Kroc Camen Writes

I’m very pleased to announce that over the coming months I will be publishing here over 200 pages of personal letters written to / from Tanner Helland during 2003–2005. This article will serve as an index for the letters as they are published, as well as a source of background information to the events of my life and projects at the time.

Around 2001 whilst I was still at college I came across a rag-tag band of VB6 developers called “The Gathering Project” (TGP). Like any VB6 group at the time, they had set out to create an RPG in VB6 to prove that it could be done. My skills were certainly nothing special at all, but I think a combination of charm and an eye for detail got me a job there. The project was headed up by Clint V Franklin and Tanner Helland both VB6 programmers, but also an artist and musician respectively.

I can safely say that those early days at TGP were some of the happiest moments of my life. We became a close knit family and discussed the project in great fervour. Looking back, whole essays could be written about why the project ultimately failed, it was one of many such projects going on at the time.

Clint Franklin stepped down from the project early in 2003 and I took over, renaming the project to “The Lost Alliance”. I never had the managerial skills that Clint had used to keep the team together for so long and after many emotional ups and downs I left.

What I gained out of it though was a wealth of experience and the two best friends I have anywhere in the world. I stayed in contact with Clint and Tanner and we kept up to date on our various pet projects making this and that app / game.

It was early in 2003 that Tanner took up two years missionary service that would see him travelling Canada with a busy schedule and no Internet access for two years (imagine that!). We decided to stay in touch by writing letters to each other and thus began a strange discourse that covered in great detail almost every aspect of my life at the time. This was all before I had found my perfect job that I’m in now and I wandered from crummy job to crummy job disillusioned with life, stressed beyond terms I can describe to you and increasingly mentally ill.

I am no longer that person, but the historical record that these letters document shows an intensively creative period of my life where I was still learning a lot of the very basics of what I know now. These letters will reveal much that you never knew about me, and incredibly exciting projects I was working on that have never been seen outside of my inner circle of friends.

On this website, you are used to seeing mostly finished, polished products. I don’t share my failed work. These letters reveal hundreds of designs, programs and ideas in flux, many of them laughable now, many of them I would be ashamed to share publicly. IE-only websites, bad, bad code and highly questionable design ideas. But there are some real gems there that I cherish dearly.

The letters themselves were labours of love, eventually becoming little high quality A5 booklets printed on glossy paper and presented in a designer fashion. Their size was every bit as excessive as the detail, one is 36 pages long.

The letters will be converted carefully into blog-posts on this site. Some fidelity will be lost in having to represent these highly complex Word documents on a site that has no CSS classes using just semantic HTML5 and ReMarkable but I think it’s possible.

I look forward to delving into this forgotten past of mine, and I hope you will find something useful in it too.

To give you an idea, here’s a sneak peak of something you won’t have seen before: