First Page of the Journal

blank paper will not judge you

Nine years ago, I logged out of World of Warcraft for the last time.

I was a little late to this fanwagon, but I seem to have caught up to it and jumped on.

As is customary, spoiler content ahead, under the fold.

Stardew Valley is a game that supports a huge range of playstyles, so the disconnect between a casual first-time player and anyone who tries to optimize any aspect of the game is a pretty huge one.

I can say pretty definitively that I'm tired of the Hilltop Farm, though.

I've recently become slightly obsessed with Crypt of the NecroDancer. One of the things I find fascinating about it is it gives me an unusually clear opportunity to observe myself getting better at something--specifically, the process of seeing theoretical knowledge gradually progress into a practiced performance, and then into instinct. Theoretically, this is what should be happening in the martial arts lessons I've been taking for a few years now, but we don't do a whole lot of sparring, so the progress I make is very slow compared to what happens in a few days of NecroDancer.

There's an interesting Star Trek TNG episode called Parallels in which Worf gets shunted into progressively more foreign parallel universes. In one, he finds himself at his post while the ship is under attack, and he is unable to raise the shields in time because in that universe, the control cons...

I've played video games since I was a child, but the ones I played weren't usually the ones that others consider "classics".

My parents were early adopters of the home PC (an IBM, not a Mac) and never got us game consoles. I missed the Commodore 64 era. Most of what we had at home were Dad's Zork...