Consecutive Cat Catastrophe Clustercat

So, cats. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may be aware that a few weeks ago we found a tiny starving kitten that had been abandoned by its mother. Given our lack of time and money, our pre-existing cat condition, and all the millions of complications cats …

Art Is Not Politics

It has become fashionable to treat art as politics. The inclusion of millionaires of a certain gender or “race” in the latest corporate entertainment product is taken to signify an improvement in the conditions of people who share superficial traits with those individuals, even as nothing changes in their wages, …

Towards the Council

You may have noticed an absence of updates both here and on the Lands of Dream site. The reason is simple: I’d set myself a deadline for releasing The Council of Crows (November 17th) and I was in full crunch mode trying to reach it. It has finally become apparent …

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope

So, hey, Serious Sam VR is out! Verena and I worked on this, so here are some thoughts about writing such a game. This is the kind of project where you’ll sometimes hear people say “Why do you need writers for this?” And yeah, sure, it doesn’t have a huge …

We Are Not A Virus

In recent decades, there has been a growing tendency in the politics and philosophy of ecology that can only be described as anti-humanist. While this doesn’t constitute a coherent movement as such, there are several ideological assertions that crop up repeatedly across the entire spectrum of anti-humanist thought. The anti-humanist …

Human Nature

We can’t create a better economic system. We can’t beat cancer. We can’t achieve interstellar travel. We can’t overthrow the Czar. We can’t beat the plague. We can’t create machines that fly. We can’t overthrow the kings. We can’t prevent the infants from dying. We can’t cross the oceans. We …

Voting, Democracy, and the People

Whenever another election nears, the world fills up with paeans to the power of voting and doom-filled laments about people failing to do their democratic duty. Whenever someone suggests that people should actively avoid voting, no matter how they arrived at this conclusion, they are immediately hit by an immense …

Quick News Update Without Witty Title

What’s happening? A lot is happening! I’m working on a project I can’t tell you about yet. I’m working on another project I can’t tell you about yet. The last bit of The Council of Crows finally clicked into place for me – a pretty amazing bit of story that’s …

An Authentic Opinion

In online debates, the idea will frequently show up that people who don’t belong to a particular (ethnic, sexual, cultural) group are not only ethically wrong to express an opinion on that group’s political situation, but are in fact incapable of doing so accurately due to being somehow essentially different …

Error and Sin

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone. – William Blake One of the major issues any social group has to figure out how to deal with is disagreement. …