Development progress for Porydex has increased to ludicrous speed since my update post last month. I’ve finally made it out from under the mountain of backlogged work that had buried the project since late 2023, and now I’m even adding new features that I’ve been looking forward to adding for years!
Continue readingCategory: Blog (Page 2 of 6)
In which I talk about things that (usually) aren’t fictional. (Probably.)
Remember Porydex, my Pokémon dex + competitive battling stats website? It still exists, and I’m still working on it—though the progress is slow and chaotic. Here’s a general update on where the whole thing is at.
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Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’d stay as far away from it as possible.
Continue readingOver the years, various writing buddies and I have dreamed of creating massive stories set in a massive shared world—a collaboratively designed fantasy setting with thousands of years of history, with the theory being that any of us writers could pick any place and time within the world and write anything from a short story to a full length series or serial, and over time we’d build up a huge library of works within this one universe. (And with the further idea that, if a reader liked one of those stories, they’d probably want to read the rest, and we’d thereby all be supporting each other’s audience growth.)
Most of those ideas never panned out, but I’m still deeply fascinated by the idea of “massive storytelling.” Both in terms of length (a series with a single throughline, with dozens of novels worth of entries, or millions of words worth of content, from beginning to end); and in terms of width (a series with multiple parallel throughlines, like a shared universe with many entries, or a series with such a huge cast of characters that in practice it may as well have multiple parallel throughlines).
I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on “massive storytelling” for a while now. What makes one “massive” series successful over another? What causes a massive series to die out? What qualities can a massive series have that will contribute or detract from its literary success? Or, as a separate question entirely, its commercial success?
Let’s look at some examples and try to figure these things out.
Continue reading(Technically, I started watching One Pace, a fan-edit that cuts the series length down from a daunting 1,000+ episodes to a still-daunting-but-slightly-less-so 500+ episodes.)
Continue readingSometimes I think about the fact that each and every one of us is, to some extent at least, ontologically trapped. We’re all “stuck” in “The System,” whether we want to admit it or not. Whether we’re aware of it or not. And most importantly, whether we accept it or not.
Continue readingOnce, a long time ago, I was told there are two kinds of writers. There are those who love writing—who delight in the craft of it, the mental and physical labor of putting words to paper or screen, to construct the narrative their heart yearns to share—because to them, that effort is no labor at all.
And then there are those who love having written—the dreamers, the thinkers, the ones who say for years that they’re working on a novel, with most of that time spent imagining the finished product and taking no tangible steps to get there. In short, they’re the ones who don’t actually write.
But this post isn’t about writing. It’s not about any one particular subject, or activity, or even logical context. It’s about healing from trauma, and the inner strength it takes to stick to the difficult path. It’s about mortality, and finding meaning in a nihilistic universe whose lifespan is just as finite as yours. It’s about life, the universe, and everything, and also nothing at all, because it’s about a frame of mind that can be applied to just about any situation to make it better or more bearable. It’s about enduring.
It’s about the journey.
Continue readingOne weekend morning in the early 2000s, RuneScape.com was down. That’s right—the free-to-play fantasy MMORPG that had entranced millions of middle schoolers around the world, including me, with its charming graphics and goofy quests and people constantly shouting and scamming outside the bank in Varrock, was mysteriously offline.
I was devastated. Would it be back up in a few minutes? A few hours? This week? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t just put down my craving for some fantasy RPG action.
So I decided to create my own entire fantasy world with its own RPG instead.
Continue readingThe short version: I moved!
Unfortunately, that means no progress on any other projects recently. No time to work on Porydex, or Shifty Squares, or any fiction writing. Nearly every free day for the last month and a half has been devoted to some aspect of The Move, whether by way of the physical labor of moving everything from point A to point B, or communications with our lawyer who was handling all the direct interaction with the people we were trying to leave behind.
The long version:
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