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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Post mortems for the longer things I’ve written have become a bit of a tradition for me, and this one is coming hot on the heels of finishing. The body is still warm, which is the best time for a post mortem. Let’s dive right in! I worry that if I say SPOILERS you’ll think ...

I’ve been trying my hand at writing with the assistance of ChatGPT and occasionally other tools. Mostly, it sucks, delivering the occasional turn of phrase that I like but not having an understanding of how prose should flow and often eliding the things that are most interesting about a scene. I think there’s promise there ...

Thief, MidJourney This is one of those things I didn’t include in the original post, for a few reasons. The first is that it’s an incredibly long digression into legal, moral, technical, and practical matters, and the second is that I don’t find it all that interesting as it’s largely a social and philosophical discussion. Anyway, ...

This image was created by an AI, MidJourney. All I had to do was type in a prompt (“wildfire”) and aspect ratio. This AI is pretty good, but nowhere near the state of the art, and AI like it are, over the next few years, going to make art like this available within seconds at ...

This is my writing FAQ. There are many like it, but this one is mine. The purpose of this FAQ is largely to dissuade people from asking questions for which there are stock answers. These are all questions that I’ve seen a lot that I don’t want anyone to ever ask me unless there’s some ...

Having finally finished Elden Ring, playing probably more than I should have, I felt compelled to write a review of it, not of the “you should or should not buy this game” variety, but of the “this is what this game made me feel and what I felt was worth talking about” variety. Full ...