My Favorite Games, Movies, and Books in 2024
I don’t play, watch, or read a lot of new stuff, so most of these lists are composed of things that are a little older but that I encountered for the first time in 2024. Games Movies Books
Everything I Painted in 2024
Late last year I got back into miniature painting, something I hadn’t done since I was in college. I was living on my own in the middle of nowhere for most of 2024, and painting miniatures was a nice way to spend time, especially when I was snowed in. I even made a few YouTube…
How I Work
A lot of this is probably obvious to most people. Also, nobody asked. Here goes anyway. 1. Take as many apps off your phone as you can. Use web versions of apps where you can. Fuck apps. I hate apps. Disable as many notifications as you can, while you’re at it. You don’t need to…
Witch House
We used to say witches lived there. Probably everyone did something like that when they were a kid. A whole family of witches in our case, living in big old house set way back from the sidewalk that was most likely apartments but we didn’t realize that. We’d see old people shuffle in and out…
The Weirdest Ads in an Issue of GamePro from 30 Years Ago
We never had a subscription to a video game magazine when I was a kid. I had to make do with copies of Nintendo Power borrowed from the library, or the occasional treat from a grocery store checkout aisle. The very first instance of the latter was in 1994, when my family took a trip across the…
Stilts
I thought that everything would change when I got the surgery. For years, I’d been utterly miserable. Everything and everyone seemed to communicate that I was unworthy, unlovable, and inhuman. Growing up, I figured maybe things would change down the line. It got to the point where I went to bed praying that God would…
The Horror of Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue
“Educational” games were all over the road in the late 80s and early 90s. Sometimes they’d just be a cartoon rabbit trying to get you to do math problems, and sometimes they’d have you driving across the country to try and teach you geography. But one game of the time stands out in my memory —…
Preps, Goths, Anime Kids and More Met on The Palace
In the 90s, there was no Twitter, no Discord, no social media of any kind. What we did have were real-time chat rooms and programs. These were mostly text-based, with a few notable exceptions — and one of those was The Palace. Created by Jim Bumgardner and produced by Time Warner Interactive in 1994, The…
How One Man Brought RPGMaker 2000 to the West
When I was younger, the RPG Maker series didn’t have nearly the same western presence as it did today. I don’t even remember how I initially heard of the software, but it was probably through some forgotten anime forum. Back then, the RPG Maker series wasn’t being published outside of Japan, except for a few translated releases in Taiwan…
MindMaze Was the Original Wikipedia Rabbit Hole
During the mid-90s, there was a curious period of time during which home computers were becoming more and more common, but the internet was still in the early stages of mass adoption. More school-age kids had computers in their home than ever, and we were using them to write up papers and do research. But…