Some of the things I wrote recently that I'm most proud of
One of my blog posts ended up on HackerNews and, like, close to 20,000 people looked at it. I should have taken advantage of this more quickly!
Anyway, if you are new to this blog: I have been writing on it every single day since Cohost announced it was closing down last year. You can read about Cohost from the POV of one of its developers here. It was a great social media site!
I oscillate between posting garbage nothingness on this blog and posting things I am more proud of. Here's the stuff I'm more proud of:
- The real fake islands where people fake bike - a post about the real islands which the exercise app Strava uses as a backdrop for cycle trainer machine "virtual rides." A strange form of digital map graffiti on a real place where real people live.
- Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home - a post about how the poor search UI in Pokemon Home forces players to trade token/currency Pokemon as an intermediate step while trying to acquire rare creatures. Every new game release, the "currency Pokemon" tends to change. It's a bizarre game economy.
- How to buy a Pokemon online - my second in a series of posts about Pokemon Home. This one covers the real-money storefronts online which will sell you a hacked Pokemon in the current mainline Pokemon game.
- Wolf Meat - a post about how some survival crafting games treat meat as an equippable bonus, similar to a jacket or a pair of boots, while others choose to balance meat items within a network of mechanics competing for the player's attention, like hunting, farming, and cooking. Games with food systems can balance the nutritional benefit of any individual food item to encourage their players to focus on specific playstyles or mechanics.
- How do you actually make your money?!? - some thoughts about how many indie games are actually developed part-time by developers with a diverse set of jobs and responsibilities. Many games which seem like a full-time job are actually definitely not. Many people who seem to be primarily game developers may actually fill a much more mysterious role in society. Being a working artist is very difficult.
- Dispelling a terrible thing that Grammarly wants you to believe - a post about how tools like Grammarly are trying as hard as possible to give young writers new anxieties about writing and English fluency. I've worked my whole life with people whose first language was not English. So long as you are a brave and straightforward communicator, there is nothing wrong or inefficient about being a person who does not speak your workplace's language perfectly. Grammarly is simply lying to you.
- It's okay to be a certain type of hooligan - groups of children on bicycles are often characterized as inherently criminal in LA, and people in cars often harass groups of teens whom they encounter filling the roadway on bikes. However, adults also organize rides with dozens or even hundreds of participants, and they're never considered criminal when they do this. Why do so many people seem to believe that while groups of adults might ride bikes in the road purely for fun, groups of children only ride bikes in the road while on their way to rob a store?
- Some thoughts about ego, flexibility, and imitation in writing for money - a post about how your writing does NOT actually reflect your soul. It's good, actually, to learn how to imitate someone else's style. It's good for you to adopt house styles when working on teams or collaborating with writing partners.
- Someone on reddit is posting weird fanfiction about their company's custom keycaps - a deep writeup of the "artisan keycap" scene... and a strange company which insists on writing deranged fanfiction to promote their extremely expensive keycaps.
- Why you should not make your games writers sprint - a post about why Agile sprints are very unsuited to games writing labor. The secret, second topic of this post is: you should hire an editor instead of a producer for your writing team!!
- My favorite way to edit a game around 30k words - a post about a problem very few people on earth have: how to revise a game script at the end of production with about two people and about two weeks of time. I've done this many times, but I've had a weird career. Maybe you can learn something from this if you work in games narrative... but maybe you can't!