Tales from the Feed, 2026-7

January 2026
February 2026
March 2026
April 2026
May 2026
June 2026

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed (these ain't even all from my RSS feed), and I hate looking at bsky, there's probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss a ton of stuff that simply doesn't reach me

Being essentially a Civ game that takes place in the future rather than throughout history and into the present day, Alpha Centauri is, by necessity, a much more narrative-focused game than others in the series, which I really enjoyed! I wouldn't go so far as to call it a Narrative-Focused Game wholesale, but it's got more than the average Civ game for sure. The totally unmoored feeling that came from not having any familiarity with the world and its inhabitants or insight into the progression of technology was made up for, and in fact enhanced, by the weird and wild sci-fi stories I was told along the way.

Throughout this all is a thread of looming dread. This trip takes place in 2020 March, a strange and disconnected time during the COVID pandemic. The Japanese government had just ordered all schools closed for a month, but otherwise the pandemic itself seemed like a distant, unreal problem. The reader and narrator know now that what was to come in the following months would make our actions during March look naive and foolish. If only we had known what was coming, and had made different choices.

We’re going to rate each map on the World of Assassination trilogy by how much I hate being there in the Freelancer roguelite mode, which, as a general reminder, assigns random NPCs as targets, runs on the highest difficulty, has no saves/reloads, deprives you of most of your gear, and often adds additional guards/cameras.

It didn’t happen overnight, so maybe you didn’t notice, but the signs of your transformation into slop publications were gradual, and preceded generative-AI. They began when you demanded horror fiction without blood, when you wanted romance but turned your nose up at eroticism and sexuality, and worst of all, when you wanted stories of rebellion and resistance, but dismissed anything that might be overly critical of the status quo.

Nostalgia is human. But nostalgia as the dominant mode of relation to life is narcotizing. We look back because we can't see anything better ahead. To some extent that's understandable. It's also deeply pathetic. We were supposed to be better than the hoseposters, the people who couldn't ever shut the fuck up about being latchkey kids. To accept our helplessness, to make ourselves willing victims because the world is a Heckin' Mess and we'll never afford homes so we might as well indulge in spending all our money on children's toys and corporate merchandise is cowardly.

When we engage in consideration, every experience we have with a work of art, no matter how fleeting or unremarkable, has the power to transform us at any time. It lies dormant within us as we carry on with our lives, continuing to nestle and bridge connections in the background, waiting for a moment of focused thoughtfulness to let it blossom. To help us grow.

So where does that leave us? I still don't know, man! If I had unlimited time and budget I would love to create a game or a short film in this world with these characters but for now - you're gonna have to settle for snippets of microfiction and art (I recommend going in post order starting from oldest) about Tamm's misadventures and the endless oversight of their boss at the Salvage Insurance Bureau here on the blog.

Good habits spoiled by bad motivations

Instead of trying to change the world, I think it’s better to just develop a set of beliefs and principles. Then you have to summon the courage to stick to those principles with your actions and have the perseverance to continue even though it will be hard. If you truly believe in the principle and it’s a part of your life, you will stick to it.

A Video Game Writer's Toolkit

Often, it's not enough to develop a clear idea of what you're aiming for; you also have to properly convey it to other writers and enable them to see the same boundaries. The joint between all those other skills—writing in iteration, writing to a target, writing the boundaries—is writing for others, or simply communication.

If something inspires you and you want to imitate it, I think you should look closely at its own influences, and imitate them.
Paradoxically, imitating the thing itself alone tends to go badly. It was much to Tolkien’s benefit in writing The Lord of the Rings that he hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings.

For me, the main thing in finding new music is to be intentional: I am seeking, not merely putting music on as background noise and going to do something else. It's not that I've never found music because an algorithm thought I'd like it, but I have never found music when I wasn't looking for it.

Creative industries are already predatory. So few working creatives are surviving off the merit of their labour alone. Often we are supplemented by second, or third or fourth or thousandth jobs. I have seen the argument made that artists would otherwise starve, and so why not use a little generative AI in their work. Just enough to get ahead. Just enough blood drawn to create life for themselves, and then they will stop. The scars left behind will surely heal. As if one’s financial insecurity is enough to warrant worsening the situation. This lack of class consciousness when one’s own immediate interests are in hand.

The collection tries to stitch together ideas from the interactive fiction community, from professionals who have worked at different scales of video game production (from small indies to AAA), and from academia, with the goal of trying to ground those future discussions in a more widely shared body of theory and practice.

Channel Surfing on America's 250th

Over-the-air TV in my (bay) area is hit-or-miss but when it hits, it gets weird. I recorded myself making a sort of VHS channel-flipping collage, taking the temperature of the country on its 250th birthday. We have a fever! I spent a bit agonizing over how to make my crappy tape rip better, but accidentally recording on EP mode plus not wanting to spend a million dollars on a good capture card… well, I accepted the condition of the tape as another sign of the times. Noisy, vibrating, unstable.

You will not be put in jail, if you make a game that is deliberately obtuse and frustrating to play, or whatever other shape you want it to be, because every single rule of what constitues a "good" game is made up.
We often forget that we are human beings.

I first saw Math Academy mentioned on X sometime in December 2024. I was intrigued enough to look into it further, but given the price of the service I decided to do some research first, primarily by reading the then-current version of Justin Skycak’s book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning. After reading the book and taking copious notes, I decided to both sign up for Math Academy and write a series of blog posts expanding on my notes and discussing my experiences.

Frustrated with a work project? Angry about the news? Stuck on a line for a song? Mix not coming together?
Dude. Dude just pull back for a sec and go wash some fucking dishes. Like actually wash some dishes; we're talking fill up a mug with hot water from my tea boiler, use it to scrub the debris off dishes into the catch, empty the catch, use more hot water and soap these mothefuckers, rinse em off with cold water, put em on a drying rack, towel dry some so you can fit more.

Superhero stories don’t end, but our time with them can. It usually isn’t dramatic, like a breakup. You just stop one day, maybe because you got what you needed, or maybe because you found it somewhere else. Life is like that; we rarely get to decide when or how a thing ends. It’s what makes fiction resonate, why we find meaning in stories: they get to end.

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