Index—Sitemap—Tagmap—Updates

July 2025

Created: 2025-07-31 (18:49:22) — Modified: 2025-08-11 (20:27:11)
Status: completed

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Returning to my website after a six-month hiatus, I’ve been wanting to play around with different ways of sharing updates on my projects, as well as other thoughts that might not warrant entries of their own. I love reading other people’s newsletters so wanted to try out one of my own!

Updates

The website has undergone a big redesign. Aside from some aesthetic changes, most entries are now on the main page. Hopefully this means less digging around to find things. Plus there is now a sitemap, tagmap and update log to better keep track of what is new.

I do like it when sites are like hypertext gardens, when there is an exploratory quality to clicking through different pages. Mark Bernstein makes the point that rigidly structured sites can feel inert and sterile. They foreclose more enjoyable ways of navigating around.

I also want people to be able to find my stuff, though, and hiding my writing several nested entries deep seems like a poor way of doing this. This is something I want to keep playing around with, to balance making the site accessible while still letting different areas have their own ambiances.

I posted a story, Bushfire, about an inauspicious start to a summer beach trip. This was a Muse Ariadne prompt fill. More prompt fills to come throughout the second half of the year!

I posted an entry on Gameboy Puzzleworlds with a retro review of Oracle of Seasons. I want to write about Link’s Awakening DX and Oracle of Ages too. But beyond that this is my chance to dive into the system itself and how its hardware constraints influenced the games that were made for it.

Finally some additions to the slipbox. The idea of this entry is to collect occasional notes on things which may or may not get developed further. I’m calling it a random-access blog. This month, brief thoughts on linguistics, Engine Summer and Reagan Library.

Marginalia

It is midwinter in my corner of the world. Canberra is not elevated enough to get snow (although we can see it on the ranges at the western and southern edges of the city) but it still gets pretty cold. This has been one of the coldest winters in a long while.

I love this time of year. Most days have blue skies with no wind and even if the temperature is in the single digits we can wander around looking at all the bare trees. Everything gets so quiet and still. Even the rainy windy days are enjoyable if you can make it to a warm coffeeshop.

It is also a really good time for moss

So not a lot of exploring, but a lot of staying in reading and playing games.

Mostly fantasy and science fiction this month! I’m slowly working through a copy of Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiange that a friend lent me. This is an incredible short story collection, every one I’ve read so far has been revelatory and heartbreaking in one way or another.

The standout for me so far is Story of Your Life. In the story aliens arrived several years previously, leaving artefacts in meadows across the planet and remaining in orbit since that time. The military hires a field linguist to establish communications and learn their language. This narrative is intertwined with vignettes from later in the linguist’s life, when she has married, divorced and had a daughter.

I had seen the adaptation, Arrival, years ago and hated it. The film raises fascinating questions about the nature of language and memory but then devolves into military drama. My only half-joking complaint at the time was that there was not enough linguistics.

Story of Your Life turns out to be very much about the linguistics and it is very much the better work because of it. Not just because the descriptions of how the linguist learns a fundamentally alien language are themselves enjoyable. Without spoiling the story, it also contextualises why the vignettes from her future life are interwoven with the narrative and why she acts as she does. It fills the story with an emotional resonance largely missing from the film.

I want to write a long essay about this and other stories from the collection, so, look forward to that in the future?

I have been rereading Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea novels, on the fantasy side. I have so far finished A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. My thoughts on this series are still half-formed, but it is interesting the way the first three novels centre on young adults confronting darkness and death. Le Guin’s writing is clear but gentle. These stories have the quality of myths passed down for centuries.

I finally played Co-Open by Lowpolis after listening to the soundtrack for years and immediately fell in love with it. You are a kid buying groceries on their own for the first time. You can wander around the co-op grocery selecting different foods… or you can go exploring all kinds of places you’re not supposed to be in.

The game evokes a genuinely childlike sense of exploration. You encounter all sorts of other characters, mostly teenagers or adults, who treat you like a kid but try to let you into their worlds all the same. I’m very fond of the emo-goth cashier, who reminds me of my sister and her friends when they were spooky, edgy teenagers, and of the lady who gives you a recipe you can assemble using ingredients found in the co-op.

Aside from that, many of the characters are queer and use neopronouns. The game does not draw attention to this, but it speaks to a utopian streak running through Co-Open. The community grocery and what we see of its surroundings form a meeting place for all different people (bird-people) to safely be themselves. I want to write so much more on this game!

Around the grounds

The 32-Bit Cafe Sites for Social Change code jam is running until 11 August 2025. The prompt is create a website, page or post showcasing a cause, why it is important and how people can get involved.

I’ve been reading a lot about repair for my entry. Some highlights include the Places Magazine Repair Manual series, particularly “Step by Step” by Shannon Mattern, about service manuals themselves, and Dr Smartphone by Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch, an ethnography of smartphone repair shops with really cute illustrations.

Readng all this got me thinking about the connection between repair and craft, about how we develop the skills to make or fix things in the first place, and questions about who gets access to the resources, time and training to do so. In this vein, “Rolling the Ladder Up Behind Us” by Xe Iaso is a thoughtful discussion of AI-based vibe coding as a twenty-first century analogue of the power loom.

Probably anyone who ends up reading this newsletter will be in the loop, but Itch this month was forced by payment processors into mass deindexing the adult and nsfw games posted on its platform. The subsequent discourse around this has mainly focused on the non-porn games that got swept up in the delisting, but also… this doesn’t take away from the fact people who are making explicitly pornographic games deserve just as much solidarity and just as much to make a living off their work.

Without adult and nsfw games the frontpage of Itch has plummeted into a sea of analog horror. Do your part to restore the equilibrium and yell at money!

References

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