Blog

Language is a funny thing. It only works when everyone is on the same page, but it’s so large that actually getting everyone in compliance would be an impossible task even if we all agreed to it. Loan words slip in, meanings change, euphemisms become canonized, words and phrases undergo reanalysis, reinterpretation, rebracketing, it’s a ...

The Case of the Sleeping Beauties is a novella that I wrote back in 2015. Ambitiously subtitled “a Utah Sinclair mystery”, it did not make any significant splash. It’s got 67 lifetime sales, a 3.8 rating, and a single proper review. Some of this is simply a lack of marketing: back in 2015 I had ...

Worth the Candle is 1.6 million words and covers a lot of characters, themes, and events. The average Pixar movie is around 90 minutes. How would you stuff one into the other? The first answer is that you wouldn’t, obviously. But that’s boring, so I’m going to try to game out how I would attempt it, if ...

My web serial, Worth the Candle, has been adapted into a webcomic. This was thanks to my agent, who I have a great fondness for, since without him I would have to spend time trying to make connections and call people and do a bunch of work that I don’t know how to do and ...

This is the second part of my review of Factorio: Space Age, covering the planets. This will have more spoilers than the previous section, but also include more cohesive thoughts on the expansion as a whole. Vulcanus Once you’ve built a spaceship, you have a choice of three planets to go to, and you can do them ...

Factorio is my favorite game of all time. I played it very early on, then periodically after that. When I started, the graphics were much uglier, there was no nuclear power, biters dropped little purple orbs you needed to use in science, ninety percent of the current QoL was missing, and it was still one ...

Let me lead with a score: 7/10. I overall enjoyed the core gameplay and thought that the story was completely mid, which normally would result in a better overall impression of a game. Unfortunately, the core gameplay was a lot weaker than it should have been owing to some of the game design decisions, and I ...

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, the game, in ...

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 to ...