Hello,

What do you think about Vibe Coding and AI-Software Development? My fellow developers use it but it feels very stupid to me. Seriously, you are effectively making AI do your work. You do some job but you have no idea what’s going on. This AI bubble made people braindead. I haven’t even talked about maintenance hell it causes. Hackers are too happy they easily exploit these rookies. When I tell these, they ignore me.

Dang, I wonder what we’ll see in the next few years.

Over the course of my career, I’ve developed a small informal list of “DeGraw’s Laws of Software Engineering”. I’ve recently been moved to create a 4th law:

Any proposed efficiency gains from using LLM and AI tools will be consumed twofold by discussion and debate surrounding said efficiency gains.

Yet, here I am writing this blog post. Ironic.

Disclaimer: In this post, when I use the term “AI”, I use it as a colloquialism for the large language model based tools such as ChatGPT and Claude Code. I reject the term “AI” in general as it implies we even have a good definition of what intelligence is, much less what artificial intelligence might look like.

No new problems

I don’t believe that AI development tools have introduced any new problems in software development. Crappy code has existed as long as code has. Lazy developers have existed forever. I’ve worked with people who could write and ship great code that powered real features that made people’s lives better. I’ve also worked with people who were either incompetent or simply didn’t care enough about their work to strive for quality or greatness. It’s not surprising to see that the exact same spread of developers are now using AI tools with more or less the same spread in quality. Perhaps it’s accelerated the overall quantity of code being written, but I also don’t think simply more volume is a problem either.

For example, I’ve seen AI bots review a pull request on every push. With each push, there will be a fresh batch of comments from the bot, not just on the newly pushed code, but on everything. Before AI tools, if a coworker reviewed your PR and left a batch of comments, which you fixed, and then that coworker re-reviewed and left a fresh batch of comments on the previous code they didn’t see the first time, that coworker would be bad at reviewing pull requests. It’s not a new problem. If I download 300 lines of code from GitHub and submit them as my own without ever reading or understanding them, I would be an unskilled developer. If I have AI write my code and I expect you to read it and make sure it works, I’m a bad developer. I suppose you could argue that the scale at which these problems seem to be manifesting is itself a new problem, but for my purposes here I don’t believe it is.

Learn the tool, don’t tool the learn

I keep saying this and I know it makes no sense. What I mean by it is just use the tool as is. Don’t build a ton of custom stuff to make the tool work better. I think particularly with the fundamental way that LLM tools work, adding hundreds of lines of “context” and additional instructions is a real foot gun. There’s hype and there’s this existential dread that this AI tool feels like it’s better at my job than I am, so then what do I do to protect myself? I must become an expert at the tool! I think that thinking is counterproductive. Think about someone who is an expert user of their code editor. We’ve all worked with the hardcore vim, DVORAK-toting, custom-Linux-distribution people. Rarely are they “better” at their job than someone who’s using the built in terminal and Notepad++. I’m not arguing against building proficiency with your tools. I’m not saying you shouldn’t seek out and use the best tools for your job. But if you have to buy a thing and spend an entire work week tweaking and learning how to use it “correctly”, you’re probably trying to optimize the wrong thing.

I’m only about a month into my use of Claude Code. I came in pretty blind. I don’t participate in the zeitgeist surrounding it. I don’t really talk to people about it. I don’t know the latest and greatest tips and tricks. I couldn’t tell you what the difference between “medium” and “high” effort is; I couldn’t even tell you how to change the level of effort. I don’t optimize my workflow to make things easier for Claude. I give it pretty stupid queries. I work in small increments and iterate. Just like I did before I used AI tools, I commit frequently and when I go off in the wrong direction, I’ll revert my changes. I don’t actually know what a “skill” is. I have a vague understanding of what an “MCP” is, only to the extent that it seems to allow Claude to use external services more efficiently. Just like random code off the internet, I’m skeptical of its output. I review its changes before committing (and I sure as hell review them before asking someone else to). Overall, it’s been pretty good. I rarely open my editor any more.

I also like using Claude to explain things to me. It’s eliminated a lot of the vocabulary friction I run into when trying to pick up new technologies. Is it a hash or an object? Is it an input or a prop? It’s really good at that.

Disclosure is important

It’s a bit ironic to me that some people feel afraid to acknowledge their AI use. Again, it’s not a new problem. One time I was interviewing with a company and they sent me a little take home challenge. It was tricky. I banged my head against it for a bit and then turned to Stack Overflow. I tried out the solution and it worked and met all the challenge’s requirements. I actually copy pasted the Stack Overflow solution with a comment saying that I had done so. I got the job.

I’m reminded of an excellent quote from possibly the greatest sports comedy of all time: Cool Runnings.

Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.

If you feel like you’re not smart enough to write a blog post yourself and instead you need AI to write it for you, then using AI and then lying about or not disclosing it won’t make you smart enough. In fact, it will make you look even worse. It makes it look like you not only think you are stupid, but that every one of your potential readers is also stupid. It’s fine to submit a pull request that you gave your best effort on, acknowledge there are major gaps in your understanding and that you’re learning, and humbly ask for feedback or help if it’s not up to par. Acknowledging that you lack skill or knowledge is the first and only step you can take to gain skill or knowledge.

I find Claude Code’s default behavior when committing to be a really sensible default here. It will use your credentials, but tag Claude Code as a co-author. There’s been some debate about whether this means you should disclose all tool use, but that’s stupid in my opinion. When I copy and paste code from Stack Overflow, which I have done multiple times, I leave a comment linking to the answer for future reference. It’s relevant context. The fact that I copy and pasted the code into nano is not relevant. Similarly, acknowledging AI tool use is helpful context. Perhaps we find out in a year that Opus 4.6 accidentally introduced a vulnerability every time it tried to write a console.log statement, somehow. Having the context of all the commits that were written using Opus 4.6 makes cleanup a thousand times easier.

Commodification of code is not new

Can I spot a website built with Wix.com from a thousand miles away? Yes, I can. Did the person who made that site also probably not really understand how web development worked? Yes. Is that website likely less functional than something a competent professional could churn out? Probably. Does it matter? No. The development budget for the Wix.com website was $0. Can a professional code up a better website than Wix.com for $0? Not one that values their time, and life is too short to commit acts of charity every time someone wants to put up a web page for their barbershop. Maybe the budget is greater than $0 but still not whatever a professional would charge? There have been cheap contractors available since the dawn of the internet.

Whenever I come across a new technology service or company, I like to look at their job postings because it gives me an idea of what they’re using to make it. The job posting is also a pretty good indication of the overall competence of the company. More often than not, the janky horrific service has been offshored. Things we have to use and don’t really have a choice like health insurance websites. I’m not saying that people simply living in certain places in the world are somehow less capable of producing quality work. But you get what you pay for and usually the cheapest labor comes from developing countries. In general I think this is good and fine actually. That gives someone else an opportunity to compete and deliver a higher quality product.

The fact that an otherwise nontechnical sales rep can “vibe code” up some abomination of a prototype is fine! It’s good even. We can iterate. If that person then tries to launch and sell that product without understanding how it works, well then I say good luck. This is not a new problem. Shoddy engineering is shoddy engineering. Plain and simple.

Is code a form of art?

I think this is the same debate about craftsmanship vs trades. Generally speaking, we don’t really craft things anymore. Things are still crafted, but they’re reserved for premium prices and services. Clothing used to be tailor made. Then, during the Civil War out of necessity, standard clothing sizes were introduced, because we needed uniforms to be made at a scale that hadn’t really been seen before. Today, clothing is made at an incomprehensible global scale. Here’s a quote from Carter’s recent post:

[Temu’s] parent company, Zoetop, produces 1.2 million articles of clothing a day.

Is it still possible to get tailor made clothing? Yep! Maybe you should! But the vast majority of clothing is not tailor made. There are also a lot fewer kids running around that can’t afford clothing than there were during the Civil War.

I think software development can be a form of art. But if you’re hired to work in a mass garment factory and you wake up each day to make art, it’s probably not going to work out super well for you long term. Carter calls himself a “code plumber”. I’ve viewed most software development as the modern day factory/blue collar job for a long time. We’re not coding to craft works of art. We build products that are marketed and sold almost exclusively for profit. Engineering means working within constraints. Time and money are the two ever present constraints. If you work for an S&P 500 and you feel like you’re coding up works of art, I’d really like to hear more about that because I think you’re going to be in for a reckoning sooner or later. Imagine if a paint contractor working on the newest mass scale subdivision project thought of themselves as an artist. I hope they go home and pump out some Bob Ross landscapes!

This is why personal projects are more important now than ever. This is why you should have a digital garden. If you believe code is a form of art and you are sad you don’t get to make as much art as you’d like, do it at home! I understand work is exhausting and the last thing you want to do after a frustrating day is more code. Separate it mentally! For me, AI tools help me care a little less about my trade and a little more about my art.

We do things at home because at home they can be perfect. At home, our constraints are time and interest, not money. Your blog post doesn’t need to increase revenue. You don’t have to write yourself a performance review to justify spending 18 hours optimizing the semantic HTML of your website. If you don’t care about code as a form of art, that’s fine too! Put your energy where you feel like putting it.

Disclaimer

This post was proofread and edited for spelling, grammar, and clarity with the help of Claude Code (Opus 4.6). You can view the commit with Claude’s changes on GitHub. Here are the prompts I gave it:

1. we’re going to work on my most recent blog post titled Re: Opinions [about vibe coding]
2. there’s a youtube link that needs to be inserted with my youtube partial
3. help me review spelling and grammar
4. yes
5. okay let’s double check it
6. okay let’s triple check it
7. let’s edit for clarity now
8. let’s go through those one by one
9. show me the full sentance when reviewing
10. yes
11. yes
12. yes
13. no
14. yes
15. let’s change to “If you work for an S&P 500 and you feel like you’re coding up works of art”
16. change to sooner or later
17. yes
18. no
19. put it at the end with a new ## Disclaimer as a numbered list

Have a burning question you’d like to ask me? Shoot me an email.

Originally launched in 2004 - nearly 22 years ago - the Nintendo DS redefined handheld gaming and became the company’s best-selling console of all time, only recently surpassed in 2025 by the console/portable hybrid Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa unveiled the new console on stage and highlighted a few of the console’s innovations. It will feature a 1600x960 top display as well as a 1280x960 bottom display. Representatives noted that this is an exact 5x integer scale of the resolution of the original DS and a 4x integer scale of the Nintendo 3DS, highlighting the company’s focus on both the original DS line as well as the less popular but still beloved successor, the 3DS. Like the previous handhelds, the 3DS Plus will feature a lower resistive touch screen with stylus control.

The console will run a slightly modified version of the 3DS’ system software, with minor changes such as support for the new higher resolution screens. Most notably, the console will not include a game card slot and will instead feature a relaunch of the Nintendo eShop where users will be able to purchase “99%” of both the DS and 3DS’ game libraries, including support for “DSiWare” titles. Analysts have commented that this is likely a decision made to streamline game ownership and curb piracy that was rampant in the original DS’ lifespan due to “flash carts”. More recent “jailbreaks” that allow users to download and install pirated 3DS games were also likely a factor in the decision.

Nintendo didn’t specify the new console’s CPU, but they did announce the system will have “up to 20 hours” of battery life operating on a 2000mAh battery. Other modernized features include support for Wi-Fi 7 including 5 and 6 GHz bands and Bluetooth 6. Like the 3DS, the 3DS Plus will support local multiplayer using an ad-hoc console-to-console network as well as online multiplayer. The popular “StreetPass” makes a comeback as well. The system will also feature the dual exterior cameras of the 3DS as well as the single internal camera. Nintendo did not specify the native resolution of the cameras, but from hands-on demos it appears they operate at least at the top screen’s native resolution.

It appears that Nintendo is also hoping to attract smaller indie developers as they also announced that any retail 3DS Plus will be able to be converted to a developer console after paying a nominal yearly fee, very similar to the approach that Apple has taken with their mobile App Store process. The yearly fee will enable developers to target the new console with modern game engines such as Unity, Unreal, and even Godot. Nintendo did not specify terms of the new eShop, but it’s expected they will take a flat percentage of digital sales.

The console features built in 64GB of system storage, with support for the same microSD Express cards supported by the Switch 2.

Perhaps the biggest question in the room was how the system will enable the unique three-dimensional display that gives the console its name. The 3DS features a stereoscopic display, and a later revision of the “new” 3DS used an infrared head tracking system to improve 3D performance. Still, many players found the display to be difficult to use. The new console instead uses an advanced gyroscopic system to enable “3D-like” images on both displays. In our hands-on preview, we found the effect to be quite compelling and much more stable and reliable than either of the previous consoles’ solution.

“I love the 3DS! It’s like a personal, portable, mini Nintendo Switch!” said 8-year-old Ruby who was present for the launch. “It’s so fun to be able to customize my 3DS with fun themes and play with my friends on the bus!”

The 3DS Plus will launch holiday season 2026 and is expected to target a retail price of $199.99 USD, positioning it nicely against the nearly $450 Switch 2 launched in June, 2025. Because of the personal, portable nature of the new handheld, it is expected that households will own multiple consoles, allowing each family member to play on their own. With the vast majority of the DS and 3DS library available at launch the console is bound to hit the ground running, rather than waiting for strong first and third party game titles to arrive.

This was written as the first post in a series for a “Blog Prompt Challenge” I’m participating in. The prompt was “What’s something cool I’m caring about or into recently?”

I’ve been a big fan of the Nintendo DS system since I bought a DS Lite back in 2005, around the time it launched. Later I bought a 3DS XL in blue, refurb’ed from Nintendo directly. I remember being really blown away by Super Mario 3D Land and had a great time playing through it. I owned a 3DS through it’s entire lifespan, eventually selling my XL and buying a white New 3DS (non XL). Later, Nintendo had a crazy black friday special where they sold a black New 3DS (non XL) for, if my memory is correct, $99. I somehow convinced both of my brothers and my wife (well, I just did it for her) to buy a console and a copy of Mario Kart 7. We had so much fun over that Thanksgiving holiday doing local multiplayer. My brother became extremely paranoid that the game was cheating against him. I don’t think any of them really ran very far, I know my little brother sold his console off pretty quickly.

Years later as my kids grew up, playing the 3DS became a fun family hobby. I understand that you can play Mario Kart on the Switch in split screen, but having your own personal console is such a fun experience. It feels more special, more private. My older brother actually gifted my daughter his 3DS for Christmas a few years ago so we have a total of three 3DS systems in my house (now I’m a little worried about being robbed for them). Family 3DS sessions are something that happens regularly in my home.

That quote from Ruby was real, she actually said that a week ago. She was watching some YouTube shorts on my phone and one about the 3DS showed up and she asked me to get her 3DS for her. I keep them up on the shelf because I know how irreplaceable they are now. She asked me to get her this random Tinkerbell game and Animal Crossing which I did. She reminded me to do it the next day before she left for school and first thing when she got home she excitedly asked if I’d done it. For about two weeks she actually spent a decent amount of time in the Tinkerbell game and Animal Crossing. I feel like it must be a little biased because I love the 3DS so much, but I honestly don’t sit my kids down and force them to listen to me and it’s not like they pay attention to the 100 other things I want them to do. I think the 3DS is actually that incredible.

I like to be friendly to the youth at my church and in my neighborhood and I noticed recently they all want 3DS’s. What’s up with that? The thing that’s a decade old, older than most of them? I mean I love the 3DS so I talk to them about it and they’re excited an adult is interested in the same thing they are. I know of a kid who asked for Pilotwings Resort for Christmas this year and actually got it. Coincidentally, that’s one of my favorite 3DS games too!

The prices for used 3DS systems are absolutely outrageous right now! And they’re only going up and up! I’ve held the position that the Switch is the worst of two worlds. It’s a subpar console and a subpar handheld. It has a touch screen but can you think of a single game that actually makes use of it? No, because they have to support docked mode and the touch screen doesn’t exist there. It doesn’t feel very personal. Nintendo recently made some strides with their “virtual game cards” and the ability to loan them to people, but it feels like too little too late. I think most households own a single Switch console and the premise of owning multiple is very uncommon. The DS had download play, you could actually do multiplayer with just a single cartridge between consoles. The Switch has no such ability. The 3DS had StreetPass, encouraging you to take it out with you in public to interact with other owners. The Switch has no social features like that.

Recent Chinese handhelds have emerged such as the Ambernic RG-DS but it’s bad. Nintendo really knows how to make great portables and I just really want them to start doing it again. I firmly believe if they were to relaunch the 3DS even without any of the upgraded features I laid out, they’d sell like hot cakes.

I do have an incredible soft spot for the original DS. The one issue with the 3DS is that it’s actually not that great for playing original DS titles. The screen just doesn’t upscale well enough, it uses some non-integer scale factor that just looks bad. For that reason, I own a DS Lite that I prefer to play my original DS games on, and recently I’ve been playing a lot of DS games.

In the mid-late 2010’s I would scour my local classifieds and pick up any and all DS systems I could. $30 for the console and 8 of the absolute worst shovelware titles of all time was my jam. I ended up with a few that were in really bad shape, but one DS Lite that was in “ok” shape. I played on it a lot but eventually I decided I really wanted to try out a DSi since I’d never actually used one.

About a month ago I loaded my 5 year old up in the car and we went hunting for a DSi. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but I just wanted something in mostly “like new” condition. We hit up about 4 local pawn shops with absolutely no luck. Then, just one more in town. They had an absolutely mint red Mario 25th Anniversary DSi XL with a bunch of accessories and shovelware for $200. I’m talking it has the original stylus level mint. I tried to haggle because I didn’t want any of the accessories but they wouldn’t budge. I walked away.

We went to Target to look at the Switch 2 since my son has really wanted to play the new Donkey Kong game and keeps talking about it. I was close, but they had a console to play demos on and he just wasn’t that into it. Plus the price tag just feels so high - $450 for just the console with no games or $500 if you can find a Mario Kart World bundle (a savings of $20 since most first party titles now run $70 individually). I just couldn’t swallow it considering there are only two games that really feel like it’s worth owning the system for right now - Mario Kart and Donkey Kong. Not to mention I have all the same gripes with it I have with the Switch - it’s a bad handheld and an even worse console. Do one thing well! I would love to see the data because my gut says the vast majority of Switch consoles spend nearly all their time either docked or in handheld. I doubt most users do both frequently. Kids probably play in handheld mode, adults probably play docked. That’s my guess at least.

I mean for heaven’s sake the hottest news recently is the ability to play a GameBoy Advance Pokèmon game on it? Seriously? I think it’s great that Nintendo is letting us play their old games without piracy, but that’s something checks notes the 3DS could have done 10 years ago! They’re not exactly giving me a reason to run out and buy a Switch 2.

After we had fun looking at the Switch 2, I decided that DSi XL was exactly what I had set out to find, and I wouldn’t likely see another one locally for a decent price any time soon. We went back and I bought it, shovelware and all. I listed all the loose games on eBay but only three have sold - two copies of Nintendogs and a copy of Mario Kart DS. I think that roughly brought my out of pocket down to the $170 range which still felt like more than I wanted to spend, but I’m happy. I doubt the rest of the shovelware will sell so I’ll keep them around. Who knows, maybe there’s a Tinkerbell in there that my kids will want to play some day.

I have absolutely loved my DSi XL. Compared to the DS Lite, the buttons are clicky like the 3DS. I honestly think my DS Lite was worn enough that I was having a hard time with some button presses such as holding B to run in New Super Mario Bros.. I’ve already played through 4 games on it, so my investment feels very much worth it. If you’re interested to know what I’ve been playing, well, you’ll have to wait till next year when I publish my annual “games I beat” post. Until then, you can catch up on what I played last year, or the year before.

Nintendo, please make the 3DS again. Just start selling them. A digital storefront with the entire back catalog will allow you to maximize profit and minimize expense. You don’t need to deal with physical game publishing. You could be generous and offer a way to let me port my physical games in to the digital store, but I think there are enough new players out there you’d still sell a zillion consoles even without that ability. Hardcore gamers already hate you, I don’t think this will move the needle on that either way. The 3DS is a great first device for kids especially. It has social communication features that currently parents have to lean to a phone for, but phones are not good for kids. Pictochat has way less possibility of causing major harm than Snapchat. Just do it. Please. We want to play a small, portable, perfectly executed console. People still want their Switch 2 to play Breath of the Wild at a respectable framerate, but just as many kids out there want to experience Phantom Hourglas and A Link Between Worlds for the first time.

My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.

For week 1, Sam chose the prompt:
"What's something cool I'm caring about or into recently?"

My friends' posts this week:

• Sam: Four Keys Book Arts and Project Hail Andy
• Jared: The Nature of Prototyping in Professional Development
• Carter: I'm enjoying having opinions

Recently I was showing my website to a group of strangers and one of them asked me “But why? I don’t see the why.”

Why do I have this website? Why do I want to have a clean archive of a bunch of random Wikipedia articles I browsed at some point? Why do I have an entire page of just clouds?

Maybe it’s self importance. Is that pride? I guess somewhere inside of me I hope someone else finds this website and thinks “wow this guy is just the coolest ever” and send me an email that says “you are the coolest ever btw would you like a billion dollars?” But I’m also not an idiot, at least I try not to be, and I know the reality of that situation is slim. Well, the billion dollars part of it, but I do know that random people find this website.

I have two brothers and we have a group chat called “DeGrawtism” which is just too perfect to not call out. My little brother sent us a link to this insanely cool personal website マリウス.com↗ . As far as I can tell, it’s just one random person on the internet with a ton of random information. It feels vast and massive. You can easily get lost there for 30 minutes or more. There’s not a lot of context there, just a bunch of stuff someone is into. I think that’s the coolest thing of all time. There are easter eggs, surprises, and more information than most people have ever even thought to write down about themselves. They’ve got an FAQ that answers the question of “what”:

[This] is my personal, non-commercial website, where I post about software and hardware projects, where I collect various information for my own reference, as well as publish write-ups that I believe might be interesting to like-minded people. It is a website the way we understood websites to be, back in the 90s and early 2000s, before everyone and their dogs were online and the internet was destroyed primarily but not exclusively by big tech corporations, politics, more politics and AI slop.

What is this site? マリウス.com↗

This feels pretty much like it could be straight out of my own mouth, when describing catskull.net.

But it doesn’t really answer the “why?” Why do I bother?

Honestly, the simplest answer is just because this is who I am. I like having a website. I like blogging. I like writing down thoughts and publishing them on the internet. A friend recently put me on blast in the group chat by referring to me as “Drummer, writer, internet enthusiast.” Is that such a crime??? Sue me!

A big part of my motivation is that I want to keep a record of my time here on the Earth. Maybe that’s the next answer: Because I can. I can have a website. I can read it later. I can cringe at the cringe and laugh at the laughs. It’s fun. What do other people do for fun?

Who am I?

My name is Dave and at the time of writing I’ve been around the sun 34 times. That feels like a good age to me, but I’m not sure why. I think the concept of keeping a pet is a bit unbelievable. I think if dogs are allowed on airplanes then smoking should also be allowed. Not that I think we should allow smoking on airplanes, but it just seems insane to me that a dog can fly through the sky. That goes for other pets too. When I was a kid, we had a dog named Mr but he kind of scared me.

I grew up mostly in Saint George, Utah. My family moved around a bit, but I’ve lived in Saint George for most of it and it’s where I live now. We lived in Henderson, Nevada (Las Vegas) for a few years but nowadays I think I’d rather take a bullet than have to go to Las Vegas for literally any reason. Everything is dirty, people are crazy. I definitely don’t think that the free sale of liquor is a good thing for your local community. In fact, if it were up to me, I’d reinstate the prohibition. Sometimes I go to the gas station to get a drink or a snack and it absolutely blows my mind to see how much alcohol people buy. Frankly, it makes me sad. I’ve been around a decent amount of substance use, and alcohol is by far my least favorite substance to be around. That said, I’ve also never actually tasted any so maybe they’re all on to something. My poison of choice is soda, specifically Dr. Pepper and I drink way way too much. At this point I’m up to like 4 cans a day, sometimes more. I used to have a mini fridge in my home office but it was incredibly loud so I just drink it room temp. I have a water cooler in here too, but I don’t drink enough of it.

I’ve historically had fairly low self esteem which I think limited my ability to connect with other people. It’s still not the greatest and makes me overly defensive. I’m also fairly direct with people, intentionally or not which can come off as meanness. I can’t hide my feelings very well. I’m working on it, more just becoming comfortable with not being flawless all the time.

From a very early age I was attracted to the idea of playing the drums. I’m not sure why I just thought it was cool. I took piano lessons for a while in grade school, I even wrote a song about pickles. Finally in 6th grade I signed up for the percussion class at school and really enjoyed it. Shortly after that I got a drum set for Christmas and started taking lessons and I’ve never really stopped playing. I mostly play “rock” music. In middle school I joined a ska band with some older kids and we had a lot of fun writing songs, playing shows, and even recording a little EP/demo. I wouldn’t necessarily say I still listen to much ska music. I still do listen to a ton of music. I really like anything that’s even a little bit psychedelic. I realized that this has actually always been true. As a young lad I’d listen to the oldies station for The Byrds or The Mamas and The Papas. I didn’t really know anything about that but I just liked to. I remember hearing Twist and Shout for the first time in my Cub Scouts’ leader’s van and it just totally blew my mind, I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I still really like The Beatles and I totally think they should get back together. A couple of years ago I built my own electric drum kit by buying a few cheap kits off amazon and stripping them all down and installing sensors and everything. I’ve had a ton of fun with it because I can just go straight into Logic Pro which has a ton of really excellent sounding virtual drum kits and I can even hit record and work on little jams and stuff. I haven’t been doing that quite as much extremely recently, though. I did join a local community concert band a few months ago and I go practice with them once a week. It’s kind of strange to play with a conductor and a full band like that but it’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed being able to play a real acoustic kit in that setting. We have a concert coming up in a few weeks that should be fun, if not a little scary. I’m not going to lie to you, I think we sound kind of bad. It’s just a volunteer community band full of random people of all skill levels. I’m not very good at reading music, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. The other week the bass player came up to me and basically said “Your timing is all off, it’s not possible to follow you and the conductor”, but to be honest with you he’s not that good either and at nobody else has really said anything hahaha. I think for what it is, it’s fine. Some of the songs I’m good at, others I struggle more.

I guess I’m writing this down just in case you find it interesting. I’d rather not make assumptions about what you might find interesting. Worst case scenario you close the tab.

My family was fairly tech-oriented growing up. My mom used some crazy program that would tell her which coupons to collect for the maximum savings. She had a couple of people in the neighborhood who would save their junk mail for her to clip coupons out of. My dad was an attorney and also kind of a computer enthusiast as well. We always had a family PC. Later, we got an internet connection. I grew up playing a lot of video games and I was always interested in computer programming. In high school I took some introductory programming classes and learned a bit of C++, HTML, and CSS. Later I got a job building the website for a local business. I’ve been employed doing full-time, professional web development since at least 2013. I had a few gaps while I went to school and quit my job to be a substitute teacher, but that’s just always been my thing. I’ve learned a lot. I feel like I’ve never really been a total super star at programming, but I’m also not the worst and I have some social and leadership skills that help me organize and motivate a team to do some good work. I’m not really sure what success in a career really even looks like, but I do think I’ve been pretty successful. I think at all my jobs I’ve done decently at least, I’ve never been fired or laid off (yet). I really like the internet as a concept in terms of information exchange. I get anxious when I see how integrated the real world has become with the online world. It seems like everywhere I go, the computer system is down or having problems. I always joke that it’s actually my fault, that I’m cursed and it just follows me around but if I’m being totally honest I think the vast majority of software is basically half-functional garbage. Try to think of the absolute best software you’ve ever used. What is it? It seems like not even Apple or Google knows how to make good software anymore. Well, maybe something like Ghostty is truly excellent software but it’s also quite limited all things considered. I do have some of the existential dread that the rise of LLM tools seems to be causing most people involved in the software world. I don’t have the answers. I guess I am choosing to not worry too much about it. Did the rise of high-level languages reduce the amount of programmers in the world? Did it increase the quality of our software? Or did it just kind of “change”… something. Is Windows 11 fundamentally better than Windows 98? Is my computer today functionally superior to my first MacBook back in 2013? Is airline ticketing today operationally more efficient than the first IBM mainframe back in the 70’s? What role does technology actually play in the real world? I like to consider that the human control of fire is actually a form of technology. But computers? I’m not sure. It’s a way more efficient way to store and transmit data around, but I also don’t know if it’s really all that more reliable than a room full of filing cabinets and a clerk who’s job it is to deal with it all.

I’ve been married to my wife since 2013. We have 4 kids. Raising children is the most intense, challenging, exhausting, fun, rewarding, thing I’ve ever undertaken. In a lot of ways I feel like a failure as a parent more than a success. I wish I had more energy to do “good parent” things, but I’m also not sure what that is. I guess I could sit and read to my kids for hours instead of write this blog post. I think I can make positive change in my life and slowly become more of the person I want to be, but right now I just really want to do this. I could be at a playground with them, or doing crafts, but I also don’t really like to do those things very much. If I didn’t have kids, I would literally never go to the playground. With kids, I go to the playground sometimes. I’m telling myself that’s good enough. Maybe some day they’ll read this blog post and it will help them somehow. I like hanging out with my kids. Right now I’ve got two of them here with me and they’re playing this hilarious augmented reality game on the 3DS called “Face Raiders”. I guess I would say I like doing things “around” my kids more than I like doing things “with” them. Honestly isn’t that a lot of what having relationships is like? Maybe there are some super couples out there who share literally every hobby and interest, but that’s just not my vibe. My wife actually has vastly different interests than I do. She likes to play volleyball, I have such little interest in any kind of competitive team sport it’s not even funny. I do like watching her play though, but it’s also frustrating to me when they lose hahaha. She likes Brandon Sanderson audiobooks and frankly I think Sanderson is like half a step above Marvel fandom (please don’t hate me for that). I like to have things neat, orderly, tidy, and clean. She like to just go, go, go. I don’t really think our differences make us weaker though, I think they make us stronger, but it does cause friction. But I also think that’s okay. Optimizing for lack of friction to me feels like a vanilla and boring life. My favorite time to be with my kids is when they’re sleeping. With the exception of my oldest who’s kind of starting to grow out of it, I like to lay in bed with my kids. Every night I lay with my kindergarten son until he’s asleep, and then most nights I lay with my third grade daughter since she usually falls asleep way later than my son.

One of my favorite times of the day is when I drink my milk. I just really love drinking milk. I usually have a big giant class of milk every night. I actually think it helps me sleep. I love ice cold milk, but our fridge usually can’t keep up with 6 people leaving it wide open for 15 minutes all day so it’s usually just kind of cold-ish. Sometimes I get a fresh gallon from the garage fridge that stays a lot colder and it hits so hard. Generally speaking I really like dairy foods. I like cheese a lot. I like my time at night after everyone is asleep to just have my own quiet time. Sometimes I’ll watch a show. A year or two ago I bought this crazy ViewSonic 4K projector and pull down screen for my office and I’ve got a nice chair to sit in. I’ve got an Apple TV hooked up to it and I like being able to hook up my AirPods to it so I can watch it without disturbing anyone. I really like the concept of anime, but usually the shows just go on for way too long. I generally find the Japanese dub/English sub version preferable, but it’s also more work than an English dub and you can’t second screen it. A lot of times I’ll play a handheld game while I watch a show.

I don’t read as much as I probably should. I like to read Wikipedia mostly, but I feel like I’d be a lot better off if I read an actual book every now and then. I have a bit of a conundrum because I really prefer to read on my phone using the Apple Books app. I’ve got a good system for getting ebooks and I like basically always having my book with me without any extra effort, but I get self conscious because as far as I can tell, reading a book on your phone and reading Twitter or watching TikTok appears to be about the same activity to an observer. I don’t want to just always be on my phone. It’s honestly a bit of a pet peeve of mine when you’re in a group of people and everyone is just looking at their phones. I think it’s especially a problem with older generation people, but it might just be confirmation bias. Because of that, I don’t read on my phone as much as I want to, but I’m also not really going to carry around a physical book or a kindle. When I do read, it seems like it’s usually young adult fiction or biographies. Maybe I should set a goal to just get through more books.

I really love a good in depth conversation. I really like to dig in and see where someone is coming from. It can be hard to get people to open up enough to really engage my attention. It seems like most people don’t really like being analyzed, but that’s just how my brain works. I think my favorite way to learn is by just talking with an expert. I actually think that’s a bit lazy but it’s just how I like to do it. That’s a big reason why I started my podcast, Interrobang, just to give me an excuse to have a conversation with people. It’s been a while since I have done an episode, though. I was super into it for a while, I stomped through 17 episodes and then I quit my job and shifted priorities and kind of got distracted. I’d still like to start it up again but it seems like time is at a premium these days. If I’m honest too I’m a bit self conscious about my podcasting skills. I do like listening to it but I also feel like I talk to much and don’t ask enough interesting questions. I guess I feel a little bit bad for my guests, like I’m not serving them very well. Maybe I’ll get better and try again, or maybe I’ll just give up on it. Who knows!

What’s a spinner?

“spinners” can be used to show the loading state in your projects.

Bootstrap 5.3 Docs↗

Still don’t know? I’ll show you. This is from the absolute latest cutting edge UX research out of The World’s Most User-Focused Company™, Alphabet Google.

Squiggle spinner isn’t real. It can’t hurt me.

Maybe this from the United Kingdom Home Office “User-Centred Design Manual” is better:

Loading spinner

Tell a user they need to wait, because something is happening.

User-Centred Design Manual↗

Every website in the world anytime I click anything:

At least they have some instructions on when a spinner should be used (emphasis my own):

Use a loading spinner to inform users they need to wait for something to happen. For example, you can use a loading spinner to show that a result is taking time to process.

Consider whether the speed and responsiveness of the service can be technically improved before using a loading spinner.

User-Centred Design Manual↗

So what’s up with this? Why does it feel like the new default on the web is to serve up a dummy HTML page as soon as possible and then make the user stare at 15 spinners and skeleton loaders. “Skeleton loader” you ask? You know, that thing where a bunch of grey boxes flash at you:

Why has this user hostile design consumed everything? Some might simply say that it’s a “Big JavaScript” conspiracy. Instead of lean HTML files with simple semantic markup, we ship 80 megabytes of JavaScript to render a single blog post. I believe this is at least partly true, but it’s also a chicken-or-the-egg problem. How many megabytes of JS is needed in order to toggle your loader classes and detect when the real content is loaded?

More concretely I can point to two things.

First, the “Doherty Threshold”. As far as I can tell, this is more fiction than fact. Here’s the TL;DR from the boldly named “Laws of UX”

In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.

Laws of UX, Doherty Threshold↗

Wow, that sounds very sciencey and as my 2008 Facebook profile will proudly tell you, “I F***ing Love Science!” Come on, a uncited and unsourced research paper? If that’s not the very definition of science I don’t know what is!

Maybe the term “addicting” isn’t a great look↗ in the year of our Lord 2026. Or maybe that’s Meta’s true crime - mastering the sub-400ms Dohrety Threshold! That’s it, that’s how they did it, I just know it. They read the Laws of UX and added a spinner to every page element in every app. It doesn’t matter how long the spinner took to spin, the interface was deemed responsive and the users became addicted. Maybe I should take a note out of that book.

Jokes aside, what I’m trying to say is that at some point we started valuing “any response at all” over “a useful response”. I believe my second point really is the smoking gun: Google Core Web Vitals (CWV)↗.

You really should just go review that page for yourself. The TL;DR is that Google uses a set of statistics that are intended to rank a web page on how “fast” it loads. They have really specific data points they look at like “Largest Contentful Paint” that measure how long before content on the page shows for the user.

Now, any discussion about the actual specifics of any of Google’s algorithm need an important disclaimer. We don’t actually know how it works. Google keeps their algorithms opaque, adopting a “security by obscurity” model under the premise that any metric if known can be gamed. It’s likely that at one point, their algorithm wasn’t good enough to properly detect “false loading” via spinners and skeletons. I would guess that today, it handles it much better. However, the damage has been done.

Teams of developers and UX researchers utilized tools that improperly measured the “responsiveness” of a web page. I myself spent many hours running Chrome Lighthouse on my production apps, trying to minimize the total weight of my assets and optimize for the few key metrics that Google deems to be “good”. I’m not necessarily saying that this is all a wasted effort.

Over the course of my career, I’ve observed many (all) metrics being gamed and abused to the point where the metric ceases to hold any value. This is actually a phenomenon colloquially described as “Goodhart’s law”↗. The Wikipedia article has a nice summary: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

So, the goal became “nice numbers from Google” and not “nice user interface”. Over time, as people correctly applied good UX research to their designs, the cargo cult↗ effect became “show a spinner, because good apps use a lot of spinners”. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of what we’re actually trying to do.

We have teams of designers so drunk on their own power that they’re spending time designing and implementing an animation of a worm circumnavigating my butt hole in the guise of “better UX”.

I’ll end this rant with a few bullet points I’ve personally used and found to be potentially useful to increase actual responsiveness without simply throwing a spinner in front of everything.

• Optimize assets. Use modern HTML to ship images in multiple formats including JPEG XL, avif, and webp. Animated gifs and videos can even be delivered using avif and webp at usually a vast size savings. See how I’m using Cloudflare Image Transformations to optimize and deliver my assets. See also my experiment with encoding gif to avif.
• Properly set an aspect-ratio↗ on your content to prevent layout shifts. You actually don’t need a skeleton or a spinner to just show that some content is still loading.
• Strategically preload↗ content that is vital for initial load. See how I improved my home page’s loading with some content flicker mitigation strategies.
• Lazy load↗ as much as you possibly can. This is especially useful for heavy third party scripts such as analytics.
• Reconsider whether you really need all that CSS. Do you really need a custom font? Consider using a system font stack↗. Lean on default browser styling as much as possible. Blue links are fine.
• Evaluate new third party scripts by viewing the site with JavaScript disabled. I’m not saying you should really support a no-JS environment, but if you’re about to throw some new A/B testing tool on your homepage, just take a gander at how it behaves when it can’t run to try and better understand what it’s really doing.
• Know, understand, and appropriately use semantic HTML↗. Not only will this help your page simply work better without any extra asset bloat, it’s a huge win for accessibility.
• Lean on the web browser for as much as you possibly can. Optimize for the latest evergreen browsers. Web browsers are actually very complex software and the major browser developers do a wonderful job optimizing them so you don’t have to.
• Know your tools. Why do you have a tool? What does it do for you? What would happen if you got rid of it? What alternatives exist?
• Bet on HTML

End of rant! Please don’t take this personally. I recognize that I’m at least a little too passionate about this stuff and that to most people a few spinners for a few seconds isn’t that big a deal. I just think we, as web developers, could be better. If you’ve been around the block a few times, help the young guns know what alternatives exist. Just because claude pumped it out doesn’t mean it’s correct. I believe we should strive for excellence, not perfection. I’m not perfect. This site is not perfect. But I do strive to be excellent little by little.

However, I think my absolute favorite feature is the “photo flashbacks” widget. You give the app full access to your on-device photo library and it will integrate random old photos from your library with a little date stamp. Sure, iOS has it’s own photo widget but it’s a little too curated sometimes. I don’t know how Feeeed determines which photos to show, but I have gotten so much enjoyment from them. Sometimes it’s just a random pocket photo, but most of them time it’s something pretty interesting. It helps that a while ago I went through the hassle of finally pulling all my photos out of Google Photos and imported them into iCloud. I’d been using Google Photos for (literally) my entire adult life (and even beyond) so I truly see photos from well over a decade ago, sometimes two decades. Seeing all the random things I have in my photo library from 10 years ago just gives me such an incredible sense of presence.

I’ve recently been granted a fair bit of mental clarity due to some life changes I’ve made. I can cast my mind’s eye back in my life and work out some nuggets. One thing I’ve realized is that my household growing up was fairly contentious. My parents fought a lot and honestly there aren’t a ton of memories of having fun together with our entire family. I had a lot of fun with my brothers, and we spent a lot of time doing random things with our mom. My dad usually worked and when he got home he really liked watching TV. I remember despising that to some extent but honestly, I get it. I’m thankful I even had a family and home at all, but at the same time, the contention was really distressing to me. My older brother seemed happy to ignore it all, and my younger brother was too young to really know what was happening. What I’m trying to say here is that a lot of times, especially times that everyone was at home at the same time, I wasn’t super happy and quite nervous.

I remember one Saturday growing up my parents were fighting and I was finding myself caught in the middle, so I decided I was going to run away from home and just be by myself. We’ve all probably been there. I think I got on my bike and rode down to the river for a couple of hours, but eventually I got hungry and decided I’d try and stick it out, so I went home. Some time later, we went to a family reunion with my Mom’s side. There was a swimming pool and we were all swimming together. Somehow a few of my uncles decided to launch me up in the air out of the pool. I was young and skinny and with two of them they could really get me flying. I loved it. It was quite literally the best thing I’d ever experienced. And I had a very distinct thought cross my mind: “I’m glad I didn’t run away from home or else I would have missed out on this.” Even today, that experience is one of the highlights of my life.

So, the question I ask myself now, is what would would-be runaway Dave say if he could see a snapshot from his future of that incredible day getting launched in the pool? Would it have made that day any easier for him? I wish Feeeed had a widget that would show me snapshots from my future. There’d still probably be a lot of blurry pocket pics, but there would also be some really interesting photos. I’ve been pondering this a lot. Snapshots from my future. How could this work? Is there something I can do right now to expand my mental gaze into the future?

The best answer I’ve found is to gaze into the known future whenever I see one of those photo flashbacks that make me smile. I write a little mental note to previous Dave about some of the things to look forward to. I think about the friends I’ve made and lost, the things I’m proud of, and honestly some of the tragedies and how I can better prepare for them.

I recall watching an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook where he said something to the effect of “At Apple, we only look to the future. You won’t find an Apple museum here on campus anywhere. It’s not that we don’t value the past, but we always want to be looking forwards.” To this day, I still have a fairly “anxious-depressive” personality and I will find myself ruminating about all the good times and nearly become future-blind. I just can’t see beyond whatever issue I’m facing right now. But when I’m able to regain my future sight, the possibilities open up. I’m much happier and more productive.

Another strategy I find fascinating came from a conversation I had with my friend Tom MacWright on the Interrobang Podcast. At right about the 1-hour mark I asked him what kind of things he takes notes on. He told me he that he’ll often write down things he’s nervous or uneasy about. He said that it both helps kind of just get it out of his head, but also serves him in the future to be able to retrospect and see that the things he was worried about ended up not being that bad. While I haven’t personally adopted this strategy directly, when I see those photo flashbacks I ask myself what was the Dave back then stressed out about? What ended up being worth the stress? So far I haven’t found anything that really ended up being all that bad in hindsight.

I think what I’m really trying to say is that looking backwards usually isn’t helpful. Looking forwards is. When I see those photos from my past, I can stand in my past shoes and look forward instead of standing in my present shoes and looking back. Doing this helps keep me future oriented and can help ease the tendency I have to ruminate.

What strategies do you have? If you have anything you’d like to share with me or the world, you can send me an email Reply using the link below this post.

I’m really excited to share what I’ve been up to gaming-wise over the last year with you! I’m proud to announce that I “beat” 50 games this year! Note that when I say “beat”, I mean that I got to the credits scroll. In some games, this takes a long time. Others, a credits screen means you’ve just barely scratched the surface, so no two entries on this list are created equally.

I’d also love to point out that I also stream a decent majority of these games on my YouTube channel! Most of the time I have no viewers, just me and the stream. A lot of times my brother at least lurks. But occasionally random internet strangers show up to make fun of my skills! It really evokes my favorite gaming memories as a child. Gathering around a random TV in the neighborhood and watching and offering tips to the one kid who was actually playing. I stream mostly just for my posterity, so if I want to remember how a game was I can just go back and look at it myself. It would mean a lot if you checked out the channel and dropped a subscription so you can hang out the next time I’m playing something! My channel is @dareelcatskull.

Let’s go!

# Freelancer

Windows [2003] | Digital Anvil | Microsoft Game Studios

wiki↗

1/2/25

I’m not sure how I came across this game, but boy, I’m glad I did. I’m not really familiar with the whole Chris Roberts-verse and have never played any Wing Commander games. I’ve been more-or-less obsessed with the entire “space cowboy” concept for about as long as I can remember. Why is it so gripping? Freelancer is everything I’ve ever wanted out of a “space game”. Here’s the thing about outer space - it’s mostly empty, which is also pretty boring. A lot of “space games” get caught up trying to work around this since your options are to make it boring or unlrealistic. Freelancer has a very basic gameplay loop – land on planet, get job, go into space, do job (usually in the form of flying to a specific place and shooting a group of bad guys), earn money, upgrade ship, repeat. At face value, it’s boring and repetitive. However, the actual space combat itself is just so well done and engaging that it’s really actually addicting. The game also does a fantastic job with some really well done voice acting and cutscene work, well ahead of it’s time. Unfortunately this game is mostly lost to obscurity and you can’t even buy it anymore. Despite that, there is a passionate community of players and mods in the Discovery scene, but I haven’t gotten into that yet. Honestly, I want to just play the main campaign again and take my time with it. By the way – how was this game not on the original Xbox? I yearn for an alternate past where this game launched on Xbox Live in 2003. It would have been incredible.

# Half-Life: Uplink

PC (xash3d-fwgs) [1998] | Valve | Sierra Studios

wiki↗

1/23/25

I’ve never played any of the Half-Life games. The only Valve game I know that I’ve played is Portal. I decided I’d find out what the fuss was about. Officially, there’s no way to play the original Half-Life on Mac without emulation. Fortunately, MacSourcePorts has a version available. It’s using a project called xash3d-fwgs, an open-source implementation of the original Half-Life engine (GoldSrc). Playing at 75hz on my little 4:3 SyncMaster LCD is quite engrossing and feels very authentic. It’s probably not fully fair to put Uplink on this list, but I’m doing it anyways. Uplink is a HL demo that has a small standalone campaign. It used to be very obscure, but Valve included it in the Anniversary release of Half-Life so everyone can play it. It really is a great little preview of the full game and is probably worth playing through before starting the campaign if nothing else as an extended tutorial as I found the difficulty to be a lot lower.

# Half-Life

PC (xash3d-fwgs) [1998] | Valve | Sierra Studios

wiki↗

1/25/25

Here’s some raw output from my notes:

• robot voice sounds awesome (kraftwerk)
• screaming butthole dogs?
• gonarch
• “Just keep shooting at the B A L L”
• helicopter is way annoying I have a theory - first-person shooters should not have a jump mechanism. I can totally see why Counter-Strike took off in a way that Half-Life didn’t as much - the combat and shooting is so tight and the AI is actually pretty fun. There’s human soldiers and aliens (butthole pigs) trying to kill you, so you have to keep shaking up your weapon of choice and strategy. Ammo runs pretty low usually so get comfortable with all the weapons. It’s not without it’s flaws but overall Half-Life was pretty fun, cursed biology notwithstanding. Seriously, jumping into the three-armed baby’s head and shooting it’s floating electric orb brain until it dies. I’m excited to continue the Half-Life-verse.

# Half-Life: Blue Shift

PC (xash3d-fwgs) [2001] | Gearbox Software | Sierra Studios

wiki↗

1/26/25

I admit I did get Blue Shift running on my Dreamcast at some point and made it far enough that the save file eventually exceeded the size of the total VMU capacity and it wouldn’t let me continue. I don’t remember much as I didn’t get far. This is a pretty weak expansion overall. It’s fine but offers no real “new” content beyond just more of the same thing you got in Half-Life and it actually doesn’t even have all of the weapons (unless I missed something). The entire end sequence with draining a coolant pool, moving barrels to jump on, filling it back up and beyond is just kind of not fun. The end sequence in particular is really weak, just listening to some NPC do some random stuff off-screen. And at the end they just… drive away? It feels like the “best parts” of this game are supposed to be little glimpses of the Gordon Freeman storyline but it’s not enough to keep me going. Play if you love Half-Life but don’t feel bad if you skip this one.

# Portal

macOS (illegal source port) [2007] | Valve | Valve

wiki↗

2/8/25

I played this around when it came out by saving my lunch money for a few months to buy an Xbox 360 and borrowed my friend’s copy of The Orange Box. For whatever reason, I never got into any of the other games but Portal was different. The entire GlaDOS narrative was just mind-blowingly cool to me then, and it still holds up! And then the credit song. I’m not going to lie, I sat in my office and sobbed. It’s just such a fun game and a pleasant experience. GlaDOS feels like as much of antagonist to the test subject as the game itself is to me. Provocative yet irritatingly engaging. Good one for kids too!

# SteamWorld Dig 2

macOS (Steam) [2017] | Image & Form | Image & Form

wiki↗

3/4/25

I played the first SteamWorld Dig game on my 3DS in 2015 after buying it as part of the first (and only) “Humble Nindie Bundle”. It’s a game that on the surface seems to have almost no real appeal but if you commit to playing it for 5 minutes, I bet you’ll play the whole thing. The gameplay is just so fun. It’s hard to describe - like a dig dug metroidvania. Overall the graphics, sound, story, and music are mostly forgettable , aside from one surprising “glitch in the matrix” event. I really enjoyed this game and it’s improved on the original in pretty much every way, so if you haven’t played either you’re safe to jump right into the sequel. Highly recommended!

# SteamWorld Heist

macOS [2015] | Image & Form | Image & Form

wiki↗

3/13/25

After I beat the original SteamWorld Dig in 2015, I was excited to see the next game in the series. I was initially very turned off by SteamWorld Heist. It’s a 2D turn-based strategy platformer. Image & Form really know how to innovate on some existing game styles, and they do it very well. It’s mission based and the maps are somewhat randomly generated. Enough that if you die or give up, you get something that’s not exactly the same the next time. It also means sometimes you just get a bad dice roll and things go south. The only real penalty is your money (gallons of water because they are robots that run on steam) and money isn’t really that useful. The game will give you new gear and weapons to use and my strategy was to use the new weapons. It’s class-based, so you recruit a team of specialists. Before each mission, you’ll select 1, 2, 3, or 4 members of your team and load them out with gear and weapons. Team members are rewarded in experience points and will unlock new abilites that make your life easier. For this reason, you end up a bit with the Pokémon issue of only levelling up your favorite members of your party. It’s not all bad, I found bundling an under-leveled team member in with more experienced members worked out just fine. And you can always go back and re-play old missions with new team members. I got pretty addicted and it was a little frustrating. I played through on the normal difficulty but had to drop down to easy for the sub-boss fight that was just insane.

# The Lost Vikings

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1993] | Silicon & Synapse | Interplay Productions

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3/15/25

Silicon & Synapse started in the late 80’s as a contract studio to port other games. It’s a solid business plan and one that is still pretty lucrative if you’re good at your target platforms. The Lost Vikings was their first original IP and is a real-time team-based puzzle-platformer. Kind of like Lemmings, but you have three Vikings. Each Viking has a set of unique abilities - one can jump and run, one can fight, one can block and use a shield as a parasail. There’s fall damage like no tomorrow. Each level is basically a unique puzzle. The game is split into “worlds” and each world has a few levels. The music is so much better than it has any right to be, and this was pretty early in the SNES lifecycle as well. The gameplay is just fun! The levels are designed extremely well. I had to use the hint book a few times, and as always I make heavy use of save states. With those handicaps, it was an enjoyable experience.

# The Lost Vikings 2

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1997] | Blizzard Entertainment | Interplay Productions

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3/19/25

So the first game was some random company and the second game was… Blizzard? As in the Blizzard? Yes! Almost immediately after The Lost Vikings, they changed their name to Blizzard Entertainment. And then Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Diablo happened. Not to mention StarCraft a year later. Those are three of the absolute best and most popular games of the 90’s. Blizzard was on fire! I assume The Lost Vikings 2 was in development/planning for a while and then Warcraft was such a huge surprise hit that it took a while for it to get the right people on the project and by the time they did, the N64 was already out and frankly Blizzard had better stuff to do. But apprently Interplay was happy to publish it to mediocre sales which is unfortunate, because this is a true sequel to an already great game. Difficulty and puzzle-wise, it picks right up where the first game left off. Each Viking how has some additional abilities (runner has jetpack boots and can swim, fighter has a robot arm to swing around, shield guy can… fart). They also added a werewolf and a dragon. The wolf can wall jump and melee attach. The dragon can fly and shoot fire balls. You still only play with 3 at a time, they just swap in and out at random. This one felt shorter than the first, but not too short. The final boss is quite a bit more spread out in this game. I should also mention that there is a PS1 port of this game that’s exactly the same game gameplay-wise, but literally all the graphics and assets are different including full voice acting that’s not bad! It wasn’t developed by Blizzard so I opted for the SNES version, but this isn’t a bad option at all!

# The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX

Game Boy Color (OpenEmu-Arm) [1998 (1993)] | Nintendo R&D2 | Nintendo

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4/12/25

On September 20, 2019 I walked into a Bic Camera in Tokyo, Japan and bought a copy of “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening” and a grey Switch Lite, both of which had been released that day. While I enjoy the remaster, I was disappointed by it’s poor performance and overall felt the gameplay was lacking some of the charm that made the original and it’s re-release so appealing. I’m sure it’s likely due to a healthy dose of nostalgia. I remember playing, and enjoying, Link’s Awakening as a kid growing up in the 90’s. I owned a Game Boy but not this game, so I was relegated to quick play sessions at a friend’s house. I appreciated multiple save files - usually there was a free space for me to save my game. I never made it very far, but the entire intro sequence was just so unassuming yet inviting to me. Later I remember borrowing the DX release from my older brother’s friend and getting maybe half way before losing interest or having to give it back. I’m pretty sure Link’s Awakening was my intro to the Zelda franchise. Later we’d own Ocerena of Time and Windwaker, but those are other stories. The game holds up pretty well. I played with the “redux” romhack which just tweaks a few very minor inconveniences. Still, the copious amount of back tracking did get old. Thankfully, the game doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. By the final dungeon, I was pretty much done with the persistant menuing to get items equipped. But then, it ended! I beat it! I liked Link’s Awakening then, and I like it now. As a kid it was just a game I could pick up and play even if I didn’t know what to do. My kids agree, letting them take a turn for a few minutes hacking away at baddies and grass is easy and smooth.

# Prince of Persia

PC (SDLPoP) [1989] | Jordan Mechner / Broderbund | Broderbund

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4/15/25

Another entry in the “it was on the family computer growing up”. I played this one a lot growing up. The completely unforgiving platforming, combined with the extremely forgiving and quick resets makes this a very good game to suck at. Indeed, my 4 year old took over half way through this one, including the combat. As always I made copious use of save states to get through each section flawlessly, but it really doesn’t detract at all from the game. The platforming is fun. Really fun. The low quality rotoscoped animations have aged like fine wine and look even better today than ever. The platforming is somewhat slow and deliberate, as any “cinematic platformer” (as they’d later come to be called) should be. Prince of Persia is an inviting and forgiving game to play for all ages and I’d highly recommend you give it a shot. It was also ported to pretty much every console around, and I’m sure those ports are all fine. Just give it a whirl!

# Blackthorne

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1994] | Blizzard Entertainment | Interplay Productions

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4/19/25

It’s a bit difficult to try and make sense of the early Blizzard Entertainment timeline. After 1993’s “The Lost Vikings”, the gang followed up with a another fresh IP - Blackthorne. The story is mostly unimportant and forgettable, but I did pick up on the same root ideas that would clearly later influence both Warcraft and Diablo to some extent in both theme and art style. Diving straight into Blackthorne after TLV, it’s clear to see how similar the games really are which is when I realized that The Lost Vikings is also technically a “cinematic platformer” as well. Following on the major success of Prince of Persia, Flashback, and Another World, Blizzard fired up the Lost Vikings’ engine and cranked out a cinematic platformer of their own. As always copious save states made the game quicker and more enjoyable. The game is broken into levels with a few different “areas” where the graphics will change. Progression usually looks like moving from the entrance to the exit, solving various platforming puzzles along the way such as finding key items or accessing hard to reach locations. The level design is really good, flows naturally and I rarely had to rely on a guide or walkthrough. A staple of the “cinematic platformer” genre is combat sequence breaks. Kind of like a 2D Time Crisis if you’re played that arcade classic - take cover, shoot, take cover. The combat isn’t anywhere as engaging or smooth as Prince of Persia, but shooting the gun is fun and you’re treated with decent upgrades along the way to keep the gameplay fresh. Like the other Blizzard games on this list, it packs in just the right amount of content to feel like you had an opportunity to really nail the platforming without going on longer than it needs to.

# Another World

Sega CD (OpenEmu-Arm) [1991] | Delphine Software | Delphine Software / Interplay

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4/19/25

“It was on the family computer growing up”. I actually later personally bought the SNES port after that computer had fallen out of repair because I liked it. This game has captivated me for a long time. It came out in 1991 which was the year I was born and it was on our computer from the time I can remember. Playing this game with my Dad is one of my earliest and most distinct memories. Have you ever seen anything like this before, or since? I haven’t really. Artist, programmer, and overall genius Éric Chahi previously worked on Future Wars which I played through last year. Chahi implemented the game as a virtual machine with all vector graphics which is why it was ported so easily and mostly very well to pretty much every system. Are you getting the picture yet? If you make a game that runs on literally everything, you’ll sell a lot more copies! After a Grammy-worthy opening cinematic, you’re teleported to the bottom of a giant pool of water. As you swim to the surface, some form of alien tentacle begins to reach for your kicking legs. As you climb out just in time, you’re greated with a bleak alien landscape. Something moves behind you. Welcome to Another World! The game almost plays like an interactive story book. The puzzles are challenging yet rewarding. I’m truly filled with a sense of wonder as I’m taken through the game’s story, each new environment more unique and interesting than the last. This is worth spending a few minutes of your time with!

# Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

MS-DOS (DOSBox Staging [WarCraft: Refurbished]) [1994] | Blizzard Entertainment | Blizzard Entertainment

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4/29/25

I distinctly remember when the family got Warcraft back in the day. It was pretty exciting. We’d been a Dune II household, so a hot new RTS was really something. As a kid, I liked the art and voices. I understood the basics of RTS gameplay but likely never made it much past the first few missions. Just like then, I made it to the first cave level for the Orc campaign and decided I’d rather cheat my way through than deal with the poor unit command options. The possibility of complex unit command structures is there, but the UI just make it so incredibly difficult. I think it’s 100% beatable as-is. I just ran out of steam brute-forcing it. Cheating my way through the rest of the Orc and the Human campaigns was actually pretty fun! It’s fun to see the misssions as the story and map unfold on both sides. The voice acting is really good, and the art is fun and chunky. I think Dune II is a better RTS overall, but Warcraft proves once again Blizzard knew how to make a compelling entry into an (at the time) uncommon genre.

# Waluigi's Taco Stand

Nintendo 64 (OpenEmu-Arm) [2018] | Kaze Emanuar | Camelot

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5/9/25

I can’t say Waluigi’s Taco Stand was on my list of games to play this year, but I’m glad I found it. It’s a delightful little collect-a-thon. Waluigi has gambled all of his and Wario’s (joint account) money away and rent is due to Koopa Troopa. He gives Waluigi a job at his taco stand. Each customer has a specific request for what they want on their taco and it’s your job to go run around and find all the ingredients. Goombas give you beef. Goombas are beef. Goombas are cows? Goombas make milk? I’m left with more questions than answers but I can say that I had a short little blast running through this game. Would recommend! “You must become ‘Wa’ with yourself.” - Ancient Chinese Proverb

# Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE

Apple Arcade [2025] | Bandai Namco Entertainment | Bandai Namco / Apple

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5/10/25

Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE is the first new mainline entry into the Katamari series since 2011’s mobile-exclusive “Touch My Katamari”. I think Rolling LIVE is overlooked as another mobile exclusive, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The game boasts 4K 120fps support on all the Apple platforms that support it. It’s not some watered-down mobile port. It’s a full-fledged entry into the series! In my opinion, this is the best Katamari game yet. It has you helping The King collaborate with “streamers” to build your streaming channel. The “streamers” are random people with specific requests, from a man in an eating contest asking you to roll him into as much food as possible, to an Alien wanting you to roll up the entire world. I think the live-streaming aspect of the game is an extremely original take on the series that just makes the game more fun to play without actually changing any of the core gameplay. In fact, if anything, it helps make a bit more sense of the story. Rolling up everything in sight while beeing cheered on by your chat is just such a pleasant experience. The soundtrack is phenominal, and you can listen it on all streaming platforms. My favorite track is the blissfully cheery “Making a Star” which serves as the perfect juxtaposition for rolling up screaming and kicking people into your Katamari.
I love Katamari. I’ve bought every Katamari re-release so far. I intend to keep buying and playing, and talking about Katamari until the air leaves my chest for the final time. I like to consider Katamari literally. What if you were sitting in your living room, and a little cool dude came rolling a ball through? At first, it’s fine because it’s just like crumbs and other stuff. But then he comes through again, and dang it he just stole your shoe. Finally, he comes through and rolls YOU up. But here’s the thing: it’s not a problem! Getting rolled up by a Katamari is literally the best-case scenario for your life!
I’d like to thank Bandai Namco for developing this game, and Apple Arcade for releasing it to the masses. I think everyone should play this game from ages 1 to 100. It’s universal.

# Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius ~forever with me~

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1996] | Stone Heads / Konami | Konami

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5/25/25

Of all the Parodius games, this one is my favorite. I’m loving the trend in 2025 of “completly random games I had no intention of playing”. Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius ~forever with me~ is the 4th entry in Konami’s Gradius parody series Parodius. Where Gradius has a theme of space, Parodius has a theme of absurd. I truly do not know what kind of crack the designers at Konami were smoking in the 90’s but I’m really glad they were! I don’t play “shmups” often, they stress me out and I, generally speaking, suck at video games. Back in the day I had Parodius Collection on my PSP and just found it to be super engaging and easy to pick up casually. After watching a My Life In Gaming stream where they played Adventure Island II, I got an itch to play my own insane 90’s Japanese pixel art game. Parodius! I love that game! I picked this specific entry at random. The title implies that the game has a game-show style announcer. As someone who speaks zero Japanese, this means that throughout the game, a random Japanese voice will shout things at me. I love it! My favorite is when you get a fairy (no clue what it does), he’ll say “yeah” in the funniest way. It’s literally the sole motivation I have to get the fairies, just to hear him. Each level is truly a children’s book on acid and every segment has me on the edge of my seat, eager to see what insanities they’ve cooked up. They even took the “cat bus” concept one step further and one of the final bosses is a “cat train”! There are lots of “ships” to choose from, each representing something absurd. I played through as the baby. A literal flying baby - that’s the ship. The music is mostly remixes of classical music and they did such a fantastic job! I made heavy use of Duckstation’s rewind feature, which made the game a challening but completely frutstration-free experience for me. Highly highly recommend, I loved this one. Image credit - Moby Games

# Harmful Park

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1997] | Sky Think System | Sky Think System

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5/26/25

After having fun with Parodius, I decided to give another “cute ‘em up” a try with Harmful Park. I played with the Japanese translation which is to say I have no idea what the story means, if there is one. I can say it’s a straightforward, forgiving, and fun horizontally scrolling shooter. Instead of the Gradius style power ups, you have access to all of your weapons at all times. You can power up to get 2 sub guns which makes you pretty tough. I used the normal bullets and mowed everything down easily enough on “Easy” diffuculty. I went back and did the first 2 stages on “Very Hard” difficulty, and it still wasn’t so bad. This is definately not on the level of a Parodius game in terms of inventiveness, but it’s a great two player game you’re sure to have fun with.

# Sexy Parodius

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1996] | Konami | Konami

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5/26/25

Sexy Parodius is the 5th and final mainline entry in the Parodius series (not including Paro Wars, a turn-based strategy game). Like the name implies, the game is “sexy”. What does that mean? Well, there’s girls in risquee situations. Though really it’s not too “adult” themed, I probably wouldn’t let my kids play it. I really like Parodius!

# Gokujō Parodius Da! Deluxe Pack

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1994] | Konami | Konami

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5/26/25

The second and third Parodius games in one package! They’re both just as fun as the next. Having now played through all the mainline Parodius games (except the very first one), I think that Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius ~forever with me~ is my overall favorite. I think that’s the culmination of the crazy ideas Parodius represents.

# Time Bokan Series: Bokan to Ippatsu! Doronbo

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1996] | Eleven | Banpresto

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5/26/25

I don’t know where I heard of this game or why it was on my computer, but it was and I’m very happy. Apparently this is based on a 1970’s Japanese manga called Time Boken from the studio most famous in the US for Speed Racer. The game consists of 7 or 8 levels. Before each, you choose from a handful of mech-vehicles to pilot. Each ship behaves differently and they’re all fun to play, so it actually makes for quite a bit of genuine replay value. I found myself playing through stages two or three times. It’s a vertical shooter and the pixel art is a great example of the peak of the 2D/16 bit SNES look we saw glimpses of on the Playstation. I really enjoyed this one and I can definately see myself coming back to this, assuming I will be able to remember the name.

# Time Bokan Series: Bokan Desuyo

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1998] | Eleven | Banpresto

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5/26/25

The only thing better than an obscure PS1 shmup based on an obscure manga is the sequel to such a game! It’s more of pretty much the same, which is good in my opinion. There’s nothing here that fundamentally shakes up the gameplay. You could start with this one just as easily as the first. Unfortunately this seems to be where the Time Boken shmup series ends. I can’t even find anything about the developer of this game, did they do anything else? I’m not even totally positive Eleven is the developer, that’s just what the Time Bokan wiki says! If there’s more games in this series, I’d love to play them. I did find a racing game Bokan Go Go Go, maybe I’ll give it a shot.

# The Legend of the Mystical Ninja

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1992] | Konami | Konami

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5/28/25

Mystical Ninja! I was introduced to this game by illegally downloading a ROM in 2001 and playing it on Snes9x on my brother’s computer. I was immediately taken with the unique charm. Set in feudal Japan, Mystical Ninja’s story is mostly irrelevant beyond the need for a joke. And the jokes are quite silly! The game refuses to take itself seriously. Some of the platforming sections are challenging. 2-player mode in theory is great, but in practice my kids made it hard or impossible to not die. Lots of great 90’s Konami art and design with more easter eggs and throwbacks to keep track of. The game has the entire first level of Gradius fully playable in-game! The game is filled with little fun things like this, I think it wants you to hang out in mystical Japan just as much as it wants you to beat the campaign. Good music, good graphics, tight platforming. I like it! It’s shorter too, only a couple of hours to play through.

# Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shōgun McGuiness

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1993] | Konami | Konami

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5/29/25

Being a fan of Mystical Ninja I became familiar that it was actually a part of a much larger series in Japan, based on historical characters, similar to something like Robin Hood or Johnny Appleseed - folk heroes. In 2005 my family got a broadband connection and I can remember searching up the Nintendo 64 Geomon games on eBay and offering a “best offer” listing $20 off their listed $120 price and they replied “Not for this incredible treasure!” To this day, the only Goemon game I had ever played was Mystical Ninja. I changed that! Goemon 2 improves on the first game in pretty much every way. You can tell that Super Mario World came out during/after the first game had been developed. The second game goes so far as to almost be a spoof of SMW. An overhead map replaces the direct linearity of stages in the first game. They even introduce a couple of “alternate exits” a-la SMW, but as far as I could tell they were both single-route deviations, not an entire new path like SMW. Still, what’s there is there and it’s good! My favorite addition is the new mecha stages! I love mechs and mecha-anime. Each boss fight has you controlling a mech, first in an “endless runner” type stage, smashing towns and enemies as you go. Then, a first-person Punch-Out style fight! You can hit a left hook or a right hook and have to deflect and punch the boss at the right time. It’s really fun! And funny too! It’s a bit less all over the place compared to the first game, and I like both for what they are.

# Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana's Movie Madness

Game Boy (OpenEmu-Arm) [1993] | Konami | Konami

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5/29/25

We had this growing up. It was one of the few games on Game Boy I played as a child. I can remember bringing it with me to visit my dad at his office to ask him to help me beat a level. He obliged and of course I immediately died. I must have been 3 or 4. This one is a bit odd - it released in North America first and a few months later in Japan. There are a few fairly critical design flaws. Just issues in the level design where the difficulty seems to be accidentally extreme just for a single jump. I cheat, and use save states, so I was able to get past without too much pain. But if I didn’t have that, I don’t know that this game is even beatable. It’s too bad because other than a few issues, it’s really fun! Good music, nice graphics, and the platforming is as tight as any Konami game. You’ll traverse 4 distinct movie sets and each has a few stages plus a themed boss fight. I liked it as a kid, and I still like it. It’s enjoyable enough that even a 4 year old can spend 15 minutes with it and have some fun.

# Bust-A-Move '99 (Puzzle Bobble 3)

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1996-99] | Taito | Taito

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6/21/25

Lore drop: in high school I dated this girl and on her family computer they had one of the worst clones of Puzzle Bobble I’ve ever seen. But Puzzle Bobble is such a cloneable game that even a bad clone is still fun as heck. We’d go head to head and I’d beat her to the point of her rage quitting. Getting a little bubble to nudge up right where it should be is really freaking satisfying. I just like poppin’ bubbles, man. Generally speaking I think the PS1 got relatively okay arcade ports of most random Japanese stuff, and emulation is really good thanks to Duckstation. I briefly considered trying out the arcade version via MAME but PS1 is just so easy.

Puzzle Bobble 3 was released in 1996 in arcades. It was eventually “localized” and released in the US as “Bust-A-Move ‘99”. More like “bust-a-nut”, am I right? I won’t bite the hand that feeds though. I think most of the Puzzle Bobble games are about on par with each other in terms of gameplay - which is to say incredibly satisfying and addicting. To be honest, the game might technically be a form of gambling, but I won’t get into the specifics of that. I tend to like the earlier 16/32 bit look of the earlier games, but I’m warming up to the bland “2002” PS2 look the low-quality releases of that time had.

# Bust-A-Move 4 (Puzzle Bobble 4)

PlayStation (Duckstation) [1997-99] | Taito | Taito

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6/21/25

More of the same! A good thing! I really don’t know what else to say.

# Super Bust-A-Move 2

PlayStation 2 (PCSX2) [2002] | Taito | Ubi Soft

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6/24/25

Like I said, I’m generally not a fan of the early PS2 low-budget aesthetic. This one doesn’t even bother to fill up an entire CD-ROM, let alone a DVD! But I have to say, I lost quite a bit of the charm I felt with the earlier titles with this one. I really just think I prefer the 90’s aesthetic for these games. The bubbles just don’t pop with the same zest they used to. I think I’ll go backward, not forward. This game is notable for having the worst voice acting I’ve personally seen in a game. Nobody plays Puzzle Bobble for the story, but the presentation here is almost offensively bad. Just skip. You’re here for the bubbles not for the voice acting.

# Frederik Pohl's Gateway

DOS [1992] | Legend Entertainment | Legend Entertainment

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7/1/25

As a broke kid with internet access, I spent a lot of time diging through archives of “abandonware” DOS games looking for hidden gems. One day I was playing “Space Wars” on my Palm Pilot and a long time family friend asked if I’d ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It immediately struck a chord. As I read and researched, I found the interactive fiction adaptation co-designed by Douglas Adams himself and Steve Meretzky.

I found the strictly text-only interface to be a little overwhelming, which is why when I discovered the crop of early Legend Entertainment interactive fictions, I jumped at them immediately. It’s everything I love about IF and everything I love about retro DOS gaming - great art, animations, and soundtrack! It really makes for quite an immersive experience.

Eventually I read the Gateway books, my favorite being the first sequel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, but this game has always stayed with me. I had a really hard time putting this game down. Steve Meretzky has some input on this one as well. I feel they really leaned hard into the interactive fiction aspect. There are certainly challenging puzzles, but if you read and take notes nothing should be too incredibly difficult. I relied on the official hint book, as well as a walkthrough at times when I was just stuck.

Really awesome experience! Would recommend.

# GRASSY KNOLL: The JFK Assassination Simulation

Inform (frotz) [1995] | Tom Kidd | schnapple.com

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7/6/25

I’ve been following Tom Kidd for some time. He does some excellent work on the macsourceports project. A lot of the games I’ve played on this list are thanks to his hard work. It seems like I’d heard him mention Grassy Knoll in passing, or maybe I read about it on his website. It was a bit of a surprise to log in to the macsourceports discord after a few weeks and see he’d just released a “Director’s Cut” of the original version of the game he made in 1995. Since I’ve been on a bit of an IF kick, I thought I’d give it a whirl. I ended up streaming it, and he joined in for some helpful commentary. How fun could a “JFK Assasination Simulator” be? Well, it’s more like historical interactive non-fiction than anything. He’s recreated a few key buildings and details about the Dallas area where the unfortunate tragedy occurred. It’s a bit observational, like A Mind Forever Voyaging. The point of the game is to just kind of look at things. There are some dynamic gameplay elements, like following Oswald’s trail out of the Book Depot. Overall, it was an insightful little journey through something I know embarrassingly little about. Thanks, Tom!

# Superluminal Vagrant Twin

Glulx (Spatterlight) [2016] | C.E.J. Pacian |

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7/11/25

Since I had such a fun time with Grassy Knoll, I decided to see what other modern interactive fiction might be out there. Superluminal is essentially a space trading sim. It’s pretty straightforward, but the gameplay loop is quick and rewarding enough that it’s pretty satisfying! It’s a bit like a giant fetch quest, but there are some puzzles along the way. It’s not always obvious who is buying and selling. I had a fun and quick time with the game! And shoutout to Spatterlight for macOS. Super sleek and customizable IF parser. Knowing that there’s a parse this good out there makes me very excited to keep playing more IF.

# Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure

Game Boy Advance (Analogue Pocket) [2004] | Dimps | Banpresto/Atari

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7/13/25

For some reason, Dragon Ball has always had a special place in my heart. Young Goku is just so cheerful! We rented Curse of the Blood Rubies at some point and loved it. I never watched much DBZ either. I ended up browsing the list of GBA games to see what I might want to play and I optimistically picked this game, hoping beyond hope for an actually good Dragon Ball game. Boy, did I find it! This was a total blast! It actually reminds me a lot of the good parts of the sidescrolling parts of the Mystical Ninja games I played earlier. On top of that is a really quite compelling 2D fighter. As you progress through the game, you slowly gain abilities and upgrades. The final boss fight against Piccolo was challenging but not overly so. I’m trying to get my friend Pacheco to play it also so we can go head to head over link cable!

# Beetle Adventure Racing

Nintendo 64 (OpenEmu-Arm) [1999] | Paradigm Entertainment | Electronic Arts

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7/22/25

My friend had this one growing up. I remember it being cool and fun. After my friend Carter hooked me up with one of them new-fangled N64 Switch Online controllers, I decided to give it a go with it! I really like this game! The racing is fast paced! Apparently this was developed as a Need For Speed title and then switched to a VW Beetle tie-in game, inexplicably. Fun fact! This game was released in Australia as “HSV Adventure Racing” and “HSV” is a brand of Australian cars. There are 4 circuits, and unlike Mario Kart, you’ll be re-playing the levels from the previous circuits, only faster. Each time you complete a circuit, the next circuit unlocks which has you then play through all previous levels with the addition of one more. So by the end of the game, you’ll be kind of sick of the first level, but you’ll also need to rely on all the random tricks and shortcuts you’ve found along the way. Because the levels are so long and dense, there are many opportunities to find secret passages and shortcuts. The levels seems to be pretty balanced as well, unlike the shortcut in Wario Stadium for example. It’s just how you’d like to do it, which made local multiplayer really fun. Trying to steal secrets from each other was a blast. The soundtrack is a nice drum and bass track and the announcer sounds fantastic. It’s a great racing game!

# Rhythm Heaven

Nintendo DS [2009] | Nintendo SPD/TNX Music Recordings | Nintendo

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8/15/25

I loved this game! As a drummer of a few decades, you could say rhythm is in my DNA. The presentation, the art style, and the MUSIC. I love the sound aesthetics of the Nintendo DS. The slightly bitcrushed sound tickles some deep synapse in my soul. I picked this one up brand new from a Walgreen’s in maybe 2015 at a time when I certainly had much better things to spend my limited income on. I’m not ashamed to admit that until now I’d never actually played it. I just know it’s a good game for me so I’ve been hanging on to it. I haven’t had such a huge smile on my face in quite some time. I beat the main campaign but there’s still a ton of post-game content. It’s mostly just slight variations on the base rhythm games, but more of a good thing is, well, a good thing! I hope to keep plugging away on this one as time permits. The only issue - my kids want to play whenever they hear the DS open. They are horrible at it, I make it look easy I guess, but we still have “fun”.

# Star Fox 64 3D

Nintendo 3DS [2011] | Nintendo EAD/Q-Games | Nintendo

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8/27/25

Look… we had Starfox 64 growing up. In fact, my own late father once described his greatest life accomplishment in beating my older brother at Starfox. I had a lot of fun running through the short campaign. How many of us have been totally frustrated by the “protect the idiot party member” sections of an otherwise decent game? In Starfox 64, you have not only one idiot party member, but three! Slippy, the cute childish frog that seems to be completely unable to help himself stay out of harm’s way. Peppy, the boomer-ish bunny that is equally hapless. And Falco… Falco… How do we deal with his constant insults and sarcastic attitude? Do we just take him out deliberately? Personally, I feel bad when I let a party member down. But I also am not good enough at games to keep them alive. This game stresses me out. I didn’t find this 3DS port to be particularly impressive and most of the time struggled to get it to even shoot in the right direction. Struggling against controls does not a good time make. Look, I’m glad that this 3DS port exists. I’m glad Nintendo finally re-released it as part of the classics collection since it was out of print for a long time. It just didn’t translate super well for me. I like Starfox, and this gave me a hankering to play Starfox Adventures. I churned through the short campaign on “3DS” mode and that didn’t leave me with much of a desire to ever pick it back up. I guess the lesson learned is don’t make your antagonists more sympathetic to the player than the protagonists. I’d rather have my party die and leave me alone than try to constantly stop the incredibly weak enemies from absolutely destroying Slippy. Plus, if they die, then you don’t have to listen to them any more. Bring back the SNES style bloop bloop voice acting. I’d kind of like to make a romhack that replaces the voice acting with the most insulting and annoying lines of all time.

# Super Mario Land

Game Boy (Super Game Boy 2) [1989] | Nintendo R&D1 | Nintendo

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9/3/25

This might be the very first video game I ever played. It’s almost certainly the first I beat. I really love Super Mario Land. We didn’t have an NES, so I believe this was also my introduction to the concept of Mario. My brother had an original Game Boy DMG-01 with a copy of Mario Land. Hirokazu (Hip) Tanaka’s soundtrack is bar-none. Lore drop - while I haven’t officially met Tanakasan, I have seen him in real life and could have said hello if I had something intelligent to say to him. I especially love Overworld BGM 2. I made up some words to it - “Everything, is going to be okay. And everything, is going to be just fine. And everything is going to go my way. And everything is going to beeeeeee juuuussst greeeaaat now!” I love the insane diversity of the worlds, unlike pretty much anything we’ve seen in another mainline Mario game. Aliens? Easter Island? Pyramids? I love it all! The submarine and airplane stages are an excellent break from the normal platforming. This has to be one of my favorite games of all time. It’s tricky, but extra lives are plentiful so you should be able to get through it without too much trouble. Thanks, Nintnedo and Mr. Tanaka!

# Shining Force

Sega Genesis (OpenEmu-Arm) [1993] | Climax Entertainment / Sonic! Software Planning | Sega

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10/3/25

If my memory serves, it was Christmas 2001 that my brothers and I received a copy of Sega Smash Pack Vol. 1 for our Dreamcast. The summer before, we’d sold off a bunch of our systems, pooled our money, and saved up to buy a used Dreamcast from Software Etc. Ill-fated as the console may have been, I personally loved the Dreamcast and to this day I think it’s my favorite video game console of all time. I just love the Dreamcast. Everything about it. We had owned a Super Nintendo, but my experience with the Genesis was mostly just passing. Other kids had them, I thought the controller was strange but I liked the unique sounds and graphics compared to the SNES, Game Boy, and PC.

To be honest, I found most of the games on Smash Pack mid at best. Streets of Rage 2 (“Streets of Agence” as my younger brother called it) was particularly fun to play. Golden Axe, Altered Beast, and Wrestle War… not so much. However, one of the games that caught my “video game expert” older brother was Shining Force. I remember watching him play through the first missions, fascinated with the various party members who would join you, seemingly at random. It was fun to watch and offer my fledgling strategy advice during battles. That Christmas, my mom helped us convert our garage into a temporary “game room” (probably just to keep us out of her hair) but man, I fondly remember the gentle sunlight streaming in during the realtively warm winter days of Southern Utah Christmas. I don’t recall how far he made it through the game, but I seem to recall that he eventually rage quit out of frustration. Still, I always remembered Shining Force as a curious and inviting Sega game.

I have a confession to make: I suck at video games. My attention span is almost zilch. I get distracted, bored, then end up doing something else and by the time I want to revisit, I can’t remember where I left off or what to do. I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever actually beaten an RPG that wasn’t Pokémon. However, about a year ago I sunk a decent amount of time into the PS2 remake of Phantasy Star titled Phantasy Star Generation 1. I gained an appreciation and understanding of the non-Nintendo/Square/Enix JRPG heritage. They just play differently and in my opinion, different in a good way. Shining Force is certainly no exception.

Shining Force is incredible. It’s hard for me to put into words why I like this game so much. It reminds me a lot of the early Pokémon games in the way that you play through with mostly a small-ish party, but there’s still plenty of other characters for you to familiarize yourself and form strategies around for future playthroughs. Most of the party members in Shining Force, like Pokémon, are optional. I’m generally pretty thourough but I still didn’t even find all of them during my playthrough! The game is incredibly balanced, the enemy AI adapts to your specific party and play style. It’s challenging but incredibly forgiving! The hero of your party, Max, has a spell that will instantly teleport you from the battle back to the last Priest you visited to resurrect and heal your party. All experience is kept, so even if you fail and have to retreat or die, the game rewards you for even trying since when you attempt the battle again, your party will be a little stronger! I did a bit of “grinding” to level up party members if I found a battle to be a bit too difficult or if party members kept dying, but it doesn’t really feel like grinding in the typical JRPG sense since the enemy AI will adapt to your new stronger party. No two battles will ever go exactly the same way! It’s a bit like chess in that sense.

As usual, I cheated by using a single save state (mostly to eliminate mistakes and random number pitfalls), and made heavy use of fast-forward to help with my lack of patience. Even still, my experience with Shining Force was absolutely incredible. This is a strong contender for my Game of the Year, and possibly even my favorite game of all time. There are no tutorials. No exposition. No insane story and opaque directions. It’s incredibly linear. It plays almost like a book. But with the variability in party members and stats, I could see how people would play this game again and again. There are some rough spots when it comes to inventory management and party management. My choices were mostly “vibes” based, just seeing which members seemed to do well in battle versus those who just totally sucked. If you ask 10 people how they play this game, you’ll probably get 10 different answers and to me, that’s what makes a game fun. I don’t think they expected you to buy the strategy guide and call a 1-800 help line like cough Nintendo cough did at that time. They simply made a great game that’s fun to play.

# Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict

Game Gear (Retroarch/Gearsystem) [1995] | Sonic! Software Planning | Sega

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10/6/25

After having a complete and total blast with Shining Force, I knew I wanted to play another game. I had a hard time deciding diving straight into Shining Force II or sticking with the timeline of the games and going with Final Conflict. Obviously, I went with Final Conflict. There are actually a total of 3 Shining Force games released for the Game Gear and if the other two are anywhere near as good as Final Conflict, they’re easily in the top 3 best games released for the Game Gear. Too bad nobody would have been able to actually see the dang game on actual Game Gear hardware back in 1995! It really is too bad because this is possibly one of the best 8-bit RPGs on any system ever released. I like to imagine an alternate timeline when the white LED was invented in the late 80’s, which would have enabled the Game Gear to have a display that is actually legible. Oh well.

Final Conflict takes place in between the first and second Shining Force games on the Genesis. To be honest, any connections to the first game are mostly irrelevant. The only characters from the first game that appear are Adam, the useless robot who is actually unplayable but becomes a combined tactician and priest (he heals your fallen party members); Mishaela, Darksol’s evil magician lady who’s kind of a mini-boss in the first game; and (spoiler alert) Max, the lead from the first game who’s fallen under Mishaela’s spell. Other than that, I’m not aware of any people or locations that are related to the first game. All that to say that if you’re playing this for the overall Shining story, it’s not really necessary.

That said, as an 8-bit tactical RPG, Final Conflict is pretty good! There are absolutely no overworld exploration sections. Most of the time between battles Adam will just ask you if you want to save and allow you to raise fallen members. Occasionally you’ll go to a town which consists of Adam and his normal abilities, and a shop where you can upgrade your weapons and buy healing items. Some of the major annoyances with inventory managment are actually solved here by simple means like asking if you’d like to immediately equip a new item and the ability to quickly see what everyone is currently holding instead of diving through the same menu a thousand times. That was a welcome improvement! Due to the Game Gear’s limited screen resolution, a decent chunk of the battle map will be taken up by title text but simply holding START hides it! You’ll be holding START a lot if you want to know where you’re going!

Compared with Shining Force, Final Conflict felt slightly uninspired. Two maps stand out though. The first being a bridge you have to cross while it’s falling apart by an evil giant squid that will also completely wreck you if you stay near the edge of the water. The second to last map has you ascending a giant tower with 5 statues that will continually rain hellfire down on your party while also getting completely pwned by flying magic creatures giant area of effect spells. Seriously, I almost rage quit on this mission and had to go through several times before I eventually loaded everyone up with as many healing items as I could. Further complicated is the fact that the final battle against the same 3-headed (well, two handed and single-headed in this case) dragon as the first game will fully heal any of your party members but will not raise them. This means that if most of your party dies in the lead-up, you’re stuck with whoever is left. The first time I beat the second to last mission I ended up with only two party members which left the final mission impossible. Usually you can simply egress back to town to heal up and jump right back in, but in this case doing so will boot you back to the tower of hellfire doom! So you really have to be careful to not leave yourself with no remaining party members! Once I was able to do this, the final boss was a total cakewalk. The other issue I had is that many of the maps make use of “suprise” attacks where a bunch of random enemies will pop up half way through the map and totally wreck your tactics. Even still, they aren’t too hard, it just kind of left a sour taste in my mouth each time my carefully planned out team layout would just get completely turned upside down by a random magic user casting some spell that nailed 4 of my party with massive damage. Melee and ranged enemies are no problem but man, the enemy magic is seriously overpowered! I had less of a problem deciding which party members to take with me and which to leave on the bench because there’s less party members overall and the ones I left benched basically completely sucked. For these reasons, I feel that there’s significantly less depth in this game than the mainline entry, but for an on-the-go “side story”, I still had quite a bit of time with the battles!

Overall, Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict is a fun and impressive game for yet another ill-fated Sega console and it’s too bad we didn’t get an official release in the US. Thanks to the folks at Shining Force Central for the fan translation!

# Mother 3

Game Boy Advance [2006] | Brownie Brown / HAL Labratory | Nintendo

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10/30/25

I first played EarthBound on my brother’s PC using SNES9x in about 2002 after becoming familiarized with Ness in Super Smash Bros. I found the game to be very difficult, yet appealing. For some reason the typical high fantasy setting of most RPGs never really struck a chord with me. But this strange game set in modern day America, complete with an odd but interesting soundtrack, was quite intriguing to me.

A few years later I ended up with a Dell Pocket PC and it could run NES games quite well despite the horrific ergonomics. Somehow I came across the unreleased original “Earth Bound” game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, known at that time as “EarthBound Zero”. I can remember getting to the factory level and being quite overwhelmed, but still the game was intriguing.

In October 2008 I was in my senior year of High School. I had a friend’s PSP I was “borrowing” and liked to play random games on. The fan translation for the long rumored “EarthBound 2” finally came out. That was my introduction to Mother 3. I have a clear memory of playing it on my PSP while waiting in the school parking lot for my friend to finish basketball practice. It had everything I loved about the other two Mother games with a modern layer of polish and refinement that made playing it a pleasant experience. I never actually beat the game at that time, but I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

Over the years I’ve participated in Mother 3 fandom by keeping it around to play, organizing group reproduction buys (before the days of cheap bootleg carts flooding eBay), trying it out on various emulators, and generally just keeping the game on my radar, hopeful for an eventual official release. There’s been several times I’ve nearly decided to finally give it an earnest shot again, and a couple of times I’ve attempted it only to become frustrated or distracted by life. That’s right, up until now I’d never actually beaten Mother 3.

I’m not sure what made me decide now was the time, but roughly 17 years to the day from the fan translation being released, I decided to give it another shot.

Mother 3 is an absolute treasure. The story for the most part is incredibly linear, playing more like a book or movie than a true video game. I like this in games. I don’t like not knowing what I’m supposed to be doing and not knowing the little sequence break tips and tricks experienced players know. I also don’t have the time or patience to figure it all out on my own, and I feel like a cheater when I use a walkthrough, it just takes away the wonder and excitement. Mother 3 fits that niche perfectly for me. It’s excellently paced, broken up into chapters that just seem to be the right length to keep it fresh.

The game is genuinely hilarious! One thing I like is that the overall cast of characters is small, maybe only 50 or so NPCs you’d actually interact with. Because of this, you’re able to watch them all grow and change throughout the game. It’s not just town after town filled with endless people who usually but not always have nothing helpful to tell you. Each time you see an NPC you can expect they’ll have something unique, novel, and usually pretty funny to say to you.

As usual, I cheat by playing with a single save state and fast-forward. I generally “suck” at video games, so using a single quick save buys me a lot of peace of mind knowing I won’t mess anything up too bad. Occasionally I’ll use more save states when starting a big battle but that was rare in this instance. Fast-forward makes the occasional grind less of a bother.

Mother 3 is a masterpiece. It’s my favorite in the series by far, and likely one of my favorite games of all time. I just get it; it gets me. I’d like to personally thank Itoi-san and everyone else who was involved in it’s creation. I’m glad they took the time it needed to get it just right. If you’ve never played it, there’s never been a better time than now!

# Donkey Kong

Game Boy [1994] | Nintendo EAD / Pax Softnica | Nintendo

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11/4/25

Another one we had in the family growing up. This served as my introduction to the character of Donkey Kong. Colloquially known as “Donkey Kong ‘94” because Nintendo decided to release it as simply “Donkey Kong” despite the fact that it is not the same game as the original arcade Donkey Kong and it’s home console ports. Instead, this serves as a partial remake of that original arcade game for the first few stages, then it opens up into a nice little puzzle platformer. Much later, Nintendo would attempt to remake it for the Game Boy Advance but instead opt to spin it into a new series which became Mario vs Donkey Kong. I beat it using fast-forward and rewind and it took me about 3 hours. Interestingly enough this game introduced Mario’s backflip jump later found in Super Mario 64. It’s a fun, cute little game with decent replay value and the last real entry before Donkey Kong Country would totally retcon the Donkey Kong characters.

# EarthBound

SNES (OpenEmu-Arm) [1995] | Ape Inc. / HAL Labaroatory | Nintendo

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11/11/25

What can I say about one of the most beloved and neglected video games of all time? I have to admit, I am usually pretty eager to update this list shortly after I beat each game, but it’s been over a week now and I’m still not sure where to put my thoughts. On one hand, I love the charm of EarthBound. The music in particular is incredible, I love the Hospital Dub track so much I can easily listen to it for hours on repeat. However, I didn’t love the obscure mechanics and niche strategies. I suppose it makes sense that for the US release, they included a full strategy guide with every copy. In a way, I wish I would have referenced it throughout, as I kind of assume that’s the “official” way to play the game, and apparently Nintendo has high quality PDF copies available for a free download, and it’s quite fleshed out. There were many times I was confused on what to do next, or in what order, or using which items. Inventory management is an absolute nightmare and offers no “fun” whatsoever. Mother 3 also has limited inventory, but all of the key items and equippable stuff doesn’t take up room and they make the whole menuing system a lot less cumbersome to navigate. EarthBound on the other hand left me continually wondering what items were worth even having at all since they like to fill you up with “trick” items that are worthless and do nothing. But a broken machine? Yeah you need to keep that around for sure. How am I supposed to know that? Another instance where I started getting “I’m not playing this game, the game is playing me” vibes is with the “despawn loop” to try and get some enemies to leave you alone. I streamed my entire playthrough and had a lot of fun as some “professional EarthBound players” (my designation) showed up to offer tips and spoilers. That was my favorite part of it actually! I’m glad a played through it but it left a fairly plain taste in my mouth overall. That’s right, I’m saying that I think EarthBound is overrated. The best part is that it’s a game that proves you can do things a little differently and still have a nice game! As a self proclaimed fan of the Mother series, I still hold Mother 3 far above the other two entries. It’s really really good. EarthBound is ok.

# Golf Story

Switch [2017] | Sidebar Games | Sidebar Games

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11/16/25

I’m not sure how I heard about Golf Story. At the time it came out in 2017, was one of the only good indie Switch exclusives so it got a decent amount of praise. Back then, I bought the digital version of it and made it maybe 40% of the way through the game until my oldest son, who was two and a half at the time, somehow deleted my save file so I walked away out of self preservation. Later, there would be a limited (cough) physical release so I picked that up as well. Well, it sat on the shelf for long enough and after the relative stress of EarthBound and Mother 3 I needed something a little more casual. I dug out the defunct Switch Lite I bought on launch day at a Bic Camera in Tokyo just by chance, that will always be a fond memory for me. In retrospect, Golf Story is a good 2d golf game with some limited RPG elements. The core gameplay is mostly aiming up your shot, taking into account environmental hazards like wind, setting spin/angle on the ball to curve around trees or to get the ball to bounce just the right amount. That core loop is satisfying and addicting. They break up the rounds with the occasional minigame or off the wall challenge, and it’s mostly not annoying. There’s a “Made in Unity” splash screen and all I can say is that it shows. There’s a fair amount of jank and bugs, but nothing I ran into was game breaking. Now I kinda just want to play Mario Golf. It’s too bad Golf Story never got a wider release on other systems. Unfortunately it seems that the developer made a sequel that was very poorly received and they’re now defunct. I’d love to see a proper Golf Story sequel as I think with another layer of polish they could make something truly great!

# Retro Game Challenge

Nintendo DS (melonDS) [2009] | indieszero | Xseed / Bandai

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11/18/25

This is another game that came out during a very pivotal time in my life, my senior year of high school. I actually didn’t even own a DS, but I talked my friend into loaning me his DS Lite he’d just gotten for Christmas so I could play Retro Game Challenge. I’ve always had a very special place in my heart for this game. I’m pretty sure Xseed lost money on their US localization, but I’m really glad they did it. Back in the mid 2010’s, when GameStop was trying get rid of their DS stuff, they’d sell loose copies of this game for like $5, so any time I went into an area on vacation I’d make sure to hop on their website to scour the area for any and all copies I could get my hands on. I think I ended up with 4, but now I just own 2 complete with a home printed case. The developer, indieszero, would later go on to make the NES Remix games for Nintendo, but for some reason those never really interested me. Retro Game Challenge consists of 8 Famicom style games. There’s a galaga clone, two puzzle platformers (one is a sequel), a proper top down shmup, a top down racing game similar to Micro Machines with an in-game ramen noodle branded tie in “sequel”, a proper 8-bit RPG in the vein of Dragon Quest, and a late-generation 2d platformer that also serves as a much expanded sequel to the two previous puzzle platformers. Each game has just enough original gameplay to keep it fresh. You’re given 4 challenges for each game, such as attaining a certain score or beating a level, and rewarded with new games to play. The premise is that you’re sent back in time to the 80’s by the “Game Master” to play games with himself as a child, completing challenges for each along the way. One aspect that really helps sell the whole vibe is that there’s an in-game magazine that will occasionally release new issues complete with sneak peaks of upcoming “in development” games and cheat codes for the old games. The cheats will come in handy too, since your final challenge is to beat every game. I would say it didn’t quite hold up as well as I remember it, but it still scratches a major itch. With the amount of impossible 8-bit shovelware games that are out there, it’s nice to have a super linear curated list of different games to play. The games really do feel authentically 8-bit as well, I think they could all be actual NES games and I wouldn’t even be surprised if there were ever proper console ports of the games themselves. indieszero really knew what they were doing with this game and it shows! If you’ve always wanted to be a fan of the 8-bit era but found some of the games just too daunting and challenging, give this on a shot! There was a sequel as well that unfortunately never saw a release outside of Japan, but luckily there’s a good fan translation of it. My only real question now is if I go straight into the sequel or do something else. I’m kind of feeling the Switch itch again, so we’ll see…

# LocoRoco

PlayStation Portable [2006] | Japan Studio | Sony Computer Entertainment

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11/22/25

In high school I requisitioned my friend’s PSP to do shenanigans with. Back then, the most reliable way to mod them was to make your own “pandora’s battery” which I did successfully. A replacement official battery was $30 at Best Buy if my memory serves correctly. As a broke kid, I simply couldn’t afford games (let alone the system itself), so this really opened up a world of possibilities. To be honest, I’m not sure that there were really any good games on the PSP, at least none that I can remember playing. I mostly liked playing emulators. However, I can remember distinctly one day at school where I think I was an aide for the computer teacher during a period where he didn’t have a class, so it was just me alone in the computer lab. I don’t know where I heard about it, but I loaded up a freshly downloaded copy of LocoRoco and was immediately smitten. The entire presentation was just so charming! I have a vivid memory of then immediately looking up how much a copy would cost at my local GameStop and it was only $20! More than that it was in stock. I immediately left school and drove to GameStop and picked it up. I didn’t even open the case but I felt like it was such a unique game that I needed to shell out a few pennies to support the craft. Revisiting LocoRoco today, it’s still got quite a bit of charm. After I booted it up nearly all of my kids from age 2 to 10 gathered around asking what I was playing, who were those guys, what was going on. There’s a strong soundtrack full of really unique music that the little blobs called “LocoRocos” sing along too. There are 5 worlds with 8 stages on each world. There’s not much in terms of variety, and the game is really a one trick pony. You control the “world” and tilt it using the R and L triggers which cause the rocos to roll. Pressing both triggers together causes the world to bounce, launching the rocos into the air. You start with a single roco and eat fruit hidden throughout each stage that cause you to grow larger and adds another roco to your blob. You can hit circle to break your blob into individual rocos to navigate tighter spaces, and hold circle to cause them to rejoin. Honestly, I think it’s really more of a glorified demo than a full game, there’s not just enough unique concepts to sustain the whole game. However, I think it was designed to be played in shorter spurts rather than sinking several hours into in a single session. I still really love LocoRoco but there’s very little in terms of replay value. You can gather a total of 20 rocos on each level, but as far as I know the game does not reward or punish you for getting all of them or missing some. Well, other than giving you parts for your house which is a mini game where you build a kind of rube-goldberg machine to guide the rocos along a certain path. Personally I wasn’t super interested in doing this. As I played through the game, I sensed a certain lack of polish that seem to be more inherent in Sony’s games as opposed to Nintendo. But maybe that’s the point, it’s not a Nintendo game and Nintendo wouldn’t have made this game. I love LocoRoco for what it is but I can’t see myself revisiting it any time soon. There are technically two proper sequels but I”m not sure if I’ll dive into those, although I hear that LocoRoco 2 is better in pretty much every way.

# Mario Tennis

Nintendo 64 [2000] | Camelot Software Planning | Nintendo

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11/22/25

Okay, this is kind of cheating I think. For this list I consider a game that I’ve “beaten” as having gotten to the credits screen. However there’s no real set standard in video games for how much of the game’s content you’ve actually experienced in order to see a credits screen. Some games like Castlevania like to trick you with “bad endings”. Others, like Retro Game Challenge leave almost nothing on the floor. Mario Tennis will show you a credits scroll as soon as you fully complete a tournament a single time, which is what I did. I can remember playing this back in 2000, I’m not sure if we borrowed it from a friend or rented it but I believe it was around Christmas time and I had a lot of fun playing it by myself. I think what you’re supposed to do is complete the tournament with every character, but I”m not sure what reward there is for doing so. There’s probably unlockable characters and other things, but it’s not clear to me what any of that is. Honestly, I like that about this game. You can get as deep as you want but it’s not forced. I’ll probably spend some more time with Mario Tennis, or I might jump into the Gameboy Color or GameCube version. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this was the official introduction of Waluigi which is frankly, incredible. Also this incredible fun fact from the wiki article: Camelot asked Nintendo if the game could also feature girlfriends for Wario and Waluigi, but Miyamoto said that he “didn’t even want to see their girlfriends.”

# Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Nintendo DS [2005] | Konami | Konami

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11/25/25

I really love the Nintendo DS. I especially love my DS Lite that I picked up off some kid in the local classifieds back in 2015 with a copy of Bakugan that’s long gone. I love everything about the DS Lite. I actually bought the original white DS Lite when it came out from money I’d saved up from my (probably illegal) telemarketing job I had one summer. It didn’t last long, I think the white color combined with the touch screen just really stressed me out, fearing damaging it. These days, I love my banged up black and red Lite. It’s missing the stylus. It’s missing the Slot 2 cover. But the unique form factor and crispy pixels just look so good to my eyes. After streaming a lot of games locked away at my desk my lack of involvement with my family started to weigh on me so I wanted something I could play on the go. I reviewed the games I beat last year and noticed I had beaten Aria of Sorrow and meant to play the DS sequel but never go around to it.

Dawn of Sorrow is both beloved and hated. The issue is there are some extremely grindy aspects combined with a really gimmicky and glued-on touch screen mechanic. However, my experience with Dawn was pretty positive! I really love a lot of the “metroidvania” style Castlevania games, and compared to some of the others, I felt like Dawn really kept the pacing up. Usually I’ll get completely lost at least a few times, and I did get lost a handful of times in Dawn but I was able to quickly search the internet for the next step. The map layout is fairly forgiving with warp points located at pretty ideal spots. And the touch screen gimmick? You have to do a “seal” when you beat a boss which consists of tracing a specific pattern on the touch screen. If you mess it up, you have to keep fighting the boss and try again. However, at any time the game can be paused and you can review the seal pattern and even practice it. To me, this wasn’t really that annoying. It took about 30 seconds, and I did mess it up a few times on a boss battle but for some reason it didn’t really bother me all that much. The bosses themselves are quite fun to play and offered a nice challenge. The more annoying mechanic to me was the “soul capture” aspect. Randomly (and I do mean truly randomly), when you kill a monster you’ll absorb it’s “soul”. There’s no stat I found that impacts how frequently this happens so you really just have to grind until you get the soul you want. The game forces you to capture three specific souls at the end of the game to get the proper ending and having to remember where the specific monsters live in the castle, combined with the random number generation that dictates if you’ll even capture the soul, that late in the game really deflated a lot of the good pacing the game has. It’s just dumb. Those specific three souls are really not even useful in any other way, it’s not like you need them to beat the boss or anything, it’s just an arbitrary stupid gimmick the game forces you to deal with.

One thing I’m mixed on is this mechanic where to get better weapons, you have to fuse specific monster souls with a weaker weapon to keep upgrading. Fortunately the game tells you exactly what soul you need for the next upgrade, and for my playthrough I used only a single axe weapon so it was just one little thing to remember as I naturally encountered the monster I needed. By far the grindiest part of the game for me was my decision to upgrade my axe to it’s final level, which required a soul from one of the strongest enemies in the game. The “final armor” as the enemy is named required 15 hits to kill and there were a couple of times I actually died when trying to capture it’s soul. I think it took me about 30 minutes of killing the enemy, navigating back to a save/heal point that wasn’t really even that close, then rinse and repeat. Just… ugh. I seriously considered rage quitting the game at that point. But thanks to the DS I was cozied up in bed with my daughter so I decided do persevere to get the best axe weapon in the game.

As far as post-game content, as typical with Castlevania games, you unlock another mode where you play as another character with it’s own abilities and mechanics. Honestly, I feel like the so-called “Julias Mode” might actually be better than the main game. It completely eliminates the soul capture and seal mechanics that everyone hates so much and actually ties into one of the main game’s “bad” endings. I’m half tempted to complete the playthrough in Julias Mode since I think it would go pretty quickly.

I’ve said way too much already but as you can tell, I did enjoy this game. It’s well done, good music, and excellent pixel art graphics. Oh, not to mention a great anime opening cutscene! It’s a really complete package and may be the peak GBA/DS era Castlevania game. Still, I think Symphony of the Night might be better than them all…

# Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

Nintendo 3DS [2013] | AlphaDream/Good-Feel | Nintendo

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11/27/25

Ugh. Uuuuggghhh. Last year I finished off a playthrough of Bowser’s Inside Story (original DS version). This is the fourth Mario & Luigi title and so far, it seems the series is going downhill. I think my favorite was Partners in Time since I love the DS aesthetic and it seemed to be mostly gimmick-free. Dream Team is the opposite. It’s basically one big gimmick. And you know what? It’s not even really much of an RPG. It’s more like Mario Party RPG. What I like about the action-RPG elements of the original Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi series is that the action elements in battle serve to just add a nice little cherry on top of an already fun game. Instead, Dream Team is like a series of mini games strewn together with some fairly weak action platforming stages. There aren’t really that many battles to do, and when you do them it’s a few minutes of the same repetitive minigames over and over and over again. All of them really just have you pressing A and B in certain patterns and there just wasn’t enough variety to keep it interesting. On top of that, your special attacks are again, like individual minigames that you basically have to learn and master or else you’re better off just doing the regular attacks. I actually gave up on learning the special attacks and limped through.

I actually started this game maybe around the time last year I beat Bowser’s Inside Story and then got bored of it. When I picked it back up, I kind of intended to give it a fresh start from the beginning but it turns out I was like 90% of the way through the game so I decided to just finish it off. I just did not vibe with this one, sorry. Even the setting is just kind of… dumb in my opinion. It’s something to do with Luigi going to sleep using a magic pillow and then Mario enters the dream world which is a 2.5D platforming stage. On the platforming stages you can use “Dream Luigi” to do, for lack of a better term, special moves such as a high jump or a tornado spin. It’s just not fun! It’s cumbersome! There are battles in the dream world and you have a completely different set of special moves (minigames) to learn and master, or ignore like I did. I really wish they would have just kept the same stupid moves the whole time so at least I could master one or two of them, but the way they split up the “dream” sections meant that I basically would almost get a special move down, and then have to switch to the other mode and forget it. I can absolutely understand why I rage quit this game after like 40 hours. Good grief.

I generally prefer the aesthetic of the original DS over the 3DS. It’s not that AlphaDream did a bad job with the direction on these, it’s just not for me. But the gimmicks. My absolute hell the gimmicks. We’re talking mandatory motion controls. I just covered Dawn of Sorrow which was lambasted for having contrived touch screen elements. This game is basically chock full of that kind of crap. “Tap fast!” “Draw fast circles on the touch screen!” There are certain boss battles which play like extremely drawn out quick time event. We’re talking like a 10 minute quick time event. The final one with Bowser took me about 30 minutes on it’s own just to do all the stupid random crap. There’s way too much unnecessary animation so in between the actual game you’re forced to sit through the same mini cutscenes again and again and again. Seriously, did they playtest this at all? How is this fun? I actually felt pretty bad about the whole AlphaDream situation with them going out of business but man, they deserved it. This game really seriously kind of sucks. Fortunately for the actual RPG boss battles they give you an “easy mode” if you die which I graciously took advantage of. I’m not going to learn the dumb mini games which are actually enemy attacks just to try and dodge them and not get completely fricked over.

Am I excited to try Paper Jam next? Yes I am. Besides Brothership (which was made by another developer completely), that’s the only other Mario & Luigi game I haven’t played through. If it’s this bad, I’m going to give it up sooner than later and I won’t look back. AlphaDream, go frick yourselves for what you did with Dream Team. If you want to play the M&L series, I’d say start with either the original Superstar Saga or Partners in Time and definitely play the Super Mario RPG Switch remake before you give Dream Team a second of your attention. Bad game. Shame.

# Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Game Boy Advance [2001] | Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe | Konami

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12/11/25

I’m not entirely sure which Castlevania game was the first that I played in earnest, but it was likely this. I might have played some of the original NES games in an emulator at some point, but Circle of the Moon was certainly the first I owned. I believe that one of my Boy Scout troop leader people recommended it to me, so I picked up a used copy from the local Game Crazy for $15 or so. Circle of the Moon was a launch title for the GBA, and reviewing the list of US launch titles for the system, it’s clearly by far the best. In fact, it’s probably the only US launch title that’s even noteworthy or worth playing at all (other than Nintendo’s own remake of Super Mario Bros. 2).

Hot on the heels of the massive success of Symphony of the Night, Konami trimmed down a bit of the complexity into a great little portable package. Contemporary reviews complained the game was hard to see on the GBA’s tiny unlit display, but that’s not a problem for us at all, is it? Even by the time I bought my copy, I had a GBA SP and never really had an issue seeing the graphics. I can’t really remember how far I made it in the game back then, but I’m pretty sure what happened was what normally happened for me: I made it somewhere between 40-70% of the way through, at which point my older brother commandeered my GBA and either finished the game for me, or started from the beginning and finished the entire thing before I had a chance. That’s okay, he is much better at games than I am.

One of the “innovations” of Circle of the Moon is the “Dual Set-Up System” which gives you the “opportunity” to collect randomly dropped cards from certain unknown enemies. However, the drop rates for the cards is completely horrific. During this playthrough, I think I collected about 6 of the cards total, out of 20. There are two sets of 10 and matching them up does… something. Sometimes the game tells you, sometimes it doesn’t and you’re supposed to just figure it out? Luckily, there is an easily exploitable bug where you can activate any combo you do have and then immediately change to any combo whether you have it or not and the game will activate the new combo. The most useful combo for me was on that gives you a poison cloud around your body which eliminates most enemy and boss projectiles as well as serves to open all the secret walls you can whip through to get powerups. Like most Castlevania games, getting hit at all by an enemy results in massive kickback, sending you absolutely yeeting through the stage. It doesn’t even matter how strong or weak the enemy is, if they touch you, you will fly. So the poison cloud really helps to give you a protective barrier when there’s a ton of random enemy projectiles on screen. The game is pretty challenging, so a bit of grinding is necessary. I ended up making it all the way to the end of the game about 10 levels under the recommendation for the final boss, so I grinded (ground??) for about 30 minutes while watching a show. With enough save states, I made it through without too much trouble.

Circle of the Moon is fun. I like it. I think it’s a great intro to the entire franchise as well. It’s straightforward enough that you don’t need any prior knowledge and honestly, the stupid DSS system can also be ignored if you’re willing to grind and pull your hair out a bit.

# Metroid Fusion

Game Boy Advance [2002] | Nintendo R&D1 | Nintendo

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11/13/25

Metroid Fusion… what a game. For some reason, my brother got Metroid II on the Game Boy and that was just one of the games that existed growing up. I really, really sucked at it though and found it mostly not very fun. I have a very vague and early memory of seeing another kid playing Super Metroid at some point in the late 90’s in his basement in the dark. I think later when we got into emulation, my brother revisited Super Metroid and we’d grown in our appreciation for the style of game it was. Still, it wasn’t all that interesting to me, and I also sucked at it. In the summer of 2001 my family moved to Henderson, Nevada and I made friends with a really cool kid. It turns out, he had a copy of Metroid Fusion and I had a GBA SP with basically no fun games at all, so he let me borrow his copy. I think mostly my brother played it, and he really enjoyed it. I don’t think I played it very much though. Later, in my early adulthood, I picked up a Game Boy Micro from a thrift store for $20 and an EZ Flash IV and I played through Fusion. This was my first revisit in about 15 years or so.

What I liked about Fusion then, and to a lesser extent now, was how straightforward it is. It’s nearly fetch-quest level of straightforward. A bossy computer orders you around from point A to point B. Having come fresh off of Circle of the Moon, I was struck by how easy the game is. The bosses? A total cakewalk. Even the much feared Nightmare X boss was absolutely no problem at all. The plotline with the evil SA-X Samus clone thing was pretty cool though. One of the favorite movies is Anihilation which features a similar evil-ish alien clone plot line. The eerie ambiance of exploring a derelict space station research facility is spot on. Metroid as a series is very much a read-in-between-the-lines approach when it comes to storytelling and music, but the music that is here is top notch. The biggest downside for me when it comes to the overall game design is the usual complaint against “bomb every wall”. Once you get the super bomb, it’s basically enter room, super bomb, shoot tile with revealed weapon. I think I prefer the Castlevania game design approach where the hidden rooms are more supplemental and not in the core level progression.

# Metroid: Zero Mission

Game Boy Advance [2004] | Nintendo R&D1 | Nintendo

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12/15/25

Since Fusion was mostly enjoyable, and also did not over stay it’s welcome by any means, I decided it was only fitting to dive straight back into the next logical game. Released just two years after Fusion, Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid game on the NES way back in 1986. I’ve attempted to play the original Metroid but holy balls is that a bizarre game. I honestly think they expected you to sit there with a sheet of graph paper and map it all out yourself. So, Zero Mission is a welcome remake with all the nice features of the Super Metroid and Fusion nicities (like a freaking map). Compared to Fusion, I actually appreciated the slight return to form on the graphics and design front. I actually found the gameplay to be more difficult than Fusion, which isn’t to say it’s by any means hard at all.

The big addition of Zero Mission is an entirely new exposition event after the main game ends that has Samus in her “zero suit” which is just her basic human form with a little pea shooter. It’s kind of a stealth-ish section that has her exploring some Chozo ruins and avoiding the space pirate crew. Eventually you get her ultimate powered up form but the victory is short lived and before you know it, you’ve blown up the space pirate ship and escape on a stolen ship.

As I played through Zero Mission, I had the feeling that this game was a lot like Super Metroid if they sanded down every edge into a smooth ball, not unlike Samus’ morph ball. There weren’t really any amazing new features, just kind of more of the same old same old, but it’s well executed. My play through lasted just over 4 hours, like Fusion. I have a small feeling that a lot of the love for the Metroid series is through rose tinted glasses. Having said that, I have never put significant time into a Prime game, but I did beat Dread which felt very mid to me. Has the Metroidvania genre been beaten to absolute death? I don’t think so, considering the sequel to Hollow Knight felt like by far the biggest release of 2025. People are still showing up in big ways for a metroidvania game but it seems like Nintendo doesn’t know how to deliver them any more. Konami got off the bus completely about 20 years ago. I’m looking forward to the eventual Bloodstained sequel myself. Do I play SotN next? Go back to Dread? AM2R? I think I might be a little vania’d out at this point so maybe I need to change up the genre. I put several hours into Racing Lagoon a year or two ago, and I kind of really want to go back and finish that one off for good.

The specific ways that Google is deteriorating are unpredictable and especially discouraging. First, they prioritized unrelated ad spots in our searches. Then they force-fed us their “AI Overview” at the top of the page. I myself personally use a specific “adblock.css” user agent style sheet to hide most of the slop they’ve shoved into search (see the project’s GitHub for more information). The writing has been pretty clearly on the wall for some time now.

However, it now appears that Google is replacing a page’s meta description with their own AI hallucinated slop. At the time of writing, a google search for “meta description” lands you at Google’s own documentation page for what it is (archive). Here’s what their page says about how the search “snippet” is produced:

Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. We may also use descriptive information in the meta description element when it describes the page better than other parts of the content.

This came to my attention only recently. In a Hacker News discussion on Ghostty shaders, I referenced a blog post I’d written showing off some off the shelf shaders. I use Cloudflare Analytics so I’ve known this blog post is one of my most hit pages. I guess a lot of people are interested in Ghostty and using shaders. However, another commenter let me know that the link preview text (the text that shows up under the link in search) did not appear anywhere on the actual blog post. More than that, it was factually incorrect!

If you do a Google search for “ghostty shaders”, my blog post should be the first or second link. Here’s the preview text:

Feb 22, 2025 — Ghostty doesn’t directly support shaders, but a repo with shaders can be cloned to ~/.config/ghostty/shaders. Examples include ‘drunkard+retro- …

Screenshot, for posterity:

“Ghostty doesn’t directly support shaders” - o, rly??? The Ghostty docs would suggest otherwise!

As another example, here’s what a search engine that hasn’t been completely captivated by large language model shoehorned feature development shows as the preview text:

Feb 22, 2025 Back when Ghostty released I played around with the entire config, including trying to get some shaders to work. iTerm2 has the ability to have an image background in your terminal and ghostty does not, at least not directly. I wanted to get a custom image with a shader but couldn’t get it working.

Another screenshot:

If you go inspect the page source of that blog post, you’ll see that this preview text is exactly what is in the meta description tag. Nothing more, though apparently their UI does truncate the text at some point.

So yes, Google Search is replacing the established meta description tag with their own hallucinated AI slop in 2025! Someone tell MDN their docs need to be updated.

As mentioned in the above lore drop, my family relocated to St. George, Utah when I was in the first grade (age 6). I recall making friends with the teacher’s son named Eric but that was fairly short lived because I don’t have virtually any memories of our friendship, other than the fact that at one point early on he was my friend.

Shortly after that, I made another friend who was my best friend for a while. We’ll call him “Will Smith” because the best way I can describe him is acting like “Will Smith” did in the late 90’s. He was the youngest in his family and I guess by extension usually the butt of the joke, so when we hung out he passed that treatment on to me. We fought a lot. I remember one time we collected a bunch of leaves from my yard, since my yard had leaves, bagged them, then took them to his yard since, since his yard had a trampoline, so we could jump in them. However a fight shortly broke out between us and I remember attempting to re-bag the leaves so I could take them home with me and it got physical. Needless to say, we didn’t have great problem solving skills. I have a lot of memories hanging out together, sleepovers and other things but it seems like a lot of the times we really did just fight.

I’d guess we were “friends” for a bit of first grade and most of second grade. Then, we just stopped hanging out. I’m not sure why but I think we both realized we had just had enough. By third grade I think we both had moved on completely to new friend groups. I don’t remember fighting with him any more, but I also don’t remember any of our other interactions. I think maybe I just avoided him.

During this time, it became clear to me that I had a fairly explosive temper. I’d hit a breaking point and just start raging uncontrollably. Screaming, yelling. I never hurt anyone or anything and it only happened a few times, but the fuse could be short. One time I was in Hollywood Video and a known aggressor came up to me and starting mocking me in a way that is not possible to describe in politically correct terms today, other than to say he was doing “retarded” gestures and vocalizations. I responded by walking up to him, punching him two times hard in the face, and then walking away. The whole interaction lasted maybe 30 seconds. I knew him from school and he very much deserved it, but this was the first time I’d been the direct target of his harassment. It never happened again.

At some point my Mother made it clear that she did not approve of clothes-staining activities and that mustard in particular stained clothes. I liked mustard a lot (still do), though I’m not sure why this rule was ingrained into my head so strongly. Well, one fateful day when I was in fifth grade, Will Smith sat near me at lunch. He was up to his usual debauchery and started using his lunch tray to launch things on the lunch table. I believe I moved away from him, but he persisted. Suddenly, he launched something very hard and it just happened to land directly in my lap. It was a mustard packet. Mustard was all over my pants. It would stain for sure.

I went black with rage. It was an out of body experience. I stood up, and just started swinging. Blow after blow after blow. I remember him begging me to stop but I just kept punching and punching his face again and again. Eventually an adult came and restrained me and I gave up the fight through tears.

As usually happens in Elementary School, I was taken to the Principal’s office. I didn’t have many interactions with the principal but his name was Mr. Jones and he was generally a pretty nice guy. I’m not sure what his goal or opinion on the situation was, I’d never fought at school like this before and I think generally was an okay student. I didn’t get into trouble in class. The only thing I can remember is that he used an analogy that frankly, made no sense to me whatsoever then and still doesn’t. He said:

Dave, you’re digging yourself into a giant pit. You’re the only person who can get out, and you won’t let anyone else help you.

Eight years later, on November 24, 2009, a 26 year old medical student named John Jones entered the “Nutty Putty” cave and would never exit. The ordeal is now world-infamous as a case of intense morbid curiosity, especially among those with little experience in caves who can’t fathom how it could be possible to become stuck a few hundred feet underground head first in a way that rendered rescue impossible. I’ve personally known about the incident since about the time it occurred, since it made pretty major headlines here in Utah. However, only recently I was made aware that John Jones is the son of my old principal, Mr. Jones.

I honestly have no idea why I find this interesting, but I do. I can’t stop thinking about it. I wonder if he had some kind of premonition about pits you can’t escape from. I still don’t know what he meant by his analogy or how it was supposed to help a 5th grader who had had enough of grade school shenanigans who was also probably feeling the initial surge of testosterone as I entered puberty. Maybe the moral of the story is a mustard stain isn’t worth getting upset over and you should stay away from caves.

Much earlier, I recall riding in the car with my Dad and he’d often randomly burst out with little quips like “good grief!” or “oh boy…”. It was kind of strange, but I also got it, I think. I have a strong internal monologue and I assumed he did as well and these were simply times when the inner monologue accidentally became and outer monologue.

I eventually got a job in an office doing programming, and I’ve had feedback from pretty much anyone who’s ever worked near me that I am very vocal while I work. It’s not uncommon for me to say, out loud, “Oh! I see!” (when I finally understand), or “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” (when I finally understand how stupid some code is). I remember a new coworker later telling me I actually really freaked him out several times because he assumed I was talking to him. I was not. I wasn’t even fully aware that I was doing it.

In the past few years, maybe since I’ve been isolated by working from home all day, I’ve struggled with intrusive thoughts. You know those times when you’re falling asleep and you suddenly remember the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done? It’s like that, but nearly constant. I found myself, again, muttering “gosh dang mother effer” about a hundred times each day. I’m not sure if my family knows I do it, but I know they’ve heard me say something because a few times they’ll ask “what?” and I’ll say “oh nothing, sorry”.

Well, again, I decided I’d like to change that habit. I’ve never been diagnosed or anything, but I believe this is a form of mild Tourette syndrome, or at least some of the symptoms. One strategy I’ve developed for dealing with past shame and embarrassment is to apologize, if needed, to the person I feel ashamed for hurting or wronging. Or, more likely, to myself. To reassure myself that yep, I made some mistake or error but that it’s okay.

So now I find myself repeating to myself “It’s okay, Dave” about a hundred times each day. Sometimes, if the feeling is very intense I might even say “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Say it three times quickly. Like a whisper. Sometimes if I’m relaxed and alone I might even yell it. “IT’S OKAY DAVE!!! IT’S OKAY!!!” When I’m able to slow down in the moment, which isn’t very often, I’ll actually slow all the way down and say something like “Yeah man, you really did mess that up. That was embarrassing for you and for them. But you know what? It doesn’t seem like anyone holds it against you, so it’s okay. You learned and you can try to do better. It’s okay, Dave. It’s okay.”

I’m not perfect still, and honestly I’d like to stop the intrusive thoughts, and the impulses but I feel like “It’s okay” is a better solution that “f%&k you mother f&%$@er”.

I’ve also leaned on this strategy when I’m dealing with a very low and depressive mood which isn’t incredibly often, but often enough that I’m having to deal with it. “It’s going to be okay, Dave”. “You’re going to have a great day!” “Has anything you’ve been so worried about before turned out to really be that awful?” I wouldn’t say it really helps but it does keep the wolves at bay.

I don’t know what my future holds. But I’m hopeful that there will be things that are very much worth it. There is joy yet to be had and incredible things yet to be done.

“It’s okay Dave.”

It took several weeks to get the ball rolling with subbing. However, I’ve been more or less subbing full time for just under a month now. Substitute teaching has been a really amazing and eye opening experience. I love that I get to hop around many different schools, subjects, and age groups in my local town. So far, I’ve subbed for everything from 6th grade to 12th grade in virtually any subject you could think of.

Granted, my experience is still quite limited but I thought I’d take a moment to jot down a few thoughts and observations I’ve had thus far.

The first thing you should know is that in Utah, our public schools are quite good relative to many other states. Especially in Southern Utah, our schools are quite well funded because it’s still more or less a “retirement community” which means that everyone that owns a home here, including the “snow birds” that are only here part of the year, pays into the public school system in the form of property taxes. Overall, I’ve been impressed with the physical quality of the schools I’ve been inside, the faculty, and the students. Sure there’s some obvious room for improvement, but really I haven’t seen any glaring issues at all.

However, there is a difference from school to school. Even for the same age groups. It’s palpable from the moment you walk through the doors. That difference plays into the classes and students themselves. I’m not exactly sure what the difference is, really. I have a few theories based on my observations and interactions, informed by my life’s experiences as well. Most things really aren’t all that mysterious and unique. Most things are pretty simple when you isolate the variables.

Subbing is interesting because I don’t actually meet the teacher I’m subbing for. But I do see and get a good handle on what kind of person they are. I see the way the classroom is decorated, or not. Is it clean? Dirty? Tidy? Interesting? Does the classroom feel like a place that I like to be, or does it feel like a prison cell? Some have quotes of dubious origin, the normal things like “Be the change you want to see in the world - Nelson Mandella”. Some have literally nothing. Some are carefully decorated in a way that’s both aesthetically pleasing and welcoming. As crazy as it sounds, I can get a pretty decent feel for how the day is going to go the moment I walk into the room and turn on the lights. It’s not a sentence, it’s just one more variable that goes into informing me how things are usually handled.

This extends to the school itself. Are the people that work there happy? Are they healthy? Are they well groomed and professional? Again, not a sentence, just another point of data that goes into the overall “vibe” of the place. Our schools are generally very well maintained and quite new, so I’m not dealing with dilapidated buildings at all.

As for the students themselves, I view them as entirely equal regardless of any external variables. This is because people under the age of about 18, especially people who are in the care and guidance of competent adults are not truly accountable for themselves. This is literally why we have a legal separation between children and adults. As an adult, it is my job to care for and nurture the children I come into contact with. They are not responsible for their haircuts, their clothes, their intellectual abilities. They are responsible for their actions, to a limited extent. And I think that’s the pudding. That’s the difference.

If you read my about page, you’ll see that I consider my greatest career accomplishment over about a decade of technology startups are the individual interns I recruited, trained, and helped as they transitioned into their first full-time “career” job. I can also say confidently that those individuals have paid me much more than any of the companies ever did, or even could have. Because they didn’t pay me in money. They paid me with who they are. Seeing them thrive - not only at their job, but in their lives.

How did I create an environment for them to thrive? I simply set the expectations as high as they wanted to set them. In fact, usually, my role was less about setting their expectations for themselves, and more about helping them temper their expectations so they didn’t burn out. It sounds counter-intuitive. Imagine cheering for some marathon runners by yelling “Slow down!” But that’s really what it was. They’d compare themselves to others, even other interns, but I knew them individually. I knew why I hired them, what their skills were. I knew who they were. As much as the corporate world believes we need perfectly trained robots all capable of the exact same tasks and output, that will never be the case. We need individuals. Maybe one could crank through a feature request and bang out a zillion lines of new code to much applause and appreciation, but another might take notice of a strange bug with huge implications and do what it took to get to the bottom of it. It’s a false dichotomy for sure, but my point is that no two people are the same. My role was more about taking them at face value and championing their unique interests in a way that would be rewarding for the company and themselves.

School is very similar, but also very different. Kids have to be there. I mean, they don’t have to be there, but they’re there usually one way or the other and not necessarily by choice. As a student myself most days I’d probably have preferred to be somewhere else doing something else. Like the corporate world, this has the unfortunate tendency to treat people in aggregate, using arbitrary metrics to assign progress and learning. Again, I’m not saying these are bad things wholesale, but without special care and attention they can be destructive. Just like we shouldn’t hope that every “staff software engineer” should have the exact same output, we shouldn’t hope that all students have the exact same learning outcomes.

So what am I driving at? Well, I’ve been giving a ton of thought into what makes a school “awesome” versus “less awesome” (they really are all incredible). I think many would simply throw a metric out, like socioeconomic status, testing scores, or attendance numbers. However, I think this is selling it very short. In my opinion it boils down entirely to expectations. What expectations do the faculty and staff have for the students? What do they have for themselves? Closely related, what goals do they have for the students and themselves and what role can an individual play in meeting those goals? Simply put, I think the difference boils down almost entirely into who cares the most.

This is not at all a criticism of any individual, school, class, or system. It’s just an observation. Every situation is unique. But the underlying principles are universal. Do people want to be there? Honestly, my goal as a sub is to do such a fantastic job that the students are begging for me to come back, and for the teachers I’m subbing for to feel so confident in my effort that they’re more likely to take a day off, attend a conference, or really just ask for help. I love to help! I love to help individual teachers, and individual students. Even if just for a single day I can do something to make someone’s life just a little tiny bit better (or if not better, maybe more memorable). This is exactly what drove me out of a corporate job. No ability to make a difference, good or bad.

I’m in a school, every day, with kids who are incredible. Not only that, they are literally my future, our future. I want to help set them up for success in their lives in any way I can. What goals do they have? How can I help them with that goal for a single day? Maybe it’s just having someone actually stop to look at them and listen to them. Maybe it’s caring enough to correct inappropriate behavior. I view it as life or death - literally. Most of life really just boils down to how well you can “get with the program” and be a positive influence in your sphere. An individual’s ability to do that almost entirely determines how happy and fulfilled they’ll be in life. Those that are unable to learn this have a fairly bleak future. Which is exactly why it’s so important to me to be a part of what helps them right now. Today it’s helping another classmate on a tricky assignment, getting sent to the Principal’s office, or earning a reward. Tomorrow it will be their livelihood. It will be our livelihood!

The grass isn’t necessarily greener. I’ve traded waking up in the morning to frantically check teams to see what urgent issues someone feels like I need to be involved in for checking for a last-minute sub position. I’ve also traded a nice comfy salary for relatively little pay. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how the money will ever be enough. As I look forward it’s daunting and alarming to think about all the things that I need money for that I simply don’t have coming. But when I’m in the classroom, when a kid raises their hand to ask for help, when I get to see all the interesting and unique ways people are people, those worries go away. In a way that a corporate job never fully satisfied. Even during the worst times I remind myself “well at least my great-grandboss isn’t going to randomly walk in right now and ask me to do some idiotic and counterproductive long term project”. At least I’m not in a daily standup. At least I don’t have to update and mitigate NPM dependencies. Maybe a kid is having a bad day for about a million justifiable reasons but that’s so, so much better than an emergency “all hands on deck” because a middle manager needs to have something concrete to put on their performance review or else face the reality of the meaninglessness of their daily life.

I like teaching. In fact, I love teaching. Kids are so awesome. Our future is so bright. I’m so happy and satisfied to be able to simply carry the egg across the finish line untarnished. Our rising generation is so much more capable and well equipped to deal with the problems in the world, all I have to do is boost them along as best I can.