works of wanderlust

Month: June 2025

  • game con-spiration

    I’ve been a lazy game developer lately. 

    A couple months ago I was proudly telling people how much progress I was making on Pleck’s Mart. Heck I was logging at least—at least—a couple hours every day adding to the code base and debugging the game and making art and then sitting at the cafe writing story for the damn thing.

    I also wrote a couple months back about how I made some silly choices around leaning into a dead-end part time job that was supposed to round the rough edges off my days but instead wrapped me up into grocery store drama and derailed a bunch of personal motivation in my off-hours, plentiful tho they were.

    In short tho, I haven’t been coding for about two months now.

    Sadly. Realistically. Frustratingly. 

    There is a mental wall in the way, if I’m being honest, because (a) I was just coming up on a challenging bit of code, (b) a new version of the engine came out in the intervening months, and (c) it’s kinda sorta summer and (d) I should be spit-polishing my resume and not making video games.

    But then I went to Game Con this weekend.

    A couple things happened, very passively to be honest, but they happened at Game Con nonetheless.

    First, I got to wander around and talk—actually chat with and talk to—other indie game developers. That’s big. There’s a hundred reasons to go to a convention linked to your hobby, but seriously on or close to the top of that list of reasons should be the simple fact that hanging out with likeminded individuals is inspiring for another long list of reasons. There is a community. There are organizations boosting these efforts… locally. People have trod this path before us and are coming up the path behind us, and that means something.

    Second, I got to finally have a chat with Chris. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now, hung out countless times, vacationed together, stood atop a mountain peak in the sun, and rung in the new years nearly every year of that twenty. He is a legit developer. I mean, he professionally codes for a living, has a business, does community building, and that list goes on. And I sheepishly gave him access to my github repo. We finally got to chat, hanging out in the halls of Game Con, playing some board games and poking at the demo booths, and he wants to help with Pleck’s Mart. What’s our next step, he asked.

    So, it’s monday morning after the gamer inspiration weekend and I’m looking down the day at a question of not if I go down into the basement today to write some code… but when.

    What is the next step?

    As ever, it’s one problem, one line, one version at a time. And if nothing else, looking for that lost momentum.

  • weekend wrap eight

    The last three days have been punctuated by epic thundershowers meaning not only does the lawn now desperately need to be mowed thanks to the rain, but also that it was a good weekend for a time-consuming indoor actitivity.

    This weekend was filled with:

    Games. Anita scored a pair of tickets to the annual Game Con convention over at the expo center, three-day VIP passes, and she apparently had no interest in attending. One ticket to her husband, obviously, but I took the second and spent a huge chunk of the weekend, including Friday, there.

    Friday I got to the con just before lunch, did some of miniatures painting, wandered around, watched a couple demos, and then met up with Chris on his break, who was volunteering there all weekend, and we played some board games in the middle hall.

    I skedattled out of there around five, and chilled with the dog through another thunderstorm as the evening pressed on.

    Saturday I got up and got back to the con to meet Aaron. We did some wandering and product sampling, checked out a lot of the vendor booths and then watched some of the mainstage shows while we ate mediocre poutine. He took off around 2 and I stuck around a little longer to paint another free Warhammer miniature.

    Back home later that afternoon we made dinner and I retreated to the basement to read.

    Sunday morning was a beautiful sunny day and so we logged a nice ten klick run in the river valley.

    Sunday was also a dual event in our house, Karin’s birthday and also Father’s day, so the poor kid was juggling gifts and cards and being in a good mood.

    I had bought Karin a 2 player “duel” variatiaion of another board game we like. Finding good two player games is our new challenge as the parents of a kid just about to launch into university, and we played a couple rounds trying to figure out the rules… then the strategy.

    We walked the dog over to the cafe for something else to do later that afternoon, and then as the evening pressed on we went for a slow but tasty dinner at the nearby sushi place to celebrate the double celebration day.

    And then, just because it had been a busy couple of days, I hunkered down for the rest of the drizzly night to finish off another book in my queue so that I could move onto other things… not that it’s a race or anything.

  • book reviews: fathers day

    Coinicentally perhaps, all three of the last trio of otherwise-disconnected books I recently read had a thread of fatherhood-related importance running through them. 

    It was Father’s Day yesterday, and my last as the dad of a kid (because The Kid will be An Adult in a couple months) so while I’ll be a dad for the rest of my life my role is changing a little bit this year, and I’m not sure what that means yet. The fathers in each of these books were important narrative elements but each in a very different way, one a paragon, one a lunatic counter-example,  one a steady hand in a storm.

    Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    I have listened multiple times to the audio version of the entire Hyperion Cantos, a four book hard science fiction series set roughly six hundred years in the future in a society of humanity resettled onto hundreds of worlds interconnected by technologies, both alien and AI, that they don’t truly understand. This first book is a kind of Canterbury Tales story, a collection of backstory narratives told by a collection of pilgrims—one the aforementioned father travelling to complete his daughter’s journey—travelling towards certain doom towards the mysterious shrine of a threat that has defined each of their lives yet which is understood by none of them. The Shrike is a kind of technological demon of unknown origin, built by aliens or sent back from the future, with control over time and space and a merciless agenda the pilgrims can only speculate upon. I decided to read the text version of all four books after I obtained a complete ebook collection, and even though I’ve heard all four novels more than once I find I am reading more details on this pass though. The author incorporates as both a theme and a character throughout the novels a kind of embodied homage to poet John Keats who died tragically of tuberculosis in the early 1800s at the age of 25, and while visiting the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2023 I happened to see the commemotation of this marked upon his final home, if nothing else grounding this now-comfort read for me and urging repeated readings of this wonderful collection.

    The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

    If you have seen the 1986 film adaptation of this book which stars Harrison Ford as a misunderstood inventor driven mad by his pursuit of a Swiss Familiy Robinson-like escape from america to the jungles of Honduras, you’ve been misled about the tone of this novel. The novel is decidedly darker, and whomever turned this into a PG-13 romping adventure into the wilds did the source material a deep disservice. The novel’s protagonist Allie Fox is witnessed through the eyes of his fourteen year old son-made-narrator who details with gaslit devotion the madness of his father as he rages against the world as he flees with narcissitic paranoia further and further off grid to escape the perception of modern society as a prison. In a modern parlance we would recongnize these sorts of men who rule their families with thinly disguised emotional abuse as fountains of toxic masculinity, ripe for the propagandas of the right wing sovereignty cults or the red pilled movements. Seen from the eyes of his son, the collapse of this man into destructive madness is simultaneously pitiable and fearsome even knowing what such men have done to our societies over the last couple decades when they don’t take flight from their own shadows. This book shook me.

    Dust by Hugh Howey

    I did it. I sunk my teeth into the final book of the Silo trilogy and read the conclusion to this dystopic tale of society’s collapse at the hands of madness and righteousness. Even more than the previous two volumes Howey seems to lean into the misguided evils of people who blindly believe in things: their own infallibility, patriotic furvor, religious ideologies, among other subtler concepts. All of this emerges from the narrative web that Howey wove with the rich collection of characters and stories that only just started to interconnect even as the second book concluded. In the third and final installment the disparate storytelling becomes an obvious whole as the plot bounces between the characters and their chances of fortune that have led them on a plot-based collision course with each other and the ultimate conclusion of the story. The author isn’t shy about raising the stakes with any and every chapter, beloved characters meeting fatal fates with a regularity that would make Game of Thrones readers blush, but the harsh reality at the end of the world is that between desperation and ignorance is the rawness of survival against the odds. I wonder how the mini-series that prompted me to dig deeper into the orginal novels will handle it all.

  • head over feets: zen edition

    I have been doing a self-experiment. (That’s what I am going to call these things that others might call “challenges” or “streaks” of trying to build a habit over the course of 30 days. Experiments on myself.) I have been meditating every day.

    And before you get the images of me all new-age yogi omming on a cushion with incense and such, I’ll tell you instead that it has been an effort much more of a timer-based mindfulness exercise. Me just sitting there with my eyes closed focused on stillness and breath and focus of thoughts. I read a more science-focused book on meditation and the author compared the health-based meditation to mental pushups: just repeating the focus, correcting ones form, adjusting, repeating, and building mental strength and stamina. I mean, it’s all the same stuff in the end, but instead of chanting I have an app on my phone that makes a gentle sound when the timer expires.

    I’m working on a whole article about that experiment that I’ll publish in a couple weeks, but I’ve had some reflective thoughts on the effort and how it relates to another kind of meditation I’ve been doing for nearly twenty years, thirty day challenges be damned. 

    Running solo and sans music is, believe it or not, meditative. At least, data point of one, it has been for me. I just didn’t really recognize it until my efforts to be mindful on my living room floor and my solo running efforts overlapped. 

    Yesterday morning I went for a run in the rain.

    I followed a familiar route that led through my neighbourhood avoiding as many roads that I could and focusing on finding a route towards the river valley. I dodged onto the asphalt trail and followed that fo a few minutes until I found the exit into the single track through the trees.

    Mindfulness is about focus on the body and a stilling of ones thoughts. It is an impossible feat for nearly everyone, I am given to understand. One can creep ever closer towards the goal that is infinitely out of reach. Running through the woods my mind turns itself over to the trail, each step a miniature obstacle that requires a kind of focus and attention. The meandering terrain of a single track course maginifies that focus, forcing the mind into a single purpose machine tracking the undulating and potentially dangerous footing while modulating the body for pace and breath and the beat-beat-beat of a racing heart.

    To be fair, this is not the first time I have made this connection between mindfulness and my chosen sport.

    I used to write a lot about the space that running gave me to think creative thoughts, work through problems, or ponder philosophical ideas. (I know, I’m odd.) Going for a solo run has always been a way to slip into a mindful trance of sorts and plod around the neighbourhood working through stuff with an unencumbered mind.  People even ask me how I run without music, to which I would reply that I sometimes do run with headphones but most often I just prefer the space to think.  What I never really recognized until lately was that this thing that the zen folks and the yogis and the chanters sitting atop cushions are all trying to achieve is a state of mental clarity and calm that I already kinda found out there in the river valley trails, and I suspect is a familiar state of mind for countless other runners and trail racing folk.

    I am enjoying my daily fifteen minutes of mental pushups. I turn on my timer and find a quiet place to sit and then just listen to my own breath for a spell. When my little experiment is over, this effort to build a new habit has reached its milestone, when the final chime rings I will need to decide if it remains something I find space for each day. Or, instead, does this become another tool in my health toolbox, like strength training or eating well, is it something I just do to make me a better runner.

  • writing: enough

    It’s all well and good to write about writing but at the end of the day you’ve really just got to sit down and do it.

    It’s mid-June and Father’s day is approaching. This is something of an anniversary for me because on the day after Father’s day, two years ago, I had a meeting with my then-boss and resigned from my job.

    I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it because—as my kid told me just yesterday as she prepares to transition out of grade school and into adulthood—you kinda put on rose coloured glasses after you finish something, don’t you?

    I’ve spilled uncountable and unpublishable words on the reasons and follow-up of quitting a job and avoiding the perceptions of others that goes along with that: weakness, disloyalty, presumptions of cause, and all those things. Really, it was just an opportunity that I had and it was time to make a switch and take a break, and the stars aligned.

    Inside that opportunity was the notion that I was going to fill at least parts of my days putting words to paper. (Well—digital paper.) And heck, inside of these last two years I have typed out what has probably amounted to a quarter of a million of those aspirational words.

    I mean, along with writing, I’ve done a long list of other things. Frankly, I need to. Writing is as much as chore as any task. You get tired. Your brain needs breaks. I gave myself a modest daily goal and was persistently reluctant to push past those goals as a means and a method to avoid burning myself out on writing. SO I write for a bit each day and then do other things. Though, oddly enough, those things have varied, but the writing has kept pretty consistent.

    Yet here I am, almost at the two-year anniversary of that transition, casually poking at the pursuit of full-time work bear again, and looking back on what, if anything, I accomplished in the wordsmithery field that defined a big chunk of the last two years.

    Sure, a quarter million words including probably what amounts to a hundred mini-essays, the first 90% of a long novel, a string of blog posts, a small collection of short stories, and lots of vaguely reflective writing.

    Tiny goals, two years… big results.

    Just sitting down literally every day and writing… something.

    Is any of it worth anything?

    I mean, if you are judging my productivity in the context of publication and sales, then look: the world is fickle. I’ve written thousands of those words on the frustrations of commercially viable wordcraft. We live in a world where barely a fraction of the people read, and then when those people do read they are doing it as an escapism, and it seems from where I sit that most people are hoping to escape into romantic fantasy or comic book absurdity or political theatre or—well, heck if I knew maybe I would have gone viral and we wouldn’t be having this one-way conversation, would we?

    If, on the other hand, you are simply judging me by the fact that I write, say roughly, about 500 words per hour and have produced, again roughly, about a quarter million words, then this means that I have spent about 500 hours over the last two years writing. That’s a lot of practice… and a lot of personal value.

    Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like enough.

    What even is enough?

    I don’t have a number, per se, but I feel like if I was to tell you that I am happy with my output despite the fact that a quarter of a million words and 500 hours of effort seems impressive, I would add to the end of that statement that I probably could write a bit more.

    Now, maybe you see the posts on this blog and you read some of it and wonder why I write on the topics that I write on. But heck, it’s all practice tho, isn’t it? Movie reviews, updates about my weekend, stories about my garden, meandering philosophical essays on the productivity of a Saturday afternoon. None of it’s breaking news, but writing enough is often about putting in the time and practice. That goes for anything. You don’t judge a runner for training multiple days per week for a race or begrudge a chef for prepping ten thousand meals before opening her own restaurant. Why point a questioning finger at a writer for just writing and writing and writing and then writing some more—even if the topic is blah or not of interest to you in particular?

    As such, my only advice on this topic was right there in the lede. I realize that even for myself I’ll only feel like I’ve done enough when I actually just done it. I just gotta sit here and keep writing, practicing, honing this craft, and perhaps amounting to something of that even I approve is enough.