Book Thoughts: There is no Antimemetics Division
This was another random fun sci-fi audiobook purchase and it was a good time!
An SCP-inspired (inspired is strong here, the author wrote out a good chunk of this book as part of the SCP archives) about unknown cosmic-horror entities and memory.
Specifically about the antimemetics division of an international secret institution dedicated to safely containing cosmic horrors (and not-so-horrifying interesting entities). Antimemetics being, of course, the study of antimemes, which are things or ideas which cannot be remembered.
It was a very interesting read, and I enjoyed a lot of the speculative ideas surrounding the concept of an antimeme and the ways they were worked around. When the very nature of your work is to study things that you will naturally forget you need to get creative, and the author definitely did!
I wasn't the biggest fan of the second half of the story -- it all got a little too epic and cosmic-horror-y for my tastes. Overall, though, a fun lightweight sci-fi read with some neat and novel ideas!
Book Thoughts: By Night in Chile
After stumbling blindly through Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" I ran out and bought all the books by Bolano I could find. While I'm clearly not equipped with the literary capacity to fully grasp his works I really enjoyed something in his writing (or rather, in the translations of his writing,) and wanted to try some more.
The first thing I picked up was By Night in Chile which is a very short and initially baffling read narrated by a narcissistic priest / poet / literary critic on his deathbed. The story is delivered in a single exhausting paragraph that never lets up.
I definitely missed a lot here thematically on my initial read, but was still swept along by the braggadocios narration wherein our protagonist tells of his time drinking at the houses of wealthy artists, his rise to fame as a literary critic under a nom de plume, and his less successful but equally proud work in poetry.
After finishing the book and reading a couple short reviews to help it click, it is clear to me now that this is a story about omissions. The narrator tells a grandiose story about his life and importance and accomplishments while dancing around his guilt.
- Read the rest -
Game Thoughts: Final Fantasy 9
I have a very deep nostalgia for Final Fantasy titles -- specifically for 7-10 which I played as a teenager. These works made a fairly a large impact on my life and my artistic tastes.
I'm not normally one to replay long games, and have recently had trouble finding joy in traditional random-encounter JRPGs, but after recently opening a few packs of Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering cards and pulling a Vivi card, Final Fantasy 9 was calling.
I don't think I would have made it through the game without the Memoria mod, so I want to highlight how much that helped. Besides helping upscale and widescreen the graphics, it enabled a few cheats for some of the groan-inducing minigames (frogs, jump-rope), as well as options to change the awful card system to the Final Fantasy 8 game, make battles actually turn-based (battles pause when a character has a turn) and enable quick buttons to double the game speed and turn off battles temporarily. I shamelessly used all of these, and even switched on "9999 damage every hit" a handful of times when I needed to grind.
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: Service Model & Alien Clay
I forgot for a little bit there that listening to audiobooks could also just be done for fun. Not that I've not been having fun with Borges and "The Weird" short story collections, but I've been trying to challenge myself a little more than the usual sci-fi/fantasy fare.
Well after a few hellish months at work leading me to abandoning most of my hobbies and my morning stream I decided to take it a little easy and fall back to old habits and purchased some good old-fashioned sci-fi novels to keep me company on my walk.
I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, though I found the subsequent books in the series felt a bit more like watching a fun sci-fi TV show rather than having the impact of the first title. Nothing wrong with that, so I picked up two books that had a slightly similar feel to them: Service Model and Alien Clay -- both one-shot novels by the author.
Service Model follows a totally-not-sentient valet robot through an apocalyptic wasteland. It's campy and funny and overall very enjoyable junk-food with a handful of memorable moments.
Alien Clay is Australian Prison Colonies X 1000 with exoplanet exploration, authoritarian regimes, and alternate biological evolution. It's sarcastic and anti-authoritarian while it digs through its ideas about modular biology and alternative evolution.
I like them both a lot as fun sci-fi romps, though admittedly both felt like the author was a little too on-the-nose with the political undertones (or I guess just normal tones?) of the two books. I am a great lover of le conte philosophique, but a little creative subtlety goes a long way.
I don't think I'd recommend these books to people the way I recommend Children of Time (I have given away about 5 copies of that to people, now) but they gave me the lightweight audio entertainment I was craving.
Book Thoughts: The Weird
Hungry for more audiobook short stories I came upon a monstrous collection of strange fiction curated by the Vandermeers: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.
Going into the 70-something hour collection I knew there would be many stories not to my taste -- cosmic horror and ghost stories, while appealing on a conceptual level, have never held much for me -- however with other names like China Mieville, Borges, and Kafka listed in the long directory of authors and over 100 strange stories to dig through, I was confident I'd discover some gems.
Here are said gems:
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: The Savage Detectives
Continuing my meandering literary exploration to scratch my new-found Borges-flavoured itch, I stumbled across a name as I perused a used book store: Roberto Bolano.
While I admit that jumping at a random latin-american-sounding name and hoping for some similarity to Borges is a fairly ignorant stretch, it paid off in this case. It turns out that Bolano is frequently compared to Borges -- though the book I picked up, "The Savage Detectives," is definitely an entirely unique flavour all its own.
- Read the rest -
Game Thoughts: The Playdate
On my recent international vacation I found myself in transit with alarming frequency. Between trans, taxi rides, layovers, and 14-hour flights I had a lot of time in my hands.
I also had a gaming console in my hands, for I rarely leave home without at least one mechanism for playing games. I recently got my hands on a second-hand Playdate which I very quickly fell in love with. The Playdate is a retro-inspired console with a monochrome LCD non-backlit screen and a crank.
(It was designed in partnership with Teenage Engineering, and I'm honestly a huge sucker for anything those folks design.)
Games for the playdate can be "side-loaded" (downloaded from Itch.io or other places) or purchased and installed from the official playdate store -- after which you need to actually download the games which takes a very long time. Perhaps the slow downloads were another attempt at retro, invoking the pain of a dial-up connection.
Games range from $2-$15 on the online store, and most of the games fall into the "cool tech demo" range that, quite honestly, I wouldn't normally pay for. $5 will get you a full-blown 10+ hour game on sale on Steam, while $5 on playdate indies might net you a basic arcade game or a 3 hour Zelda clone that would normally be free somewhere like Itch.io.
That said, I didn't find myself hesitating to drop a few bucks on Playdate titles. Maybe this was just excitement for the platform, but it may also just be part of the magic of what feels like a smaller indie-focused community -- much like buying music from Bandcamp.
I'm going to break my game insights down below into the following categories:
- Intentional Purchases where I actually directly paid money for a game through the Playdate store
- Season Games which kinda just show up on the device (I also dropped like $30 on season 2)
- Sideloaded Games which were either free or bought on Itch.io
And finally an overall review of the Playdate after abusing it for a few weeks.
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: Cosmicomics
After my brush with Borges was been seeking a similarly interesting collection of short stories, thinking that surely his works had inspired generations of writers of works with a similar dreamlike oddness and intellectual mouthfeel.
Apparently not!
While many such strange and dreamlike stories have been authored across many authors, it doesn't seem any one author has been selected by the internet as "Borges 2.0" -- and so I turned to the best possible source for a recommendation on where to go next: A used bookstore worker.
After a very engaging (and enthusiastic -- support your local bookstores!) conversation I was recommended Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a collection of short stories that explore the universe and history through fantastical, fairytale-esque comical stories.
It is certainly a unique set of stories, entirely unlike anything I've read before. Calvino starts with an interesting scientific or pseudo-scientific concept such as "before the big bang the universe was concentrated into a single point" and plays with it through his immortal narrator "Qfwfq" who proceeds to bemoan how hard it was "back then" when all one's stuff and all one's neighbors were literally on top of one another. Using absurd extrapolation and willful misinterpretations we get scenes of the protagonist hopping from Earth to the moon (because it used to be much much closer, you know), and many other wild tales.
While the ideas present were often very fun, the collection ultimately wasn't for me. While I found many grins in the reading, the fairytale approach to storytelling felt too lawless for my tastes. I enjoyed the whimsey and poetry of some of the concepts and stories, but ultimately found the absence of universal consistency made surprises feel cheap rather than profound or interesting -- though every individual story's core concept was always delightful.
A handful of stories in the collection I did truly love -- though these tended to be a slightly different vein than the rest of the collection. The Chase features a simple setup of a narrator in a car-chase moving at the speed of rush-hour traffic. The Count of Monte Cristo explores an interesting jailbreak scenario. These were much smaller constructed worlds which felt more finite and tightly purposeful or allegorical.
I didn't love all of Cosmicomics, but the bits I did like were wonderful, basking in the whimsey was fun for a time, and the reading helped me better define what kinds of literary thought experiments keep me engaged. I need to keep searching to pinpoint exactly what it is that I loved in Borges' fictions, and I have definitely come closer.
If funny-yet-poetic modern cosmic creation myths & fables told from the first person perspective of a primordial (yet very Italian) god sounds intriguing to you, this is very likely the only place you're going to find that.
Thoughts: Music Update Jan 2026 - DAWless
After an exciting start in 2024, my musical growth stagnated a little over the course of 2025. While my interest-in and joy-derived-from making music has gone unhindered, I haven't produced very much of late (save for my June 0dd.company project: Whalefall)
Outside of that, however, I have still done a lot of tinkering! I've played with the headless version of the Dirtywave M8, learned (and subsequently forgotten) how to use LSDJ and Nanoloop on the GBA/Analogue Pocket, had a bunch of fun with Bespoke Synth, and spent many evenings failing to read sheet music or jamming along to a song on a bongo or with my Arturia Microfreak.
There was much music, but I never felt like producing a song, as I felt very much turned off by DAWs. Don't get me wrong, my DAW of choice (Bitwig) is an excellent piece of software -- just the whole concept of involving my computer in the process felt wrong outside of standalone midi controllers and synths like Orca and Bespoke. I hated the entire VST situation from the get-go, I didn't want to play stupid games with Wine to get a virtual piano working, and honestly there was just too much going on. I think a DAW is objectively the best and most powerful way to produce a song, but it doesn't spark joy. It doesn't feel like music to me.
- Read the rest -
Year End: 2025
2025 was a stressful year.
The world, which has been inching closer to insanity for a good portion of my adult life, now seems to be moving in full strides. News and social media have pushed beyond satire into absurdism, the cyberpunk dystopia presented in books like Snow Crash has effectively been realized in the modern age of AI and literal "Megacorps", and quite honestly I don't see a way to dial it all back or divert the course of where humanity seems to be headed.
It has also been a stressful year at work. I have spent my career (~13 years now) doing web development and general problem-solving at a public university. It's a job I love, but due to some budget changes and restructuring I felt it was necessary to push a bit, which resulted in a daunting new job title, a new boss, and new team members. The transition, added responsibility, and visibility into the inner workings of the beast have left me somewhat breathless and exhausted. The requirements of the new role are often at odds with my natural un-seriousness and "open & free" philosophy, and as someone who tends towards workaholism, I worry that this new role will slowly erode a critical part of me.
Media-wise 2025 was an interesting shift. I played less games, read less books, and watched less shows, but the media I did consume felt impactful and important toward the end of the year. Reading Borges' Collected Fictions took a large chunk of time and resulted in a big mental shift for me, leading me to seek out more short-story-shaped content and literature instead of the beefy fantasy and scifi novels I'm accustomed to. I think this shift was already starting to happen, but I feel like I'm better positioned to pick out things that will keep me interested going forward (we shall see).
Normally I'd list out every book and game here, but I've added an archive page to the site for much easier access! My book and game of this year are easily Borges Collected Fictions and Expedition 33.
Output-wise 2025 has been excellent. In March I founded 0dd.company, a small amateur artist collective designed to match my own slow pace of production. We have 3 small galleries now, and I've been able to consistently work on bite-sized content in-between the larger 3-month project timelines. These projects aren't anything crazy like the game-dev and book-writing plans I slowly accumulate (and never make) in my head, but by focusing on smaller creative endeavors I'm getting more practice and actually making things instead of just thinking about them. Between my mastodon account, the 0dd.company, and this blog I'm happy with what I've put out this year.
I want 2026 to be a year of learning, making, and philosophy. I need to stay centered and not let work bleed into my personal time, and I want to wield that personal time effectively to learn and make interesting new things. I also need to not let the world going to shit get to me -- the world has always been going to shit, and it will continue to do so whether or not I stress out about it.
May 2026 see many curious new ideas and no major catastrophes.
