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In exciting news, my first professionally-published short story just came out! These Hearts, Who Once Held Up the Sky

It's a flash fiction about burnout, managed collapse and finding the road to recovery in the company of others.

I'm particularly grateful to you good Exilians, because this story was inspired by some excellent conversations we had about burnout and recovery back at the Exilian pub last August. It wouldn't be the same story without this community <3

I mentioned The Banished Vault at our meetup last night, and thought I'd go into it in a little more depth here. First off, a thread I wrote on BlueSky to give a sense of the game.

In short, it's a puzzle/strategy game about a small group of monks on a gothic space monastery fleeing a phenomenon know as the Gloom, which is causing all the stars in their wake to go out. Your monks travel between systems in stasis, and each time the Vault arrives in a new system, you have a set number of turns to explore the various planets and moons and gather enough resources to refill your stasis tanks to survive the next hibernation cycle, while not running out of fuel for your ships or falling afoul of various dice-based hazards.

Meanwhile, your monks lose Faith every time they go into cold-sleep, and their ultimate win condition is to build highly-expensive scriptoriums on specific Hallowed planets so they can write new scriptures about their journey. Once enough scriptures have been written, the journey is a success (though I appreciate that you can continue playing after that point).

It's also got a wonderful art style, balanced between monochrome engraving-style splash screens and character art, with a tangible board-game feel to the various maps:

I asked this on Mastodon last week, but no-one had any suggestions, so given the number of historians on here I thought it might be worth asking:

Can anyone recommend me an offline horizontal timeline-making tool?

I'm looking for something akin to TimelineJS or Tiki Toki, to visualise some periods of my life, but given the current state of internet scraping I don't particularly want to upload a bunch of personal info to someone else's server.

I'm not after Gantt charts or vertical-scrolling timelines, but most of the search engine results I've found assume I want project management or fancy websites.

Any thoughts?

(Open source would be ideal, but I'm absolutely willing to buy a reasonably-priced product if it's good enough.)

I'm having a play around with some piano arranging this month - specifically because there aren't enough Skies of Arcadia arrangements on the internet - and as part of the process I spent last weekend setting up a recording workflow through Reaper.

As a test track, I had a go at playing Nobuo Uematsu's Zanarkand (not my arrangement, in this case):

https://on.soundcloud.com/vxds31B2N77s4B7b9

I've been watching some of the E3-replacement games shows with my wife this year, mostly as it's become something of a tradition. Given how rough a year it's been for the game industry, it's been fascinating to see how much time's been given to interesting indie titles, and I thought I'd share a few of the games that looked promising so far to me:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2202650/Crescent_County/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240620/UNBEATABLE/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2963240/Generation_Exile/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101370/Wind_Runners/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2582320/Mixtape/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2132890/Possessors/

Has anything caught your eye?

Ahead of the forthcoming DLC, I've been diving back into Elden Ring over the past few weeks, with two goals: to set up a new faith-build character suitable for the DLC, and to do an in-game photography project that I've wanted to do since I realised how absolutely beautiful this world is.

Slash-cut to me trying to play Elden Ring without the HUD, and regularly jumping off my horse and backing my butt up against nearby rocks so I can force the camera to clip through my character and I can get nice clear screenshots xD

A few examples (with only *very* early-game spoilers):








~ Rob

Hi folks!

I'm Rob, a statistical programmer, miscellaneous creative and doting catdad from Wales. In my spare time, I write microfiction and essays on fiction and videogames, take photos of nature and pleasing textures, and play the piano.

I know Jubal from Mastodon and other online communities, so I thought I'd poke my head in and say hi!

~ Rob