Nate Eckman, Austin, TX (2025)

08/19/2025

I started grad school this summer to study how to develop and apply technologies to change the way we interact with stories. Think cinematic games, branch narrative movies, location-based entertainment, mixed-reality storytelling — and their interfaces. The program is as much art as it is tech. One hour I’m coding, the next I’m writing a scene for motion-capture. It’s exhilarating.

But beyond the curriculum, I’ve had the chance to join what I think is the most inspiring community I’ve had the privilege of joining, people, who, in such a short time together, already feel like friends for life.

It’s the niche nature of the program - no doubt. Despite all our differences, hailing from six+ countries, with identities as varied as sound, book, and fashion designers, drag queens, programmers, animators, environmentalists, engineers, journalists, writers, dancers, and architects, we’re a group dedicated to fostering a more creative future. They’re challenging the norms of gender and racial identities and depictions of both on screen, rewriting the definitions of music, reimagining our relationship with nature, the ways we dress, and design public spaces. In this one group, it’s like the whole world is up for reinvention. It’s a lofty set of visions. That’s what makes them all artists.

Anyways, I guess this is part life-update, and part PSA. If you’ve ever had an interest in a similar program I’d love to tell you more about it. And since this is instagram I guess I should share a few pictures too. So here are a few of my favorites from the summer term in NYC.

02/13/2025

Coming back to the city starting this summer to start a masters at NYU! Can’t wait to show yall what kind of stories I bring to screen next.

12/03/2024

Live anywhere for seven years and you’re bound to make plenty of memories and friends. But no one warned me that I was going to be given the best of both.

I’m forever grateful to you wild bunch. You know who you are. You gamblers and techies. Pole dancers and two steppers. Fly fishers and fitness enthusiasts. Entrepreneurs and local billiard stars. Rappers and pitbull mommies. Country singers and karaoke feins. Trans men and women. All you g**s - so many g**s. You loyal friends who celebrate things like a friendiversary. You readers who made my first book possible. Cinephiles who encouraged and helped me to make my first short film. Old lovers who mended my heart, just in time to meet my soul mate. You, Austinites, who beautifully excavated these seven years from a bleak and short line of time, and shaped them into something beautiful.

I’m not in Austin anymore. And I’d be lying if I said I knew what was next. At times thats been scary. But when I feel this fear or regret creep up I grasp to the memories of your inspiring lives and in that moment I’m no longer afraid, because I’m home again.

So I guess for now it’s so long and till next time, y’all.

10/28/2024

This summer, after another round of MFA applications ended with rejection, I dug into my pile of unfinished scripts and committed to bringing one to screen.

I’d been thinking of making a movie since 2019, when a filmmaker, producer, and now dear-friend, commissioned me to write a feature about a veteran struggling to transition back into civilian life.

I was hooked. But couldn’t find the momentum to find another project. Covid started. Then a divorce. Then a change of jobs. My life was starting over. Creative projects would have to wait. But in the interim I kept watching films, and reading just as much about movies and their makers.

One of the greats I studied with particular acuity was Paul Schrader. He’s a fellow midwesterner, who spent his early life steeped in the church, and went on to study philosophy and history. As the broad-stroked similarities multiplied I started imagining myself as an asymptote to his life’s trajectory, following its traces in my own way. Hoping that my unconventional twists and turns also lead me to a fulfilling life in making movies.

Time will tell.

But last week I had the immense pleasure of reading through his papers at the Ransom Center in Austin, TX. There’s an indescribable power to touching the physical works of a person, to see the coffee stained edges, nonsensical scribbles in the margin, and early rough drafts. There’s a realness to the works which, despite all the internet’s pronouncement for authenticity, cannot be rivaled by anything published online.

I left their contemplating about all that’s changed since 2019, proud to have made my first short film, and brimming with ideas about my second.

10/23/2024

Scenes from set of this little movie called Diagnosed. In April I hope to announce which dream film-festival I’ll get to premiere this short. Until then, I’m editing, preparing submissions, and starting to write the next movie I hope to bring to screen.

Photos shot and developed by THE .r.stryker

08/07/2024

Script is production ready. Crew is starting to come aboard. Casting calls begin Friday. This thing is really starting to come together. And yeah I’m excited to one day share it, but I’m especially loving the process of making my first film.

03/25/2024

When you turned 31 we weren’t yet engaged, hadn’t imagined a wedding, or that we’d start our first seven months of marriage with me unemployed — feeling both so in love with you and unwanted by the world. It was an intense year, a fast one, one that could left us damaged. But because of your steadfast partnership and hope in us, we lived a beautiful year. The big moments were grand. But it was the little laughs and impromptu dates, the gentle glances and ten second dances — those things we’d the chance to share everyday — that made it so remarkable. I can’t believe I get to live beside you. And damn I can’t wait to see what you make of 32.

Some of my favorites of this past year.

1. Our first photo as engaged.
2. Lexi learns a new instrument.
3. Lexi winning.
4. Lexi finds a pony.
5. Wedding ready.
6. Lexi finds a better follower than me.
7. Lexi takes a very important call.
8. First date night after moving in with each other.
9. A SHOW ABOUT DEATH!
10. Lexi watches the superbowl.

03/22/2024

Harold Bloom called it the Anxiety of Influence. I prefer to consider them a heaping of blessings. These are a few.

In writing his masterpiece Midnight’s Children six years after his castigated debut, Salman Rushdie taught me to embolden and nurture that shy, small, voice inside me still too timid to splay itself across the page. In Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka offered solace in navigating modernity’s estranging isolation. In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, I’d capitulated to the fact that one day I will look around and realize that nothing around me, not even me, will be what it seems; and from that point, all of life becomes a great adventure.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories — now translations from her own Italian — embody the pinnacle achievement of authorship in her perpetually evolving use of language. And to the one whose best works were among his last, Roth, oh filthy Philip Roth, whose Human Stain shook me with the most haunting epiphany that every person’s nature frolics beyond the constitution of words.

In these disparate iotas, denominating stories both magical and realistic, vestiges of my soul reawaken. In their pages life is both realized and re-imagined.

03/21/2024

The drafts of each particular me pile high in the unnavigable memory of my past. I investigate them for clues that can guide me to what’s next. Anything precocious or enduring. There: evidence to arraign my soul before celestial courts. After trial I’ll receive my conviction — a direction. The case runs cold. So the question looms. Who, and why, am I?

01/30/2024

Should your desires transpire from an untraceable set of transmissions, your actions appease the assaults of an average, your very intelligence heed to the outputs of another most unnatural, what then would be left of you? Of us?

The atom of democracy is the individual. Remove you, the concept that there could ever be a body and mind separate, independent, and free then the world as we know it collapses. Your little name becomes decimated into an even smaller number in an enormous database. Good morning, 24601.

I do not celebrate Neuralink successfully planting its first device into a live human this week. To suggest that this is an undisputed demonstration of human progress is foolish. If not for the philosophical reason that our minds should remain, as much as possible, independent, then for the particularities of Neuralink’s leadership operating within a country with a particularly inept governing body, which seem to all but guarantee that the promises of medical care will dissipate in the heat of board arguments over unprecedented control of information and capital — i.e. your thoughts.

I tried to capture the state of this world in my debut novel After Thought. I’ve moved on from this world and have been busy at nights writing my second book. It’s been a refreshing and daunting escape. Though, each morning, burdens from the day’s news compound. So, if I sound like I’m writing like I’ve got a chip on my shoulder, just wait until I’ve one implanted into my head.

12/20/2023

I’m recommending just one book in 2024. Tomorrow morning, I’ll reveal what it is and why it’s my only recommendation of the year, to subscribers of speculatively. It’s free to join. Just peep that link in bio.

Who knows, maybe after reading it, you will — like me — forever wander, seek, and times swear that you see a two-mooned sky. #2024

12/17/2023

This was the last paper I wrote in farsi. Five pages about something I now need Google translate to understand. When I read each letter reflexive, unfamiliar, sounds pour out my mouth. Strung together, these tones form words which have lost all meaning. I’m saddened by this fact. Not for it’s literal meaning, that I’ve lost a language. But for what it suggests…that I’ve traded my curiosity in pursuit of more employable skills.

This has happened elsewhere in my mind: with laws, histories, equations. Knowledge replaced with a host of excel formulas and project frameworks. Master of tools and techniques for ‘optimizing’ and ‘scaling.’ Alright, I’m sharing, can everyone see my screen? Let us begin our presentation. More each day I feel like a character casted into this role of Nate, responsible for delivering a most reprehensible script, which, if played well, guarantees me all the comforts of some upper-middle-crust.

Okay, so let’s follow the money. I’m no longer holding a script, but on a reality TV show. The premise is to exchange snippets of my memory for cash, would I go as far as to trade all I know for every possible dollar? I’ve gone this far. The cost of my duller, dumber, quieter mind? Here, I’ll open my Chase app. It aint much.

What to do now? Continue to play the game? Is it too late to reverse the rules, barter some of this cash to squash this nostalgia in and for myself? Let’s see.

**There’s a lot here I’m still putting into words. Once I do, I’ll share these complete thoughts with subscribers to my site. Sorry if this sounds baity — I just don’t believe any social media is conducive to longform thinking. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become one via link in bio. Note: unlike my dilemma, it’s free!

Nate Eckman

08/19/2025

02/13/2025

12/03/2024

10/28/2024

10/23/2024

08/07/2024

03/25/2024

03/22/2024

03/21/2024

01/30/2024

12/20/2023

12/17/2023

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