Insert Irish-Themed Subject Line
Hey everybody,
Sale Alert! If you need any of the stuff I sell on itch, you can get it for 50% off for the next few days. Or you can buy everything and save even more. The link above will take you directly to the sale page.
Otherwise, there's not a whole lot going on here other than closing in on finishing up the first draft of Castaways & Conspiracies. Kickstarter sent the email saying funding was on the way a couple of days ago, so hopefully the money will hit my account and I can start getting the add-ons shipped this week.
Here's a trippy picture of hippie van I made for a recent Artbreeder contest. The topic was "Road Trip." They have a contest every day and I usually create something. I also used Artbreeder for most of the art in The Blasphemous Temple of Yargolith. You can see all the things I've made playing around with their AI here.
I've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks organizing, tagging, and cleaning up the files on my ebook collection using a cataloging program called Alpha Ebooks. It's strangely therapeutic. Otherwise I probably never would have gotten this far. Fiction, Nonfiction, and Comics (except for some stuff I unwittingly bought with DRM) are done and I'm working on the games now (which will take a while).
Recent Reading
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow hits on a lot of the same ideas as Chokepoint Capitalism, but this time in regards to internet platforms and content distribution. DRMs, Right to Repair, IP fuckery, and other common Doctorow themes all get plenty of discussion.
Rinconete y Cortadillo by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is one of Cervantes exemplary novels (that's what he called them) about a couple of guys joining a Seville thieves' guild. It's very short (I think the multiple prefaces and end notes are longer than than the actual story), but I enjoyed it because it kind of feels like an ancient ancestor of a Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser or Thieves Word story.
Cartograph: Atlas Edition by Brandon Lee is a world-building journaling game that I picked up from this year's ZineQuest. You can read my review here, but you have to be a Patreon member to read my journal from the game I played.
Recently Watched
After Midnight with Taylor Thomlinson: I was a big @midnight fan, and the reboot is pretty good. The biggest problem is that I'm old and not nearly as online as I used to be, so I'm sometimes completely lost.
True Detective (Season 4): I've watched about 4 episodes. It's good, but not something I want to watch every night until it's done.
Mean Girls (2024): I somehow missed that this was a musical. That's not necessarily a problem--I like some musicals. The problem is that the music is terrible and every song goes on too long.
Poor Things: I watched this last night. I enjoyed it, but have to admit that whoever called it an art house reboot of Frankenhooker was not entirely wrong.
That's all I can think of to talk about right now. I'm sure I'll have more in a few weeks.
TYTYVM,
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson