When I say I'd see you in another three years, I meant it as a joke, but here we are. Living in a new city now. Las Vegas is a never-ending source of amusement for me. It is a city built both on glorious excess and ignoring life's struggles. It has a wonderfully vibrant arts community, an enormous population of unhoused, and the single best library district I've ever encountered. So, up and down. I've been here for a year and a half. There was a school shooting less than a city block from where I live, but also a Fall TV pilot being filmed and a Super Bowl being played within walking distance. It's a weird place, but it's exciting, and that's enough for me.

I've joined a nice writer's group, which has put me back in the habit. Even sold a (second) short story to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, which is the same magazine who published my first story, "Copper Charley" twelve years ago. The new is one called "Jennifer Does Pushups" and it will be featured in next month's issue. I'm even listed in the Sneak Peak section of Analag's website, which is pretty darn nifty.

On the video game front, I've been burning through my Epic backlog, which I finally dumped into a spreadsheet so I can track how many hours I have left. 930-ish. Sheesh. No one who knows me would ever believe this, but I don't play nearly enough video games(!) Plus, I'm to take a side-trip this week (or maybe this month) to play Monster Camp, which so far has turned out to be as hilarious and well-written as the first one and I love it so very much. I expect to buy the third one three years from now when we talk again.

If you read the post below this one from 2022, you'll notice me professing my love for the first Monster Prom, and also Murderbot from Martha Wells, which is now being turned into a TV series on some streaming channel I refuse to pay for and therefore will never see, but I enjoyed the books, so I hope the series turns out well.

Lastly, I've decided I'm done with Twitter. I stopped posting over there long before Elon Musk took the whole thing over and turned it into his personal echo chamber, so while I could say this is a political stand I'm taking, that would be a lie. Mostly I'm just upset that you're required to log into Twitter to view the content on Twitter and I *hate* that. That's also why Pinterest and Facebook can fuck off and die, although I'm told you can simply edit the page and remove the pop-ups to continue reading the content on these log-in only sites, but that seems like a lot of work and I would rather just not visit their stupid social media platforms at all.

So, that means you can find my very tiny social media presence hanging out on Bluesky @joeissilly, at least for the moment. Or click the little butterfly logo up there. Peace out.

Hello Internet. Been a while since we talked. The Pandemic sort of shifted my priorities, as I am sure it did for everyone. While we were stuck inside, I wrote a role-playing game/activity book about fairies for my nieces called Fae Bay. We played it for most of the school year while were stuck at home doing remote learning and trying to avoid other human beings. That is mostly over with, now that everyone seems to have figured out what they are comfortable with, coronavirus-wise, but I recently went back and tidied the game up, fixed some of the more glaring issues, added some artwork and combined it all into a nice tidy package, which is available for purchase on Itch.IO. If you are interested, there is also a demo, if you want to run through the adventure with your kids before diving into an incredibly long adventure with them.

For video games, I am back to playing League of Legends (turns out, I still suck at it, go figure), and have roped my nieces into playing against the robots with me. They are enjoying it, but we haven't tried diving into actual games against other people yet, on account of they are way too young for such a toxic environment. I've also been playing a lot of Space Food Truck lately, and also Monster Prom, which I totally fell in love with during the past couple of years.

I've also been reading Martha Wells' Murderbot series as of late. Four books (novellas?) in, and still enjoying it. I also did a re-read of the entire Expanse series earlier this year, after Amazon finished up their six season run of the show. I loved that show, and even more and more as it went. I miss it already. None of the other offerings out here so far have come close to matching it. I watched the Sandman on Netflix this month (it was okay, better than most shows adapted from Neil Gaiman's work) and Resident Evil (which gets dumber every episode) and also finished off Better Call Saul, which I've been very impressed with.

That's it from me, I guess. See you in another three years!

I updated Slinko this week to smooth over the Xbox Live Sign-In, which was forced on me during the last update. I copypasta'd the logic right from the Xbox Live Sample, just to smash it through the submission process in order to get my Xbox Controller hotfix in, but I didn't care for the way it handled the sign-ins, so this week I put a little work into it, to make it a little more user friendly. I'm now using the Gamertag for the High Score, which means I had to update my Privacy Policy again to reflect that new information.

For fun stuff, I picked up Axiom Verge free through the Epic Games Store, which means I had to finally sign up for it. I'm kind of sick of seeing new game launchers and had been avoiding the Epic one for some time, but I just couldn't pass on Axiom Verge. Took me a couple of days to finish - and it was awesome. I generally hate Metroidvania as a genre, because I LOVE the first Metroid game, but everytime I play a "Metroidvania", the level design makes it feel like a puzzle game and not a Metroid game. That is why I hated Ori and the Blind Forest and Outland and Guacamelee! and a whole bunch of other ones I won't even bother to mention. Axiom Verge was the first one I've played that made me think the guy who made it actually PLAYED the original Metroid, and didn't just start on Metroid Prime like the rest of these youngsters.

Watched the finale of Luke Cage Season Two last night. I kind of liked the ending, but it seems to me they were really expecting to get a third season and it looks like it isn't going to happen. Too bad, that was one of the better offerings I've seen on Netflix so far.

Howdy folks. Sorry I've been gone for a while. Programming stopped going well and then life intervened and intervened again and I just got sidetracked. Things have settled down a bit, though, so I'll try to be a little more communicative. At the end of last year, Slinko got pulled from the Windows Store for lack of updates, so I added support controller support and its now playable on the XBox One. Kind of silly, I know, but I did it anyway.

And then I had to re-update it because it was crashing for all those people who didn't have Xbox Controllers attached to their PCs. Ugh. Not one of my finer moments.

On the free-time front, I've got access to Netflix now, so I've been slogging my way through all the Marvel shows. Also watched The Haunting of Hill House, which I have mixed feelings on.

Man, things have not been going well on the programming front. Slow and obnoxious and I don't really have any good updates to show you right now. Mostly I'm just posting to tell you I added a Terms of Service page to the coding section, because Microsoft is now requiring each app to have Terms of Service associated with it, which seems kind of silly to me, because they already have Terms of Service for the store and it is already a legal monolith, but whatever.

Dan and I finished off the second draft of our script a while back, and after a few weeks (or has it been months?) it is time to dig back in for one more draft before we send it out for feedback.

Not much else going on. Reading some books - NK Jemisin's inheritance trilogy is probably the best of them. Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil was also a really interesting read. Oh, and Colony and Legion and the Expanse are back on television, so that's awesome for the next two months or so.

This week I started building the foundations of a MapEditor into my toolset. Then I built a small test map, forked my network test and added the map to it. Not bad for a week of work, considering I was splitting time with the writing.

Speaking of which, Dan and I put another twenty pages of work into the script this week. At this pace, we'll be done with the second draft by mid-April, but I'm betting we'll need at least one more draft before we start pushing this on other people and getting some feedback.

Finished off Titanfall 2 this week. Not a bad campaign, well-written, although I feel like it went a little heavy on the wall-running. Anytime you came to a place where it was not immediately apparent what your next move was, try wall-running. And then more wall-running. And then more. On and on until they let you jump back inside your giant murder-bot, which is where the game really shines. As someone who has been playing 'mech games since before they were in 3D, I LOVED the mech combat.