Joe Cecil

Ghost stories come with a paranoid aftertaste

I find ghost stories often come with a paranoid aftertaste. I just finished playing Yuppie Psycho, a ghost story type of game. It's not the most intense example, and yet it still had me feeling slightly on edge after playing it intensely for two days and after thinking

There's an index now

I just finished writing an index, or map and guide, to this blog, inspired by Put a Number On It's similar guide. It's long. That's more than enough for today.

Does fixed-point futurism make sense?

In an interview, Venkatesh Rao defined fixed-point futurism something like the following. You pick an arbitrary thing, anything at all, and try to make that true. That's your fixed point. For example, your fixed point might be: I am going to wear red shirts. That's now

Bucket fill

Possibly favorite visual effect is the slow bucket fill. The recent Terra Nil trailer shows fire behaving in just this way. There's a point in the grass where the fire starts and it radiates out slowly and evenly in all directions. This gets really neat when there are

What's in a username?

The year is 2004 (ish), and I'm playing Blockland. I remember booting it up the first time and just being amazed at the size of the room. Everything is massive. It's a bedroom like any other, a bit sparser, but my character is tiny, a little

Joe Cecil © 2026