next to his seat and pulled out a MacBook Air. He opened it with a deft single motion and tapped a single key. Then he rotated it so it faced me. On the screen there was a glittering matrix of thousands of geometric three-dimensional diamond shapes that rotated in sync with each other, bobbing up and down on shining waves of color that rippled across the horizon line accompanied by rubbery staccato synth tones. They gathered themselves into a stream of water that poured up, into the sky, forming a luminous canopy stretched out into the distance as the music swelled, growing in majesty. The scene widened into a vista of mountainous terrain with clouds and snow blowing past the camera, massive towers studded with jewels rising in the far distance. Down low amidst the rocky detail of the ground the snow piled up in fluffy crystals while sprouts from the ground pushed through them to bask in the sun. The hills blossomed into a riot of color and flora, a million red and white petals fluttering in the wind. Then in just a few seconds everything drew inwards again, back into that point of light, which became a star in space, joined by millions of others, a spinning galaxy, and then nothing. That’s cool, I said. Dieter shook his head as though I’d said something wrong. “Everything you just saw, that whole animation, the music, everything, the entire code for that fits into sixty-four kilobytes,” he said. “There’s no image files or sound files or any of that. It was all generated by this program smaller than an empty Microsoft Word document.” He explained an animation like this was called a demo
May 21, 2025 at 6:13 PM
matthewseiji.com
A page from Process, a novel

#BookSky
A book, open to a spread with a digitally corrupted image of a person on the right and following words on the left: I can see papery enclosures, hexagon-shaped. There is soft webbing, too. Slow growth and entanglement. A dance. Flow and encirclement. My head is swimming. I like the notion that to be obsessed with something is to become it, in a way, even though that’s not what really happens. When you look at your reflection in the mirror do you say, there’s me, or do you say, more properly, there’s the reflection of me, or even more properly, there’s what I’m seeing as the reflection of what I’m seeing as me. All I see right now, though, is darkness. No, that’s not true. There are also many small blinking lights, and they are pretty. I see them and I think: math. That’s mathematics, right there, math in physical form. The math is happening and now things exist. We have shape and form. What a miracle, these numbers. Attraction, repulsion, indifference. Is this making sense? Does the Queen of Infinities understand what I am trying to convey here? Things that go forward can also go backward. I should hope so.
May 7, 2025 at 4:34 PM
matthewseiji.com
They never talk about Big Tom Eagan, the Lumon Industries would-be heir who quit the family business and ran Eagan’s Drive-In diner in Tumwater, Washington.
A picture of Eagan’s Drive-In, part of a local family of diners called Eagan’s or Big Tom’s. The creator of Severance is apparently from Olympia.
April 14, 2025 at 10:57 PM
matthewseiji.com
POV: You are being embrittled
This is a scientific diagram about something called embrittlement and the conditions under which it can happen. I don't know what it actually means. Sorry.
February 12, 2025 at 7:36 PM
matthewseiji.com
This is one of those early 2000s “internet” or “multimedia” computer keyboards with lots of goofy extra shortcut buttons at the top that probably never worked. There are buttons for Copy, Paste, Search (these are not in the frame), and so on. Nearer to my hand are apparently dedicated buttons for launching Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Who would use this? The point of the picture however is that there is one particular extra button labeled “Log Off,” and I am about to press it. Obviously, I don’t expect this button to do anyth
January 1, 2025 at 10:08 PM
matthewseiji.com
Me in my echo chamber
First of all, this is a surreal and an incredibly creepy photo. It depicts a vaguely human-shaped torso, bone-white, placed on top of a wheeled office chair, and a single speaker mounted on a cheap tripod pointing directly at its head. Every other surface of the room, including the floor, is covered with sharply ridged brown soundproofing material set in tiles at ninety degree angles to each other. It is bizarre and unsettling. To move onto the joke of this post, the photo depicts the Anechoic Test Chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota. Anechoic chambers are so quiet that people who enter can hear their eyes blinking, their blood flowing, and other normally inaudible processes of the human body. It is said to be so disorienting and uncomfortable that most people cannot last more than forty-five minutes inside. Anyway, the word "anechoic" literally means "without echoes," so I am basing the humor, such as it is, of this post on the idea that a room that is as devoid of echoes as is humanly possible to create is my "echo chamber," a place in which one would presumably hear many echoes. Large technology companies often operate their own anechoic chambers, and one on the Microsoft campus briefly claimed the world record for quietest chamber in 2015 with a measurement of ambient noise at -20.6 dBA. However in 2021 Orfield Labs retook the crown with a whopping -24.9 dBA. That is so quiet. Of course, let’s not forget that echoes can and are often desirable too, from the real-life echo chambers used for aesthetically interesting spatialization, to music intended to be performed in spaces with particular acoustical properties, to the addition of digital reverb in the signal flow of nearly every piece of electronic musical equipment, from amps to software synthesizer plug-ins. In the sense that an echo is sound reflected back to us, how could we not be in one unless we ensconced ourselves in a strange room in a laboratory somewhere? It is the lack of echoes that is unnatural.
November 20, 2024 at 12:17 AM
matthewseiji.com
September 13, 2024 at 3:13 AM
matthewseiji.com
Coincidentally, I happened to find out the other day that legendary dragon Fáfnir’s name is translated as “the embracer”
Excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Fafnir, which includes the sentence: The name "Fáfnir" has been translated from Old Norse as "the embracer".
February 15, 2024 at 8:22 PM
matthewseiji.com
Yeah I love video games too, my favorite games are uhhh *nervously glancing at the shelf behind them* Zom Bomb, White Fog, The Pig, White Fog, Zom Bomb, Serbian Psycho, The Pig, White Fog, Zom Bomb...
This is a screenshot of a shelf in someone's apartment in the game Ghostwire Tokyo, featuring a selection of games with made-up names. I love bookshelves in games and always stop to read the made-up titles of books, movies, and games, because they are often weird and funny.
December 16, 2023 at 9:56 PM