Author: alexanderwales

I’ll try to keep this one short. In theory, I am the sort of person that this game was made for. I played the original Final Fantasy 7 on the original Playstation around 1999, when I was thirteen years old. I have a lot of nostalgia for it. Unfortunately, it’s been 25 years. Doubly unfortunately, […]

I always read about what school shooters or wannabe assassins have to say. I read or at least skim through manifestos, most of which are really poorly written and usually just have badly misunderstood ideas that are copy-pasted from diverse places. I read social media posts and discord logs, where available. Some of this is […]

Rising Impact is a shonen sports anime about a third grader who is really ridiculously good at golf. This is a review, along with some thoughts on shonen sports anime and what makes them tick. Spoilers for the first season follow. I don’t watch a ton of anime, so tend to just go in blind […]

Cross-posted from my tumblr. Inspired by this post by @a-memory-a-distant-echo, this is a list of ongoing works-in-progress, where “in progress” I will define as “I have added at least one sentence in the last year as an indicator of actual mental load being used”. This does not include worldbuilding or planning documents, which spring up […]

I picked up The Ministry of Time when I was in Berkley. It was prominently placed, it had a bold and colorful cover, and I’m a sucker for time travel of any kind. When I brought it up to the counter, the cashier told me that it was one of her recent favorites and really […]

Spoilers follow. Content warning: death, transphobia, homophobia I don’t review most things I watch. I’m a writer, not a reviewer, and most things just sort of pass by having been consumed and thought about in a way that I don’t feel the need to share with others. I’ll be upfront: I Saw the TV Glow […]

This is not really a blog post proper, more of an update to an older set of posts made a year ago. Since that time, newer, bigger, and better models have come out. I gave a little talk about what it’s like to work with the AI and where my frustrations with it lie, particularly […]

[content warning: sexual violence] It’s been 10 years since I wrote Metropolitan Man, and last night I read it for the first time in almost that long. Since writing it, I’ve written over 4 million words, and hopefully, grown as a writer. I’ve also forgotten parts of the story, so was looking at it with […]

[content warning: sex] [spoiler warning: The Client List, Fingersmith, The Handmaiden, May December] This isn’t a blog post about how to write a sex scene. I haven’t written many of them, unless you include erotica, and in erotica the whole purpose of writing and reading is different. Here, I’m talking about sex scenes that exist […]

This is a review for all four of Sanderson’s “Year of Sanderson” books: Tress of the Emerald Sea, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, A Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and The Sunlit Man. Because these are all their own books, they’ll have their own sections, but this is at least partly a review […]

This is going to be a short review of a show from 2010 that I watched three episodes of. I would normally not review something that I watched so little of, and let it fade away like so many other shows that either aren’t good or aren’t for me, but this one is somehow sticking […]

The short version? Balatro is my game of the year right now, and there’s very little hope of anything else replacing it. I have my gripes, which I’ll get to, but it executes an interesting premise far, far better than it needed to. Roguelite Poker The basis of Balatro is making poker hands. Every hand […]

[Content warning: anti-Semitism, transphobia, politics] [Note from the future: I wrote the majority of this review shortly after playing this game, which was a while ago. I’m sick right now, and have a policy of working on things that aren’t my main writing while feeling sick, so decided to read this over and finish it […]

I wasn’t originally going to write a post mortem for this, but the final word count is above 80,000 words, and it’s certainly been a unique project, so fuck it, what do I have a blog for if not this? Spoilers for Worth the Candle follow. Link here, in case you haven’t read The Exclusionary […]