Articles
Criticism and analysis, mostly of videogames, but also of topics within the orbit of videogames.
| Title | Description | Original Date |
|---|---|---|
| From Independent to Indie: Cave Story Revisited | A retrospective on Cave Story, placing it in context as a link in the transition from the post-shareware limbo phase of independent game production to the indie boom. | |
| Digital Phantasmagoria: On the Art of DataErase, Glitch Witch, Anime Porn Historian, and DIP Switch Devil | An introduction to DataErase, glitch artist extraordinaire. | |
| On 3-D Body Adventure and "Educational Games" | An educational game from the '90s becomes a window into the broader zeitgeist around the information technology of its day. | |
| The Time Traveler's Diary: A Year in YU-NO (2017-2018) | In which my brain is slowly denatured and reconstructed by the most interesting pornographic game ever designed. | |
| Flash Forever | A primer on Flash games, and a personal account of growing up with them. | |
| Monster Kids: On Sin & Punishment | A tribute to one of the Nintendo 64's lesser-known games, and one of its best. | |
| Game Diary, Entry No. 6: Welcome to Crystal Hell. | A struggle with the infamous final level of Super Mario 3d World leads me to ask what concepts like "difficulty," "fairness," and "mastery" really mean. | |
| #selected notes | The handful of posts from my blog's "digital notebook" tag that I think are worth including alongside the major articles above. It's rougher, earlier writing, but some useful ideas are still developed. | –present |
Programs
I program, as a hobby. Most of my publicly accessible code is on this site somewhere; some of it is under version control at my sourcehut page. I hope you'll find the programs below interesting or, failing that, useful.
| Name | Description | Git repo |
|---|---|---|
| Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir Translation Project | An ongoing effort to translate the original FDS version of Famicom Detective Club, from 1988. | N/A |
| Knight | An implementation of Warnsdorff's rule for finding knight's tours in x64 assembly, turning it into an exhaustive backtrack search. Creatively optimized. | https://git.sr.ht/~asterism/knight |
| Mizmaze: Dance of the Bacchic Knight | A terminal maze game? In 2025? Could it work? Maybe. | https://git.sr.ht/~asterism/mzmz |
| init.el | My Emacs config. A permanent work in progress, though some of the functions therein may be worth yanking into your own code. | N/A |
| s2ram.el | An Elisp library implementing an idle Suspend-to-RAM timer under EXWM. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. | N/A |
Miscellaneous
Works that don't fit neatly into any of the categories above.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Game Boy Camera gallery | A gallery of photos taken with a Game Boy Camera. |
| Venn Void | A puzzle combining an anagram with an inverted Venn diagram. |