Categories
gifts new year tech

Happy 2021!

So it’s a small thing, and it’s late in the day (and already 2021 by the time most people read this), but I thought a fun little thing I might do tonight is make something to (hopefully) put a smile on somebody’s face. It’s a Game Boy ROM I created using GB Studio, playable with a Game Boy emulator, and it has no sound (since I built, tested, and compiled it in about 90 minutes)… but I hope you might enjoy it despite its flaws. I even made all of the assets myself, basic as they are, aside from the font I used. Proud of that!

I’ll try to write more thorough blog posts again in 2021, I’m sorry I dropped the ball a little this year. The game doesn’t make up for it, but I promise I will over the next 365.25 days.

I hope you enjoy my little trinket, and a positive 2021 to everybody! Stand Tall, friends!

Categories
gifts notebooks

A Word For Expensive Notebooks

I was walking through the local Barnes & Noble recently, and there are a few parts of that store I always have to explore: literary fiction, manga/graphic novels, and reference books (I need to learn how to edit longer work more efficiently, I admit). But on my way out, there’s that space where they keep the greeting cards and fancy notebooks, and I’ve been drawn into that space more times than I can remember.

Touching the covers of a beautiful, empty, lines-properly-spaced notebook, reading the quotes in typewriter type printed across or wrapping around, they’re all beautiful little snowflakes. At least, until I find the price tag on them and practically snowball them back onto the shelf.

I have a theory. Not just about myself, but about most writers… we have a love/hate relationship with expensive notebooks. We love to look at them, we love to imagine the stories that should be written in them, but we hesitate to mark them up with a possible failure. And EVERY story started is a possible failure.