Where I’ve Been #

First off, let me update you on my current projects:

My scifi mech novel, SoftWar - Predator, Prey is my current focus. I’ve completely finished the first 13 chapter draft, but my wife has given me some incredibly valueable feedback (aka the main character sucks) and she’s 100% right. So I’m four chapters into the rewrite and it’s getting better. I’m excited to see this new version of Yuri survive Rocco-II and fight off the Zard hacker.

No sooner had the chamber pressurized than the door to the port cracked open, just slightly enough to allow the hiss of rushing air to echo through the space. Yuri glanced at the door and watched as it opened slowly. He felt a gentle pull as the low pressure tunnel equalized with the inside of the port.

The figure of a man pushed the door wider, and casually glided inside, weightlessly, like a grim reaper. His eyes were narrow and fierce, like a hunter’s, his hair was long and black, tied loosely behind his head. His black stubble was patchy, matching the tattered poncho of rags and stained fabrics he wore over his broad shoulders.

Over the course of the last seven months in the academy, Yuri’s planet-side mech training had covered several skills to effectively navigate around a battlefield. He knew how to use grids and maps to chart friends and target locations, and he found the z axis easy enough to pick up on the fly.

What he hadn’t practiced was navigating in a gravity-free environment. He didn’t have a feel for the subtle, high precision adjustments needed to maintain his position in the asteroid field, so he kept drifting into rocks and overcorrecting into more rocks.

Chapter 2 #

Yuri caught up quickly, not wanting to be left behind. The two of them walked across the long steel platform toward the far left side of the massive industrial space. Yuri could see the engineers ahead carrying Hawthorne’s stretcher down the scaffold staircase. They were so high up, the boy felt a bit of vertigo and kept his hand on the railing.

The first mech they walked past was a bulky Ajax frame painted dark blue, with massive miniguns held in both hands. Boone dragged his hand along the mech’s body casually, as they walked by. It must have been his.

Are you an angry American who is disillusioned by American politics? Depressed even? Here are some ways to take action.

Join the DSA #

If you’re a fan of Burnie Sanders or AOC, you should join the DSA and participate in your local chapter.

In light of how poorly the Democratic party is handling Trump’s second term, you should join an organization that is actually fighting against tyranny and oppression.

So there I was… #

So there I was applying to another startup on Y-Combinator a few Mondays ago, and in my cover letter I made a joke about how difficult it is to get deterministic responses out of LLMs. Almost immediately after I sent the email, I instantly came up with a better joke I should have used instead:

How many LLMs does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Chapter 1 #

A few hours later, on a dark and sandy beach, a few kilometers from the outskirts of New Miami, the young man reclined on his red and yellow beach chair. Waves rolled in slowly and quietly all around. On this lonely beach, he was isolated and free.

He’d been swimming in the ocean only minutes before. His clothes were drying on the mech that knelt on the sand beside him. His training mech, the old Ajax with chipping paint and rusting bolts, was larger than most buildings. To climb out, Yuri had used a rope-lift that dangled out of the open chest cockpit.

Chapter 0 #

“Order up! #103?”

The cook’s gray apron and red polo shirt were soaked through with sweat, and his thin mustache and long black hair curled from the humidity behind him. Steam and smoke emerged from the small noodle shop’s front window like ghosts escaping the underworld. The short, stocky asian man leaned out, underneath the bright orange neon sign, Lu’s Noodles, and looked around.

“Tonketsu Ramen, extra egg, extra meat! #103!” Lu said angrily, slamming the vinyl menu below the counter to make a harsh plastic clattering sound.

Intro #

I’m working on a game right now that involves a lot of narrative. That’s lead me to think a lot about moral choice in games, what I like, and what I want to do in the future.

For my game, Esmerelda: The Black Amber Covenant, I want to have quests and a morality system. But what does that look like, even just from the design perspective?

Well, let’s think about some games that did moral choice well:

The Problem #

Maybe like me, you work on lots of remote, terminal-only servers setting up stupid stuff like Plex, Jenkins, Godot Packaging, game servers, etc.

If you do this, you probably spend hours testing terminal commands trying to find the exact commands to configure your device properly. If your server ever went down, all that work would be lost forever.

Luckily, that command history is available on the device itself (up-arrow shows previous commands), but it doesn’t really help you if that VM is deleted and lost forever, or if you want to show somebody else the many steps it took to do something complicated. Copying commands one at a time is a non-starter too.