We’re rapidly approaching the end of the 2024 and I’ve taken time to analyze my achievements and failures for the year. While I was going over it, I thought, hey why not put this online? Not only do you readers get an update on my progress, but putting my goals for 2025 should give them more power. This way I’m not just accountable to myself, but to my readers as well.

Finalize the book and decide its fate

At the beginning of last year, my book was ready for beta readers and while I thought it was of professional caliber, I decided to let the beta readers tell me what they thought of it, along with a whole lot of other questions. I’ve heard many writers talk about how in the beginning your first few books will be rough, and I left room in my goals for this book to be a failure. So I decided that if I got a confirmation that my book was worthy, I’d continue down the path of independently publishing it. If not, then I’d find some way to use the material while I pivoted to a new project.

Unfortunately, I didn’t finish the project this year so while I’m happily still working on the book, there’s no way it’ll be ready this year. This being my first professional book, I spent a lot of time learning and obsessing in between each stage. Altogether I brought the book through beta readers, beta edits, writing up a blurb and one final edit before I submit it for professional editing (In Progress). I feel like I’ve been embroiled in Walk Amongst the Stars forever. I can’t wait for the next book to go a little faster, since it’ll be much less of a learning experience than this was.

It doesn’t seem like enough work when I look at it all in one sentence like that. But I also spent time researching book covers, blurbs, editing, book betas, mailing lists, professional editing among other things.

Begin newsletter

Another tip that I’ve heard again and again is that a newsletter is an author’s best friend. An absolute necessity that allows you to directly communicate with your audience. So I rented out a post office box and then promptly dragged my feet... Well, crap. While I was waiting on beta feedback, I tried to get it up and running, but I kept hitting technical challenges. I finally learned what I was missing by the time all the beta stuff had come back. So instead of making time to do some learning and tinkering, I just kept letting this one slide. Next year.

Decide on the next book and start planning

This one was easy and came naturally. After getting encouraging feedback from my beta readers, I sat down and outlined how the next two books in the series will go. Then I added to it over the year.

Make money off my business

Since the book wasn’t out, that didn’t leave many avenues for money to trickle in. But I set up my merch store in 2023 and in 2024 I managed to make a couple of sales which technically counts.

I owe twelve blog posts and four merch designs

This was occasionally a pain in the ass. If you pay attention to the date most of my blog posts happen, it’s very close to the wire. I know it’s not vitally important to have each post in place on time, but I’d rather set the precedent of being diligent than setting a precedent where I blow past deadlines and can’t do at least twelve posts a year.

For my merch designs, I’ve posted one of these just after the buzzer, but otherwise I’ve gotten four designs up and ready. My photo editor skills are slowly improving with each design, too. I’m pretty happy with my new design.

Next Years Goals

I can tell right away that I’ve got more goals than I can probably finish in a year, but here they are:

Finish and launch Walk Amongst the Stars: Book 1.

Get the mailing list off the ground; for real this time.

Begin WATS book 2. (I think I’m most excited about this.)

Rearrange the blog so it has some structure rather than a giant list of entries.

Explore ways to monetize. Membership platform, tip system, put my merch on more print on demand stores, blog ads / affiliate programs.

I owe twelve more blog posts and four more merch designs.

And finally, I set a monetary goal on a sliding scale. From a reasonable 100 bucks (because I’m a brand new, unknown author), to a highly improbable $1000. To a completely ludicrous $10,000 because why not aim big?

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While I was putting the last I, Gamer together I found I had way too many odds and ends to talk about with the Nintendo Entertainment System to fit into one blog post. So I have a couple more topics to get to before I move on.

Every day the line between gaming PC and console get’s a little more blurry. Back in the NES era (1985 - 1995) it was all about optimizing games to work around the limitation of the time. Again, today it’s becoming harder to see the differences between console generations, but back then the differences were monumental. Here’s a picture of an early NES game verses a SNES game from the end of the NES era.

In the older console generations, you would see game quality improve until they hit the limits of what could be done. Then innovate to go beyond even that. Tricks like displaying sprites only half the time to make things run smoother and reusing sprites with a color swap. Then moving into adding battery backup saves and extra memory on the cartridge.

Speaking of bending the rules, let’s talk about the Game Genie. An addon device that acted as a pass-through that allowed you to screw with the game’s memory. If you did it right, you would end up with a positive benefit, like the ability to keep jumping without touching the ground or not losing power-ups when hit. It came with a booklet of cheats and a subscription service to get supplemental booklets. If you made up your own combinations, you’d likely make the game fail to launch or play the game with the wrong sprites and colors.

I didn’t actually use the Game Genie very much. I just ran through the cheats for games I owned, which gave me a little more replay value and then forgot about it. I do remember liking that it had a cool gold paint job like all the best NES games and it had this cool interface to enter the codes.

The NES controller is primitive compared to modern consoles, but I considered it a big upgrade from the Atari joystick I was used to. It had one extra play button and moved the pause and select buttons onto the controller which NES games utilized for a myriad of things other than simply pausing the action. For as much as I loved them, they came with some downsides. They could be creaky when you were holding down the buttons. The controllers weren’t rounded, so the squared off edges would dig into your hands. I’d walk away from an intense game with NES pseudo-stigmata.

Towards the end of the console’s lifespan, I picked up both a Four Score and Advantage controller at a used game store. The Four Score was simply a controller expansion, allowing you up to four controllers. I only had one game that allowed for four players (Super Off Road). But thanks to the Advantage, I had three controllers. The advantage was an arcade style controller with some extra buttons allowing you to rapid fire. The Four Score also had options for turbo buttons. I never used this feature as I was already lightning fast on the buttons. And due to the way some games worked, you couldn’t leave the setting the same. Games like Mega Man would allow you three shots on the screen, so the rate of fire changed depending on your distance to the target.

One thing I took for granted with the NES is that every game came in a black plastic sleeve. This gave you a built in dust cover like a floppy disk. As cool as this was, I just discarded them. All they seemed to do was add one extra step to selecting the game and putting it in. Instead, I used a skinny shoe box that was the width of a NES cartridge. With them standing upright, I could simply walk my fingers over the games to find what you wanted.

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It’s just about Halloween, so I figured I’d talk about horror. (The genre, not the intense feeling of fear.) When I started thinking up topics, I thought about horror media (games, books and movies) and I had a realization. I haven’t watched, read or played something that left me with a feeling of fear or dread for a long, long time. (So I guess I actually do want to talk about horror as in the feeling of fear.) This got me thinking about the media that gave me a lasting scare, and I realized that was all the way back when I was a kid into young adulthood.

So here’s what I recall in order, I think:

• Doom. Back when I was probably thirteen, I remember playing this one late at night. The atmosphere isn’t constantly oppressive, but it’s often creepy. Torn out hearts beating on pedestals, crazed conglomerations of faces scrolling by, tortured bodies on the walls and plenty of other dead space marines scattered about the levels. I can clearly remember being spine-tinglingly scared the first time I encountered the cacodemon and the barons of hell. Not because they were especially scary looking. It was the sound. The cacodemon’s alert sound is a loud hissing often because it could see you, but not the other way around. And the baron of hell emits a guttural howl.
• Stanly Kubrick’s version of the Shining. I watched this movie with a group of my friends and even in a crowd this movie made me feel coiling tension throughout the movie. The giant empty hotel, Jack’s descent into madness, the supernatural stuff. The sound track and use of closeups of the actors terrified expressions. By the end, I was so keyed up that the sudden appearance of the guy in the dog costume was shocking. Looking at the scene out of context, it’s just a couple of non-hetero guys patiently waiting for Wendy to leave so they can get back to it.
• Castlevania Symphony of the night. This wasn’t a horror filled game, however I found the boss the Grandfalloon to be very creepy. This takes place in deep catacombs under the castle. The area gets kind of hellish with demons and animated skeletons and a pool of lava you cross on a bridge. I remember playing this late at night, sensing that I was getting to the end of the area, just one more area to explore. That’s when the game dropped me into a colossal pit of bones and a monster rose out of the ground made of hundreds of shrieking human bodies compressed into a ball. The bodies protect an inner monster. You have to carve your way through them all while they sluff off, shambling toward you.
• Silent Hill 2. You can’t go five minutes without hearing about this one lately because there’s recently been a remake. The original came out in 2001 and I played it somewhere around there. I actually can’t remember what drew my attention to the game back in the day because the cover art doesn’t scream must-have-game to me. And I hadn’t tried the first game. But once inside, I found some peak horror. It’s a survival horror game so you face off against monsters, puzzles and item starvation. The atmosphere is immediately spooky, wandering around an abandoned town filled with mist and lurking monstrosities that are vaguely human. I could go on all day about it so I’ll just say that this was a game that I was desperate to play more of, yet simultaneous intimidated to get back into each time and it left me with a lasting fear when I turned the lights out for the night.
• Covetous. I went through a phase of playing flash games on newgrounds.com. Covetous is more interactive story than game. It’s about a parasitic twin that eats its host from the inside out. I remember for how quick and simple the flash game was. It left me creeped out afterward. Then I sent it to my friends and creeped them out. Epilepsy warning for anyone who wants to track it down.
• Eraser Head. Even though this one is much older than the other things on the list, I didn’t bump into it until I had a Netflix DVD subscription. Where do I even begin with this one? It’s like a black and white industrial nightmare. If you’re a fan of David Lynch, you’ve probably seen this. If not, it may not be for you. It’s got a little of everything. Surrealism, liminal spaces, body horror and other grotesque imagery.

I’m not sure exactly what it is, but sooner or later horror fans become inured to it. I still enjoy a good horror story. But that lasting horror that sticks to the ribs like a hearty stew has gone away.

Here’s the horror I’ve enjoyed in the last few years:

Books

• Uzumaki
• Gerald's Game (book or movie both are pretty excellent)
• Briardark
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
• House of Leaves

Video

• Evil
• The Last of Us.

Games

• The Quarry
• Carrion
• CONTROL

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When I sat down to write up a blog post, I looked over my list of potential topics and made a startling realization. I’d forgotten to write down an entry for a DOOM mod that really blew me away. MyHouse.wad.

About a year ago, I noticed video suggestions for MyHouse on YouTube. I ignored the first one I saw. YouTube recommends me all kinds of things, and MyHouse.wad just seemed like a tutorial. But the YouTube recommendations just kept coming. And as they came I kept seeing titles with words like “Horror”, “Creepy”, “Story explained” and “Blind play through.” Thankfully, I didn’t click any of these, I just recognized the pattern and did a web search for the download link.

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It’s this BTW:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/134292-myhousewad/

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I’m used to picking my DOOM mods up off ModDB, or the download section of Doomworld, but this was a forum post with a link at the bottom leading to a Google drive. Curious. I downloaded it and dove in without looking at any of the stuff that came with it. If you haven’t tried out this DOOM2 mod, I’d recommend doing that now and reading no further. You can check out the supplemental material on the google drive before or after you try the level. It’s awesome, and I’m glad I walked into it blind.

For those still reading, the level is more than meets the eye. What at first appears to be a simple house immediately starts doing impossible things, like introducing you to a DOOM level with 2 floors. That’s when you notice the music is wrong somehow and then the level begins changing around on you. Myhouse.wad will continue mentally screwing with you all the way up to the end. Eventually, the house is more of a hub leading to other crazy places.

After playing through it a few times, I came to realize there is actually more than one end state for the game. But I kept getting stuck in the same place and I went online to look for hints. I thought I was nearly at the end, but really, I was only about halfway there. After getting myself unstuck a couple of times, I finished it.

I looked through the supplemental stuff after finishing it. Sketches, pictures, screenshots. Even a journal of the experience of creating the map which someone pointed out online evokes House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

The next day I watched some of those YouTube videos that originally clued me in to the mods’ existence and enjoyed the confused looks of the players. Including one with John Romero of id Software fame. That’s when I found DavidXNewton’s 4-part series which goes in depth on the map. Dissecting the map in detail. For a mod already so full of secrets, twists and turns, there were even more things the average player would never even notice.

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Many thanks to Doomworld user Veddge for a great map.

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Nintendo Entertainment System

I first encountered the NES at my cousin’s house. At the time, I didn’t even know what I was looking at, and I can’t remember what year this was. He was playing Gyromite with a little robot who was busy spinning tops and ponderously setting them down on huge buttons that pressed the buttons on controller two. This wowed me. I was watching a little robot co-pilot a game with you. This was the future! Except that it wasn’t, it was just a fun gimmick. Years Later when I got a NES of my own, I had completely forgotten R.O.B the robot even existed and I never bothered to try out Gyromite. And I learned recently that this was a gimmick that Nintendo abandoned after only two games.

In 1989, I made a friend who had a NES. We’d play Super Mario Bros. and RC Pro AM, and traded off playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-out. This became our go-to activity, and oftentimes during the summer, their parents had to shoo us outside into the sunshine. The NES was a big upgrade and the games I was playing blew my Atari games out of the water. I was hooked.

Over the course of the year, I raved about the NES to my parents and drooled over them in stores. Fast forward to December 1989 and there’s a roughly 1x2 foot present under the Christmas tree. My mom forbade me from even touching it, no guessing allowed. But I didn’t have to guess. I could tell on sight that the green box with snowmen all over it is the thing I’d been very vocal about, the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES Action Set to be specific. The Action set came with the VCR style front loading NES, a combo cartridge of Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt and the safety orange zapper.

I’ve never been one for big emotion, so when Christmas rolled around I didn’t flip out like that N64 kid. I probably made a face like that Parks and Rec Meme.

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To me, the NES games were much more engaging than my old Atari games. While you could still pick up all the classic arcade ports on the NES (Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Millipede. Etc.) even the game that came with the system (Super Mario Bros.), put those to shame. Now games had a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes they’d even began with a narrative cut scene giving the player some backstory. Not to mention the big leap forward in graphics and sound. (I still listen to old NES music when I write sometimes.) I started seeking NES games whenever I had gift money. Prioritizing gaming over most other activities and that eventually that meant my grades suffered. My Mom came up with a simple fix: Just get things done first, then play games. This is a rule I still follow today. Playing video games can be a high dopamine activity. Going to your day job tends not to be.

The NES era was when I started to make gamer friends, bonding over games. While I didn’t meet many people who had an Atari at school, you’d be hard pressed to find a kid who didn’t know Super Mario Bros. When I was 9 or 10, I made a friend who could beat Ninja Gaiden, a feat I assumed was impossible from having rented it. When we weren’t nerding out over The Ren & Stimpy show we’d talk games and give each other rental ideas.

When we moved, I immediately made friends at the new school chatting about Battletoads and Battletoads & Double Dragon. By the end of a 15 minute recess break, we were already friends and we still make time to game to this day.

By the time I was ready to move on, I had accumulated about 20 NES games. Looking at a comprehensive list, it’s a little hard to remember which games I bought used and which one’s I simply rented enough to finish. I can remember which games I revisited a lot. Super Mario Bros. 2, Wizards & Warriors, Rampart, Zelda 1 & 2, TMNT 1 & 2, Mega man 3, Marble Madness and Kirby’s Adventure. I remember mastering Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a feat that took all summer, and I would smile and nod when I saw articles talking about its difficulty in the future, especially that one jump. I remember buying Wizards & Warriors sight unseen. My Dad had taken me shopping and was a little worried when I wanted to buy the first thing I grabbed. I had gotten good at reading those little screen shots on the back of the box, and Wizards & Warriors turned out to be a great one. Super Mario Bros. 2 became my time killer game. My parents would tell me to be ready to leave in X minutes, I’d get ready, then pop that game in and try to finish it in the time allotted. If I didn’t have long, I’d warp to world 7 as fast as I could. If I had a long time, I’d take a more scenic route.

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I have a document with a bunch of blog-entry ideas and I comb over it every time I do this hoping that one of the topics I jotted down will jump out at me and I’ll just get to work easily and have a great day. Except it’s like opening the refrigerator expecting the old same food items to seem new and exciting. But this one has been on the list for months and I keep almost doing it. So without further ado...

Since anything I mention is in spoiler territory, I’ll stick to examples that are over 10 years old.

When I set out to talk about this trope, I was very negative about it. I recently watched a modern movie that used this trope and it left me cold. Then when I started brainstorming examples for this post, I thought up all the examples I could that bothered me. Then I turned to the internet to refresh my memory about other examples of this trope. That’s when it all clicked.

I realized that except for some edge cases, this trope broke down into three categories for me:

Movies I didn’t even realize were ambiguous:

I’m not trying to claim to be some smarty that didn’t have to rewatch and analyze these movies. I just simply watched the movie and took it at face value. It didn’t even occur to me that people were contentious about the endings until years later.

• Blade Runner
• Fight Club
• The Thing
• Taxi Driver

Ambiguous endings that I enjoyed:

This category goes on. I just stopped for brevity's sake. In this section, I either talked with someone else about the ambiguous nature or went to the internet to see what others had to say. With Total Recall, I was a kid when I first saw it. Seeing it again years later made me rethink the ending.

• Total Recall
• Inception
• Momento
• American Psycho

Movies I just didn’t like in the first place:

I’m not going to single out any movies in this section. Two of them I wanted to talk about were too new and then that made it seem rude to point out the other two. So instead I’ll talk about how they failed.

• Too artistic: Things are so symbolic that I just don’t understand what the hell is going on. I might pick up on it after multiple viewings, but that can’t happen if I reach the end and enthusiastically give the movie two thumbs down.
• Just an awful movie: Even if you come up with a stupendous ambiguous ending, it’s lost on me if the rest of the movie was torturous to get through.
• I dislike the characters: When this happens, I can often find myself rooting for the antagonist or whatever situation the protagonists are attempting to overcome.
• Unnecessarily ambiguous ending: There is the rare occasion where the ending just doesn’t seem like it gains anything from being mysterious. Except for denying the viewer closure.

So after going over all that, I’m left with one important question:

Now how do I feel about ambiguous endings?

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Hey everybody. If you write for a living or just take it very seriously, you might want a "Professional Writer" shirt, hat or magnet. If you like what you see you can pick one up at Teepublic.com

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Way back around 2008, I discovered podcasts. (The first one being SMODCAST) If I was playing a game that didn’t require that I pay attention to story and dialogue, I’d put on a podcast to enjoy. To this day, when I play a game, it falls into the “full-attention” category or the “listen-to-podcasts-or-music” category.

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<(   So you learned about this podcast through podcast word of mouth, right?   )

Well, no. Hold your horses. This is a more orbital story than that.

What I learned about was the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. At the time, I was listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast regularly. He went through a phase of recommending the series to most of his guests. Eventually, I picked up The Gunslinger, and I loved it. I foolishly bought book two before I realized I was buying parts of a newish box set. It was still cheaper to get the box set than the rest of the books individually, so I did that and gave my other books to a friend. Anyway, I read through that series for weeks, letting no other books sneak in. For those who haven’t read it. It’s sort of sci-fi fantasy with that wonderful psychic, supernatural Stephen King bend.

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Months later, I wound up with a copy of Hearts in Atlantis. I was blown away when I read the first story, Low Men in Yellow Coats. A character from the Dark Tower series popped up to say hello. I knew the series shared links to King’s other works, as they are referenced within the story. In disbelief, I went to the web to confirm that I did just make the connection I thought I did. I wondered what other connections I may have glossed over when I found a forum post talking about a podcast that covered just that topic. Kingslingers.

The concept of the show is that one host, Scott, has read the Dark Tower series and much more of Stephen King’s catalog and the other host, Matt, has not. So, like a book club, they mark off a section to read for the next episode and the hosts discuss the section. The nature of the show leads them to analyze the story much more deeply than I ever do when I read alone. I didn’t reread the series with them because it was still pretty crisp in my mind, but found it very enjoyable. Once they exhausted the Dark Tower series, they moved on to other books with Dark Tower connections. So now when I finish a Stephen King book, which my local used bookstore seems to have an inexhaustible supply of, I keep an eye out for it on their podcast.

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This year I made some drastic changes to my keyboard setup and I’ve finally gotten proficient with them.

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Back in the day, I never cared about my keyboard. My only gripe was the occasional keyboard that had the big J shaped enter key. I’d only upgrade when the plugin style changed. At one point, I tried my hand at a keyboard aimed at gamers. It had programmable “G” keys which I never once used, but it came with another new trend... LED lit keys. You could choose red, blue or turn both on and get violet.

I finally developed a preference when I tried an oddly flat keyboard at work. It felt like typing on a laptop. Later I would learn that’s because the low profile keys rely on scissor switches. I found the short keystrokes just felt right. Once I got used to it, I found I could type a little faster on it.  

I had to have one for my home PC and I found pretty quickly that it’s hard to find a wired, full-size keyboard like I had at work, so I settled on a wireless keyboard. This taught me an interesting lesson. If you’ve never used a wireless keyboard, they last a shockingly long time on a couple of AAA batteries. My HP got 2.5 - 3 years.

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Soon I was using this type of keyboard for work, writing and gaming. And after a while I encountered a problem. Some days after significant typing, my fingers hurt. It turns out there’s no cushion involved in those short keystrokes and typing fast and furious with those keyboards would occasionally take their toll. I dug up my old rubber mat keyboard for gaming and relegated the scissor switch keyboard to writing work only. Since I loved the feeling so much.

After downgrading to a standard rubber mat keyboard, I hated the mushy key feel and started looking for answers online. Which led to a rabbit hole of rabbit holes. Mechanical switches, alternate key layouts and different keyboard designs. Each category could be a blog post on its own, so I’ll move on. Suffice it to say, I spent way too much time learning these things and weighing options. It certainly slowed down my work in progress.

I finally settled on the Defy. It had all the features I wanted in one package, albeit with a steep price-tag. But I decided to splurge. Hey it’s for my writing career after all. It’s a mechanical keyboard with programmable keys. But on the other hand, it’s minimalist and has a split design. It also had a feature I didn’t know how to feel about. Columnar design.

I didn’t like the idea of a keyboard that had no dedicated function or 10-key area. And I had tried those old Microsoft keyboards with the split in them and didn’t like them. I got over that pretty fast once I got the keyboard. Now I have a button I hold that changes my number keys into function keys when I rarely need them. And I learned to use the other number keys much more efficiently. I also made a layer that contains a 10-key area but it’s not great and I use it less and less.

The columnar design turned out to be nice. There were actually a few bad habits I learned to type on a staggered keyboard that I had to unlearn on this one. For example, I used to press the c key with my index finger. On a standard stagger, it’s not such a hard stretch, but in a column configuration it’s awkward as hell.

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The mechanical keys eliminated that mushy feeling you get with a cheap keyboard. I chose “silent brown” switches which are meant to give you a tactile feel when the key press happens as well as be nice and quiet. They’re quiet, but I’m not sure that I feel any difference when I’m typing fast. One thing that I did notice is when I installed the small o-rings the keyboard came with. It ever so slightly shortens the key travel and eliminates a tiny bit of the key noise.

The programmability of the keyboard is amazing. First of all, the brain of this thing is where all your profiles are stored, so I can take the keyboard anywhere and not need to install anything, it’s ready to go. I also really liked the idea of programmability so I could try out the Colemak-DH layout. If I didn’t like it, I could always try another layout. It would only take some time to add an extra layer.

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I stuck with Colemak-DH. I saw a video that showed a heatmap of where you type and a lot of QWERTY typing happens on the upper left of the keyboard and your pinkies do a lot of work. Most alternate layouts are built to be more efficient and spread the load out across the keys better. So now instead of having my hands on ASDF, JKL; they’re on ARST, NEIO. This keeps the majority of the key presses in the home row.

I settled on the first layer being a QWERTY layout, so when someone else needs to use my keyboard, they are only somewhat lost. Plus, it came that way by default. The second layer is Colemak-DH. The third layer is a custom QWERTY layer for gaming. It’s great until you need to type and then I’m forced to switch layouts. And I have a couple of layers that give access to things I can’t use on this keyboard like the F keys and a 10-key layout.

Gaming on the Defy is a bit of a conundrum. Qwerty doesn’t work for gaming as is because almost all games with keyboard movement have decided that WASD are the default keys. The columnar design makes putting your fingers there staggered and weird. I couldn’t game on the Colemak layout because I’d have to remap just about every key the game uses. So my solution was to make a qwerty layout with every key moved to the right 1 space. So while the game reads it as WASD, I’m actually pressing ESDF to move around.

Like I said earlier, I feel like I have become fully proficient with my new key layout. It took me 4-5 months. I started out sticking to QWERTY and slowly doing typing quizes online. After a week of that, I had the Colemak-DH key map memorized by touch. It didn’t take long before I could use the new layout for simple things. I kept the practice up for about a month. After a month, I could consistently type about 25-30 words per minute. Which is painfully slow. The rest of the time was overcoming my muscle memory. When I attempted to go faster than 30 WPM, my mind would jump tracks and try to type in QWERTY. I have finally gotten to the point where I can fully gallop on the keyboard and not slip into old qwerty habits. Except for every once in a while when I’m tired, that’ll go away with time and repetition. The only downside to this is that, since I don’t have to use QWERTY anymore, my ability to use it has gone up in smoke. I’m willing to bet it would be a much shorter process to switch back, but when I do need to use QWERTY, I have to stare at the keys while I do it.

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Previously, I had written about how my introduction to video games had been when my older brother sat down to play with me. He had had an Atari 2600 since before I was forming memories. That’s probably why some of our Atari controllers had chewed up and missing rubber boots. Although that might also be because they made fun suction cups that I’d repeatedly slap on a table and then pull to hear it pop.

I remember watching him play games like Moon Patrol and Deadly Duck, and that he was particularly good at River Raid. Getting further than anyone I’ve ever seen. Eventually, he gave me the console and games. By then, he was more interested in zipping around the neighborhood on his bike with the other kids.

Side note: While I was sitting down to think about my Atari experiences, I remembered my brother got one of those Nintendo Game and Watch mini arcades: Popeye. Here’s a video. I remember that I didn’t care much for the game itself and instead loved to push the hidden reset button, which would show off every “sprite” at once.

Skipping ahead to 1987, the Iran-Contra scandal is coming to light. Ronald Reagan spoke his famous line about tearing down the Berlin wall. Later, he and Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. But I was blissfully unaware of that because I was six. What mattered to me at the time was eating a giant candy cane and playing with my Christmas present, the Atari 7800. I never did finish that candy cane; too big. I remember my mom peeling it off the carpet, probably silently cursing the impulse buy.

I don’t know if it was some kind of package deal, but I remember getting the legendary game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Oops, not legendary. What’s the word I want... Oh yeah, infamous. For those unaware, ET was a colossal blunder for Atari. Atari assumed that a since the movie was a huge success that a game based on the movie couldn’t fail. ET got a short development time and, like most movie tie-in games, it sucked. Atari famously had so much unsold stock of the game that they buried it in a landfill. Which was eventually discovered and dug up about three decades later.

The Atari 7800 came with a new style of controller, the CX24, that I thought looked very cool compared to the old ones. And boasted two buttons.  However, I found the controller to be way too stiff for my little kid hands, so I just used the beat up old CX10 joysticks. The console itself was more powerful graphically and was backwards compatible with our existing library of 2600 games. It also came with Pole Position II, which I played infrequently.

Going forward, I didn’t collect many games for the system. I got Mario Bros. which, like many Atari games, was a port of the arcade game. You play Mario and the objective is to eliminate all the enemies by hitting the floor beneath them and then booting them off the screen while they’re stunned. I was shocked when I went back to look at this one, only to realize this is the origin of the red coins you find in later Mario Bros games.

My Favorite game and one that I could actually finish was Food Fight. I remember picking it up at a Toys “R” us. I was visibly excited and the cashier, a young woman, looked at the box and asked about it. Misunderstanding the point, I exclaimed that I was excited to throw the ice cream cone at someone. Which made her laugh. It turns out that it’s the one object you don’t get to throw and must instead eat before it melts. A group of chefs try to stop you by lobbing food items at you and you can get rid of them the same way.

Ultimately, this isn’t where I became a gamer. That happened with the next console. I played the Atari every once in a while for years to come. But I was much more interested in playing Legos with my brother or making my GI Joes do battle over the rotten tree stump out back. Home gaming was still very primitive looking, with little to no backstory. Simple objectives too. Navigate without touching things, shoot all the things, collect all the things. Often on one screen that never changes.

It also didn’t help that I had no friends who were into video games until years later. And by then if they inquired about the Atari I would try to talk them out of it so I wouldn’t need to pivot the TV and hook it up again.

It turns out that Atari limped on for a lot of years, quietly releasing computers and consoles that I wouldn’t discover until recently. I took a moment to look through the games they made for the 7800, fifty-nine in total. There are a few in there that I would have probably liked, but I stopped with Food Fight and leaned on our existing 2600 games.

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I’ve added a new design to my TeePublic merch store, and it finally made me a featured store.

That means if you type “Bear Rawr” into their search bar, my design is likely to pop up.

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In Factorio you play as a spaceman who survives a crash landing on a wild planet. You must use what primitive tools you can muster to gather resources, which you turn into parts and machines.Then you turn that into research, which gives you access to more parts and tools. This gameplay loop takes you through several research types until you can launch a satellite to call for help. At that point, it becomes a sandbox where you can keep playing if you like. Meanwhile, the pollution from your machines angers and mutates the local insectoid aliens. They’re called biters, and that’s what they do when they find you or your machinery.

I got back into it recently when my friends were looking for a game to play. I casually thew Factorio out there, not expecting them to be interested. But now we’re hours into a game, cobbling disparate factory parts together.

The game has a 2D isometric sprite-based thing going on, which gives it a simplistic, charming look. It makes the game run so smoothly as well. I honestly don’t remember what the soundtrack is like because I mute the music in games in favor of my mp3 collection or podcasts, especially a game I’ve played this much.

The gameplay reminds me of computer programming, a lot. It’s surprising that I like it as much as I do since I kind of hate programming. Consider building the most basic science pack as a function. Your variables you start with are Copper and Iron. Both are useless as they are and need to be processed first. Then the iron needs to go into a loop where the iron variable changes into gears. Then those two inputs, copper plate and iron gear, convert into red science packs. Like programming, you’ve likely cobbled something together to get this process going. And then you can then go at it again to make a much more efficient process. Later, when you get construction robots, you can simply make a blueprint and have the robots plop out a copy of a process. This is sort of like calling up a function over and over again. And then there’s the troubleshooting when something breaks. You can literally walk through your process to see where the program breaks down.

Actually finishing the game was actually only a small part of the fun. After getting good at the game, I had fun chasing down the achievements. (except a few that I feel like I would need to follow a guide to get.) Finally, I would play it just seeing what I could make. I come back to the game once or twice a year and get all wrapped up in some new design idea or making a bigger facility than the time before. The game also features trains as a means to send your components to distant parts of your operation. It makes me understand those model train hobbyists, since I delight in setting up a factory absolutely stuffed with trains. Factorio also has a large library of steam mods to play with. So once you’ve gotten all the achievements you want, why not start the game with a personal roboport. Add pollution reducing filters and the ability to recycle your useless machines. There are even mods that totally change the game like sea block and exotic industries.

Factorio is one of my most played games. Steam says I’ve clocked about 1,600 hours. Although some of that, I have to admit, is where I left the game running to get some research done with a poorly optimized build. I picked it up in 2016 in early access and it was one of those rare early access games that is great the whole time. The game officially released in 2020. Oh also, Wube Software is working on a space expansion that is supposed to be ready sometime this year. I can’t wait!

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I have been using Linux mint for a number of years now. This is the story of how I got started down that road.

Way back in 2015, Windows 10 came out. At the time I had been running Windows 8.1. Windows 8 took a lot of shit back then, but it worked well for me. I even liked the odd full-screen start menu. Anyway Windows 10 was a free upgrade, I know because Windows 8’s update tool reminded me to download it, seemingly daily. Looking online, they were set to support Windows 8 until the far-flung future of two thousand and twenty-three. Between that and online chatter about Windows 10 spying on you more than ever, I just wasn’t interested. The adage about free services and you being the product came to mind.

As time went on, the pressure to upgrade got worse and worse. The dialogue box would change so one couldn’t simply press “no” without thinking. One day, they got as dirty as they could. When the dialogue box came up, it said something like Do you want to upgrade to Windows 10? Instead of a reasonable Yes / No option, I got something like Yes / Not right now. In other words, Yes / Yes with a time delay. (unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to screenshot that bullshit.) Thinking I was clever, I clicked the X to close the window. I was safe because I never agreed to anything, right? The next day, I got back from work and plopped down in front of my PC to unwind with some games. It did some Windows update stuff. I probably made myself something to eat. When I got back, I’m looking at Windows 10. I clicked around in disbelief. Microsoft had raped my computer. Sorry to offend some of you, but it seems like the apt metaphor. I told Microsoft NO for weeks, maybe more like months, and yet there it was: Windows 10. Microsoft had violated my PC and my trust.

I angrily backed some things up and uninstalled Windows 10. But I had already fallen for a trap. Somewhere in there, it asked me to make a Microsoft account. So when I went to reinstall Windows 8, I ended up running into a trap where it asked me to log in and when I did, Windows 10 was the only option. I’ve since seen things about how to downgrade to Windows 8, but it shouldn’t have been some esoteric information. This was a trick to keep me stuck with my abuser. I considered trying to install windows 7 but decided to just live with this change. I looked into how to minimize some of the crap Windows 10 comes with, but every Windows update would revert some of the changes I made.

After a while I remembered Linux existed. I had experimented with it back in my community college days. I think it was Gentoo, but that’s not the important part. What’s important is that it started me web searching Linux distributions. I remembered hearing about how the popular game platform, Steam, had made their own Linux distribution for use on their short-lived Steam machines. After going round and round on the subject, I decided that I just wanted something simple that works a little like Windows. I settled on Linux Mint. This was around the time that I was getting into writing, so I slapped together some old computer parts and installed Mint on it. It ran just fine. A little slower than I was used to because this was a Frankin-computer, built from old parts. But it worked. And I started writing with it using LiberOffice.

Linux has had a way to play Windows games for years, a program called WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator). It’s a translation layer that feeds a Windows game all the things it needs to run as though it were on Windows. Early on I tried it out, but I had very little success. I just didn’t have the patience to tinker and fiddle until the games worked. Especially when I could just boot over to Windows and have it effortlessly work.

Slowly, I noticed more and more games on my Linux version of Steam. Not all of them would work, but enough did that I began trying any new game on Linux first. It seemed like back in 2017 a lot of indie games ran on Linux, especially if they used the Unity game engine. I tried to play whatever games I could on Linux because the gaming community is so tiny. Linux represented .07% of the Steam users. Today it’s grown to 1.95% and that’s thanks to a development in 2018. Proton. This was another translation layer that was designed to work within Steam. Suddenly my small list of games bloomed and I could run most of my Steam library in Linux now. (It’s also the thing that makes the Steam Deck possible, as it runs the SteamOS distro) Soon Linux was my default option, and I only used Windows for launchers other than Steam. Also VR games and a few things that refused to work on Linux.

Sometime last year, Windows had an update that annoyed me. I can’t remember the details except that it prevented me from loading Windows until I agreed to something or signed up for something. Being hip to Windows bullshit, I rebooted. Same problem. I turned the computer off, thinking that Microsoft was holding my Windows partition hostage. It turned out 2 power cycles were enough to circumvent whatever it was they wanted. But it stirred me up. I remembered the Win10 incident. I assume they would have forced Windows 11 onto my PC if it met the requirements. So I ended my World of WarCraft subscription, the last reason I had to use Windows, and stopped. After a few months of not setting foot in Windows, so to speak, I deleted the partition and resorbed the space for my Linux games. I still don’t have VR working, but other than BONEWORKS and Half-Life: Alyx, I didn’t find many worthwhile VR games.

There were more reasons than that one incident that had eaten away at my patience for Windows. Like how they seem to be on a crusade to take all the power out of the users’ hands. Remodeling all the Office toolbars for seemingly no reason. How changing the system became temporary, the next Windows update would simply undo your change. Windows update not respecting your scheduled time. Et cetera.
I had been a Windows user since the 3.1 days.

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So that’s how I ended up on the other side of the fence. I don’t see myself ever going back and I think any of you gamers who mostly use Steam for your gaming needs could easily switch over to Linux Mint without much trouble. Heck, I got my retired parents happily using Mint. Here’s a link in case you're interested: https://www.linuxmint.com/

Really, the only reason I used Windows for decades is because it just sort of solidified into the default computer gaming system. Everything is built for Windows, it’s the default option. I hope that changes enough to get native support from more than just Steam. But until then, I’m happy with what I have and if a must have game comes around, I’ll figure out how to trick it into running on Linux.

(Note: I am not affiliated with any of the products, services or companies mentioned in the article.)

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Hey it’s 2024! When it came time to think up another blog entry, the subject that came to me was '2023 recap'. I thought up all the books, games, movies and music I discovered this year and made them do battle in an elimination tournament. Each category has three winners in no particular order. The caveat is that not everything on the list released in 2023. If that were the case, each category would only have one or two entries.

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Music:

While I listened to a lot of music on YouTube and Spotify while I was writing and editing this year, I realized when I started working on this category that the only music I’ve purchased in a couple of years was Metallica’s 72 Seasons. I found it to be fantastic. But that’s just not enough to make a category work, so I’m cutting this section right off the bat.

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Video:

These days I tend to just add things to my Netflix list and then throw a couple of D20 and choose what to watch based on that. If they both come up with the same number, then I deem it fate and watch that show. And I also expedite things that are getting ready to fall off a subscription I have.

Star Trek: Picard:
Picard just barely beat out Star Trek: The Lower Decks for me. I think it was the TNG nostalgia that put it over the top. In case you haven’t seen it: Jean-Luc Picard has retired to his family vinyard and is running out the clock. After a terrorist disaster on Mars, someone seeks out Jean-Luc looking for protection and he gets involved in another sci-fi adventure.

‍Remember:
I found Remember thanks to a Flick Connection video on YouTube. I don’t remember what Darren Van Dam’s topic was, but Remember is about an old man in a retirement facility. When his wife dies, he sets out on a mission, aided by a contact within the facility. His goal is to eliminate a nazi officer who escaped detection at the end of WW2.

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The Nice Guys:
The Nice Guys is part detective story, part buddy cop comedy. An incompetent private investigator and an enforcer come together to solve the same case. The two of them bumble their way through a twisty-turney mystery. I learned after watching that it’s based on a Hard Case Crime novel by Charles Ardai.
An honorable mention to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It was pretty excellent, but these two were in a bracket together and I leaned the other way.

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Games:

Baldur’s Gate 3:
I was content to wait for Baldur’s Gate 3 to get old and cheap before I picked it up. Although It was a little rough listening to my friends raving about it. Then I Unexpectedly got it as a gift so I had no excuse. The game begins with your custom created character or one of a handful of story NPC’s. You awaken on an Mind Flayer ship, having just become a victim of a brain parasite. You escape and must quest to find a cure.

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Alan Wake remaster:
I’m a fan of Remedy Entertainment and played Alan Wake years ago. I was going to skip the remaster, but it came to me in the form of a Playstation plus game. This was a good excuse to play it again, experience the story again, nab some trophies while I was at it. The game is about writer Alan Wake going to quaint Bright Falls to unwind and relax to break his writer’s block. Really, his wife had lured him there to get creative counseling. Once in their cottage on the lake, his wife falls into the lake and Wake jumps in to save her. After a series of disturbing images, he awakens in a crashed car with no memory of how he got there.

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Spider-Man (2018):
Last but not least, I really loved Spider-Man (2018). I won’t go in depth because I had previously written about it on this blog a few months back. What a great game. Honorable mention to Guardians of the Galaxy. Another great but it just couldn’t compete with Spider-Man, which knocked my socks off.

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Books:

Dr. Sleep:
Dr. Sleep by Stephen King. I had seen the movie based on the book years ago but I found the book in a sale for a buck, so I jumped on it. In the book we follow a grown up Danny Torrence, who is an alcoholic drifter as he’s reaching rock-bottom. When he stops moving and works on his life, he encounters Abra Stone. She has the most powerful Shine that he’s ever encountered and he’s not the only one who’s taken notice.

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Innoscence:
Innocence by Dean Koontz. I didn’t really know anything about Dean Koontz, but when I looked at the blurb; I was in: “He lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from society which will destroy him if he is ever seen. She dwells in seclusion, a fugitive from enemies who will do her harm if she is ever found. But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives...” I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing out on some references to his other works, but it was a good read.
Honorable mention to Briardark by CL Werner. I don’t know a much about Warhammer, but it was a good horror novel.

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Airframe:
Airframe by Michael Crichton is about a jetliner that comes in for an emergency landing. A mid-air malfunction caused the passengers to be violently thrown around, killing a few in the process. A team rushes to investigate the cause of the problem while an important deal is waiting in the wings.
Honorable mention to Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H. Wilson. Based on Michael Crichton’s posthumous notes. Airframe edged this one out.

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Phew, this was a lot more work than I had bargained for. Perhaps I’ll pair down the categories next time. Something I discovered about doing a list this way is that you can’t simply look up a list of all the things that released in the year to refresh your memory. So a few entries have come to mind since I did the work for this that may have changed things.

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I just got done migrating my email, and it was a huge pain in the butt that went on for a couple of weeks. So why do it? Allow me to roll the clock back a few weeks and tell you a story:

My mom came to me with a computer problem. She’s a technophobe, so I wasn’t surprised when she said she needed help to change her password. I was surprised to see that her locked up Comcast account wasn’t simply asking for a new password but a cell number. This was not a suggestion, either input the number or go away. That’s a problem. She maintains an old cell account and doesn’t have text messaging. Dad’s on the same plan, so between the three of us, we had one phone capable of texting.

I added my number to see if that would clear her problem and get her going again. Nope, that number is already in use. My mind reeled back to some customer service problem my dad was having years ago. I solved the problem by inputting my cell number. The hidden benefit is that I get a txt message whenever the cable goes out letting me know an ETA. I tried to remove the number from my dad’s account, but that wouldn’t work unless you gave it another one first. After a while, we got desperate and came up with the brilliant idea to simply delete the account and try to rebuild it. Maybe we’d get more time before she got kicked out for not having a cell number again. Nope. Her email went down in flames. A few important messages lost forever.

I set her up on an email platform that I was interested in trying out myself. ProtonMail. They immediately asked me to input an email address. Do you see where this is going? I hadn’t learned my lesson yet. With tech, apparently you have to follow plane safety rules. Help yourself before helping others around you. I input my email into ProtonMail to get it going. There was no other option. I didn’t know it at the time, but this put my email address into a pool of burnt emails that can never be used again. Thus locking me out of the service. I could have still gotten in, but I didn’t want to create an email account just to create a Proton account.

That whole thing got me thinking, I don’t have my cell number attached to my Comcast account, so it was probably just a matter of time before i got locked out too. I was already tinkering with the idea of switching to something like ProtonMail. So I went with the other privacy minded email platform I knew about. Tutanota, or as they go by now, Tuta. Oh, and by the way. I don’t hold the illusion that my emails are magically free from prying eyes now. Almost all of my personal contacts use Gmail, so they get to see the content of our emails, anyway. But the option to send an encrypted email is there in case I ever want to use it.

With my new personal email address established, I had to migrate everything away from my Comcast email. Step one was to go through my personal contacts, send them an email letting them know my new address and telling them the story. This was also a good time to trim some old contacts that no longer exist or I haven’t talked to in many years. Easy stuff. This wouldn’t be so hard.

Step two was to go through my password manager. Over the years, I’ve built up dozens of accounts. This was going to be brutal. It was time consuming, but most of the changes went smoothly. I had a small list of problem companies when I finished the list. Tutamail is kind of unknown and a few companies simply wouldn’t accept that email address and I had to bug customer service to allow it. The biggest problem was my credit card got put on lockdown and they wouldn’t simply reopen it. I had to do a complete audit of every scrap of information they have of mine. That annoyed me but they were just trying to save my money thinking I’m some kind of baddy. The thing that really made me angry was that they claimed it was a suspicious charge that triggered the audit and not the change of email. I’m to believe that my Netflix subscription was suddenly suspicious after close to two decades of transactions? Harrumph!

Observations from changing my email.

The first thing I noticed was that every company comes up with their own way to change your email address. Some you simply edit your info and they send a one-time password to confirm. Or force you to click verify on an email. Some of them allowed you to change the email and then reenter your password to confirm it. Some companies simply have no options to change it and you have to go through customer service. I had about ten of these companies on my list. Some of them just let you change it with no confirmation. That’s a little scary.

Not allowing me to change my email led to me dropping some accounts. There were some accounts that I don’t know why I had them in the first place, so rather than hassle with customer service, I just bailed on them. And I had an account whose customer service just gave me the runaround, so I gave up on them. So businesses out there if you make it hard to change your email you just may lose some users.

When the whole ordeal was over, I reflected on it and realized how poor of a practice it is to use your email address as a username. Almost the entire internet industry went with that lazy practice. It’s convenient because it combines username and email address into one field. But without that email address, you can be stuck outside your accounts. There were a precious few accounts that asked me to create a username rather than use my email and at no point was I in danger of being locked out of those. They also made it very easy to add and remove email addresses from my account.

I eventually got the same email lockup message my parents got, asking for a cell number. While I would have pulled off an Indiana Jones, sliding under the door with just enough time to grab my hat. I didn’t need to because my Comcast account was already connected to an old Gmail account of mine, which does little more than collect dust. And cobwebs, from all the web crawlers. Nice.

Last month I was talking to a friend of mine and they told me their Halloween plans were a quiet evening at home with a horror movie. That sounded nice, and it made me stand in front of my own small collection of physical media. Mostly DVDs interspersed with the occasional smaller bluer Blu-Ray case. I selected Silent Hill (2006) and enjoyed it. But the more I thought about that stack of DVDs, the more I realized I haven’t watched any of those movies in a long time. So I finished off whatever show I was in the middle of and started using my TV time to go through my horror movies.

Now that I’ve finally finished, I want to talk about a few movies in particular that I always refer to as the Evil Dead trilogy, although that’s not quite right. Evil dead (1981), Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Army of Darkness. (1992) Written and directed by Sam Raimi and Staring Bruce Campbell. Both of whom I think are pretty excellent and responsible for a lot of stuff I loved:

The Hudsucker Proxy
Darkman
The Quick and the Dead
A Simple Plan
Drag me to Hell
Spider-Man 1 and 2. I have to imagine studio interference ruined that third one.
The latest Dr Strange movie, Multiverse of Madness.
Ash Vs Evil Dead
Burn Notice
Bubba Ho-tep
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

My discovery of the series went in reverse order. It’s hard to recall, but I think I caught part of Army of Darkness on SciFi channel and recorded it next time it came on so I could show it to my friends. (Back in the 90s SciFi channel was killing it) Anyway, we all loved it. I picked up Evil Dead 2 at the Suncoast video store in the mall some time later and eventually I found a special “Necronomicon” edition of Evil Dead. The DVD case looks like the Necronomicon prop, which is pretty cool, but it had the side effect of stinking my room up for quite a while. The outside is this odd foam rubber.

Going back through them was sort of a wild ride. The first movie is this low budget indie horror movie. Four youngsters go to a cabin in the woods to have a good time. When they get there and settle in, they find a reel-to-reel recording left by the resident. They play it and an archeologist recites the incantations he translated from the book of the dead. This awakens an evil force in the woods, which begins to terrorize and murder them. This movie has the most serious horror tone of the three. It has a slow pace with lots of tension.

Evil Dead 2 is essentially a do-over of the first movie, but this time with a budget. The same circumstances as the first movie happen except that this time it’s just the main character and his girlfriend who go to the cabin. Later, the daughter of the archeologist from the recording and her companions show up, giving the evil force more victims. I was shocked at the pace of this movie. In the first movie, things don’t go all “horror movie” for about a half hour. In the second movie, no sooner do they get into the cabin do they find the tape recording, awaken the evil force in the forest and bam, suddenly Ash’s girlfriend is a horrible monster whom he is forced to kill.

By this point, it feels like Sam Raimi has kind of solidified his style. This movie is less a straight horror movie because of it. He likes to put a slapstick bend on scenes. You might pick up the occasional sound effect that would sound more at home in an old episode of The Three Stooges. This movie is another great and if you’re at all interested in the series, pick this one up and then check out...

Army of Darkness. This movie goes off in a whole other direction. The main character finds himself transported through time to the dark ages. He’s immediately abducted and brought in with a rival army’s men. They throw him into a pit to die at the hands of a “Deadite.” He does what he spent the last movie doing, slaying evil fiends and accidentally convinces the king and his wiseman that he’s their fabled chosen one. The one who is meant to bring an end to the evil that inhabits the land. This movie has gone all the way over to action adventure while accentuating its slapstick style. Watching it again it was mind-blowing the way the movie works. It could so easily be too cheesy, too campy, but at every moment the movie is just so damn cool that you can’t help but love it.

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Earlier in the year, I set up a merch store using TeePublic. My first design, for lack of something to post, was simply the banner off my website. I think it looks pretty good on a shirt or a coffee mug. None of the designs I post are exclusive, so when I have some time to kill I’m going to look into posting my designs on a few of the popular print on demand stores. That lets me cast a wider net and give you more options.

But the reason I’m making this post is that I came up with a new design. I told myself when I started that I’d post a new design quarterly. It seemed like a minimal amount of work that I can keep up with. And eventually I’ll have many designs to choose from. I figured now that we’re into October that I could make a Halloween design. I spun my wheels on that for a while before I realized I probably should have already had a design like that done before October came around. So I pivoted and I’m glad I did.

I came up with this little guy. What a cutie, right? After doing some digging I don’t think I can legally name him the book bug although he is certainly of that species. So I’ll have to think up a name for the little guy at some point. I’m thinking he’d work well in my yet to be made newsletters and maybe he’ll infest the back matter of my books, urging you to sign up for the newsletter and check out the website.

Here’s the link: https://www.teepublic.com/user/daniel-seven-merch

I hope it’s to your liking and I look forward to making more.

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This month’s blog post was an easy one. It’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a couple months now, but I had to hold off because it would take up a lot of my free time. Back in 2020, I was crushed to hear that the Venture Bros. was unceremoniously cancelled after season 7. Later on, I read online that there would be a venture bros movie. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they’d be getting the Metalocalypse treatment and doing a movie to wrap things up.

I jumped online and preordered the movie The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart. Then I realized I wanted, no needed, to watch the show over again from the beginning before the movie ships. Then I realized that my DVD collection was incomplete. I had picked up half the series on DVD during a sale and had never gone back to grab the other 4 seasons. So I splurged and got those as well.

The Venture Bros. elevator pitch is probably something like: A parody of Johnny Quest with modern humor and pop-culture references. Hell, over the course of the series, several of the Johnny Quest characters make appearances. The show centers around the Venture family. Dr. Venture, who was a boy adventurer and is an adult failure of a super scientist, living in his father’s shadow. The Venture twins who are homeschooled in subliminal learning beds. They are nieve and old-fashioned in their mannerisms. They follow in their father’s footsteps, tagging along on his adventures. Their bodyguard, Brock Sampson, who is a killing machine secret agent. Their old robot, Helper, who communicates with beeps and boops and is very rarely helpful.

I loved the show right from the first episode “Dia de los Dangerous”. In which Dr. Venture is in Mexico to teach, afterward he tries to score some drugs and winds up in a bathtub full of ice. He uses his trusty robot Helper as a portable dialysis machine. Meanwhile, his archenemy, The Monarch, has migrated with the butterflies of his namesake. Since he’s in the area, his henchmen find and kidnap the Venture brothers. Brock shows up to stop them and after severely tranquilizing and running him over, they believe they have done the impossible; killed Brock Sampson. Later he rises from his shallow grave and goes all sickhouse on their asses.

The show takes a little while to nail down its tone and flesh out the characters. For example, Brock begins as just an unhinged murder machine but before we hit season 2, you can tell that he has a soft spot for the family he bodyguards.

While the first couple of episodes are a little different in tone, (I might even concede, up to episode 5 or 6.) they are not wildly different. And after that, every episode is a killer. And over the seasons, they maintain a high quality.

Events in the show matter and don’t get reset at the end of the episode like a sitcom. They manage to keep things fresh over the years by throwing some pretty large changes in the mix. I’ll back off of that topic to keep things spoiler free. If you’re into animation, do yourself a favor and watch this show.

Then it was on to the movie. I didn’t know what to expect. I was so immediately sold on a Venture Bros. movie that I didn’t even watch the trailer when it released.

The movie picks up where season 7 ends, so I can’t really talk about the setup without getting into spoiler territory. So proceed forewarned.

The Monarch is desperate to attack his arch enemy now that he’s been elevated to a level 10 villain. Hank is missing, having awakened from his sci-fi coma and wandering off. After touching base with the dangling plot, they introduce a new deadly new villain organization who is poaching the roster of guild villains and elevating them to drastic proportions.

The movie managed to involve a lot of the cast of characters, have an interesting plot and answer the big questions the fans have been hung up on for years. It was really excellent, and I watched it a few times in a row. The first time I watched it, I couldn’t shake this melancholy feeling that while this was great, it would have been much better as a final season, rather than a movie. Then I watched the commentary which was alright. It’s perhaps the best commentary of the whole series. The commentary always seemed like a weak point to me. And I rewatched the movie a second time and really got every last detail out of it. The series tends to drop a lot of subtle plot points that I often needed another viewing or two to fully get.

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Metal Gear Solid 4

In revisiting old games, I’ve been slowly making my way through the Metal Gear Solid series. Third person shooter with emphasis on stealth. I mentioned playing MGS3 back in April and now I’m on the fourth installment. The game is pretty excellent, further refining all the things that make the series good. In fact, based on the way the games play, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that MGS2-4 used the same game engine, upgraded each time.

I got to part 3 of the game and while I could vaguely remember a lot about this game, I couldn’t remember anything about what came next when I started chapter 3. When the level loaded, I remembered. Horrible realization came back to me. I hated this part.

In this section, you are tasked with covertly following a resistance member to their secret hideout. Not too tough. Except that the guy you are following cannot see you or any guards, which have set up patrols and roadblocks. If he does, he’ll lose his nerve and run back. And if you go off exploring, you are likely to lose the guy and have to start over from the beginning. Escort quests are kind of hated, but this was a whole escort level.

I wish they had simply cut the escort part out. You’re at point A and need to sneak to point B, where you meet up with the resistance leader. Sneaking through the locked down city, having to get creative to avoid helicopters, patrols and roadblocks would have been fun. Most of the game is forgiving about breaking stealth and battling your way out. So if they felt a change of pace was needed, just increase the severity of the enemy response. Instead of a small team as backup, a bigger team could arrive. Or if that was too much for the poor ole PS3 to handle, they could have made a small team of much more badass soldiers show up.

Here’s a video of Metal Gear Solid 4’s Eastern Europe area:

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Anyway, with how frustrating I found that whole thing, it got me thinking of some of the worst parts in otherwise great games. So I present to you my Mt Rushmore of good games with bad parts. Behold:

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Max Payne

I love this game. Third person shooter with bullet time. I think this was the first game I played where they actually draw the projectiles and you could see them in slow motion. In one part of the game, Max gets captured, and the villain gives him a dose of drugs and escapes. During his crazy drug visions, he relives the death of his family over and over. At one point he has to travel in slow motion through a darkened blood maze. Straying from the blood means falling into oblivion. This actually prevented me from finishing the game when I replayed it because I didn’t have the patience to get through this section. It was too annoying to follow the maze while falling in slow motion over and over to the haunting lamentations of Max’s dead family.  

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God of War

Next up is the Spike wall climb in God of War. The original God of War is one of my all-time favorites. But once you get to the Hades section of the game, you must navigate many platforming sections and avoid death traps. It’s not that you didn’t have to do these things in the rest of the game, it’s just that this section is almost entirely this. Close to the end, there are columns you have to climb with massive blades sticking out and rotate left or right. It’s one thing to miss a jump, fall and die. It’s quite another to spend a few minutes climbing to the top of one of these columns, only to fail at the top, and have to climb the entire thing all over again. After failing enough times, I felt more like Sisyphus than Kratos.

God of War: Spike climb

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I grabbed Mt Rushmore as an example, so I feel the need to use 4 examples. How about...

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

This is the game on the list that I remember the least because I exhaustively played it when it released. Then, upon revisiting it years later, I got to the water temple and realized that I didn’t feel like finishing it. The Water temple is a huge puzzle to solve. It has a central tower and you gain the ability to raise or lower the water level. Things get pretty tedious in solving it. Link, the main character, can’t swim. Instead, you put on heavy boots to sink and take them off to ascend. Every time you do this, you must go into the pause menu to change his boots. The other thing which is slightly less annoying is every time you change the water level you must wait while a cutscene plays showing you the result of the water level change.

There isn’t any one example to show off, so here’s a play through of the water temple.

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I was looking at a pile of books, trying to figure out which one of my recently finished books I should talk about. I looked at my last blog post and it hit me. Banking off my last post, I’ll talk about Legends and Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes By Travis Baldree.

Sometime last year I was browsing around Amazon, flipping through the books they’re trying to peddle to me. As I scrolled through, I saw the title pop up and I laughed out loud. Putting the title and cover art together, I said to myself, “Fantasy... coffee shop?” I had to know more.

In the book, we’re introduced to Viv, a mighty orcish warrior and her adventuring companions as they wrap up one last thing before she retires from the adventuring life. She travels to the city of Thune, where she plans to sink her accumulated wealth into the creation of a coffee shop. Coffee being something she discovered on her travels and is relatively unknown in these parts.

Once established, we’re treated to many luscious descriptions of coffee and other tasty treats. Viv’s shop draws in a group of lovable weirdos that we, and Viv, get to hang out with. Throughout the book, a series of problems crop up that threaten the titular coffee shop and Viv’s new way of life.

I found the book pretty hard to put down, which is funny because a lot of what I enjoyed was the simple slice of life parts of a fantasy world like this. From construction of the shop, to characters literally stopping for a cup of coffee and shootin’ the shit. I’d classify it as a Cozy Fantasy. Which are two genre tags I’d never thought to put together before this book.

The book was fresh on my mind because, for my own writing career, I was eyeballing the formatting of several E-Books. Anyway, I scrolled to the end and my kindle app did that thing it does where it makes you aware of new books. Up popped Bookshops & Bonedust a prequel. It’s set to release on November 7, 2023.

Noice!

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I recently watched the movie Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and I loved it. It is perhaps the best movie I’ve seen this year, although I don’t take in as many movies as I used to. Not long before covid lockdowns gutted the movie theater business, our local cinema had gone downhill. The final straw was being forced to buy tickets via phone app with assigned seating even when my Dad and I were the only patrons in the theater. (I found D&D:HAT on Paramount Plus.)

I had low expectations because I had seen the old Dungeons and Dragons movie, which was like a strange car wreck of seriously taken fantasy drama and action colliding with bad writing, characters and special effects. And even Jeremy Irons chewing the scenery down to a nub couldn’t pull the movie out of a nosedive. Mind you, that didn’t stop me from watching a bunch of times as it reran on cable tv. That probably had a lot to do with more successful examples of D&D that I was really into like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment and the few Dragonlance books my friends lent me.

But I’ve gone off course.

In Honor Among Thieves, we meet Edgin and Holga, a bard and barbarian duo who put together a group for an adventure, a heist to be specific. To accomplish their goals, they add Simon, a sorcerer, and Doric a Druid to their roster and quest for some magical doo-dads.

Anyway, I found the movie highly entertaining, carefully riding a razor’s edge between serious and lighthearted in a way I think the old movie tried to pull off. The other thing that needs to be pointed out is that Honor Among Thieves does what all good game adaptation movies do, it sticks to the source material. The role playing game mechanics are on constant display in the subtext. Any fan of the role playing game will appreciate the lore, spells, abilities, and dice checks seamlessly woven into the movie.

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It’s the summer of 2018 and while I go through my morning routine before work, I’m hoping that this beta downloads quickly so I can play it a little bit before the day’s drudgery begins. The game is Fallout 76. I’m a fan of the modern Fallout series, the ones from after Bethesda Softworks took over. This game is more of what I enjoyed about Fallout 4 but in a live service model.

Let me define a live service game for any of you who aren’t familiar with that term. It’s a game that aims to offer a never-ending stream of new content with which to keep you playing and preferably buying new things. I say that’s the aim because in practice it’s easy to make that claim and very difficult to actually develop significant new content on the fly.

Typically, this business model is supported by including some kind of in-game store that allows a player to buy cosmetic items and convenience items. Cosmetic stuff, like skins, keeps things interesting by allowing the player to change the looks of things like character models, weapons, tools and more. Convenience items allow the player to make the game a little easier, but taken too far can allow a player to simply get ahead in exchange for money.

Back to 2018. The game launches in November and I enjoy it. It’s everything I had hoped it would be. (Although it’s pretty buggy, any long-time fan of Bethesda knows to expect some bugs.) It has an interesting quest line where you follow in the footsteps of many NPC’s who have long departed or died, as they decided to launch the game completely devoid of NPC’s. A total wasteland populated only by old robots and horrible mutants. I started off playing it heavily with multiple characters, all doing different builds and over time, I settled into a more maintenance style of play. About an hour a day just knocking out the daily challenges, which move you through the season pass. The game’s way of keeping you engaged. I would go on to play the game all the way up until last Wednesday (May 17, 2023)

So why blog about it?

Well, there are problems with a game that never ends:

First of all, there’s only so much time in the day. Even though I had boiled my time in Fallout 76 down to an hour a day, maximum. I was also playing two other live service games: Modern Warfare 2 and World of WarCraft. With three live service games, my daily free-time activities were at odds with each other. It became a battle to watch some tv, read, exercise, and play some games other than live services. I decided that I can really only handle two of them at most.

Secondly, even though I’m quitting, I don’t dislike Fallout 76. It’s simply the slowest to update live service game I was playing. Any significant new content seems to release every other year. There have been a number of smaller updates and interesting things in the season pass but ultimately not enough to compete with these other games.

I still fondly look back on some of those old live service games I used to play. Mass Effect 3, my friends and I did some serious heavy lifting on those community challenges. I sometimes think of throwing around the awesome power of my Warlock from Destiny 2, making the other team rage with Teemo in League of Legends and cruising around exploring planets in No Mans Sky. But the difference between these was that I felt “done” with those games. They either ended or my interest in them did. Not so with Fallout 76. I just don’t have time for it anymore and it feels kind of sad, like having to move away and give up your pet.

Those aren’t the only problems with live service games, mind you, just the ones that have been bothering me.

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I’m a gamer. I have been ever since my big brother sat me down in front of an Atari 2600 hooked up to a simulated wood paneled CRT TV and played Slot Racers and Combat with me. I don’t want to get hung up on nostalgia in this post, I’ll do that some other time. But suffice it to say that from then on I’ve had a lifelong love of video games.
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After I had been writing for a while, an opportunity arose at my day job to transfer departments, but it would mean switching to a part time schedule. I decided to take it since it would afford me extra time to write. I worked three days a week, wrote three days, and took a day off. As time went on and my hours at my day job diminished, I decided I needed to tighten my belt a little and watch my spending. So I became more choosy when picking out new games to play. And it lead me to develop the “Video Game Round Robin Technique”.
   

The what?
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For those unfamiliar, a round robin is a way of cycling through a group of options so that each option gets used, and then the cycle repeats over and over. For my application, this means that I bounce between playing something new on PC, something new on PlayStation and then revisit a classic game. This helps me spend less on Steam sales, play through my PlayStation plus backlog (which I tend to forget about), and to enjoy some old games again. Slowing down my Steam purchases has also helped me avoid buying a game which later becomes available on PlayStation Plus.
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Most recently, I played through DNA (Declared New Apocalypse). An amazing Doom Mega-WAD. The level design did some stuff that blew my mind and it features some modified doom monsters which are so well designed they seem like an evolution the original game designers should have thought of.
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Then I played Spider-Man on PS5. I highly recommend that one if you’re at all into Spider-Man. I don’t keep up with the comics so I don’t know where they drew the story from, but it was fantastic. Everything else about it is pretty top tier. I couldn’t get enough of it.
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And finally, I played Metal Gear Solid Three for my classic game. Both the second and third games have very clunky controls compared to modern games, which makes them hard to go back to. They are also a little frustrating. It seems I used to have much more patience for games back in the 2000s.

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Blog entry number two! Only now I need to figure out what to talk about.
Ah, I’ve got it, but to explain we’re going to need the “How We Got Here” trope:

Push in on me sitting at the keyboard, slow motion as I begin to look worried about coming up with something.
Daniel Seven: “That’s me. I’m supposed to be writing a blog entry but I’m drawing a blank. Suddenly, all my interests seem silly and trivial. I bet you’re wondering how I wound up here.”

Years ago, when I was still building my own role playing game, I began to tinker with writing and as things became more serious; I started to reach out to whatever resources I could find to teach me. The first one I found was The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I was listening to a lot of the Joe Rogan Experience at the time and if you did too, then you know he didn’t let much time pass between recommendations for the book.
It’s pretty cool. In the book Pressfield Defines what it is to be a professional and how this helps you fight against what he calls resistance. Resistance is the internal, insidious force that stops you from succeeding. And damn, did he nail it. I go back and read through this book every winter when the seasonal depression starts to slow my work and drain my energy. This isn’t just good for writers either. I think just about any creative type could get something out of this one.

The next one was On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King and another one of those books that Joe Rogan would bring up every few episodes. The book is split into two parts. Part 1, a memoir of his life and how writing fits into it. Part two, King goes in depth on how he writes, starting with the broad concepts and then going further into the rules and style. It’s another good one. The first part is an interesting read and the second part helped me have a general idea of how the drafting process goes.

Next up I found Johanna Penn’s podcast, The Creative Penn. The problem with podcasts is it’s hard to nail down when things happened so I don’t know when I found it but I started listening around episode 400, which is several years ago. Before this podcast, I always went back to episode number 1 when I found a new podcast. Because the news and information Penn provides is an ever-changing thing, it was kind of redundant to go back to the start. And it sort of broke me of that habit.
The podcast has been a big help, slowly filling in all the missing pieces of not just writing but the career aspect of writing. It also introduced me to many tools and services I may not have found otherwise.
After listening to this podcast for a while, I realized as long as you conduct yourself professionally, it’s possible to forge a career as an independent author. And that’s what I’m doing.

Then the YouTube algorithm caught on to my writing propensity and it served up a whole host of channels. I grabbed onto a few of them. Writing with Jenna Moreci, Chris Fox and a little known author, Brandon Sanderson.

Jenna Morechi’s channel tends to follow the 10 tips on a topic format. By then I’d reached the point where I was hearing the same information over and over, but I stuck with Jenna because even with the most basic lesson, she could show me some new facet. She just released a writing book Shut up and Write the Book and I’m pretty sure she improved my current work in progress. (And gave me some more rewrites. Thanks, I think?)

Chris Fox drew me in because he was showing off his writing career from the inside. How much his book properties made him throughout the year, his spending on advertising and the impact it had. This was on top of the usual writing tips and tricks.
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And last but not least I got invested in Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube channel because he was offering a blurry, hard to hear recording of his Creative writing class at BYU. (I just checked his playlist and it looks like he’s updated the class with a more modern recording.) What an amazing thing to give away!

Many thanks to everyone I mentioned on this list. You upped my game and helped me get this far.

Hello and welcome to the- what’s the opposite of grand? Covert?

Welcome to the covert opening of my website. I’m releasing it in a vacuum with no content. Things should become more fleshed out and interesting by the time people notice this website exists.

Here you can find updates on my current work in progress, my bibliography, these blog entries and eventually the ability to buy my books directly from me. Don’t worry, I also plan to make my work widely available so you can keep your collection all in one place.

Who am I though? I’m Daniel Seven. “But that’s not a name, it’s a number. You’re doing it wrong.” You might be thinking. Well, my name is so common as to be out of the question. Every pen name I thought sounded good was already taken, multiple times in some cases. After looking further outside the box, I settled on Daniel Seven.

This is the beginning of my writing career and I have been learning as I go, so everything has been slow going. I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy, so most of the stuff I’m excited to write falls into those categories.

I plan to do these blog entries once a month and I’ll sprinkle in other things like news and updates. I know that’s not a whole lot of content, but books don’t write themselves and that’s where the bulk of my time goes. With that being said, I should wrap this up. If you took the time to read this, thanks. And I hope to be writing books for you in the near future.

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