September 2011
1 post
Stairway to Heaven
I found this on a backup disc from last year. I have only the faintest memory of writing it. Posted with the bare minimum of proofreading.
Carver’s Glen was not what you’d call a decent town. In fact, calling it a town would be charitable. Amounting to little more than a handful of shacks clustered around a wind-scarred general store, it was not the sort of place where anyone could...
May 2011
1 post
The Game We Played With The World
So here we are. Osama bin Laden - terrorist, religious fundamentalist and angry rich guy - has been pronounced dead by the United States government. Hurray for that, I suppose, but I’m not particularly excited or encouraged by the world’s reaction to this news. I tried very hard this morning (yeah, for like an hour - ed.) not to express any opinions about the announcement, because I...
February 2011
1 post
Perspective Bomb
I thought very hard about whether I should write this. Two weeks ago, I decided that I want to stop sharing my opinions on the internet. After all, if I’m going to add my voice to a discussion, I need to be damn sure that it’s actually going to contribute, and since I’m not really an expert on anything, this doesn’t happen very often. Perhaps, after years of being stubborn...
January 2011
3 posts
Fixing the World
The afterparty went late into the night. Sullen music echoed across the warehouse roof as disillusioned twenty-somethings shuffled past each other in the August heat. The smell of cigarette smoke and warm beer mixed with the silent, screaming angst of the partygoers, their masks of indifference haggard and misplaced.
Awkward advances fell flat against the glare of the skyline, the girls...
Metaposting (Oh Snap!)
This post is not a story, nor is it quite an editorial. It is about the thoughts and realizations that led up to me writing it, if that makes any sense.
The past few days have been rather interesting, as far as my writing is concerned. Thanks to a suggestion from the excellent Krystian Majewski, I wanted to write a short story with Roche limits as its central theme. I’m still going to do...
Tron: Legacy and Thinking Too Hard
“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like?”
Thus begins Disney’s Tron: Legacy, the crusty baritone of Jeff Bridges rumbling lazily between programming genius Kevin Flynn and carefree slacker The Dude, who now seems to just be part of the actor’s persona. Thus also appears a remnant...
August 2010
1 post
On Echo Chambers
Lately I’ve become wary of situations in which everyone appears to agree on something. There are plenty of reasons; the most coarse is simply the vague dystopian creepiness of an entire group adhering to an idea without harsh enough inquiry. Less cynical is the scientific concern that homogeneity leads to stagnation, and progress can be stunted when there isn’t enough variation in the...
July 2010
3 posts
And The Stars Said "Come Home"
The break in the clouds lasted several days. It had been years since the sky had permitted more than a glimpse beyond the atmosphere, and now a freak high-pressure system had unfolded the velvet night like a gift. The astronomer would have taken advantage, but he was miles from any observatory, and he knew the constellations by heart. He would have gained nothing from retracing his charts, aside...
Handle With Care
I miss photographing animals. Since I have few opportunities to snap photos in the wild, I took advantage of a day trip to the Norwalk Aquarium in CT.
Old Summit Photos
I’m visiting family in New York for the rest of the week. Went through some old photo albums at my mom’s place and found these. Sorry about the reflections; I snapped them with my phone camera on the kitchen table.
June 2010
10 posts
Sword In The Rain
From the letters of Arto Vaeltanen to Martina Strannikova, ca. Aug. 2023:
…but it is not [the bloodshed] that tears at my soul and finds me whispering your name in the night like a mantra, like a ward against darkness. It is the mentality, the brutality of thought, the oppressive air of antagonism and mental violence that blankets this desert. One does not ponder in this place; one only...
Angry Young Man
The boy was raised far from any city. He knew little of their verticality and their coddling sterility. Baptised in the falls of Supai, he knew the laws of nature long before any others. His world was pure and his heart undaunted, and the sun shone on his head every day of his young life.
He was raised to know himself, his every strength and weakness. He was raised to know what a man is and is...
Aldebaran's Kiss
As he sat cross-legged on the boulder, the wanderer let his eyes come to rest just above the horizon. The last sliver of sun had dropped from sight, and the clouds were aflame with its radiance, purple shadows on orange shapes. Directly above the wanderer’s head, the brighter stars were becoming visible. He visualized a thin strand - silk thread or lightning - running from the center of his...
Peregrinus
Peregrinus paused at the crest of the hill. The city lay open before him, a dead thing no more alive than the marshes he had crossed to reach it. Buildings rose beaten and torn from the gray earth, rearing gray heads toward a gray sky, silently howling the Song of the End. He’d heard the song before, in the cries of refugees following the last death rattle of war, in the wailing of the...
The Tempest
The android landed softly on the mountaintop, the engineer cradled in his arms. His metal feet made no sound on the rock. Masters of grace, the machines flowed through their surroundings like water, and he had been the first to teach this to the others. In this moment, as always, he was grateful to the generations of bodhisattvas who had lived before him, and to the engineer in his arms, who had...
Alpine Lake (1:50)
Still making soundscapes...
Goddess and God
The young man rose to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the corpse of the slave trader. He hadn’t wished to kill the man, but violence redirected is still violence nonetheless. The young man had only changed the angle of the blow, and in a moment the slave trader had gutted himself with his own blade. The young man bowed and said a prayer.
The women locked inside the wagon looked at the...
In Which Food is Love
I neglected my blogging responsibilities over the weekend. Gotta work on not letting this happen in the future, but first I gotta work on being able to focus on my daily responsibilities when my mind is fully preoccupied with the magnetic presence of another human being whose very existence is an effortless validation of every notion that I’ve held about the world since childhood, but was...
Byzantium After the End
It never stops raining on the upper levels of Umut Sehir. The steel-reinforced asphalt flickers with wetness under the low ceiling of the sky. Little remains of the city below, known by many names over the tired, wind-beaten centuries since the first of our many lapses in judgment.
There had been no apocalypse; no cataclysmic event to mark the dawn of a new age, or even the end of the last....
Dead of Night
Beautiful thunderstorm tonight. Sky was low and heavy, green-gray with a restrained fury that only Mother Nature can manage. I was very nearly struck by lightning, actually. A single bolt hit one of the lampposts in the parking lot about twenty yards off, leaving my ears ringing for several minutes.
I came home a little after midnight to find that the power in my neighborhood had gone out....
May 2010
12 posts
Dance Like You're Drunk
Sometimes, without warning, at weird hours of the night, I become really Greek. I’m actually Greek-Ukrainian, but my ethnicities show themselves in completely different situations, and never at the same time (put me in the Catskill Mountains on a summer day, for instance, and I’ll be as Varangian as you please). Tonight, though - as on all nights when I’m up late and love is on...
Hope Rides Alone
Anyone who’s spoken to me about music for longer than five minutes has no doubt heard me sing the praises of the Protomen. I’ve had more than a few friends shake their heads at me for my taste in music - namely, my unwavering belief in rock and roll. Not alternative, or industrial, or nu metal, or whatever silly new genres the recording industry keeps inventing to foist new depths of...
Whoops...
Keeping this short, as I have an exam tomorrow and there’s a little catching up to do. There’s a good reason for this time crunch, though: inspiration has kept me awake. My friends and I have been brainstorming on an idea so cool that I don’t want to talk about it yet, but you’ll know it when you see it.
I’m also deeply in love with a woman who lives five hours in...
The Dreaming Mountain
Another speed-writing exercise. Challenge Modifiers: No Similes or Metaphors, One Independent Clause Per Sentence.
When the shaking stopped, Mara opened her eyes. The jungle was gone. So was Jeramie. At least, it might have been Jeramie. The thing that chased her had been huge. It bled electricity and uprooted trees. She had assumed that Jeramie was already dead. The vaguely humanoid thing...
House of the Unfamiliar (3:21)
Guitar instead of...
Chemical Highway
Trying my hand at speed-writing story fragments from single images by concept artists. Going to start with a piece from my “Pretty Pictures” post. Challenge Modifiers: No Adverbs, Maximum One Adjective Per Noun.
Teddy Vyshaev sat on the barrier at the outer edge of turn 7, feet hanging over the hundred-foot drop. The smell of ozone lingered even this high above the track. The...
She Smiled and Said "Finish It"
I just finished Alan Wake this morning. Unlike what you’d expect, I am neither shaking with fear nor pumping my fists in victory. Instead there’s a lump in my throat, and my mind is vibrating with a creative intensity that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in a long time. I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. Like someone reached into my head to show me a place that...
A Mile in Their Shoes
I’ve played a lot of Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption this week, and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch others play them too. The contrast between my play style and those of others has made me realize that there’s a way to play videogames that might be new, or maybe it isn’t - all I know is that I’ve never seen anyone outside the Squadron of Shame doing it....
The Lights
Like war, it was inevitable. Like a virus, it was silent and omnipresent. Like hate, it burned and crippled every mind it touched. And like soured love, it gave little warning. It began in the pristine innocence of doubt. Gathering fear as a wheel gathers mud, it became anxiety, then angst, then silent shrieking horror. It resided not in one person, but in the whole of their kind. It was a...
Southward Bound
I’ve always been fascinated by Australia and New Zealand. Ever since I was a child, when I watched Dot and the Bunny religiously, the wilderness of the southern hemisphere captivated me. When The Lord of the Rings came out in 2001, I remember suddenly feeling defensive about New Zealand, because I’d wanted to go there before it was cool. I never knew when the day would come, but I knew...
Pretty Pictures
My earnest admonition to videogames yesterday brought back a lot of memories and a lot of imagery from my lately-dormant creative impulse. So much code and programming work over the past year has made my imagination a little lazy, so I took the opportunity to give it a little bit of a jump start today.
Sometimes I get a little bummed out by how little most games, films or TV shows actually look...
Interactive Intervention
Dear Videogames,
Look, I love you. I truly do. But we really need to talk. For years, I’ve looked past the silly little mind tricks you’ve played, the unpredictable behavior, the drinking, the public masturbation. I’ve tried so hard to ignore all of these things and see you for the creative form I fell in love with. The power of interactivity, the potential for genuine change...
April 2010
2 posts
What I've Learned About Games
This list is dedicated to the things I’ve learned from a life spent playing, and the games that taught me by their examples. These have always been my personal design commandments, and I hope that my work will one day come to embody the principles listed here.
GAMES SHOULD HAVE PERSONALITY
Any character can deliver dialogue, but there are precious few that can earn our admiration. It is...
Quit Screwin’ Around, Kid (3:34)
I left...
January 2010
2 posts
The Titan and the Rajah
This is part of a bigger story, but I want to put it down as is, whether the events are clear or not. I’m also experimenting with less flowery prose. Tell me if this is better or worse!
“You’re not really a titan, are you?” said the little girl, brushing the wrinkles out of her dress. Few noble families would ever let their children play in clothing so extravagant, but...
Building Valhalla
Most of my daydreams end with the sensation that I am flying over a sea of my friends’ smiling faces. I laugh at the top of my lungs as I backflip off the surface of our tiny planet and freefall toward the stars, blazing a trail for others to follow long after I’ve vanished into memory. Sometimes I am alone, other times there is a woman with me. Most of the time I arrive at the center...
December 2009
5 posts
Sit Down, Have Some Capo (2:29)
DADGAD tuning,...
What, Me Practice? (1:37)
Particularly...
Old Notes: July 7, 2006
Although he possessed a devastating imagination and a profound gift for descriptive language, H. P. Lovecraft was essentially a frightened mystic. He feared progress and saw mankind’s achievements as not only cosmically insignificant, but in fact decadent and self-destructive. Despite his status as a towering genius in the fantasy genre, he is merely fortunate that his racism and xenophobia...
Old Notes: April 21, 2006
The sky split, and he was torn through the horizon by a force stronger than gravity or fear…
That single sentence was sitting all alone in the middle of a page. No idea what I hoped to accomplish with it.
Old Notes: April 10, 2006
“The Diamond Shoals? You fuckin’ nuts, doll? There’s cheaper ‘n quicker ways to die than that.”
The starship mechanic rested one massive shoulder against the wall, leaving grease stains on the rust-caked concrete. Scraping carbon from under his fingernails, he scrutinized the girl in front of him, who was standing well within his personal space and looking straight...
Scrawled on the Flight Home
A steel and aluminum insect, its carapace dotted with seams of light, skated along the translucent film between the sphere and the void. Waves of vapor rolled beneath, vast and unbearably close in the gray, diffuse light of the waxing moon. My eyes were fixed on some uncertain point on the horizon, an ice-feathered sheet of clear plastic detaching my senses from the ecstasy of freefall beyond. A...