Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

I finally beat Nuclear Throne last night.  It's in my current favorite genre which could be called Action Rogue-Lite.  These are games very loosely in the linage of a very old game called Rogue from 1980, that was a turn-based, procedurally generated (That means the levels are randomly (not ACTUALLY RAMDOM) created each time you play) dungeon crawler.  Besides the random levels, the other thing that made Rogue special was that you had ONE chance to beat the game.  I mean... once you die you have to start over.  Unlike most games where you can save and load your saved state if you die, or where you have a bunch of lives and continues, Rogue was Hardcore Mode before such a thing existed.  Throughout the years a smattering of games tried to preserve this mechanic but it mostly faded from the game design zeitgeist for a couple decades.  Most people just don't find the emotional toll of starting completely over when you die to be fun.  As videog...

Here’s something I’ve been kicking around lately. Part of my continuing development as a human who wants to be the most loving person possible, I’ve been seriously investigating claims, philosophies, movements, politics, etc. that I’m naturally inclined to ignore or reject. The latest of these issues is the Black Lives Matter campaign, a popular movement swirling around a range of issues, but primarily instigated by the perception that police disproportionately kill more black people than other races. The status quo backlash response has been a movement rallying around police with the slogan All Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of the issue because there’s a billion resources for anyone who wants to look into it. The point of bringing my investigation of the issue up, is to tell you about my experiences with social media. I’ll start by saying that I really love using Facebook. I love the unexpected things I see and hear through it fr...

Just finished reading a book about Jony Ive, who’s the main industrial designer behind most of Apple’s hardware over the past 20 years. (And since Job’s death; all the software as well.) The book was written by a clearly devout fanboi, but still had a lot of great insight. The book gave me a lot of conflicting feelings. Because I love the fact that a company created a culture in which a singular vision of products could be developed. I love that a design philosophy was given the chance to overrule production, budget, engineering and tradition. Not because I think design is the most important thing in the universe, but because an experiment like that is a great object lesson. The fact that Apple has had such massive success coinciding with this process is fascinating. My personal problem is that almost all my experience with Apple products have been frustrating, disappointing and baffling. Due to both the industrial design and software design. A prime example of this...

I’ve got several very large projects I need to finish before I can really devote the largest portion of my energies to the final project I hope to spend the rest of my life on.  That final project is Tales From Talifar; the fantasy world that I hope to develop into the next Star Wars or Marvel universe sized phenomenon.  But I still need to finish my Cutscene Subversion Project video series which I’ve been working on and off for the past 6 years.  However, there’s still stuff that I can hopefully start to build towards now.  And a couple of those are starting, so that’s pretty exciting to me.   Books coming soon!  My mom has been very busy working on our first big hit, the Scarred King Trilogy.  (Along with 7 or 8 other books) set in Talifar.  Part of that process means finding a great editor.  And that’s exactly what she did.  Jeff Gerke has been fantastic at picking up the themes and making sure we push towards those.  Findin...

Reflections on the book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt.  (Don’t be frightened by the word Righteous in the title: this is not about religion!)   I just finished a book that is now on my top 5 books of all time list.  Maybe top 3.  (Time will tell.) In my wildest fantasy, I would strap every human into a chair, pull their eyelids open with a terrifying machine and force to them read it.   This book basically reinforces with (what I find to be) very good arguments, a message that I’ve been trying to articulate and spread for a long time.  It has to do with how we relate to those with radically different worldviews, politics, religions (or lack thereof), etc.  Like many in my generation and after, I’m a child of two ideological worlds.  I was raised in a conservative, evangelical Christian subculture.  Most of my world revolved around a church of people with with a very homogenous worldview.  Everybody read the same evangel...