I’ve had the Steamdeck for a couple of weeks now. I have a few different thoughts about it. Mostly, it’s cool as hell, but only if you like messing with hardware and software.

This is just a short update on how writing is going. Right now I have two short stories out for consideration, three more that are nearly done or in editing, and another one that was finished quite a while ago, but needs a rewrite in a few areas. I’m thinking it might be a numbers game.

Best Games - Bagman 1982 was a pivot point year for video games. Games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were still riding high. To any arcade operator or game seller, it would have seemed like video games were on an unstoppable upward trajectory. Arcades were making money. Atari and Coleco were raking it in with their home consoles. Even home computers, like the Commodore 64, were driving huge game sales.

This will be a short one. I’m really just here to praise the graphical Swiss army knife that is Blender. So, a little bit ago, I was working on some textures. The task was to pack a non-alpha grayscale image into the alpha channel. Non-alpha, in that it wouldn’t be used as transparency data for the image. I figured that a channel was a channel so how hard could it be.

I want to talk about sci fi doors. Okay, this is important. Actually, you’re right. It is super not important. It’s silly. But I just want you all to know that I have a real problem with sci-fi doors. Before I get too far ahead of myself and start ripping on some artist’s work, I know, I get it. I’m an artist too, and I have made a lot of sci-fi nonsense. Greebles and patterns that really don’t mean anything on machines of indeterminate function. I do it a lot. And I will do it again. I get it. I understand. Designing something that looks futuristic and interesting is tough. There are only so many techy looking crates and boxes a person can think up before things start getting weird. I do have a real problem with doors. Sci-fi doors. Some of ya’ll got to get it under control when you are thinking up doors. Every single one of you has used a door. There is just no way that you are this far into an art career that you have been given the opportunity to draw, paint, model, or construct sci-fi decor and you don’t know that form and function of a door. It’s just not possible. You have used a door. I went and typed ‘sci-fi door’ into google image search. Go ahead, try it now. Type that in. An awful lot of them look similar, don’t they. You know what they don’t look like. Doors. Doors might be one of the most practical and least artistically adorned bits of architectural technology that we have come up with. They are never overly fancy, pokey, or embellished, because people will be interacting with a door on a near daily basis. They are usually pretty smooth. They have one extremely obvious interaction point. If they have hinges and rotate on those hinges, they have to be fairly light or at least well balanced. You know what I didn’t see in several pages of the google image search? A door on hinges. You know what most doors in the world have? Hinges. Even most doors in space and at sea have hinges. Because hinges are practical and reliable and if the door breaks, those hinges are easily accessible and repairable. You can make a solid airlock or water seal with a hinged door. Doors on hinges are good and useful, so I doubt that we will abandon them in the future. Look at this regular ass door.

Best Games - Karate Champ Now hear me out. What if a game could be one of the best games ever made while being completely broken in very fundamental ways? What if a game could have innovative, even revolutionary, controls while being terrible to play? What if a game could represent a tectonic shift in what multiplayer games could be, while mostly coming down to random chance?

We just got back from a trip to Disneyland. We’ve been a couple times, and I always wonder at their ability to design spaces. If you have done any game development, or even if you’ve just played a lot of games, you will know that most of game design is moving people from one place to another, one task to another. Doing that smoothly, interactively, and enjoyably, is arguably the core of game design. If a menu is difficult to use, if an interface is tricky to manage, people won’t play your game. If there are too many unintuitive moments or situations, people will quit playing. Difficult puzzles and complex interaction take a distant backseat to the more common knob twiddling and button pressing that players are required to do. It’s these spaces between the ‘gameplay’ where most players fall off. The people who design Disney’s parks are absolute masters at this. If the rides and shows are the ‘gameplay’ getting people from one to the other is the game design of a theme park.

Blender has a new-ish feature called geometry nodes. I won’t be doing any sort of tutorial or how-to about it here. I have done a few things with it, but I don’t have any level of expertise that I would feel comfortable sharing. At best, I might be able to explain it.

I love to pick apart stories. Not to criticize or poke holes in them, but like tearing down a machine, I want to see how they work. Or don’t. How setups are paid off. How motivation is sold. Or isn’t.

So, I have false teeth. I spent most of my life playing a lot of hockey, and I have found that pretty much everyone assumes it’s due to that. Fair enough. If the sport is associated with anything, it might be missing teeth. Nothing so gruesome happened. Honestly, in all the games I have played, I think I have only been hit in the mouth with sticks a couple of times, and pucks never. Well, maybe only once. Or twice. Who keeps track of these things. Nope, it’s the mundane genetic reason. I have hypodontia.

Best Games - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance The resolution of the gameboy advance screen is 240 x 160. That isn’t a lot of space. In the english version, a single font character is about six pixels tall by four pixels wide. That is extremely efficient for a font, but it also means that you can’t put pages of text on the screen. There just isn’t enough room for all of it. That’s why the menu system for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is amazing.

I started a story about two years ago. Best I can figure, anyway. The first date on the original document is April 11, 2020. I didn’t really know what the story was going to be about when I started it. That’s how it usually goes. I start with one image or idea and sort of figure it out from there. By the time I have a few pages typed up, I start to understand who the characters are and what they want. After that, I gradually walk my way to an ending.

shhh. I’m editing a story right now. It’s broken, but sort of limping along. The fixing is happening. Back to it.

Best Games - Syndicate Sometimes, one of these best games isn’t really a very good game. Sometimes it’s just the promise of the game. The thing it could be. What people imagine it to be.

I’m writing a story using the second person perspective. You know, the “you did this” “you went here” perspective. That’s right, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Except this isn’t a choose your own adventure. This is a horror story.