A “cyberdeck” is a custom-built portable computer, usually based around a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer (SBC). Some are mounted inside heavy-duty cases for the apocalypse, others are rough assemblages of parts. Cases often come out of a 3D printer, and keyboards are variously spare parts for cellphones, small
“Does it ever wake you in the middle of the night? The feeling that one day they will pass that foolish law or one just like it, and come for you? And your children?” —Magneto, X-Men (2000) X-Men is a big deal among superhero franchises. It went from a new
“This isn't even a reluctant superhero story. I'm just getting screwed over. Is this what you guys want?” —She-Hulk, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Social media has gotten weird, and not the good kind of weird. There are a lot of reasons for this, and one big
Okay, let’s do this one last time, yeah? For real this time. This is it. My name is Miles Morales. I was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for like two days, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest. —Miles Morales, Spider-Man:
“You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” —Ultron, Avengers: Age of Ultron Thanks to the Comics Code, superhero media has a long history of sanitized stories. While American comics could be salacious enough that some clearly weren’t for children, their popularity among
“This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” —Woodsman, Twin Peaks: The Return Because of fan theories about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me being in part a critique of Silence of the Lambs
I’ve been working on my 90s anime comedy fantasy RPG Dragon World off and on for nearly a decade now, and I really need to finish and publish it, for a variety of reasons. When that’s out of the way I want to do some supplements, including alternate
David Lynch is known for not explaining things. In one interview he famously said that Eraserhead is his “most spiritual film,” and when the interviewer asked him to elaborate, he simply said, “No.” I became a huge fan of Twin Peaks over the past few years, and Maggie Mae Fish’
“It was the 80s. No one was too worried about the future.” —Janine, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire I’ve always been a fan of Ghostbusters, but it’s a franchise that’s struggled. The original movie takes place in a world where ghosts are real, something that the entire world shouldn’
“I often wonder, how many alternate timelines do you destroy the world because, frankly, you don't have the cojones to die yourself. Hmm? So, as usual, I'll be the bigger man.” —The Joker, Zack Snyder’s Justice League One of the big contrasts between Japanese manga
I first discovered the German heavy metal band Rammstein because I bought the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway. This was long before I became a huge David Lynch fan, and at the time I picked it up solely because it had the Nine Inch Nails song “The Perfect
“Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale
keyboards
One of the things I latched onto in order to stay sane during the pandemic was mechanical keyboards, which have become a major hobby and side hustle. I run an Etsy shop called WeirdLittleKeebs, where I sell both open-source and original designs. Some days I'm more motivated than
isekai
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, and maybe it’s just the state of the world, but I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately. Specifically, my own past, something I usually don’t dwell on too much. My mind wanders to a scenario where my
superheroes
There are several reasons why Japanese manga and American comics are so different. Cultural differences are a major factor of course, but these two forms of sequential art also developed independently and under different circumstances. Manga grew out of printing techniques that date back centuries and became both thoroughly mainstream
writing
For whatever reason I had the idea to try to explain my creative process, I think as much for myself as anyone else. I don’t have a lot to say about the nitty gritty of how to put sentences together, and this is more about the overall shape of
Gladiator
“If he could but have ended the war single-handed, it might have been different. But he was not great enough for that. He had been a thousand men, perhaps ten thousand, but he could not be millions. He could not wrap his arms around a continent and squeeze it into
LLMs
“Artificial intelligence” is the current source of tech hype, and it’s a lot bigger than recent fads like the metaverse and NFTs. Cryptocurrency is still going strong despite being rife with scams, but it’s still small potatoes compared to the current AI bubble. Total investments in generative AI
The Matrix
Working on the Xeroverse novels led me to The Myth of the American Superhero and its “American monomyth” becoming a significant influence on the story and my understanding of the world. I’ve covered it previously, but in short, the American frontier fostered a heroic archetype of a loner who
superheroes
To accompany the Xeroverse Tetralogy, I'm also working on a nonfiction book tentatively titled The Trouble with Superheroes, which lays out the various issues I see with the genre and how it could be better. One of the linchpins of my critique is to take a close look
writing
Mother’s Basement, a YouTube channel that does content about anime, posited that the way to see if an isekai anime is worth watching is to see if the protagonist being from Earth actually matters within the first episode. That isn’t an ironclad rule, but when the whole premise
Over the past few years, the core of my creative endeavors has shifted from designing TTRPGs to writing fiction. I do want to get back into TTRPGs at some point, but my writing feels like it needs its own home. A blog feels like the right place for that, though