I did the math, and to act like flying will feel fairly normal fairly fast is irresponsible. Real safety won't feel normal, and airlines owe the truth to the passengers they’re claiming they’re eager to accommodate.

A short interactive fiction that I wrote, coded, and illustrated (except the gorgeous lead art, by Ruby Ball) for a "green stories" contest—you explore a neighbor's house in search of items to use in your new garden.

Just in time for the holidays, the diagonal gift wrap hack has gone viral. Somehow, wrapping presents feels like art and math in the ways people fear most about both subjects. But this method is super easy to learn and use—and appropriately nerdy, to boot.

A short interactive fiction that I wrote, coded, and illustrated for a game jam—you take a seat across from a stranger, and their nature is revealed along with the lines in your palm.

Content note: This issue gets into nitty gritty of internal organs and body fluids. Long, long ago, when physicians were more like esoteric guessers, the leading minds in western medicine believed the human body had just four fluids.

Novel Ties: The Wordy World of Fallen London If you were a certain kind of person in 2009, your life slowly, and then quickly, filled up with mentions of Fallen London. But that’s only the very beginning of Failbetter Games’ story. The game lived partly on Twitter, spawning quixotic out-of-context tweets that spread like the swirling parachutes of a ripe dandelion. Its lush, grim setting set the stage for all of founder Alexis Kennedy’s subsequent work, and the world of Fallen London continues

An introduction to the video game genre of interactive fiction (IF), based on the varied and lovely and innovative works of IF legend Emily Short.

Nintendo threw everything they had at the third Paper Mario game, an ambitious and creative Wii showpiece with an enormous scope and story. But after that, where else could they go?

Lovecraft is one of the most profound influences on everything we think of as horror today. If you love his stories, and more importantly the influence his stories have had, I’d like to share a lot of other stories, ideas, events, legends, movies, and more that have some of the same themes: paranormal investigation, loss of sanity, cults, unfathomably big ideas, and much more.

Famous now as the shallow and demispiritual leader of the Parrotheads, Jimmy Buffett also wrote some of the most beautiful and substantial songs of the late 20th century. He lived in various places, flirted with several colleges around the Gulf before getting a degree in history, and worked both as a yachtie and as a music journalist very early in his career.

I wrote the three included history and teaching books, created dozens of animated characters and background tiles, and designed the block language used in the app.

I won’t link to the New York Post story where Julia Allison, who definitely wrote her own Wikipedia page, says the groundbreaking HBO show Sex and the City ruined her life.

On an episode of Waypoint Radio a few weeks ago, the hosts each gave their top 10 games of all time, and their lists were predictably super different. But they pointed out that time affects how we feel about our favorite games, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that point. You can never go back to being the child who pulled ExciteBike out of its envelope for the first time. That might make you feel sad for the loss of childhood joy or whatever, and sure, but it also means ExciteBike is in a mus

I’ve been researching and writing about historical and future armor, which started, as usual, with one wild hair: the Air Force cadet who experimented with non-Newtonian fluid oobleck in military armor panels. What a rad idea! I thought, and then, Wait, I have no idea what armor is made of.