Ever since I was a little kid, I hated the idea of being tough. I didn’t like the idea of being told to “toughen up”, “be brave”, “don’t be such a baby”, “suck it up”, or “be a man.” Since I wouldn’t learn phrases like “toxic masculinity” for many years, I think this concept in my head was something I referred to as just “being manly.” I had no interest in any of that. I related to characters in…
I don’t watch a lot of movies. But, since I was traveling a bit this summer, I’ve watched probably twice as many movies as I usually see per-year and it’s only August. At some point I caved and got a Letterboxd account, where you can follow me and read my quick little reviews. But for your convenience, I’ve collected my recent ones below. Enjoy!
I like autumn and winter fashion. Everyone’s got their fashion preferences, that’s mine. Nothing wrong with that. Something I try to be mindful of, because it’s a bit more unfortunate than a preference, is that I definitely have some subconscious biases when it comes to clothes. Primarily, when I see people in autumn fashion I associate that with maturity, intelligence, and sophistication. When I…
I’m fond of that You Got The Dud! scene from the Simpsons. It became a bit of a meme in recent years, largely because of the very out-of-style way that Homer’s smile slowly and smoothly grows bigger before he breaks into laughter. I agree that it’s quite funny and strange. But beyond that, something I find really charming about this little snippet is that it’s a scene where Homer and Marge are…
I really don’t want to become a stubborn old man. For multiple reasons! First being that I don’t want to become an annoying bummer to be around. Nobody wants to deal with a guy who thinks everything new sucks and everything was better “back in the old days.” Nobody wants to deal with someone who has to make a snarky comment every time they’re confronted with something they don’t already…
When talking about social media, it’s common to metaphorically say that there’s a “migration” from one platform to another. When Tumblr policies changed, users migrated to Twitter. When Twitter got bought by a billionaire, users migrated to Bluesky. Users migrate from Instagram to TikTok back to Instagram again. The language calls to mind birds flying south for the winter, or people moving from…
This post risks sounding a little holier-than-thou so I want to preface it: obviously I do not have any answers to life’s questions regarding how to make a difference in the world. I’m just some guy. But something I think about a lot is the idea of trying to improve your life or improve the world, especially by changing your habits. This could be mean boycotting a company, getting off social…
Playstation (aka Sony Interactive Entertainment) recently dropped news that they will be discontinuing production of physical discs for new games released after January 2028. Instead of gab on it in...
In my senior year of high school, my art teacher gave us a big final project before our end-of-year gallery: the Sixty Hour Project. The assignment was as simple as it could be. You just had to spend 60 hours on an art project and present it to the class. There was no real way the hour count could be enforced, so you just had to log what you spent the time on in a sketchbook and from there it was…
Back again for Volume 2. My disclaimer from Volume 1 still applies: I’m no RPG expert, just a guy who’s been doing his best to make one and wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. (Also, wow, it’s been almost a year since the Vol. 1 post…) Today let’s talk about Character Archetypes. Characters usually play a big role in RPGs. They’re, obviously, a huge part of the fun for a lot of people.…
It’s happened again, and it won’t be the last time. There’s a thing I like, something that brings me joy, and yet I can’t find a way to talk about it without feeling a need to roll out a list of defensive caveats first. Whether it’s Homestuck or Steven Universe or Undertale or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (ok I only saw like three episodes of that last one but they seemed decent), there…
I feel like surviving in creative fields these days requires a lot of confidence, networking, and self-motivated energy. As some would put it, it requires a bit of “hustle.” Something that I don’t see mentioned a lot is that I feel like this filters out some kinds of people from being able to be successful in certain fields. A lot of people have some level of shyness. A lot of people are more shy…
I don’t know anything about personal finance, but figured I’d share this silly little thing I started doing a year ago: putting a dollar into my savings account every day. A year ago I opened a new savings account that happened to have a good interest rate, or whatever you call it. I don’t really know the proper terminology, which probably isn’t a good sign for my understanding of personal…
I watched Pixar’s Hoppers. It’s pretty good. The performances are fun, the environments are stunning, and the animation is really great. If you have any interest in it, I think you should check it out. But there’s something about the writing that really bothers me. It’s not the jokes, which I thought were fine (including plenty of nice little visual gag moments.) It’s also not, to my surprise,…
For many years, I have been longing for a certain type of social dynamic. You see it in sitcoms…a group of friends who can drop-in and drop-out as they please...
I can’t remember exactly where this was, or if my brain made it up, but I believe I was listening to a One Piece podcast once where an exchange like this happened: HOST: “Yeah, it’s one of those things where I wish Oda just wasn’t such a perv with his character designs.” GUEST: “My partner and I used to feel that way for a long time. We used to wish we could change the things about Oda that we…
Real GamesThis might be a slightly extreme take on my part, and I’m sure there are reasonable folks who would disagree, but I don’t think that there’s any level of...
From 2010 to 2015, I created a fantasy coming-of-age webcomic called Soul Symphony. I wanted to make this post as a bit of author’s commentary on the protagonist’s character arc and why I wrote the ending the way I did. Rest assured, I’ve written this all with the assumption that you’ve never read the comic before (especially because the website doesn’t even exist anymore) so if you’re into…
A while ago, we got a notice from the local power company that there was a planned outage coming for the area. They planned to turn the power off for our apartment from about 7:30am to 4:30pm in order to do maintanence on the power line. That’s…inconvenient! It’s obviously not only disruptive to folks who work at home (like myself) but also sucks for trying to keep food cold, flip light switches,…
I don’t talk about this much, but I love trivia. I love Jeopardy and trivia game shows. I watched them a lot with my family growing up. I love trivia...
I. It’s going to be okay I think when I was young, I subsconsciously got the idea that when “things will be okay” it means that you won’t get sad, scared, angry, hurt, etc. There was this underlying belief that “okay” meant “the absence of badness.” I imagine I’m not the only person who had that kind of idea, or maybe even that goal. The idea that making sure you’re okay meant that bad things…
Something that fascinates me about the internet as a space is, obviously, how different people’s experiences can be. One way it tends to differ, which has been standing out to me lately, is the idea of “positivity” and “negativity” in the tone of discussion. For some people, they feel surrounded by constant toxic positivity. People constantly going to bat for major corporations, people afraid to…
RPG Maker is a great piece of software that lets non-programmers jump straight into the meat of making their own RPGs and top-down narrative games. The best part about it, by far, is the flexibility of its plugin system. The program is nearly wide-open for community members to make their own plugins that change and add new features. Some people share their plugins for free. Many others sell them…
Despite playing Pokemon since childhood, I’ve never really understood the battle system. At least, not on a competitive level. I’ve got enough of a handle on it to play the main story mode of the games (though I personally bristle when people characterize the games as “too easy”, I think their difficulty level is pretty fair if you don’t grind!) but the PvP element of it has always been way too…
In the past decade there’s been a couple of subgenres of games that have really blown up, especially on Steam. Sometimes they were pre-existing varieties of games, sometimes they’re clearly based on a successful game. Often they are created by small developers. A few that come to mind… Vampire Survivors -likes The Binding of Isaac -likes Slay the Spire -style deckbuilders Suika Game -likes Idle,…