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Art Design

Fantasia & AI Art

A meditation on imagination, possible aphantasia, and AI art.

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Art Design Life

Insecurity Authority

A week ago, as I was finishing the writing on my largest game* to date, I posted a twitter thread about my insecurity and imposter experience, and how I had downplayed (sabotaged, even) my own work. Thread: https://twitter.com/stratometaship/status/1536318473177284609 The writing is now basically finished. Usually, after I finished a writing project, I felt a melancholia, […]

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Art Life

Tricks of Mind

Me: “It’s lovely weather, it would be nice to go and write in a nice cafe, next to a brook. Trees, sky, water. Bit of inspiration.” Me2: “Well, you’ve walked the dog, and shaved, and cleaned the apartment, and you’ve got plenty of time, that would be reasonable. After all, you get more and better […]

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Life

Sluggard

There is a mood I often struggle with, a variant of the procrastination daemon. A sluggardly daemon. I’ve done the things I needed to do. I can do the thing I want to do. Gears clash and grind. The sluggard pops out of its box and begins to chatter. “You want to go there?” “Isn’t […]

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Art Death Life

Art Death Pandemic Recognition

Art.Death.Pandemic.Recognition. Time is a strange journey. Look fair away, it’s done a loop, the stars have spun upon their teetotum sky, washed away in sun’s arising, sandcastles in the sky. Look hard close, it grinds still, ossifies to bone, petrifies to stone. Sunday morning is the morning for the making of pancakes in our household, […]

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Art

How To Commission Art (the Long Version)

Nine times out of ten, when somebody who has never (or rarely) commissioned art before reaches out to me about making a piece for them, one of the first questions they ask is, “Umm, so … how do we proceed?” I then explain how, and we proceed. Seven times out of ten, when somebody who […]

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Art Design Life Play

The Gentle Lightness of Games

It’s time I took a bit of a breather and some personal stock. The air outside is clear. Not too toxic today. The thirty-lane toll station is moving briskly. If I look back five years, or even three years, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d possibly be here now. Indeed, looking back over my life, there […]

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Art Life

Names, Fantasy, and Witchburner [37]

Ighn’y Hormkvst smiled coldly as they surveyed the ruin of Ifth Takwarda. The last city state of the akhpaeen lay before them, tumbled by his cannon golems, the a’kopst-ravn’een, those who bring the fire of purification. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands called them the abomination, the scourge of civilization, the ti’vrekk-kopta. But there was nothing to […]

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Art Life

30 In Savage Lands

On the 22nd of February, Bastien Wauthoz aka. Acritarche, wrote to me about illustrating a series of cards for En Terres Sauvages, crowdfunded as a supplementary goal to Bastien’s French translation of the Perilous Wilds by Jason Lute. I agreed, and sixteen scenes to illustrate arrived in my inbox. This will be easy, I thought. […]

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Art Design Life Play

29 The Ungamed Life

I learned the alphabet and how to read when I was three years old with a computer game. I had to match pictures and letters to the angular marks on the stubby rubber keys of the ZX Spectrum 8-bit personal home computer that my father brought home to Yugoslavia from a business trip to London. […]