writing
Join my Patreon to get early access to posts, plus bonus material and a backlog of essays, fiction, and games! Join Word count is a useful metric for the length of a piece of writing. It’s not exact—words themselves vary in length of course—but it’s good
writing
Join my Patreon to get early access to posts, plus bonus material and a backlog of essays, fiction, and games! Join I have the dubious honor of being the translator of Maid: The Role-Playing Game, the first Japanese TTRPG to be released in English. I did so because I
worldbuilding
Join my Patreon to get early access to posts, plus bonus material and a backlog of essays, fiction, and games! Join I got into anime in the mid-1990s, back when it was a niche fandom that people mostly just found confusing rather than cool or uncool. We were huge
RiffTrax
Join my Patreon to get early access to posts, plus bonus material and a backlog of essays, fiction, and games! Join Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the biggest purveyor of the concept of riffing movies. They would take some old B-movie like Robot Monster or Teenagers From Outer Space
Gary Gygax
Back when Twitter was still Twitter, before it became the current hellscape, I ended up following some members of the Jewish community there. Part of it was that they’re good people (there are of course Jewish jerks out there, including Jews who are jerks to other Jews for strange
The Hero's Journey
The archetypal AD&D character progression echoes the Hero’s Journey, which YouTuber Maggie Mae Fish ruined for me by talking about problems with both The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Joseph Campbell’s wider beliefs. While the narrative archetype of the Hero’s Journey is a sturdy
For the past two years and some change I’ve been working from home and not socializing in-person nearly as much as I’d like. When my day job presented the opportunity to switch to a new team that would work from a nearby office, I was actually excited
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
A “cyberdeck” is a custom-built portable computer, usually based around a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer (SBC). Some are mounted inside heavy-duty cases for the apocalypse, others are rough assemblages of parts. Cases often come out of 3D printers, and keyboards are variously spare parts for
“Does it ever wake you in the middle of the night? The feeling that one day they will pass that foolish law or one just like it, and come for you? And your children?” —Magneto, X-Men (2000) X-Men is a big deal among superhero franchises. It went from
“This isn't even a reluctant superhero story. I'm just getting screwed over. Is this what you guys want?” —She-Hulk, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Social media has gotten weird, and not the good kind of weird. There are a lot of reasons for this, and
Okay, let’s do this one last time, yeah? For real this time. This is it. My name is Miles Morales. I was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for like two days, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest. —Miles Morales,
“You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” —Ultron, Avengers: Age of Ultron Thanks to the Comics Code, superhero media has a long history of sanitized stories. While American comics could be salacious enough that some clearly weren’t for children, their popularity among
“This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” —Woodsman, Twin Peaks: The Return Because of fan theories about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me being in part a critique of Silence of the Lambs
I’ve been working on my 90s anime comedy fantasy RPG Dragon World off and on for nearly a decade now, and I really need to finish and publish it, for a variety of reasons. When that’s out of the way I want to do some supplements, including alternate
David Lynch is known for not explaining things. In one interview he famously said that Eraserhead is his “most spiritual film,” and when the interviewer asked him to elaborate, he simply said, “No.” I became a huge fan of Twin Peaks over the past few years, and Maggie Mae Fish’
“It was the 80s. No one was too worried about the future.” —Janine, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire I’ve always been a fan of Ghostbusters, but it’s a franchise that’s struggled. The original movie takes place in a world where ghosts are real, something that the entire world shouldn’
“I often wonder, how many alternate timelines do you destroy the world because, frankly, you don't have the cojones to die yourself. Hmm? So, as usual, I'll be the bigger man.” —The Joker, Zack Snyder’s Justice League One of the big contrasts between Japanese manga
I first discovered the German heavy metal band Rammstein because I bought the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway. This was long before I became a huge David Lynch fan, and at the time I picked it up solely because it had the Nine Inch Nails song “The Perfect
“Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the