Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

I just started listening to this awesome podcast called Final Games.   https://soundcloud.com/finalgamespodcast The format is this: He interviews a prominent game developer by asking them to choose 8 games that they can take to a deserted island.  The reasoning for why those 8 are chosen leads to great analysis and design insights.  Listening to this made me consider which games I’d take to last the rest of my life in seclusion.  And this lead me to a small quandry I want to explore now.  The problem is this: I really like dark, isolated, lonely-experience games.  Games where the world is uninviting, ugly, scary, weird, grim and dark.  Almost always dark.   These are LAST kind of games you would want with you if you were never going to see another human again.  Granted, you can take the 8-game-island scenario more or less literally.  You could just list your favorite games.  But I like thinking more seriously about it, wh...

My grandfather died last week.  A couple days before that my aunt had a heart scare.  And on Friday morning my wife and I went to the sentencing of the man who sexually assaulted her.  None of these things made me cry.  Instead, I cry when I see characters do things that show great compassion for others in shows and books.  What is wrong with me?  Well, lots of things.  But I found this book to be very comforting when asking myself about my feelings concerning the way I react to the pain of those I love.   Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338 is a fascinating book.  I feel the need to apologize for the clickbait title, but the substance of the book actually mostly warrants it.    The fundamental move Bloom is making is the disentanglement of empathy into two distinct concepts, and to remove both of those from the...

Several years ago I thought I might try doing some art tutorials on YouTube.  I made an opportunity for myself to get an audience by doing a cross promotional project with work.  I was leading a project on Guild Wars 2, and we were brainstorming with the PR team about stuff we could send to the press to get attention for the release.  Part of the game involved fighting giant monstrous worms, and the idea of gummy worms came up.  Then I thought how cool it would be to MAKE our own custom gummy worms based on the creatures from the game.  Everyone agreed that would be cool, and then I had the idea to record it all and make a tutorial that we could promote the release with in addition to the actual gummy worms we were sending out.  I hoped they would put the video on the official Guild Wars 2 page or something, but for whatever reason it worked out that they just had me put it on my own YouTube channel and they promoted it.  So it was a pretty lucky ...