I just attended the opening of “F(R)ICTION: Art & Games” at Arsenal Contemporary Art, an exhibition happening as part of the 2026 ELEKTRA Biennial. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there that I highly recommend checking out if you happen to be in Montreal sometime in the next month, including some impressive large-scale installations, an arcade cabinet with arms growing out of it, and some old-school computer terminals where you can chat with alien micro-organisms.

But also, tucked away in a corner off to the side is a little text-based game I made 12 years ago called “Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames”. I wrote it for a little game jam called Ruin Jam, which was organized in response to a not-so-little internet tantrum called Gamergate. Maybe some of you remember it? Anyway, the prompt for Ruin Jam, to quote the jam website, was to include the following suggested items that were considered at the time to be ruining videogames:

• "Forced Diversity", i.e. Minority characters with agency.

• People who make or talk about games having social and/or love lives.

• "SJWs", which stands  "Social Justice Warriors". It's bad to be this for some reason.

• People calling things that aren't games games. The criteria for what a game is has yet to be disclosed.

• Not being able to jump, shoot, or be killed.

• Criticism or satire of existing game franchises.

So I basically made a thing that included all of the above, complete with glitter text effects lifted straight out of “CRY$TAL WARRIOR KE$HA” by Porpentine. Given how scared I remember being at the time that I, too, would become a target of harassment for being a rising star in indie games who happened to be openly trans, it felt cathartic to be able to channel my feelings into something creative.

Oof, it’s been a while since the last time I was in the habit of writing online for an audience. I don’t do social media anymore (good riddance!) so pretty much all of what I’ve been up to lately has been shared on Soft Chaos’s Comradery page. However, I’m at a point where I feel like I need my own channel of public communication, especially because I want to talk about my solo projects and other things I’m working on that fall outside the scope of what Soft Chaos does.

So the big major thing is, I’m writing a play! I lucked out and got into the early bird for next year’s Montreal Fringe Festival, so I’ve got until next summer to put on a show for it. The working title for said show is I Played the Tuba in High School and All I Got Was This Stupid Gender Euphoria! and it’s going to have some technologically mediated audience participation (using Intrinsink) and of course, musical numbers performed by me on tuba.

That’s not all, though! I’ve also been working on a companion piece of sorts: a videogame called Tuba Trouble: A Point-And-Honk Adventure.