Tim Donlan

Reading Roundup 2020

2020 was supposed to be a year of vision.  The first year of a new decade; an election year; a census year.  And of course the name itself 20-20.  Vision. Like they say ...the best laid plans of mice and men.  And while I was mostly confined to my couch,

Reading Roundup 2019

I read 33 books this year.  Mostly e-books, borrowed from the library on the Libby app, or printed paperbacks. I tried to vary my selection, including non-fiction, contemporary literature and some classics, but my guilty pleasure is still Science Fiction. Here are some highlights, with the full list below: Man's

NovelGen 2019

I generated a novel using an algorithm for National Novel Generation Month.  Here’s the result: The Journey of the Book [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fSdTGUGhDEg0VD2xlon1VJaG5xioMlB2/view]. Previous Attempts I used to try to write a novel every year during the month of November.  In the last few

Babel

The last few weeks I've been trying to learn Spanish. I downloaded Duolingo on my phone and have been pretty consistent about building a habit of practicing a few minutes every day. The app itself is well done - a nice mix of pure memorization, verbal recitation and deciphering context

Terminal

I finally ascended - hacked and slashed my way through the Realm of Zot to grab the Orb and carry it back to the surface. Granted, I took a few shortcuts, and some purists would even call me a cheater, but it was still quite the challenge. The game: Dungeon

On Time

I was gifted a Fitbit Smartwatch for Christmas, mostly as a tool for marathon training. I have no complaints with the little bit of tech. It's got great battery life, tracks steps and time, and is mostly reliable at buzzing my wrists with notifications from my phone, email, slack and

What's in a name?

The domain I've owned for over a decade (daydalus.net) expired and was snatched up some Chinese company that manufactures industrial welding robots. If I was clever and had a bit more time, perhaps I could have played it off as intentional, viral marketing for some science fiction work in

Dead Phone

My phone died the other day. I was mindlessly tapping and swiping through something - (instagrammed photos of distant mountaintops?  some mindless action rpg?  snarky comment threads on hacker news?) - when the screen went black.  The home button was lifeless.  A few seconds later, it started up, a glowing

blogging

Migration

I decided to migrate my blog from wordpress to ghost [https://ghost.org/]. Its been a few years since I've actually written in my blog, but I've seen various mentions of the ghost platform.  I wanted to try it out, but the shelf life of open source software is about

lego

PiBot

I’ve had a raspberry pi gathering dust for a few years, but I had an inkling to do something cool with it. Over the holidays, I was gifted a PiStorms kit. PiStorms is a “shield” for the raspberry pi that fits directly onto a set of pins and interfaces

farming

Pixel Harvest

I usually grab a selection of the best indie games each year, during the Steam Winter sale. Last year, the certified standout was Stardew Valley, an 8bit farming throwback to Super Nintendo RPGs of yore. The amazing and endearing thing about the game, beside the fact that all the programming,

art

Goldfinch

If you’ve been to New York, there’s a resonating sound that perpetuates across the island. All the cars and movement reverberate against the orthogonal architecture, a low echo, like the inside of a sea shell. And when you’re there, despite all the movement, energy and money, the

apple

California Dreaming

This past December was the sophomore year of the Disney Star Wars resurgence, and fans and critics were generally pleased. Rogue One was an entertaining return to the time of the original trilogy, complete with Stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and Vader’s signature black helm. The key differentiator was the tone

bloodborne

Soulsborne

I first discovered Dark Souls [http://daydalus.net/index.php/2013/10/01/the-zen-of-dark-souls/] huddled down in a dingy basement, like one of the lost and despaired corridors so common in the game’s setting.  Since then the series has been one of my favorites.  The second installment made some

the name of the rose

A Rose by any other name

On a dusty bookshelf tucked away in the corner of a nondescript brick building, it sat, yellowed paper and bent spine. Printed in the early 80s, jacket art and overblown font signifiers of the time, newly translated from the Italian. Before the Sean Connery Hollywood adaptation. The Name of the

Music 2016

I used to religiously await the end of year lists from stereogum and pitchfork, eager to learn if my own musical preferences and best picks aligned with the lords of taste. This year I completely forgot about those sites (until it was time to research this writeup). Maybe I’m

Reboot

You have an inkling to be better, to get up earlier, so you set an alarm. When it blares in the early dark, still stuck in a dream your wife elbows you in the spine, and you lumber out of bed to brush the grimy sour from your lips. The

alcest

Best Music of the Year

Here’s my top 10  list, in randomized order: BT – A Song Across Wires The mixing and flow in BT’s latest is exquisite, as always with his stuff. The album actually digs into the minutiae of EDM that elevated BT in the first place.  There aren’t as many

HBO

The Long Bright Dark

HBO has a thing for Louisiana.  True Blood, Treme, and now True Detective.  Maybe it’s the tax breaks, or the distinctive mise-en-scène of a Spanish moss shrouded bayou.  Or maybe since Katrina, when the southern gothic literary tradition became glaringly real on CNN, the State has dominated a cultural

fantasy

The Dark Tower

Note: There are spoilers from The Dark Tower in this review.  Don’t continue unless you’ve read the whole series. Recently I’ve been getting this urge to go through stuff I wrote a while back, archived files in obscure directories buried deep.  To dust them off, read them

Top 13 of '13

Here’s my top 13 of ’13. This isn’t any sort of attempt to make an objective Best Of list, its just the records that came out this year that I listened to the most. I’m often sitting in a chair, focusing on some sort of project, listening

cocos2d

A Year of Failed Prototypes

It’s been over six months since I released my last game, and almost that long since I’ve updated this blog. I’ve been busy with non-gamedev stuff, but I’ve also been hacking away in my spare time. Unfortunately, most of these projects haven’t really gone anywhere.

boston bombing

Boston, Snowden, and the Death of the Net

I saw the explosion on Twitter, bored in my cube on a weekday afternoon. There were runners in the foreground, city brownstones, and a white cloud of smoke, like vented exhaust.  People stood around the office, cluttered in groups, speaking in soft whispers.  This wasn’t an industrial accident, this

base jumping

Two Tales

Two new stories posted I wrote earlier this year: Feigrastir [http://daydalus.net/wordpress/?page_id=536]– We jump at sunrise, and our features are cut in silhouette, like woodcuts in an old book. Die Twenty [http://daydalus.net/wordpress/?page_id=540] – There are dead ants in the spine

dark souls

The Zen of Dark Souls

I played a lot of Dark Souls this summer. I was staying in the basement of my in-laws. My own house had been torn apart by hammers and crowbars, in preparation for a renovation that would last many months. So I had my Xbox and little 26 inch flat screen