00:03It's hard for me to talk about Santa Cruz because I've never lived anywhere else.
00:06It's just normal.
00:07I mean, I grew up here.
00:09My mom was obsessed with the beach.
00:11So that was like always her dream is to live in Santa Cruz.
00:14So that's where she forced us to live.
00:18I don't know.
00:18I grew up here.
00:19It was like a skate surf town.
00:21I never got into either.
00:23I stayed in the house and played video games in Drew.
00:29Monsters.
00:30I only drew monsters.
00:32I drew weird shit.
00:33There's like a big giant drawing of a kid with a bunch of like weird, like a demon inside of
00:38him that's scratching to get out.
00:40In third grade, my teacher recommended that I be evaluated, psychologically evaluated, because she thought I was mentally disturbed.
00:48My mom said that, no, he's just an artist.
00:50He likes to draw.
00:51And she said, that's not art.
00:52That's a cry for help.
01:01But I mean, I basically grew up a lot with my grandma.
01:04I didn't get along with my stepdad.
01:07So whenever there was a problem, I would just go stay with my grandma or we would all stay with
01:11my grandma.
01:11But my grandma was always extremely supportive to the point of being very annoying to my mom and my sister.
01:20To her, I was the golden boy that could do anything.
01:22And she made me really feel like I could do anything.
01:25It was like when she said, you're going to be a success, it wasn't like she was just saying it.
01:32It was like a fact.
01:34Like that was going to happen.
01:36Like that was that.
01:40Ether was kind of based around my niece.
01:42She kind of reminded me of me because she didn't really seem to like to play with other kids.
01:46And she liked to just do things by herself and explore by herself.
01:49And she was very imaginative and she really liked monsters.
01:53So that whole thing like brought me back to when I was little.
01:56And I thought, how cool would it be to like make a game that could put other people inside my
02:03mind when I was like five, six, seven.
02:06And that was Ether.
02:09So this kid gets on the back of a monster.
02:13And the monster goes around in space.
02:14And he gets to explore all these other planets because he doesn't, he can't connect to anybody on Earth.
02:19So he goes to find other friends.
02:21But all these other planets are inhabited with these kind of weird or sad or nervous creatures.
02:28And he goes and tries to solve their problems.
02:30And he solves the problems but they don't become happy.
02:33And he keeps going around all these different planets.
02:35But each time he solves one of these problems, the Earth gets smaller.
02:39And then when he comes back to Earth, it's so small that when he touches it, it breaks.
02:44And then he's kind of lost in space.
02:46And it was kind of just like the ideas of, you know, it's really cool to be a creative kid.
02:51And it's cool to do all that stuff.
02:53But there's of course dangers of isolating and becoming obsessed with things and having phobias.
03:00And that was the whole thing is like each of those planets was like a phobia of mine when I
03:04was little.
03:05And when I was little, before I'd go to bed, I would obsess about these things because I thought I'd
03:09be able to fix them.
03:10But in the end, I would just make them worse.
03:13They wouldn't be fixed, but I would be so obsessed with them.
03:16The next day that I go to school, I'd have stomach aches and I need to go home.
03:19A lot of the imagery and stuff that I pulled from, I'm still very, very, very happy with.
03:26To me, it speaks perfectly of how I felt when I was little.
03:29Like when I play that game, that's exactly how I remember it feeling and still very happy with it.
03:37And then shortly after that, my grandma passed away and she had a box of my drawings that she saved
03:44when I was little.
03:45And that's when I found this picture that I had drawn of me in space floating.
03:52And this is like, this is Edmund floating in space and my friend is, my friend too is space or
03:57something like that.
03:58Space is my friend and my friend too is me.
04:01I should break that out.
04:03But yeah, it was validating to find that box and see those things and be like, wow, like, this is
04:10just like the game.
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