Book Review: Metropolitan Man May 30th, 2024
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 as ...
Why to Write a Sex Scene May 29th, 2024
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 within novels, ...
Book Review: Sanderson’s Secret Projects May 07th, 2024
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 ...
TV Review: The Client List (NSFW) May 07th, 2024
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 ...
Game Review: Balatro April 28th, 2024
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 is worth ...
Game Review: Hogwarts Legacy April 28th, 2024
[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 up. ...
Game Review: Underhill April 09th, 2024
Note: This review contains no screenshots, because this game doesn’t actually exist.
The dwarves are mining, the bugbears are lumbering through the mushroom farms, the imps are scurrying to and fro, and all the traps at the entrance to the dungeon are armed and ready. From a bird’s eye view, it seems as though everything in ...
The Exclusionary Principle: Post Mortem July 18th, 2023
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 ...
Puzzling Out Puzzle Games July 13th, 2023
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, mostly to crystalize some thoughts that I’ve had while playing puzzle games, particularly in terms of what I like from them. A lot of what’s here is drawing from my experience of my favorite puzzle games like The Witness, Baba is You, Snakebird, A Monster’s ...
Adventures in AI Text Generation, pt 2 (of ???) July 08th, 2023
I’m still trying to get an LLM to write me a novel, and experiencing the first major setbacks while working on chapter 2. I’ve got an outline, a central conflict, a major payoff to some setups that need to be a part of early chapters, and am trying to get some kind of a workflow ...