I wrote that whole thing last week about the rise, and repeated fall, of authentic media. It was a sort of eulogy of Giant Bomb, a website, and collection of revolving personalities, that I have followed since before its inception. I was a fan of GameSpot’s On the Spot podcast and the people there who eventually left to form Giant Bomb.

Back before MTV or MuchMusic, there were music video shows. At first it was just segments of music or dance shows that would run a video or two. Eventually, there were hour long blocks of television reserved for music videos. The music video was a new and rising art form and at least a few people out there decided that there was an opportunity available for anyone who could present a platform for that art.

I’m making my game using the Godot game engine. I have used Unity pretty extensively in the past, and recently I have been using Unreal for some other work, but I’ll be sticking with Godot for my personal project.

I sat down here, an hour or so ago, with the intention of playing a game. I have a couple of new games I have been trying out, but I didn’t end up playing any of those. I played old games.

I had been writing a different thing about games for this post, but I thought instead that I would say this. My story Birds, Vibrant and Wild, published in Kaleidotrope’s winter 2025 issue, received a nice review and recommendation in Locus.

Best Games - Grand Theft Auto If you made a pie chart of the entire video game industry, every property and title broken out into its own set of wedges, there would be a very slim few that would be instantly identifiable. Pokémon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto.

I haven’t written about it here, because it didn’t seem relevant to what I write, or draw, or model, or whatever, but I do have some thoughts about generative AI. Some of them are even good.

I just prepped one story to send out (it will probably be in the hands of a publisher by the time I post this), and I am getting another one ready (again, it might be ready by the time you read this). It’s been a hot minute since I sent out a story. I’d almost forgotten how to format a story. Almost, but not quite. There is no single way to format a story for submission to an outlet. There is a standard, but there are usually unique requirements for each outlet. Just simple things. Specific fonts, ways to organize the header. Nothing onerous, but it does meant that you can’t just send things out on autopilot, you need to actually make the effort to figure out how an outlet likes to operate. And while you are there, maybe read some of the stories they publish and figure out if they are a good fit for what you are writing. I will likely get back a quick rejection or two, but I have to say, I sort of missed it. Maybe I should keep fixing up the many other stories that I have sitting on the back burner. At least one of them has to be good, right? That’s just normal odds.

I am redesigning some of the assets for my game, because a few of them didn’t fit the gameplay and level designs. I tried to make the airship work, but it just didn’t. So now the airship is a lifter and the ambulance is a regular ground type vehicle. I really wanted the player to be able to fly around, but creating obstacles in the air felt false and arbitrary. I know that 90s arcade games could be arbitrary, but false always feels bad.

Best Games - The Operative: No One Lives Forever Looking, and sounding, like the full color mod-styled version of Emma Peel, Kate Archer is the sort of protagonist that would be surprising and eye catching today. In the year 2000, she absolutely stood alone.

Many months ago I started making the switch from using a lot of cloud services to backup and host files to a mostly self hosted setup. It hasn’t been entirely without issues, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how well a lot of these solutions work.

At the end of these story competitions it is customary to write a summary of all of your stories and how you arrived at them. While I do enjoy reading other writers summaries, I really don’t like writing them myself.

Well, I wrapped up the last story for this short story competition thing. The results aren’t all in, but I did… fine. A lot of my stories ended up somewhere in the middle of the list, but they got some decent comments. The thing with this competition is, it’s not really a competition at all. Really it’s a good way to get a lot of other writers, some of whom are very good, to look over a first draft of your work and offer a lot of opinions and advice.

Best Games - Red Baron Anyone who played arcade games in the 80s remembers Battlezone. Battlezone was that tank game made up of vector lines and blocky shapes. It was in first person, felt fully three dimensional, and it was unlike any other game in the arcade at the time.

If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!