I’m back down to only having one story out on submission waiting for a response. Every other story I had out recently has come back with a rejection. A few I expected since they were long shots at best. Most were form rejections, but the few that did have comments were, at least, complimentary. Still, it can be pretty demoralizing. Doesn’t mean I plan to stop any time soon.

I have spent a long time recreating a system that used to be trivial. Back in the early days of computers and arcade machines cycling colors was a novel effect. Even on the Atari 2600, a computer that couldn’t even draw an entire frame to the screen and instead had to parcel it out to individual crt scanlines, programmer figured out ways to cycle though a palette of colors. On some games the most animation you were likely to see was color cycling.

There is this one amazing old game that’s really tough to emulate. I mean, you can try. All the parts are still available for it. The keyboards, various different flavours of basic, information printed on paper. We might sit just outside the temporal requirements though. It’s an activity who’s time has past.

No, you can’t replace photoshop with the AI recreation of photoshop. And I don’t think that you ever will. That is not at all to say that I don’t think that tools created with the help of AI coding agents won’t be made. I do. I also think that some of those tools will be very good. Maybe even better than something like photoshop. I also think that, at this point, a lot of the the new features of photoshop will be created with or using coding agents. They are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is, they are absolute fucking idiots. And, despite what some silicon valley paint sniffers would have you believe, they will always be fucking idiots.

I’ve gone to great lengths to make writing easier. And by easier, I do mean less complicated and with fewer steps between thinking of the words and producing a finished manuscript. Most of the tools that purport to do that tend to make the process more complicated. Scrivener has too many functions and too many buried features. Word is more UI than productivity tool. Libre Office is trying to be word, so it definitely has too much UI for its own good. Google Docs and other online tools are fine, but they are also not particularly trustworthy these days.

There are a lot of ways to create seamless tiling textures. For years you did it by painting the center of the texture, offsetting the entire image by half on the x and y, and then filling in the empty space in the middle. Repeat that process until you have cleaned up any pixels that give away the boundaries of the tile.

I have been using Obsidian as my main writing tool for a couple of years now. I run it on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows laptop (that might become a Linux laptop fairly soon, but that’s another post). It works great on all platforms, and it is simple to sync my work from one platform to another. On the extremely rare occasion when I get a version conflict between two of the platforms it is flagged and fairly easy to correct.

I now have three partial games using my 2D pixel art but is actually 3D polygons setup in Godot. I say partial games, because even though all of them run and you can move around and do things in each of them, not one of them is really a game.

Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again. At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.

About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.

After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.

It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.

What would you do if you were suddenly attacked by several unknown guys? Since I played Kung-Fu Master, I know what Thomas, the kung-fu master would do. He would punch and kick his way through a lot of unknown guys. Way more than several. It’s a full regiment of unknown guys. Way more guys than would ever fit in the Devil’s Temple.

It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.

Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule. Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.