Misc on Eturnip.com

723

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I now have three partial games using my 2D pixel art but is actually 3D polygons setup in Godot. I say partial games, because even though all of them run and you can move around and do things in each of them, not one of them is really a game.

At first I thought that working on more than one, or shifting from one project to another, would mean I would lose any momentum I occasionally have for the main game I started all of this for, but that hasn’t really been the case. Instead, when I started the second small project, I found all sorts of efficiencies and procedures that I quickly fed back into the main project. When I started the third one I discovered a bunch of solutions to basic framework stuff, like menus and project flow screens. I, then, went back to feed those changes into the main game.

It’s probably partly that blank page effect, where this new project has none of the baggage of the old one so you just add whatever you think of, but since these aren’t really blank pages and there is a shared setup that all of these projects are using, moving changes from one to the others is pretty easy.

That said, I should get at least one of these things to a presentable state in the near future. Right now I think it might be the middle one?

721

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.

Now I have a new keyboard, the position of my drawing tablet doesn’t strain my shoulder, and my monitors are all at a very neutral height. I even have more desk space, which is interesting since I have all the same stuff on my desk. Maybe even more.

I don’t think that my set up is ergonomically perfect or anything. I probably still have a ways to go before I have everything set up for every situation, but this is the place I make art, code, write, and play games. Having the space be more comfortable will always be a priority.

But that leads me to questions. What would be better? What do I already have that I’m not using well? What could I assemble or move or get that would make the space better? I don’t really know, but now that my desk is so much better than it was, I find myself asking these questions a lot more often.

My new keyboard is really nice.

720

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.

Writing a first line is pretty easy. Start somewhere, come up with an opening line that you think would make a reader want to continue reading, and then write it down. Easy.

Writing a last line is pretty easy. Think of something that summarizes your thoughts and feelings on the story and write that down.

Now write all the stuff that goes between that first line and the last one.

All of this writing stuff is easy.

Now, make it not terrible. That’s editing and it’s horrifically difficult. Does this word go here, or here? Does this feeling come across in this paragraph? If someone who isn’t me read it, would they think that same feeling came across in that paragraph? Do we need two sentences or thirty seven? Is all of this actually terrible and am I a terrible writer?

If you ever wanted to ask yourself any or all of those questions, maybe give editing a story a shot.

Anyway, enough of this diversion. Back to editing.

719

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.

What if you don’t have any nostalgia for a thing from the past but nonetheless you find yourself fascinated with it? What do you call that? I don’t know.

Recently, I have been checking out a lot of games that came out on the MSX, a uniquely Japanese computer.

While I am sure that people in Canada got their hands on an MSX machine when they were a going concern, I certainly wasn’t aware of the thing. Maybe I saw it in some game magazine or other, or I saw a game with MSX compatibility on it’s packaging, but none of that made much of an impression.

Now, through emulation, you can play any number of games for the MSX. Oddly enough, not knowing Japanese isn’t really much of a hurdle for most of them either. They either have some info or instructions in English, or they are so simple that it’s pretty easy to get into them.

I think what I am liking about messing around with MSX games is that they are familiar, we did after all have a lot of access to Japanese made games in the west, but because they were made with a different market in mind, they are also subtly different.

So it’s not nostalgia, it’s novelty, but novelty from the past. Like an alternate history to the games I played growing up. This is some other persons nostalgia. Out there somewhere in Japan there is another guy about my age, with older kids and sore knees, and he is getting into playing old North American and British dos games. Or Commodore 64 games. Or Atari 8bit computer games. He has no nostalgia for them, but he finds the idea of exploring the joys of someone else’s childhood fascinating. It makes his world smaller.

I haven’t found any wild surprises, or discovered any games that completely blew me away, but the search is enjoyable, so I think I will keep dabbling with these old computers. Maybe I will play some games made for the FM Towns Marty next. That might be fun.

717

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.

716

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule.

Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.

All you really have to do is imagine that no matter what part of their work or step in their process you are focusing on, that they have thought more about it than you have.

And that would be true. No matter how much experience you have, no matter how long you have been doing it, that particular piece of work you are critiquing, the person who created it has thought more about it than you have. They have reasons for doing what they did and they have a depth of understanding of their work that you could never begin to imagine.

That doesn’t mean that their work is flawless or it couldn’t be helped by another set of eyes and another point of view. But if you see some mistake, there is a real good chance that it was a decision made intentionally. Even if it wasn’t, you should approach it as if it was.

That will instantly change how you approach critique. It isn’t about what you would do with that same medium. It’s what they did, and all the choices that they did or did not make.

Quite often, you might find that they had already considered your brilliant advice, but went down another path for reasons that you aren’t aware of.

Assume that they are the experts on their own work. Tell them what parts connected with you and what parts didn’t. Don’t bother telling them how to fix it, because you will be wrong and they will have likely already thought about that course of action and abandoned it.

But pointing out what did or did not connect with you will help them tailor their revisions to make sure that their intentions are clear and come across in their work. Approaches that were too subtle can be bolstered, often in ways that are much simpler than you would ever come up with. Because, again, they have thought more about this than you have.

That’s my only real approach now. Imagine that whatever I might say in a critique, they have already thought of, so I am just here to support or focus their own internal arguments.

Learning to take criticism in the same way is an ongoing learning process.

713

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing.

So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.

Very early in I think my second or third year of university, I was walking past the archeology department building. I was probably on my way over to the drama department, or going To one of my very scattered labs. In any case I happened upon the best joke I have ever seen.

Someone had gotten hold of some tempera paint or chalk, I don’t remember which, and sketched out a large, say 6 or 8 foot long penis.

The drawing was crude and not very detailed, but that wasn’t the funny part. I mean, anybody can draw a dick. Sometimes that’s funny, but not usually.

The joke was the accompanying text. Under the giant dick, in full view of the the archeology building and written so that you could read through the windows, were the words “Dig this bone”

It is a joke that I think about a lot. It took into account, location, audience, breaking of expectations, and it was neither mean nor did it make the audience the butt of the joke. It was temporary paint, so it wasn’t even vandalism. It was just a precisely targeted and funny joke. The dick wasn’t even realistic enough to be offensive. It was just the most dumb, and the most clever joke I think I have ever seen.

I don’t know that I will ever write anything as good as that.

708

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating.

They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.

In 1998-1999 lcd and plasma monitors existed, but they were not the type of thing you would, or even could, use in an arcade machine. They were expensive and were riddled with too many downsides. On the other hand, CRT displays were common and generally pretty high quality.

That meant that not only would the games be displayed on a pretty descent, commercial grade, CRT screen, but the developers would likely be working with a very similar CRT display right on their desks.

Developers could be fairly certain that the artwork they created would be exactly what their players saw.

That’s the sort of convergence that lets you create this.

Tough to read, right? Well, kinda. It is legible, but only just. You can also see that they wrote ‘WINTER’ instead of ‘WINNER’. And that typo is even more funny when you consider that this is not at all how this text looked on the Third Strike screen.

Now that you had that warmup, try reading this list of locations.

Now these images come from asset rips from the game, but I can’t actually guarantee you that the color values of these pixels are correct. They probably are pretty close though. But that does mean that what you are looking at here and what the developers and players of Third Strike saw are very different.

CRT phosphors are relatively chunky when compared to the RGB pixel grids of modern screens. They are also ridiculously bright. Like tiny colored light bulbs that flick on for just a small fraction of a second. That means that the shapes they describe soft, cloudy, glowing shapes, not sharp, defined pixels.

These particular sets of pixels end up being quite legible when they are pushed through the aperture grill of a particular type of CRT.

Unfortunately there is not really a good way to replicate this, or even to take a photo of a CRT screen. You can, but it won’t look the same as it does with your own eyes.

The best I can do is to simulate it with shaders, and even that won’t look quite right because it lacks the physical characteristics of a specific type of CRT monitor. Still, these might give you a tiny indication of what it would have looked like.

That each of these characters is composed of only 9 pixels and is still identifiable as real text is amazing, and it just proves that sometimes the tools and the art are so intertwined that they can’t really be taken separately.

If you happen upon a real Third Strike machine in the wild, give it a play. It’s important art, and deserves your attention and love.

706

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2026-cgda/entries

Yesterday I got the chance to participate in a game jam. This time I wasn’t jamming, I was judging. I played all the games and talked with all the teams. It was sort of fun to see a game jam from this angle.

Typically, by the end of a game jam, I am happy to have made something, but I am also so frazzled that I can’t really think that hard about any of the games, including my own. It was interesting viewing the games through a different lens. I know all too well what it takes to make a game in a very short period of time, and I know what it’s like to over scope and come up just short of your intentions.

Ultimately, every one of these games is a pretty incredible achievement and I had a good time playing and evaluating them.

Maybe next time I’ll make something again.

705

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a while I had most of the control issues with my game worked out. You could run around and the screen would scroll at least as smoothly as a 1990s era arcade machine or console. I had introduced most of the same constraints, so I was met with the same results. The simulation of the game could move with sub-pixel precision but the graphics could only move in full pixel increments. That meant that some movements would look smooth, but moving in some directions, particularly diagonals would sometimes lead to a stepping or jitter.

Months ago I added fixes to my movement and camera scripts that minimized this jitter. They worked well. I moved on with other issues and systems and sort of forgot about my fixes.

A little while ago I reorganized most of the project. I simplified a lot of it and removed so much reused code, really leaning into Godot’s compositional nature.

While that was great for the project, it also meant that I did miss a few things. Most notably, I ended up doubling up my anti-jitter fix.

I had been working on different parts of the game and hadn’t really noticed until I played the game at full screen. The jitter was atrocious.

It was frustrating, because I was certain that I had fixed the problem literal months previous.

Long story short, I did find the problem. I had the jitter fix enabled both on the camera and on the target that the camera is meant to follow. Disabling it on the target sorted the whole thing out.

So I guess the moral is, if you are going to reorganize a project, test it for everything, and make sure that you turn off or delete any legacy code you aren’t using.

I’m certain that I will forget and this sort of thing will happen again in the future.

700

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For my birthday I decided to gift myself not having to post something this week.

Shit. I just did, didn’t I.

696

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those.

One is old video games.

The other is 3D modelling and animation.

Okay, maybe three things. I could probably talk about Star Trek episodes starting at the original series through to the end of DS9, but no one would want to hear any of that.

Okay, so just the 3D modelling and animation stuff then.

The history of it. The processes and techniques. Different programs. The technology of chewing through polygons and spitting the resultant pixels up to a screen. Any part of it.

I have messed with so many different aspects of Computer Generated Imagery over the years that I think in vertices. I can picture Cartesian coordinates, matrix transforms, and vector manipulations in my head.

I know that isn’t special. There are lots of people out there who can do the same. Many who can do it way better than I can.

Today I was writing something a bit different. A class.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a class. Maybe it’s a talk. Maybe it’s about 40 minutes of rambling. In any case, it’s about 3D graphics and how to think about setting up a workflow that gets objects out of Blender or Maya or whatever, and get those objects into whatever game engine you are using.

I am writing it out and making slides and visual material to go along with it, so the whole talk should be cleaner and easier to listen to than if I just went off the cuff, but I can say, without any doubt, that I could talk uninterrupted on this topic for an hour at least.

Hopefully that will end up being a good thing. I might just bore a room full of game devs for an hour.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

693

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are over halfway through the Winter Olympics and, yep, I’ve been watching a lot of them. Just like the summer games, It’s not so much that I want to watch my favorite sports, it’s that I like the variety. Just today I watched some hockey, some speed skating, some figure skating, mogul skiing, and the highlights of a curling match. I’ll only ever watch the highlights of a curling match. Curling is like baseball. I’ve played it, and I can appreciate what people love about it, but it ain’t my thing. It’s just a firehose of sports. I’m starting to hit the point where it’s wearing me out, but I still really love it. By the closing ceremonies I will have worked it out of my system and I can spend several months after virtually sports free. A hockey game and figure skating tomorrow though. Lets Go!

691

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend was the Global Game Jam, and once again, I didn’t participate. I would like to, but I have been doing a writing jam instead.

As much as I enjoy getting together with people to bang out a goofy game, I also enjoy spending a bunch of time with myself arguing over what word to put where. The arguments are, again, with myself.

While the approaches might be very different, the process is sort of the same. There are prompts, time limits, technical limits, and a bunch of technology involved.

The game technology is pretty obvious. Game engines, graphics tools, IDEs, and maybe even weird input devices.

The writing technology is a bit older and a bit less well understood. Writing is absolutely a technology, but stories are too. Writing is a technology created to allow people to speak to one another over distance and time. You can write something down and someone far away from you a few years from now can pick it up, read it, and understand what you were saying. Super useful.

Stories are a slightly different technology, since they existed before writing, but writing them down is probably the best way to trade them. Stories are a culture building survival technology that lets groups share learning and information and our feelings about those thing. It’s a way of packing up our thoughts and feelings into packages that we can then give to other.

So, older, weirder technology, but otherwise just the same as using Unity.

Back to jammin'

690

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.

689

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a very short story all day and I’m mostly out of words.

I have been playing some weird old games though, so I might have some things to say about that next week, or soonish.

On the upside, I think I may have slightly better formatting worked out for these posts. I suppose we can all find out together after I post this.

688

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I finished writing a new flash story a few hours ago. I will probably have to go back over it and do some editing work before it’s ready to send anywhere, but this is one of the rare occasions that I don’t think I will be adding many words.

Usually, when I finish a flash story that’s only the beginning. When I think of a story idea it usually occupies a 2000-4000 word space in my head and I squish it down to under a thousand words so that it can be flash sized. But restrictions are useful, so forcing myself to keep the word count low is good exercise. It means that every word has to do some sort of job and it can’t be just progressing your eyes through to the words I really want you to read.

This story is actually flash. I could maybe add 50 or so words, but that would be about it. The style and structure demand a small word count.

My plan right now, is to give it a once or twice over and then send it out to flash publishers, maybe as early as next week. Won’t that be something.

687

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post for 2026. So what am I doing.

Our oldest is back at university after the holidays, our youngest has been studying and getting ready for wrestling, and we have been wondering what we will do with ourselves when they are both out in the world doing things and we are at home alone.

I know what I might be doing.

Just this evening I wanted to play with some old games and apps that only work on older versions of windows. Compatibility mode can only get you so far, and these apps were not cooperating. So what is there to do.

I have now installed and set up an emulated windows 98 machine running under 86box. I know that I could have used any number of virtual environments, or I could have even installed windows 98 on some older hardware that we still have, but this seemed more convenient. And more fun.

Now I have a stupid little Pentium 2 machine with all the ram and an absolutely massive hard drive for the time… 32 whole Gigabytes! I topped it off with a video card, sound card, and fast CD-ROM drive that would make this the most expensive machine you could possibly assemble in 1998.

Now, it’s not perfect. The emulation doesn’t always run at full speed. I have had to play with settings and swap out virtual components a few times. But I knew what I was getting into. This is what I wanted.

I set this emulated machine up so that I could play with some old apps and I haven’t really done that at all. I swapped sound cards and video cards. I installed drivers. I formatted virtual drives. I messed around with old windows.

That’s what I like to do. I like to mess around with weird hardware and software. And I like to do that when the hardware is software. It’s fun.

I don’t imagine that will change. I will always play with these toys, and there will always be new toys.

686

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This will be my last post for 2025. Does that mean I need to make some sort of resolution of the new year? A semi-hollow promise to myself? Nah. I’m more than happy to make plans. Here are some things I plan to do. I will write a few more stories, finish editing a few that I have on the go, and have at least a half dozen out for submission at any given time. I will finish up the gameplay loop of my game and try to get it out to a few people for playtesting. I will work on another game and hopefully that one will be ready to go by fall. I will do some work on yet another game, and attempt to get some very experimental visuals up and running in an engine I don’t have that much experience using. Mostly, I plan to enjoy my work, enjoy my family, and enjoy my life. And I plan to do all of that for as long as I possibly can. Check in with me around 2075 and I’ll let you know how that plan is going.

685

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The saga of the nas is ongoing, but I think I have it pretty well in hand.

It’s a bunch of drives that sits and chugs along in my basement, and once in a while I write some files to it. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s one more thing that I don’t have to worry about… until I eventually do have to worry about it. That’s future me’s problem.

Anyway, that’s about it for this post. I’ll probably have a longer one next time, where I can talk about graphics for a bit. I always like to talk about graphics for a bit.

683

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had a hard drive fail on me. It was a backup drive and thankfully it didn’t have anything important on it. Still, I did lose some non-essential files. I have lost drives before, but I tend to keep most important things backed up in a couple of places and very important stuff gets the local and cloud backup treatment. That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.

I have thought about setting up a proper nas for a while. One built around a raid or zfs or both. It just always seemed like overkill. I have work files back up automatically in the background, and anything else that I don’t want to lose gets occasional manual backups. It’s a system that has worked well for me for ages. But losing that drive was the last straw.

Disks are getting pretty big these days. Two terabytes is a pretty common size for a drive. That’s an awful lot of files to lose when the drive dies, even if they might be less important.

So, yeah. I bought a nas.

It’s not a super fancy or new one, but it is one that I can install a custom version of Linux on so that I can use zfs. So that’s nice.

I know that I will have another drive die on me. It’s just inevitable. With this setup I should be able to lose a drive, replace it, and never lose a thing.

I don’t have it yet, but soon. Either it works great and I never have to mention data storage again, or this might be the first of many posts ranting about owning a nas.

682

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a very long time I used Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, and After Effects. Probably the better part of two decades. I did more designs for signs, brochures, stickers, and vehicle wraps in illustrator than I care to count. I have used a lot of other art and illustration software over the years, but those are probably the ones I used the most.

I don’t miss them at all.

The current suite of tools I tend to use for that sort of stuff is Affinity. Affinity was three products, Designer, Photo, and Publisher, but now they are fused together into a single package simply called Affinity. When Canva, the company that bought Serif, the original developer of Affinity, announced that all three packages would be combined into one monolithic piece of design and art software, they also announced that it would be free. Well, mostly free.

This seemed to make a lot of people angry.

I know, I know. If a product is free, then you are the product and all that. Massive corporations don’t do things out of the kindness of their hearts, and they certainly don’t give away things for free.

So I understand why some people might be suspicious. They had come to like using Affinity tools and they are absolutely certain that Canva will ruin them. Just the same way that they have seen other promising tools ruined by huge corporations that didn’t know why the people who used those tools liked using them. They might be right too. Maybe Canva will ruin them. But that isn’t what has happened.

I think a lot of people who use Photoshop or Affinity photo or whatever graphics app like to think that there is a massive business in selling these programs. Sure, Adobe isn’t a small company, but relatively speaking, graphics software, especially professional level graphics software, is hyper niche. Not many people use it. And of the people who use it, not that many actually pay for it. Canva has the numbers. They know this too.

But Canva makes design software for people who are not professional designers or artists. They make software that you can quickly mock up web pages or meeting presentations. They make something closer to PowerPoint than Illustrator. Powerful design software, to be sure, but not the sort of thing a professional artist wants or needs. One brush can paint a fence, but you need decidedly different tools to paint a portrait. Not better. Just different. Affinity is different, and far fewer people use it.

Making Affinity subscription software, or continuing to have it be one time payment software, would probably make them enough money to continue development, but Affinity would be a tiny part of their Value as a company. They make so much more money selling parts of the Canva platform to companies that just need a ’good enough’ design tool.

Making it free though, that hurts Adobe. And hurting Adobe is worth so much more to them than what they could make selling Affinity. There are literally no excuses to giving Affinity a try now. If you are a professional artist or designer and you would rather not pay Adobe a lot of money every year, try Affinity. You have nothing to lose.

I have also read a lot of people complaining that Affinity isn’t good enough for professional work. That’s just dumb. I have used both Illustrator and Designer for professional work, and yes, they are different, and they have different workflows, but I actually like using Affinity more. It’s just a more fluid and modern workflow. There are a lot tools that I would like the to add and improve, but it is a thoroughly capable tool for professional work. Some folks have trouble separating ‘the way I’m comfortable working’ with ‘the right way to work’. As soon as you can do that, you will be much more able to shift from one software to another. Maybe you can paint that portrait with a four inch contractors brush.

Anyway, Affinity is free. Use it or don’t. I don’t really care either way, but I do know one thing. Getting mad about it won’t get your artwork done.

678

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the last few weeks I have been plunking away on a Discord Bot. The plan was for this to be a simple little thing. A sort of management agent for a group game critique. It keeps track of games that people want to suggest for critique, creates polls to gage interest, schedules critique events, and, with any luck, does all of this with very little effort. Of course, all of that might sound simple, but this involves python coding; something I’m familiar with but not to any sort of proficiency. It also involves hosting the thing and administrating a Linux server; something that I have a little more experience with. I did what anyone trying to set up something like this would do. I went out and found examples on GitHub and stole that code. If you have never written any code, I can’t begin to tell you how far you can get just by stealing some code. First, you see how someone else did the thing you are trying to do. Or a similar sort of thing at the very least. Second, you can break it without worrying too much that you won’t be able to fix it. You already have a working copy to refer back to. So I took my stolen code, mashed that more into the shape I was looking for, and then I set the AI on it. I have said before about using ML agents to work on code. I think it works really well if you already have a working thing that you want to clean up, optimize, or add features to. In this particular case, it worked extremely well. Since Discord bots are a pretty well understood topic, and I wasn’t attempting to do anything really wild, I was usually able to tell Copilot to look at a feature I already had working and extend it or create a new feature based on it. I went from having a little poll creating bot that read out of a database I hosted, to having a fairly full featured, not terribly ugly, critique management system, while only really working on it a few hours over a handful of weekends. Now I have to let some actual people mess with it and break it.

675

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thankful today for all the people who are, and have been, in my life.

674

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve done a lot of driving recently. Well for some of it I wasn’t driving. I was just a passenger. Either way, I have spent a lot of time out on stretches of the flattest, baldest prairie that you could imaging. Just endless miles of unpopulated farmland stretching out to the horizon. Here’s the thing though. That might seem terribly boring, but it really isn’t. I really do live in a very beautiful part of the planet. We watched the sun set multiple times over the last couple of weeks. Not just the twenty minutes or so that the sky turns red orange. The entire sunset, from wickedly bright afternoon to complete darkness. And out on the empty prairie, complete darkness can be pretty damned complete. We stopped to watch the northern lights dancing behind thin clouds. I looked up at the night sky and saw the sweeping arc of our galaxy. I watched dust clouds kicked up by combines finishing the harvest drift across the road in front of me. I drove past golden fields of barley that hadn’t yet been cut. All of that is incredibly beautiful. I used to think that where I grew up and lived was dull. Generic. But it was only generic to me, because that is where I live. I think a lot of people would think that the idea of driving for several hours without passing even a small town might sound boring. Like there is nothing worth looking at out there. That’s just not true. Where I live is amazing. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

673

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This hasn’t been the easiest week. I’ll likely write something longer next week.

672

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I wrote about riding my bike. At the time, I rode my bike most places. I still do, but maybe not quite as often. I might not ride as often, but I think I ride more than I ever did before.

The biggest change, is that when I ride, and I ride somewhere at least a couple of times a month, I ride the whole time. I used to blend a lot of riding and taking the train. Now, I don’t really take the train. I just ride the twenty or so kilometers to downtown. The four or so kilometers to the grocery store. I don’t ride the train much anymore.

I still very much enjoy a longer ride. It’s equal parts being sort of disconnected from the world, and hyper focused on everything around you. I have only been hit by a vehicle once, and I am not interested in trying that again. A long ride gets me into a flow state, similar to playing a good game.

This is all well and good, but it also means that my bike experiences a bit more wear and tear. Today I started fixing a broken spoke, only to realize that I don’t have any of the right length spokes for my wheels, so I’m off to order more.

Get a bike. They are fun to ride, they get you from place to place, and when you break them they are fairly easy to fix. As long as you have the parts on hand.

669

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

we are flying back after dropping our oldest son off for his first year of university. I found myself thinking about this older post (423) that I wrote several years ago.

When you are expecting a new baby everyone is keen to tell you about all of the firsts. There will be a first poop. A first step. A first fall. A first full night sleep. A first real laugh. A first word. A first illness. A first solid meal. A first sentence. A first day of school.

There are so many firsts to anticipate. So many firsts that seem so important. So many that you try to record or inscribe to memory.

Most of them will be quickly lost amidst a flood of seconds and thirds and so on. Some you will regret losing to time, some will be better lost. Some will burn so deep in you that you will recall them perfectly and often for years after.

What people never tell you is all the lasts.

There will be a last diaper. A last toddlers tantrum. There will be a last breastfeed. A last daytime nap.

Lasts are usually things you are glad are over. I think this is why people don’t mention them. That last diaper is a real relief and something to look forward to, but you won’t remember it.

Every night before bed I would read to my kids. There was probably a first bedtime story for us, but I don’t remember what it was.

The last was only a few months ago. That was a last that will stick with me.

They like to read on their own now. At night or whenever. I understand it and appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it.

Over the years we went from reading picture books and small short stories to entire series of novels. I didn’t keep count but I know that I have read, out loud, at least 50 novels to my kids.

Some of them I did voices for the different characters. Some I didn’t. Some were so dull I would tune out and think about something else while I said the words on the page. Some I had to fight back tears to read certain scenes. During some of them, everyone was fighting back tears. Doing that every night. Reading stories out loud. That’s the sort of thing that wears a groove into your heart.

Giving that up, giving up reading to them wasn’t something I wanted to do. Of course there are lasts. I knew that this would be one of them. I knew it, but I don’t have to like it.

I know that when the next book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series comes out, I will likely read it on my own, as will they. We will be able to talk about it and discuss it and share it in the way that adults and young adults typically share stories, but I probably won’t read it out loud to them. That stings a little. But for them and for me I know it’s okay. Things change and just as there are firsts, there are lasts. As long as everyone is safe and healthy, lasts are something we all just need to accept. I know it’s more difficult for me than it is for them.

Don’t be too surprised if I start reading some of these posts and recording them. I’ll just call it therapy.

657

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 am no expert welder. Far from it. But the studio had a stick welder, and I was one of the few student who had experience stick welding. I was sort of deputized by the professors and grad students to assist anyone who wanted to learn to weld. The result was that I did a lot of basic welding for a while. One evening there was even a line of people waiting for me to tack something up for them so that they could attempt to run a bead. At least a few of those ended in the student burning through the metal and asking me if I could fill it back in for them so the could grind it smooth again.

The end result of that time was that I got at least a little better at welding.

Then I spent literal decades not welding at all.

A few days ago, I broke one of our exercise machines. I knew it might break. In fact it had broken in that exact place before and I had roughly tacked it together with a cheap mig welder that I got at Canadian Tire.

Before this, I had never used a mig welder. I did a very poor job of it, so, of course the weld didn’t hold.

This time I was determined to actually get it right, so instead of just sort of winging it, I looked up some videos on mig welding and learned the proper techniques. Turns out it isn’t super complicated and my new welds are hundreds of times better than the old one.

I did run out of wire partway through the job, but I finally feel like I got the hang of it again.

Welding and grinding this part reminded me of something else. I really love the smell of burning metal. It’s probably horrifically toxic, but it’s a good smell.

653

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

This week, the people who worked at Giant Bomb purchased it. It has now become what it always should have been. A fully independent games media, news, critique and comedy website. The people who own it could build it up or drive it off a cliff, but either way, it won’t be because they are trying to please an advertiser or pivoting to serve corporate whims.

For what it’s worth, I think that the site has done some of the best work it ever has in the past couple of years. If the people doing that work are the new owners, Giant Bomb is probably in very good hands.

I’m excited to see what they do.

652

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

There was, of course, a need for someone to host such things. Radio DJs became video VJs. Someone who could throw to the next three minute clip and maybe conduct an interview or two. The hosts were always secondary to the content, the music videos.

When MTV, and then MuchMusic, launched in the early 80s, there were literally not enough music videos produced to fill an entire day of programming. That meant a lot of the hosts vamping to fill air time.

In the early days of MuchMusic it was fairly easy to tell that this was a scrappy operation. Maybe a dozen or so people just doing their best to keep an entire television station up and running. That meant that you, as the audience, got a lot of time with the hosts. They were trying to make something slick and well produced, but it leaked around the edges.

I’m not sure when, or even if, they figured it out but fairly soon, the hosts became as big a draw to the channel as the music videos. Their quips, interactions and ad-libs. Real, authentic personalities were why the audience came and stayed. That’s the sort of authenticity that only happens when you don’t have enough money or people to make something slick and well produced.

In the late 90’s, video streaming and on demand video were just starting up. Home internet fast enough to deal with streamed video wasn’t exactly commonplace, but a few pioneers started give it a try. Most failed quickly. Some failed due to lack of resources. Some due to lack of audience. Others failed due to gross mismanagement. You know, the normal ways companies die. Not one of them died because video streaming was the wrong business to be in.

My favorite industry to follow is, and always has been, video games. As soon as people were able to stream video, I knew that video commentary and reporting on video games was soon to follow. Not highly produced, timed, and packaged TV content either. This stuff would be made by people as interested in the game industry as their audience. I found a few.

I remember bringing a copy of a video from the AllGames Network to the animation studio where I was working at the time. Most people didn’t seem that interested. One person said that it seemed amateurish. I remember thinking then, that is what you want. Not badly done video work, but scrappy, authentic work. They started other shows and joined the Pseudo streaming video company. The whole thing was local UHF channel levels of bootstrapped, but it was streamed from a studio in New York to anywhere in the world.

It was authentic, and I knew it couldn’t last. Eventually those people went on to start the G4 channel. The shows were better produced. They had flashy intros and music. They didn’t feel authentic. This wasn’t a person who loves a thing talking to you, another person who loves that thing. This was a filtered and distilled version of that. A packaged thing made to appeal to advertisers. Prettier, but less authentic.

By the mid-2000s, streaming video had proven itself. The next big entertainment platform would be a series of audio and video streaming web sites. Of course, video game journalists were on the forefront of that. There were several groups that tried it, but the pattern was always the same.

Some people from editorial would manage to get enough of a budget to get a few people on camera to talk about games. The people on camera would put way more of themselves into it than the production warranted. The result would be something scrappy, a bit clunky, and extremely authentic.

That authentic thing would get attention, and someone higher up the corporate ladder would take notice. They would think that it looked amature or janky, but it would also cost a lot more to produce that slick, polished product that would appeal to advertisers. So they would shut it down. Why put money into a product that you can’t sell. The problem with that thinking is, authenticity draws an audience.

By the time Giant Bomb started in 2008, several companies had tried, and failed, to create a streaming channel about video games. Most of them had the right idea. Create videos that speak to your audience, grow that audience, sell advertisers on the size and dedication of the audience, not on the quality of the video being produced. Stay authentic and you can’t lose.

Giant Bomb had been around for seventeen years. In all that time people higher on the corporate ladder never really figured out the secret. The secret is, there is no secret. Let the VJs VJ, let the hosts talk. Let them connect with their audience and then sell advertisers on the size and dedication of that audience. Seems simple enough.

Well, maybe whatever new thing emerges from the husk of Giant Bomb will be the one that gets it right. I suppose we will see.

650

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 know that might make some sense. Old guy, old games. Except these weren’t old games, like nostalgic from my childhood games, these were games from somewhere in the vicinity of the last generation of consoles. Maybe a bit older than that. So, some solidly PS4, late PS3 type games. In the orbit of ten years old.

I do a lot of going back and looking at games that were made many decades ago. Games that feel like they are from a different time. Mostly because they are. Games that have a very different feel. A different sensibility.

Games from late in the PS3 or anywhere in the PS4 lifespan, don’t actually feel that different from games that came out a few months ago. In the entire history of video games, that is a strange thing.

If you picked any two games ten years apart from each other, at any time in the history of this medium, which I’ll admit, only really spans about five decades, they would feel like completely different beasts.

Ten years before Super Mario Bros. Jerry Lawson is coming up with the idea for the first game cartridge. Pong is still a pretty neat thing, and almost every video game is a very simple black and white experience.

Ten years after Super Mario Bros. the selection seems limitless. You could play through a hand painted wonderland in Yoshi’s Island, or pilot fully 3D hovercraft at breakneck speed in Wipeout. If you time jumped from one to the other, the games from 1995 would have seemed like magic.

By 2005, video games had become highly interactive 3D worlds like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Massively Multiplayer Online games let thousands of players connect, cooperate, and compete with one another in shared game worlds. Maybe these games are slightly more recognizable to players from 1995, but how people play them it wildly different.

There are many video games from 2015 that are still running, and still play very similar today. I play Rocket League semi-regularly. It has been tweaked behind the scenes, but it is largely the same game as it was a decade ago. Caves of Qud was released in early access in 2015. It was fully released a few months ago.

For all of video games five or six decade history, technology has pushed forward at such a breakneck pace that the art of the medium never settled. There were no classics of the medium that you could confidently suggest to someone new the video games. A person who has never seen Jaws, will still enjoy Jaws. A person who has never seen The Shawshank Redemption, or The Sound of Music, or so very many other movies could be handed a copy and they will probably enjoy it in the same way that audiences did when those films were new. You can’t give someone Breakout and expect that it will hold their attention for long.

The graphics and sound might be slightly less wowing in a game from a decade ago, but only slightly. And it’s not like there aren’t massive changes in technology and advances in the art of making games, there are. But just like Jaws and Jurassic Park both still land the same with audiences, even with decades between them, I think we have hit a similar place with video games. We have hit the point where the medium can grow.

One of my favourite pieces of art across all mediums and of all time, is a video game. Several are video games actually, but I am thinking of one in particular that uses the medium in such a unique and perfect way, but still has something important and human to say. Outer Wilds came out several years ago now, but I can’t imagine it will be any less potent in another decade or two. That is where this art form is now. It‘s not a gimmick or a diversion or a technical trick. It is an artistic medium where people removed by distance and time from their audience can still make a calculated impact.

Video games are great. You should go play some. New or old, because it just doesn’t matter anymore.

647

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

There is a lot of backlash against generative AI, specifically the models and tools that create its version of imagery, music, and creative writing. It can be easy for advocates of these tools to claim that any criticism of gen AI tools comes from a place of sour grapes and whining. After all, they say, gen AI tools are coming for artists jobs. That is both a tiny bit right, and entirely wrong. Let me explain.

Generative AI tools, the kinds that create art, are fascinating. They can iterate on patterns, often starting from little more than pseudo-random noise, until they create an image or bit of music that is recognizable as art. That is, and you will have to admit this even if you don’t like the results it produces, amazing. I even think it can be useful, just not in the way that is currently getting a lot of buzz.

Much of the backlash against gen AI tools is that they, necessarily, use the art of human creators to do what they do. Human art is just fodder for the machine and much of it is stolen, as none of the original creators gave permission for their art to be fed into the AI model. This is all one hundred percent correct and true. Gen AI tools do copy from human artists, and those human artists should have the rights to their works respected. This isn’t just me stating how I feel about the whole situation, this is how copyright law in most of the world works. If a company duplicates your work, for any reason, you should be compensated for that, or at the very least, you should be aware of it. And Gen AI tools do duplicate the artwork, in sort of a weird mish-mashy, cuisinart sort of way, but it is, provably, copied into a digital data-model.

So the artsies got that one right. The companies behind Gen AI models do steal copyrighted works to build their systems. Which is stupid, since there are many-many sources of copyright free or licensable art available. It would have honestly cost them very little to operate on the right side of that whole issue. But that’s not even my problem with Gen AI tools. But maybe I should get into what I think they can be good for first.

Photoshop, and other digital image manipulation tools, have had something like a generative fill, or content aware fill, for quite a while. This tool does a similar thing as most Gen AI tools. It creates a new bit of image to patch in an area with new content. Say you had a photo of a beach with a lighthouse over on the right side. You like the photo, but wish it were about twenty percent wider and that the lighthouse sat closer to two thirds of the way across the composition and that there was more beach and rocks on the right side of the photo. Content aware fill can help you to accomplish that. It will create some new beach over on the right and do it’s best to blend it all in. Again, it’s pretty amazing. Now, these tools won’t do this automatically, and it will take the work of a skilled photo manipulator to do a really good job of it, but this is an example of an artist using Gen AI as a tool to do something that would have been difficult, or even impossible, without it. I’m certain that there are many examples of similar tools used for music production, film production, wood carving, tile design, etc, etc, etc. But at the core of the work will be a person making choices. And here is were I think a lot of the hyped Gen AI stuff will always come up short, no matter how much computer power you throw at them.

Humans are humans. We have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Other hominids, for a few million years before that. Animals that would eventually evolve into humans, maybe five hundred or so million years before that. That is a lot of time. A lot of iteration. A lot of refinement. Our brains run on a fraction of the power of a typical computer, but process information with a complexity that we struggle to comprehend and are no where near replicating in a digital model. When you tell a computer to create art, that is the problem that you are trying to solve.

The problem is humans. The problem isn’t replicating an art style, or building a coherent song. The problem is people. Humans don’t even fully understand other humans, but we do know how to solve the human problem. We do know how to communicate, connect, and empathize. We have to, because solving the human problem is what keeps us alive.

We instinctively know what choice of words, what series of notes, what daub of color, will strike another human emotionally. We know what makes us tick. Even if we can’t always explain why.

I’m not even saying that there is anything special about humans. I think we are a solvable problem. I think an intelligence that isn’t us, could relate and interact with us. It’s just very, very hard. Much more difficult than our current AI tools are capable of solving. Humans are a more complicated problem than the hypsters are letting on.

We didn’t learn how to solve humans from our parents, we didn’t gradually build up a model for it as we grew. It is built into our cells. It’s fundamental to who we are as animals. It’s how we are built. It’s how we were built over millions and millions of years. It’s the only way we have made it this far.

That’s it. That’s the problem that a generative AI art machine needs to solve if whoever created it wants it to churn out art that doesn’t feel synthetic to human eyes, ears, and thoughts. It needs to be human. Or at least a really good simulation of one.

We ain’t there yet.

Current gen AI tools sort of average out all of the art that they have absorbed (stolen?) to present the viewer with something that seems similar to what a human would make. And of course it does, because humans already made all that art, it’s just been jumbled up and rearranged by a predictive algorithm to provide the nearest guess at what a human would have made. When it gets that guess right, it can look wonderful. It can be a useful tool. It can help an artist move a lighthouse a kilometer down the beach. When it gets it wrong, it will look exactly like what it is, a computers best approximation of what a human might have done.

You know who solves that problem with a shockingly high success rate? Humans. It’s not that Gen AI is a bad tool. It’s not, in fact it can be a great tool. It’s just not being used to solve the right problems at the moment.

643

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Most of my setup is based around a couple of Raspberry Pi single board computers running Dietpi Linux, a Debian Linux that has been optimized to run on very lightweight hardware. The name might imply that you need to run it on a Raspberry Pi, but it’s really just the same base OS as Ubuntu so it can run on whatever computer you have. A lot of ARM based computers, and pretty much 100% of X86 computers. If you have an old computer of any sort, you can probably run Dietpi on it.

Installed on one of them, I have Pihole, a dns based ad and pop up blocker. You point whatever device you have at that machine and it will preemptively block most ads before they ever have the chance to reach your computer or device. It really makes using the web much nicer. Even speeds up some slow sites.

On another I have Nextcloud for file storage and backup. Pretty much my own private Dropbox. It is possible to have Nextcloud set up for many users and use it to host and send files across the internet. But I ain’t having none of that. I’m using it as a NAS that automatically backs up the files that I want backed up. I know that I need offsite backup as well, and I have that mostly covered, or in the works.

Lastly, I have a Jellyfin server for movie and music rips. It’s nothing complicated, but it works.

I had most of this stuff up and running very quickly, but organizing and configuring it so that it works reliably and is expandable took some time. Now that it’s set up though, I really would never go back to paying for something like Dropbox. I like having easy access and control over the entire setup. Also I was born with the gene that makes me want to tinker with things, so really that’s probably what this whole thing was about anyway.

Now I may need to buy a rack… please, somebody stop me if I legitimately start shopping for a rack.

639

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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!

638

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.

never take the prompt literally. If the prompt is, say, breaking glass, don’t just make a game about breaking glass. Like a breakout clone where all the bricks are glass. That’s dull. Maybe you are in a submarine and you are trying to patch a leaking window before too much water comes in or it shatters and kills you. Maybe you are doing a workplace simulation and you are trying to break the glass ceiling. Maybe you doing a crossing that transparent bridge… wait. No. Squid Game already did that. Just do something that isn’t the most obvious thing and you will have so much more fun.
Combine prompts. If you happen to get more than one prompt, or even if you didn’t, mix a couple together. This seems like it would make it more difficult, but, strangely enough, I usually find it makes the entire process easier. Something about adding extra constraints seems to make it more clear what sort of idea to chase.
Arrive with an idea. Now don’t come in thinking that you will make a certain sort of game or a certain sort of story, but set yourself some goals. One game jam I came in and my only goal was to animate something. Another jam, I only wanted to do pixel art. If it’s a writing jam, think about writing something sad, or in a strange style. Arrive thinking that you will write a sonnet and then work the prompts into that structure. But, of course, be ready to ditch that structure if you come up with a better idea during the jam. It will happen.
Do something fun. Doing jams is stressful, but it can be a very positive sort of stress. If you aren’t having fun with an idea pretty much right away, you definitely won’t be having fun when you are trying to squash some impossible bug at 3am. Same goes for writing… except without the bugs. Fun doesn’t have to mean funny or light hearted either. Sometimes making something very grim can be fun.

If you do any, or all, of those your jam experience will be so much better, believe me.

637

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.

636

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while.

I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.

What I have done though, is learned a little more about how to use Obsidian.

This is the first time since I started using Obsidian that I have had to export something written in it to a manuscript format. I have worked on some stories here in this app, but I had them in other places and other apps where the formatting had already been worked out.

You might think that it should be easy. Pick a font, set your line spacing and done, right? I wish. There are a lot of differences between how obsidian treats text and how other apps, like Word, treat text. It’s much simpler and more flexible, but it’s also not what people reading short stories want to see. A standard Word .doc or .docx format file is just nicer to look at in a lot of software.

I have found a bunch of .css snippets that are starting to get the format looking right, and I have a handful of ways to export. Some are easy, but aren’t quite right. Some take a few more steps, but seem to get the job done.

I know this though. After a few weeks of pushing out formatted stories, I will probably have a solid workflow. And that’s good, because I have a few stories here that I have to try to sell.

634

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I hope everyone is having a happy holiday.

632

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have much to write for this one.

I thought about writing some stuff about the games I’m working on, but none of that is in a place to talk about.

I thought about writing about writing, but that is moving forward slowly, and I will have more to talk about soon so it will have to wait.

I thought about writing some stuff about using Linux because that is something I have been doing a bit more of recently, but that’s boring.

I could talk about games in general, but I sort of don’t want to.

It’s one of those between weeks. I have a list of topics that I can pull from when one of these between weeks pops its head up, but I thought about that too and decided, you know what, no.

Sometimes it’s okay to not have anything to write about.

So that’s what this post is.

Sometimes it’s okay to not have a thing to say. Sometimes I can just sit here and type just to feel the keys. And that’s not a problem. It’s not a failure. It’s just a slow week.

Every once in a while, that’s kind of nice.

629

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Making graphics for games is a bottomless task. No matter how deep you dig, you will always find more. More to learn. More tools, more tasks, more ways to build, and more ways to screw up.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. There are a handful of channels I watch for entertainment. Things I find entertaining at least. It is mostly a cavalcade of old man nerd shit. Something that involves a fair bit of soldering. The other channels I watch are some sort of art, or technical art thing. A drawing or painting exercise I want to try, a procedural modelling technique, or some new way to compress textures more efficiently. I honestly can’t get enough.

I don’t just watch them though. I try a lot of these techniques. I test them out. A little at a time. Most of the time I try them once and then put them back on the mental shelf to collect dust. I can imagine to some people that would seem like a waste of time. Maybe they are right.

On the other hand, the absolute mishmash of techniques that make up my 2D game (that is really 3D) might not be possible any other way.

I recently watched a video about the graphics capabilities of the Sega Megadrive / Genesis. Something about the way the palette on that console worked triggered a thought and that reminded me of a modern technique for creating dither patterns and quantizing color in a fragment shader. A few code searches later and I had assembled a rough test of this technique for my game.

Is this the most efficient way to work? Am I getting enough work done on the game? Probably not, depending on the metric you measure that sort of thing by. But this is how my brain makes connections and how I work. With one foot firmly in the technical and the other in the artistic.

With that said, I also tested out some better ways to use color in my paintings, an area I know I struggle with. Those results are a little less easy to quantify. Shaders and code, though still creative, are a bit more concrete.

Maybe next week I can post up a few screen shots or a video of how it’s coming along.

628

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was going to write something about game dev and making graphics for games and how there are so many layers and intermeshing systems at work that it’s amazing anything ever gets made. I stashed that post for a later date.

Today, I’m just going to complain about snow for a very brief moment. It snowed this morning, so I had to shovel the driveway and sidewalk. Then my kids bus didn’t show up, so I drove them to school. Slowly. I will have to shovel the snow again later today and probably several more times this week. It’s difficult, but I don’t think I would want it any other way.

There was a brief window in my life where it looked like I might spend an entire winter without seeing snow. I did end up catching the end of the snowy season, so I can still say I have never not known snow.

Snow can be a hassle. It makes a lot of thing harder. I will still ride my bike through it. I will still go out and walk in it.

So maybe I will complain about snow, but I’m not sure what I would do without it.

627

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I like working with fonts. That should probably come as no surprise. I was, after all, a designer of signs and posters and banners, etc. for years. Working with fonts is a big part of the job. Learning and relearning the rules of shape, and spacing, and balance. Learning them and then breaking them. Fonts are one of the actually fun parts of design work.

I think I have only made my own fonts, or subsets of fonts a very few times. A few weeks ago, I did it again.

If you do any design work, you should check out fontstruct.com. It is all at once a source for free or permissive licence fonts, and a toolset to create your own.

Any time I did this work in the past I either had to use complicated, task specific, tools, or I would bend Illustrator or Affinity or some other vector based drawing tool toward creating a font. A task they can do, but aren’t particularly suited to.

Fontstruct on the other hand is almost too easy to use. It offers very quick tools to get you going, but also contains a much deeper set, if you really want to dig into font creation work.

Maybe someday soon I can post up some of the font that I worked on, but for now I will keep that under wraps. I think I just have to go tweak the uppercase M, and then I will be more happy with it. And maybe the Z. And the W. … fonts.

625

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using obsidian for notes and writing for a couple of months now. I’m surprised. Normally, when I’m using a tool like this, I would have found all sorts of limitations and problems by now. Something that would annoy me enough, or prove inconvenient enough that I would just stop using it. I haven’t, not so far anyway.

For a short while I used Scrivener for writing. It was good. Useful, but weirdly limited. And since I only had it as a pc application and I do most of my writing on an iPad with a wireless keyboard now, that just proved too much of a barrier.

For many years I used google docs for writing. It was available on any device I had at hand, and it was pretty easy to use, but I could never get over some of the awful export problems I had. Writing a blog post like this would be simple, but I would have to jump through a few hoops to actually post that post. Exporting, converting, checking that links or images didn’t get broken. I would often need to use a pc to post since I couldn’t get the files I needed in the places I needed on a phone or iPad.

Not only that, but google docs on iOS has a bad habit of popping the OS keyboard toolbar up over the words you are writing. It doesn’t know how to not be in the way. I would often find myself writing a line or two completely blind since the words were under the toolbar. It was an annoyance I got used to, but I still didn’t like it.

Obsidian has never done that, and even if it did I can actually scroll the page up manually or I can turn on typewriter scrolling that keeps the line you are working on more or less in the center of the page. Really useful for writing long documents or stories comfortably.

If I used google keep or notepad or notes to keep some link or idea or list, I would often forget I had even made the note. I would look weeks later and see that it said I should buy batteries or something. I haven’t only just started to use obsidian for this, but it seems a much better general purpose notebook than keep. I think I like that I get to organize it myself and it isn’t trying to help me out. It isn’t trying to be clever. It’s just a notebook.

One of the best things that I have found is that you can add the link to a YouTube video on a canvas and it will let you play that video right from the canvas. It’s an absolute game changer for organizing technical tutorials or videos on some esoteric art topic. Works for web pages too. You can scroll and read them right in the canvas panel. I recently wrote a few complex shaders and obsidian proved invaluable in keeping all of these sources organized.

And just today I discovered that the IPad version allows you to split screen two different documents. So I can have a story I’m working on right beside my notes and research document, because I always have a notes and research document for every story. If it’s a thousand word story I probably have a notes and research document that’s at least that length, if not longer. It’s just how I roll.

Having two documents up at once is an absolute game changer for writing on the iPad. I know it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of programs that do that, and I could always just use a PC and have as many windows open as I want, but writing on the iPad is very comfortable and gets me into a flow more easily than using my pc. The pc is for pc things. Big art tools and coding. Writing fits very comfortably on my iPad.

I haven’t really run into any roadblocks or inconveniences yet, and I don’t see any on the horizon. I used google docs for a lot of years, so I suppose that’s the record to beat. Well, obsidian, do you have it in you to take the title?

624

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been following Formula 1 pretty casually for a decade or so. I’m a fan, but not really a super dedicated one. I usually watch the highlights, check the championship standings, follow some of the driver drama. I don’t really have any specific team or driver that I cheer for. I just like to see some good racing. It’s rare that I watch a whole race, but this weekend I did.

I got everyone in my house to watch the Netflix show Drive to Survive, because I knew that these race car drivers and team management people were wonderful weirdos. As long as the documentary team was good and did their job well, they couldn’t help but create interesting drama. They did. My family got hooked.

It’s pretty common for me to find my kids watching the race highlights on a Sunday morning. We talk about the standings. We talk about how certain drivers will or won’t perform. We enjoy it.

I can probably count on two hands the amount of full races that I have watched live. It’s a sport that caravans all over the world so some of the race times are pretty early in the morning where I am. This one was only an hour time difference for us, so I watched the whole race live. It was great.

Even though Formula 1 is extremely technical where data driven strategy could mean the difference between scoring points or being completely out of the race no matter how skilled the driver is, the sport has a purity to it. Every driver on the grid is in control of a super powered speed machine and even though some cars are better than others, any one of them has the potential to score points. And every season there are enough changes to the cars that last year’s champions could struggle to even make the top 10. It all comes down to that combination of car and driver on that day.

Honestly though, I think I just like it because it’s something I enjoyed alone, but now I can also enjoy it with my kids.

600

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you happen to be reading this where it lives on my website, you will probably notice that it all looks a little different. A little simpler. A few of the links and menus are missing. Welcome to the new home of whatever it is I’m doing here.

For the moment, there will be a few broken links and missing features. I will be gradually adding back all of that stuff, and hopefully making it a little easier to search for old posts and images here.

I will be adding a page of external links to places like my Artstation gallery or any of my published stories. With any luck, by the time you are reading this, that page will be up.

There are a handful of other things that I will be cleaning up, gradually, over time. I would like to make sections and tags more of a thing here. Tags for posts on writing or game dev, tags for entries in my Best Games series. Things like that. Doing that effectively was always sort of out of reach with the old website. Now that I have full control over all the data, it should at least be doable. I might have to write some small programs to get it done, but that’s okay. I don’t hate programming. I’m just not that great at it.

Finally, at some point I plan to dress the new digs up a bit. Change out the art, maybe play with some color here and there. Just make it overall a touch more pleasant. And don’t we all just want things to be a touch more pleasant.

519

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I started writing this blog, it was a sort of dev diary. I didn’t post once a week and I titled, rather than numbered, each post. While I thought that no one would likely read what I wrote here, on the off chance that they might, I tried to make it a somewhat pleasant experience. Somewhere along the line, I decided to both switch to one post a week and stop worrying that people might read it. That’s why the posts are numbered rather than titled, and I sometimes repeat myself. Like right now. I have written a very similar thing in an earlier post, but I don’t think that anyone has read all of them, so I can probably slip it by without anyone catching on.

There was one other thing that I decided when I switched to one post a week. I decided that this would be a place where I advocated for good things. Usually that takes the form of commenting on Best Games, video games from the past that are great and deserve praise and recognition. Usually those games are fairly old, and have had countless articles and other, more important, blog posts written about them. I don’t like to Best Games a game that is new or current or ‘hot’.

I’m going to break that trend here. Also, I’m not advocating for a game this time.

It’s pretty rare that the first few minutes of a TV show make my eyes go wide. I like a good show, but even when they start strong, most shows will have a lull in them that makes me think ‘oh, the creators of this didn’t think that hard about this part. It’s just filler until they get to the next set piece’.

The new Andor Star Wars show doesn’t do that. Every shot matters, and every bit of background minutia has been considered. This is a TV series made by people with a deep love of Star Wars, but also by people with a deep love of stories. How stories grow and build. How one moment that seems inconsequential, but still sticks in your mind, can become the spark for wonderful, powerful scenes down the line.

This is a TV show that expects you to pay attention. You have to bring yourself to the material. There are things happening when the camera isn’t on them. There are characters saying things counter to what they mean. There are threads working through the background, and you have to keep them in mind while watching a scene in another locations with other characters.

Now, they could easily fumble this show. They could have a great setup and fail to pay it off. But I don’t think so. There is too much care and affection in this show. The creators know where it’s going, and all the steady pacing is deliberate. When those threads start to entangle with each other, I think the payoffs will be well worth it.

When the first episode ended I wanted to cheer. This was a Star Wars show made by people who love Star Wars and it was like they were saying “just go on this ride with us, it’s gonna be great”.

I’m on the ride and so far, I’m loving it.

427

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are in the time of lists. At the transition point from year to year it’s customary to create lists. The best of, the worst of. The things that are memorable from the year gone by. A ranked index of towering works.

I don’t plan on doing that.

While we are closing out a year, we are also closing out a decade, and as far as video games are concerned maybe the best decade on record. Instead of making a “best of” list, I have written a completely unordered grab bag of games that I have enjoyed over the last 10 years. There were a lot of other games that I played and thought were great. This is far from comprehensive, but if you were looking for a good game to play, I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the bunch below. I’ll probably cover some of these games in longer Best Games pieces in the future, but I will keep the raving to a minimum here. I’ll limit the commentary to why these games were important to me.

Lets Go!

The Legend of Zelda : A Link Between Worlds

I played most of this game laying in bed waiting for one kid or another to wake up. It was a salve for the tension of not really sleeping a full night for a few years straight. Aside from that personal bit of nostalgia it was just a solid game. It’s like they were in the middle of a remake of Link to the Past and decided instead to go in a whole new direction. It feels classic and timeless in all the ways that you would want.

Portal 2

I played through the entirety of the co-op mode of Portal 2 with my oldest son. He would have been around 4. Sometimes it took a few tries to get through a particularly tricky puzzle that required accurate timing, but we did it. Now he plays Doom Eternal on Nightmare, so that early practice must have stuck.

We still sometimes talk about the lemons.

Metal Gear Solid V : The Phantom Pain

I Don’t think I have played a single game for as many hours as I did with Metal Gear Solid V. I played every mission. Every mission. Side stuff. Stuff you didn’t need to do. Stuff that didn’t matter. I ran every one of those missions multiple times. I think it was the freedom. You could literally approach most of the missions in that game from any direction with any equipment. You could sneak, you could shoot, you could use the games systems against it. I didn’t think we would ever see such an intricate framework of systems so expertly implemented. I hope there are more games like it.

Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night

There have been a lot of games that purported to be the spiritual successor to Castlevania Symphony of the night, but I think only Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night can truly claim that crown. It takes everything in Symphony and extends it, expands it, reworks it into a fully modern game that plays like you remember Symphony playing like without just aping a game that came out on the first playstation.

Mass Effect 2 and 3

The first Mass Effect game came out in 2007 and I won the 360 version of it in a giveaway at a microsoft game developers meetup sometime early in 2008. I don’t think that I actually had a 360 to play it on until sometime in 2009. It is possible that I played that entire series this past decade, but I don’t really remember. Still, if I could only include the second and third entry of the Mass Effect series, that would be good enough. Mass Effect kept me up late when I really needed the sleep. There are characters and moments in that series that I will hold with me for as long as I possibly can.

Into the Breach

The simplicity and tightness of the game loop for Into the Breach is absolutely stunning. I think the only game that I have come across that is equal to it is Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, but that was too old to make the list.

Titanfall 2

The first person shooter is such well worn territory at this point that there aren’t many that can surprise me. Titanfall 2 is endlessly inventive and no mechanic ever overstays its welcome. It’s the sort of game that I can see myself replaying every now and then and wondering why no one makes ‘em like that anymore.

Dark Souls

I started Dark Souls a few times before I figured out what it was. I had to go back and play Demon’s Souls first before I got it. Dark Souls is a video game ass video game. It is what the makers of old NES side scrolling platformers would have made if they were suddenly gifted modern computer hardware and software tools. It is a modern game with a very old design attitude. I should probably go finish Dark Souls 3. I have a character stuck somewhere in the first third of that game.

Super Mario Odyssey

Most games frontload all of the good stuff. In the first few hours you will have seen everything the developers had in them. You will then spend the remaining hours of the game doing those same tasks over and over. For some games that’s enough. Others will start to drag. Super Mario Odyssey just keeps getting better and more fun the deeper you go. Every level is new and different. Very few games are so full of joy.

Super Mario 3D World

I came to this game late. It had been out for a few years before we got it, and I didn’t play it for probably another year more. When I did play it I didn’t want to put it down. Mario games have never been the sort that gives you that “one more level” feeling, but this one absolutely does. I really hope they make another.

Beat Saber

Any time we show someone VR, Beat Saber is one of the first games that we load up. It is a game that could not exist without VR. It just wouldn’t work. It’s more fun than pretty much any other rhythm game I have played and it’s simple enough that everyone gets what to do by their second or third attempt. It’s one of the only ‘must play’ VR experiences.

Dishonored and Dishonored 2

They went and made a world so beautifully ugly that I want to walk around in it. I want to be there, in that space. I want to be in Dunwall smelling the rot and feeling the roof shingles. The magical ninja power fantasy is one of the best in any game, but I think it is the setting that really makes me love the Dishonored series.

The Outer Wilds

The Outer Wilds is like a magic trick. It gets you looking in one direction while it is gradually unravelling a beautiful, tragic, exultant tale right under your nose. When you suddenly see the clockwork perfection of it, it’s staggering. The fate of an entire universe all woven together through little snippets of investigation and evidence gathering. I don’t know that I have ever played a game so filled with pleasant melancholy. The Outer Wilds is one of the best games I have ever played. Ever.

I’ll end it there. I could go on, and there are a few games that I cut from the list. None of them were bad, and at least a few would be someone else’s favorite of the decade. Like I said, this isn’t a ranked list, just some Best Games I look forward to writing about in the future.

280

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t title any of these posts. I don’t title any of the stories I have written and posted here. I realize that can be a bit annoying if anyone was trying to find a particular post. You can search for strings in the search bar that sits just up and to the right on the desktop version of the site. The string “Best Games” will, for example, return every post in the “Best Games” series where I examine why a specific game is good or important.

I posted most of the stories in parts. I would work on them, post what was done, edit, append, and repost them over and over until they were complete. Searching for those might be a little tricky.

Since I now have 6 short stories and 2 more in the works, I thought I should organize a bit. The menu now includes a new dropdown that has all the completed stories and the unfinished one that is the furthest along. You are welcome to read any of them, but the unfinished ones will be in a constant state of chaos and awful sentence structure. So, you know, fair warning.

I won’t post the stories here anymore, but I will post links and updates as they progress and take shape.

I will still be writing a new post for the front of the blog every monday, but some of them might just be a link to updates and progress over on one of the story pages.

028

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Really short update today.

I’ve just been doing some more work on creating and setting up models for import into the game. UV unwraps, zeroing out transforms, organizing materials, that sort of thing. I have a couple of longer post and Best Games in various states of construction, but none of them felt done enough to post today. I’ll polish one of them up for next week.

If anyone is interested in any longer technical writeups, something on modelling or maybe a video on some topic, let me know. I would like to try doing a video on some topic, but every time I think of something, I always go “nah. that would be boring”. I’ll let you be the judge, what would you not find boring?

003

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Quiet Moments.

The Walking Dead is the first game that has ever made me cry.

Games, sports included, are typically full of gung ho bombast. There are moments of high energy, and deep strategy, but your motivation to attempt these tasks, is kept light. Games feed our power fantasy and escapist needs. Games are consequence free conflict. Precise management of time and space. The best games are usually honed to eliminate any extraneous elements, anything that could obstruct our fun. There is a very narrow emotional band being targeted by most games, somewhere between tension and adrenaline. Time and again they successfully hit that mark. When a game makes you feel something new, it’s worth thinking about why.

I think a case could be made for calling The Walking Dead interactive film, rather than a game, but screw that. I’m tossing it into the game pile. It resembles its ancestors, games like Sam & Max or Full Throttle, but it has jettisoned a lot of the busy work of those games. Pixel hunts and puzzle solutions 7 steps deep are not to be found in The Walking Dead.

Everything that makes up your basic adventure game is either pared down or abandoned. Each episode is only a couple of hours long. There is a single save slot and autosaves are frequent. Most dialogue choices are on a timer that forces you to think and act quickly. All of these design choices drive the player forward at a relentless pace. Nothing points to offering a broader emotional canvas than any other game. The dialog and characters are well written, but not more so than other games of this type, and certainly not as well as the best movies and television. So what is different about this game?

There are two very significant advancements that Tell Tale has contributed to interactive storytelling. The first is the ability to do nothing. Most games wait for you to do anything that triggers its simulation to move forward. If you do nothing, the narrative will not advance. When the dialog choices appear on the screen in The Walking Dead one of the options is always to do or say nothing. Since the dialog system is on a timer, if you don’t make a choice, doing or saying nothing becomes your choice. The other characters react as if you have said nothing and the narrative continues affected by that choice. Occasionally, just shutting up and watching the other characters deal with their own shit is a valid option. The narrative carries on without your input or your permission. This puts the player, accustomed to being at the helm of these stories, back on their heels a bit. Suddenly the choices presented to you have real, in the moment, weight. Do you instigate a fight, attempt to break it up, or stand back and watch it happen. You only have a moment to choose, and the game will likely autosave soon after this. You are in this moment and there are no takebacks. In the face of this pressure, inaction is always an option. You quickly gain acute insight into every secondary characters motivations. When those few seconds come, choosing the exact response, with just the right nuance you need to convey is critical. At least it feels critical. Your relationships with the other members of your group feel critical. Especially when you do nothing.

On the opposite end of the tension spectrum, The Walking Dead provides several opportunities per episode to spend a long time performing an inconsequential task. These are quiet moments. Memorable ones are pushing a child on a swing and shovelling dirt. You could opt to bypass these moments and push on with the game. In the context of the narrative, these moments offer a small relief from the constant tension, while building the anticipation of oncoming tragedy. You know bad things are coming. The game has promised you that much. While it won’t directly affect the story, every moment you spend on these tasks, is more time for you, the player, to think about what has happened and what is coming. The authors of The Walking Dead are using the players own experiences and thoughts to strengthen their story. Books and movies have been doing this forever, offering up a quiet moment for the audience process what they are watching or reading, filtering the story through the only thing we have, our own experiences. Games are about management of time and space. Quiet moments are not usually part of the vocabulary. Every member of an audience has likely experienced love, loss, tension, fear, anger and a spectrum of other emotions. Tell Tale has used those quiet moments to draw on the emotions of their audience as well as any author could. The only difference is, here, you are a participant.

When narrative is added to a game it is tucked in alongside hyperkinetic play, and allowed no room to breath. Emotional story beats often feel forced, or they are mired in twitch action scenarios, never giving the player a chance to process what they have seen and heard. Worse, most games steal control from the player and present their emotional moments in a cut scene, almost physically distancing the player from what they are watching. Cut scenes undermine the main strength of the medium, interactivity. Where film is a “show don’t tell” medium, games are a “do don’t show” medium. A few other games have had some strong emotional moments. Bastion, Shadow of the Colossus, Bioshock, Journey, and the last few hours of Mass Effect 3 stand out as strong emotional storytelling. All of them worked best in their quiet moments, and rarely steal control from the player. They were able to shut up long enough for me to hear what they had to say.

I had included a brief description of the few moments that I found particularly tear jerking, but I thought that was a bit spoilery for a game this new. If you are at all interested, I would say you should just go play it. It is short and cheap. I think it’s well worth your time.

If you have any other examples or moments from games that you found affecting, or if you just want to tell me I’m a sissy, go ahead and put that in the comments.