French philosopher Guy Debord talked about the idea of the dérive, a mode of travel where the journey itself is more important than the destination, where travelers “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” But to think of dérive as a kind of ran
There is no point in kicking sticks around over Stardew Valley’s similarities to the Harvest Moon series, Natsume’s long-running farmlife simulator. Not to be confused with the also really good Neil Young album, “Harvest Moon”, which Stardew Valley does not riff upon outside of the honkey tonk atmos
In the eighth episode of The X-Files, agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are dispatched to investigate radio silence at a science outpost in Icy Cape, Alaska. There they discover a parasite—because it’s always a parasite—that makes its host hyper-violent. Suspicion and fear threaten to tear the team
At least 100 pages of four novels. At least 20 pages of maybe half a dozen others. Not one book finished, not even in rough draft. These are the vital statistics of my long war with fiction. For most of my life now it’s been my fondest wish to write and to publish a novel. Sometimes I’ve wanted to a
It all started with that one spreadsheet: a trifle to amuse myself between bouts of frenzied editing and marathon writing sessions. It was called “the Database”—an inside joke shared by me and no one else—and it was my attempt at listing every videogame I had ever played in my life. At first, I thou
