I’m a bad programmer. I have written similar sentiments here before, and I likely followed up those comments with the same explanation that I will add here. Like I said, I’m a bad programmer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t program. I have written a fair number of computer programs in several different languages. I have written programs that convert data from one format to another. I have written library software for a large company. I have written enemy ai code for small games. And the list goes on and on. All of these programs worked. Most of them were bad. Badly optimized, badly structured, and badly maintained.

I recently finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t played the game and are spoiler averse, maybe you should just skip this one. I’m going to use this game as an example, but it might get a little bit spoilery.

Best Games - Devil’s Crush There have been a lot of video pinball games. I’m talking video game simulations of traditional pinball here, not just pinball machines that incorporate some video elements. Most of the early ones were bad. Some of the new ones are quite good. 3D Pinball Space Cadet that came free on a lot of versions of windows is actually very good (but we will get to that one another time). But most of them have one tragic flaw in common. They are trying to be pinball.

I just finished reviewing a whole raft of other peoples stories. you might think that it’s difficult to write a story, but trying to constructively critique other peoples stories is so much more difficult.

I’m working on the last story in a group of stories. A bouquet of stories. Will I ever clean them up and send them off to get published? Who knows. Sometimes I just write to write, ya know. Anyway, I had this story idea worked out, but it wasn’t really crystallized. Like, all the vibes were there, but I didn’t have the details. So, instead of typing in random things, I went to exercise. I have a pretty strong belief in running background processes. When you aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, but are engaged in some other task that is more or less automatic, my brain at least, runs background processes. That’s when I figure out solutions to so many problems. Or, if not solutions, different angles of attack on particular problems. So I went to exercise and, whoosh, a whole wave of concrete ways to solve these story ideas flooded in. I had to stop at one point so that I could type up some point form story structure. Now, I’m back at the keyboard, and other than this short aside, I have been typing in actual prose rather than just mashing away at point form notes. I have a bunch more words to tap into this keyboard, so I think I will go do that. If I don’t it will be very late before I get it all punched in.

The early days of video games were wild. One developer could come out with a game, and three to six months later another developer would come out with a blatant copy. They might slap on a different color palette, or change the music, but these games would be nearly identical.

I’m still writing short stories. Normally, I am pretty good at writing something based off prompts. It’s like rapid fire word association. I get a prompt, or a couple of prompts, as input, and my brain comes up with several potential stories a few minutes later. They are almost all terrible story ideas, to be sure, but I don’t really get ‘blocked’. I think I have recently experienced the closest I have ever had to being blocked. The last couple of stories that I have worked on have been more difficult than usual, but I think I might know why. I think I might just be less satisfied with my usual ideas. That’s not to say that I think my older stories are bad, but the seed ideas for them, I might pass on those now rather than writing those first few lines. So it’s less of a block and more of a slower ramp up and more searching before landing on an idea that I think might make for a good story. I don’t know if that means that I will be writing better things in the future, or maybe worse things. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it’s a passing phase. In any case, I do have an idea for this current story now, so I better get back to writing it.

When I’m creating new 3D models, I like to start with extremely sparse meshes and build them up gradually. The upside to working that way is that it is sort of like filling out a sketch or building simple forms first in a sculpture, and then only adding detail and refinement when you feel like the shapes are right.

I’m writing a new flash story (under 1000 words) but this time I’m working on making it particularly ‘voicey’. I like to adopt a character for a story every now and then. It isn’t exactly easy to do, but it is an interesting challenge.

For now, this is some fire. I think this won’t be the last version of this fire.

Best Games - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds As a series, The Legend of Zelda rarely misses. You could start up just about any entry from the last forty years and have yourself a pretty good time. Some have aged better than others, but they are all top quality games worthy of their own entry here. But right now, I’m gonna focus on one.

Many, many years ago, during my university sculpture class, I spent a few weeks welding a lot. There were a lot of options, but quite a few people in my class decided that they wanted to sculpt with metal. I made a couple of metal sculptures too, but I spent a lot of those few weeks welding up other peoples projects.

I have a neat little stack of stories that I am punching up for submission right now. That’s nice and all, but sometimes it can be a bit tricky to take these flash length pieces and rework them in a way that fills them out, without losing that flash length immediacy.

I’m going to try to put some screen shots and a video or gif right at the bottom of this post. I’m not sure how that will work, but hopefully it will.

The 1984 movie The Terminator opens on a hellish version of 2029. A blasted wasteland patrolled by killer robots bent on eradicating all human life from the planet. The Terminator : SkyNET lets you live there.