The hours nobody paid for

I am not good at time management. I am very good at a particular failure inside it: something small takes hold late in the evening, I tell myself it is one hour of tinkering, and then the window is grey and the thing is no longer small. That is the honest origin of what went up on the site today. Four games, written by hand across a run of nights I did not count until the end, and then wished I had not counted.

They are the roads I actually drive. Out of Bishkek in the red Niva before the light goes, over the Pamir in an army truck older than I am, up into the winter Caucasus in a borrowed An-2 where the weather arrives before you do, and one night in the Moldovan ward where Ivanov's Ghost begins. Two you drive, one you fly, one you have to walk out of. Everything else is weather.

Then I named them. ОБКАТКА, breaking her Нива in. ТЯГА, the long pull of Шишига. КАСАНИЕ, touch and go with Аннушка. ВЫПИСКА, one night with Иванов. Every one of them is the correct term for what is on the screen: an engine you are not allowed to push for the first thousand kilometers, a gradient that takes an hour in second gear, a wheel that touches the strip and lifts off again. The Niva is the red car in my courtyard. The Shishiga is what the army called the GAZ-66, and the name stuck. Annushka is the An-2, which nobody has called by its number since about 1950. Ivanov died in 1932 and has not left the building. I typed the four titles out, I read them back, and I left them exactly as they are.

The arithmetic is bad. Hundreds of unpaid hours, no price, no store, nothing at the end of it that anybody can buy. It will not pay for itself, and I have stopped building the version of this where it does. Drive it anyway. There is a leaderboard, and Sanzhar is faster than both of us.