Tonight, C’s bedtime story was The Velveteen Rabbit. Fresh from a bath and rosy-cheeked, she curled up under the covers and held her own stuffed bunny close under her chin, her eyes gleaming in the low light. Serene and soft and warm in that way that only tired toddlers get. I have always loved The Velveteen Rabbit. And the obvious parallelism of the moment wasn’t lost on me – my baby in bed with her soft rabbit held close, and the boy in the story with his deep love for…
There have been several big snowfalls in a row this winter. I came home from a rare Sunday spent at the office and could barely get the car into the driveway. I didn’t want to shovel. The teens were occupied, hanging out with their cousins; my wife wanted to nap. I wanted to spend some overdue quality time with the toddler. But I needed to clear the driveway so we could park two cars in it. Could I get two birds with one stone, maybe? “Come help me shovel,” I…
Sometimes a writer just gets it right. Tolkein’s “butter, scraped over too much bread” is a masterclass in understated imagery. I get you, Bilbo. I’m feeling thin, too. Stretched. I said so to my wife tonight. I tapped the fingertips of each hand together and pulled them apart, slowly. The gesture illustrated stretched clearly, but it wasn’t right. It was intentional, gentle, taffy-making. This stretched is more haphazard, not linear; a wearing, tearing friction, the result of too much too frequently without realizing how thin things had already gotten. There’s…
The sweet selfishness of living life, not farming #content and inspiration It has been a long time since I’ve written anything for Love Make Share, and that started out as an accident. I had all this content planned, a schedule, and then things slipped. Work got busy, our baby got a little older and needed more intensive attention, and new diagnoses in the family meant a nonstop carousel of appointments, research, and work. (We’re all fine and figuring things out.) I made a couple of videos, I posted a handful…
I have had a number of successes with National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo. I wrote a novel with only a drawing to guide me, learned some lessons, lost, and won. I’m getting practiced now, and have completed three novels in five years. My hands-down best performance came in April 2021, during Camp NaNoWriMo. I set a word count goal of 25 000 words – to double the length of the manuscript I started last November during NaNo 2020. Instead of 25 000 words, I wrote almost 50 000 and…
The trailer for Picard Season 2 dropped and gave us some new alt-timeline uniforms and commbadges. Note that this is a collection of digital STL files for 3D printing, not physical objects! The Picard Season 2 trailer dropped and gave us new costumes and new badges – and I had to try my hand at making them! This collection includes the two variants of the commbadges we saw worn by Picard (with four rank bars, presumably at the rank of Captain) and Rios (due to the single rank bar, likely…
Game mechanics on their own are interesting to me, but they’re not what get me fired up. The theme is the thing that motivated me to start in the first place, so let’s talk about developing it!
Recently, I played a deck builder and though – what if this, but spaceships? That’s becoming something of a trend. In this devlog I talk about influences, what it is and what it’s not, and where I’m going from here.
The day after my office sent us all home due to the pandemic, our baby was born. About twelve hours after I finished packing up my desk, we were on the phone with triage at the hospital. We were sure that the baby was coming. Nearly two weeks early and at a truly unpleasant hour of the morning, but on her way.
Construct 3 is a 2D game engine from the folks at Scirra. We had an idea for a silly video game and started prototyping it and had a good time! The game is based on Tron’s disc combat and was a fun project to experiment with. We ran into the limitations of the free Construct 3 licence, but our game design adventures will continue…
I don’t lightly say that things are “the best” anything. But we’ve been on this peanut butter for a few weeks now and it’s so cheap, so easy to make, and so delicious that I don’t think we’re ever going back to the store-bought kind.
If you’re counting calories, you may want to become temporarily innumerate. Believe me, it’ll be worth it. These cheddar buttermilk biscuits are comfort food at its best. Flaky, soft, salty, rich, and absolutely the kind of thing where you’ll finish one and immediately reach for another.
